President Trump is making single life great again, at least for one Florida woman who says she's divorcing her husband in part over his inability to deal with her love for the commander-in-chief.
According to divorce records, Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Ehrenberg and his wife Lynn Ehrenberg, a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, are parting ways for a variety of reasons ranging from a willingness to have children to her politics.
Quote, a staunch Republican and supporter of President Trump, Lynn also said she felt increasingly isolated in their marriage.
Their public relations release stated, Ehrenberg is a Democrat, Lynn is a Republican.
It wasn't an issue at first, but that was before the Hillary Trump saga, she explained, and as that built, the tension in our relationship built.
Dave Varenberg was tangentially involved in the 2016 election when he dropped assault charges against then-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
He worked with Trump at Mar-a-Lago for years, but after Trump's political rise, he tried to distance himself.
I'm walking through the red carpet, Lynn stated, and he's sneaking through the bushes.
He'd ask me not to take pictures.
He wouldn't want me to post them.
I didn't listen to him.
She says she took selfies with Trump and her husband didn't like it.
Obviously, Lynn is hungry for some publicity, but there are a few lessons from this tragic tale of marital woe.
First, two publicity-hungry people probably shouldn't marry each other.
This seems like a lesson that the Scaramuccis have also learned in the recent past.
Their agendas obviously weren't aligned, and if Mrs. Ehrenberg's agenda deviated from her husband's, she seemed happy to ignore his agenda in favor of her own and vice versa.
Second, People of different political preferences should think seriously before tying the knot.
Politics often reflects deeper values, and while we're fond of papering over those differences because of love, the reality of marriage requires that two people share a set of values in order to live a successful life together.
Finally, the Trump era has polarized people in a unique way.
That's because Trump himself is polarizing.
He's loud and he's brash, with a thousand character flaws that endear him to some and alienate others.
People tend to see feelings about Trump as a referendum on character.
And that speaks to the problem with treating our politicians as celebrities in general.
The point of politics is that we have certain policies and ideas we would like to see promulgated.
And politicians are a vehicle for those policies and ideas.
The character of politicians only matters insofar as it speaks to the trustworthiness and capableness of the person making promises with regard to policy.
But now, policy has taken a backseat to the attitude of politicians.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
We care a lot more about what our politicians are like and what they say than what we'd like them to do.
That means that if someone likes Trump, we tend to judge them not with regard to the policies they'd like to promote, but with regard to their apparent approbation of Trump's shortcomings.
That's often inaccurate, even nasty attempt to impute motives to people out of political differences.
In any case, this looked like a publicity marriage.
And publicity marriages don't tend to end quietly outside the glare of the press.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, there's a lot happening in the news.
I'm still a little bit wiped out, to be honest with you.
We had a debate with Cenk Uyghur last night.
I'm still bad with his last name, but it was a lot of fun over at Politicon last night.
Huge crowd, like 3,000 people.
We had to move the auditorium.
Mostly fans of the show, fans of mine.
It was great.
Thank you all for coming out.
Really appreciate it.
We did a Q&A as well.
That was fantastic.
800, 900 people showed up, standing room only.
There's a real hunger, I think, for politics and for Truth-telling and honesty in politics, and I really do appreciate that that's the case.
It was actually a really good debate.
It was a substantive debate.
I was not expecting it to be, to be honest with you.
I thought that it was going to devolve into name-calling and nastiness because I'd seen Chang's debates with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza the last couple of years.
But Cenk really did stick to the topics, which is fantastic, and I think I did too, and it was a really good back and forth.
I'll let you be the judge of who you thought won, but it was really great.
We're going to play some clips of it tomorrow.
We're pulling all the clips of it today, so we'll have some material tomorrow.
It was fascinating and interesting, and I think really good.
I think we need more of those kinds of debates.
Also, we're going to get to everything Trump-related, the replacements in the cabinet, where he stands, what happens with tax reform, what's going on with Trump, a lot to go through there.
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Okay, so.
The big news over the weekend, and we discussed it a little bit on Friday, is that Reince Priebus is gone.
So that happened shortly after we filmed our show on Friday.
I posted a little Facebook note about it, but the situation surrounding Priebus being ousted was really quite incredible.
So Priebus was fired.
Apparently, they took him There's still debate over whether he had resigned the previous day, so remember, we have to reverse course for a second, remember, Anthony Scaramucci was hired as the new White House head of comms, and Scaramucci had designs on being the guy closest to Trump, that meant that he wanted to oust Priebus.
So, he did an interview on the record with the New Yorker, in which he suggested that Steve Bannon wanted to perform anatomically impossible acts upon himself, and suggested that Reince Priebus was a paranoid schizophrenic who was always afraid someone was out to get him.
It turns out someone was out to get him.
A guy named Anthony Scaramucci, as it turns out.
And after that interview happened, Trump didn't discipline Scaramucci.
He didn't say anything about Scaramucci saying anything bad.
He didn't say that that was inappropriate.
None of that.
Apparently, according to the New York Post, he loved the interview with Scaramucci because this is who Trump is, okay?
Trump is a combative guy.
He has a potty mouth and really likes when people yell at each other.
He sort of finds it entertaining.
He really is, in terms of personnel, a lot like the Joker from Dark Knight.
You know, break this pool cue, there's only one slot available.
Apparently he was angry at Reince Priebuses, according to reports, which is just hilarious.
He was angry at Reince that Reince didn't fire back at Scaramucci.
So he liked that Scaramucci was saying that Reince was a paranoid schizophrenic who didn't have Trump's best intentions at heart, and he was angry at Reince that Reince didn't slap Scaramucci back so he could watch the slap fight, which is just a very Joffrey Baratheon thing to do.
I mean, it's pretty incredible.
So the next day, Reince supposedly—that day, apparently—Reince supposedly resigns, except that He didn't really resign.
He went on a plane with Trump to Long Island, where Trump did a speech to some sort of police event, which was controversial in and of itself, because Trump said something about how if you're a police officer, you don't be too gentle with suspects, like putting a hand on the top of their head when they get in a car so they don't bump their head.
They just killed somebody.
Why are you doing that?
The left went nuts over that.
But in any case, I think that's a bit exaggerated.
I don't think Trump was openly calling for police brutality.
But in any case, What happened is that Reince gets on the plane.
He comes back on the plane.
While they're on the plane, Trump tweets out that Reince has been fired and he's been replaced by General John Kelly.
Kelly is the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
So Reince says, I resigned yesterday, but that doesn't explain why I was on the plane.
So they get out of the plane and Reince gets in a car with apparently Dan Scavino, who's one of the comms directors over at the White House, as well as, I think it was Bannon, was the third person.
And then Scavino and Bannon get out of that car, get in another car, and drive in the opposite direction, and Reince Priebus just drives off into the sunset.
It really was very much like the scene from The Godfather.
You know, leave the gun, take the cannoli.
And Reince is sort of left there by himself.
So Trump now has to paper this over.
So on Friday, he says, Reince is great.
I love Reince.
Sure, I didn't say anything when people were saying he was a paranoid schizophrenic.
Sure, I've been ripping on him paper.
for months secretly.
Sure I think he's a doofus but he's just great, unbelievable, tremendous girl.
John Kelly will do a fantastic job.
General Kelly has been a star.
Done an incredible job thus far.
Respected by everybody.
A great, great American.
Reince Priebus, a good man.
Thank you very much.
I love that.
John Kelly's a great American.
Reince Priebus, he's a dude.
I knew him for a little while.
Yeah.
Okay, so there's a lot of hope.
In the Trump administration and from Trump followers, that now that Kelly, who's a general, is in charge, in terms of the White House Chief of Staff, that there will be a little more structure to this, because so far we have seen the exit of the National Security Advisor, the firing of the FBI Director, Trump attacking his own Attorney General, we've seen the ouster of Reince Priebus, and we've seen the ouster of Sean Spicer.
That's a lot of turnover.
In any organization, that's a lot of turnover.
Like here at the Ben Shapiro Show, we've actually had the same staff since day one, because we did a pretty good job of selecting our staff.
Trump said he had selected the best people, Yeah, hard to argue that when you're firing somebody every couple of months.
I thought there was a funny tweet from somebody on Friday that says, Is Trump aware that he doesn't have to fire somebody every Friday?
Because the Friday before was Sean Spicer and then last week was Ryan Spiebus.
And this is one of the reasons why you're seeing his approval rating plummet among Republicans.
There's a feeling that Trump is in over his head and that he doesn't actually know what he's doing.
The combination of the fact that Trumpcare went down in flames last week, even skinny repeal went down in flames, and Trump came into office pledging, this is going to be easy, I'm going to repeal Obamacare, I'm the greatest dealmaker who ever was, and then none of that gets done, and he doesn't even really campaign for it very hard.
A lot of people were very upset about that, and then you combine that with all of the turnover in his administration, and it feels like he doesn't really know what he's doing.
So there's a Rasmussen poll out today.
Rasmussen has been the friendliest poll to Donald Trump.
He's down to 39% in the Rasmussen ratings.
Ten days ago, he was at, excuse me, 44% in the Rasmussen poll.
So he's dropped 5 points, 61% disapproving.
John Nolte, who's been a staunch supporter, writes for the Daily Wire.
Love John.
He and I disagree about a lot of things, but he's a great guy.
He writes a... he's...
He writes a piece today about this Rasmussen poll, and it's appropriately brutal.
He says, the failure of the Obamacare repeal bill, maybe for forever, is inexpressibly demoralizing and infuriating to Trump supporters.
Whether or not you blame the president for the failure of the Republican Party to keep a seven-year promise, a promise that defined them and justified their existence as a majority, Trump still assured and reassured us he would make this happen.
Trump ran on getting things done, and on top of tax reform and a border wall between the U.S.
and Mexico, repealing Obamacare was one of his three biggies.
The Obamacare repeal knocks some of the luster off of Trump and his biggest selling point, his deal-making skills.
Secondly, the chaos in the Trump administration finally became real with the resignations and firings of Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, and the newly installed Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and his gobsmacking, unforgivably hypocritical, breathtakingly obscene comments, leaks to New York Magazine.
Scaramucci is the man Trump hired to get the White House Communications Department in ship shape and to stop all these leaks to the corrupt media.
Trump hired this man.
Trump did.
This debacle is on Trump.
He runs to the corrupt media, leaks like crazy, and causes a massive distraction just when the Russia story is beginning to collapse under the weight of the facts.
Trump hired this man.
Trump did.
This debacle is on Trump.
That's appropriately brutal language, I think, from John Nolte, who's been a strong, strong supporter of President Trump throughout the primaries, throughout the general, and as president.
He's getting it from all sides, is Trump, and I think deservedly so at this point.
He needs to do a better job.
Now, one of the things that is frustrating about the way that the Priebus firing was done is he was fired in such a brutal and demeaning manner that when Priebus then went on national TV and said, everything's okay, nobody believed him.
So he went on national TV and he talks about how everything is just spectacular.
It's just great.
He did an interview with Breitbart and he did an interview with CNN.
Here's the one from CNN where he talks to Wolf Blitzer.
He says, everything has just, it could not be better.
Just unbelievably great.
He knows, I think, intuitively when things need to change.
I've seen it now for a year and a half on this wild ride with the president that I loved being a part of.
But he intuitively determined that it was time to do something differently.
And I think he's right.
Okay, so I think he's right to fire me and replace me.
I mean, this sort of kind of kiss-assery from Reince Priebus comes off that way because everybody knows the kind of chaos that's going on inside.
Again, that's Scaramucci's fault, okay?
Scaramucci went out and made clear what kind of chaos was happening here, and that's the guy Trump chose.
That's the guy Trump chose to put his faith in.
If you want to project stability.
This is what's amazing about this.
Trump is good at some things.
One of the things he's really terrific at, and has been his entire career, has been image.
Right?
That's been his entire career.
Trump actually isn't that great at real estate, but he is fantastic at image.
Right?
Scaramucci, too.
Scaramucci isn't that great at investing, but he's fantastic at image.
Right?
Scaramucci's the kind of guy who spent $100,000 to get a cameo in Wall Street 2.
Really.
He dropped $100,000 to the studio so he could get, like, a five-second cameo in Wall Street 2, one of the biggest bombs in recent history.
It's all about image creation for Trump.
If you want to create the image of a president who's in charge, knows what he's doing, this passive-aggressive tweeting, and then sending out your director of comms to talk about how Steve Bannon wants to suck his own clock, that does not actually, that does not actually forward the agenda in any real way.
I mean, on the same day that Priebus was saying that everything is on board, everybody's great, this is all terrific, he's now going on national television having to deny that he's a leaker.
Are you the leaker in the White House?
That's ridiculous.
Wolf, come on.
Give me a break.
I'm not going to get into his accusations.
Why not?
Why not respond to him?
Because I'm not going to.
Because it doesn't honor the President.
It doesn't honor the president again.
All that makes Reince Priebus look like he's a weakling because if you really wanted to honor the president, the president's the one who hired Scaramucci.
So what you have is the look of people who are trying to be loyal to Trump like Priebus.
They look like suckers.
And the people who are trying to be loyal in the way Scaramucci is, attacking all the people they perceive as Trump enemies, they look like sycophants.
None of this is good for a White House that is trying to project calm into an American political system that is really riled up at this point.
Now, there is some good news in all this, which is the economy continues to grow, 2.6% growth in the second quarter, which is good, strong growth.
Trump has been saying he wants 4% growth, not gonna happen.
But if he got us to 2.6% growth every quarter, that's strong growth, that would be fantastic.
That is largely because, and this is, I think, a point that a lot of Trump supporters make that is correct, There is a feeling that no matter what Trump does at this point with the Republican Congress, at least it's not going to make things economically worse.
You're not going to see him passing lots of regulations.
You're not going to see him taking a lot of harsh stances against the business community.
At least you're not going to do that.
The success of business relies on predictability.
If you're a business owner, what you don't want is your taxes being jacked up every five minutes or lowered and then jacked up and lowered and jacked up.
You just don't know how to hire people under those circumstances.
Trump, even his incompetence, provides a certain level of stability Because you know that nothing is going to get done.
So you may as well assume the system that's in place now is the system that's going to be in place six months from now.
But in terms of foreign policy, this does have some real ramifications, which I'm going to talk about in just a second.
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Okay, so.
As I say, the chaos, when it's being shrugged off, but there's just more evidence of chaos, it makes people feel discomforted.
We've heard now, for well over a year, that there was going to be a reset at some point that was going to make people feel solid.
First, the reset happened with Bannon, and Bannon did a pretty good job with the campaign.
As much as I dislike him personally, you gotta give credit where credit is due.
He did a good job with getting Trump under control for a lot of the campaign.
And then after the election, after Trump was mouthing off, there was a feeling, oh, he's assembling this fantastic cabinet, and they will keep him under control.
And then he starts firing people in his cabinet.
And now, again, we're getting the same routine.
We're getting the same routine.
Now John Kelly is coming in, and now he's coming in as a strong replacement.
Finally, things will be under control at the White House.
Here's John Karl from ABC News making that case.
He comes in as a much more powerful Chief of Staff than Reince Priebus ever was.
If you remember, Martha, when Priebus became Chief of Staff, he was announced along with Steve Bannon as the Chief Strategist, with Jared Kushner as a Senior Advisor.
Now, the power of all three positions, theoretically at least, will reside with General Kelly.
He will have authority that Reince Priebus never had.
But as you know, the issue throughout these first six months is that the real Chief of Staff in that White House has been Donald Trump.
So the question is whether or not he will truly cede that authority to General Kelly, and if he'll listen to him.
So that is the question.
Apparently, General Kelly was told by his wife, do not take this job, do not do it.
And the early rumors were that everything was going to run through Kelly now.
And then immediately within an hour, that was debunked.
Immediately there were people saying that Scaramucci would not report to Kelly, he would report directly to Trump.
Once you have many channels of communication to the top of the line, you got a problem.
Okay?
At our company, I won't even let Mathis talk to me.
No, that's not true.
But the fact is that we do have a line of communication when it comes to serious personnel issues, for example.
You go up the chain.
This is true at any company.
Okay?
The idea that you can have everybody going to the boss with everything leads to chaos inside the administration.
This is an administration that needs solidity right now because they're not getting a lot of policy wins.
And so the feeling of chaos has ramifications.
One of those ramifications is that you are seeing America's enemies feeling emboldened.
There are a couple of things that have happened in the last two weeks that make America's enemies feel like they might be able to get away with something.
The first thing I think that happened is Trump attacking his own attorney general but not firing him.
I actually think that it's not just the attacks on Sessions that are bad, but if you are going to attack your own AG, you need to fire him.
You need to demonstrate that you are a strong guy, not a weakling who just whines about the people he works with.
I don't go around the office whining about the people who work for me.
If I don't like them, I fire them.
That's what bosses do.
If Trump is the biggest boss in the world, which he is, then if you are Trump and you don't like your AG, And you keep them around.
That makes it look like you do not have a credible commitment to actually carry through your commitments.
That's why Vladimir Putin now is starting to get aggressive.
He expelled, I think, 755 American diplomats over the weekend.
North Korea fires off another missile.
They say this is an ICBM that is capable of hitting large swaths of the United States.
We're seeing America's enemies begin to get more aggressive.
And here's the question.
Is this a White House that is prepared for disaster?
Is this a White House that is prepared for bad things to happen?
Remember, with all the chaos, with all the tumult, with all of this happening, nothing externally bad has happened to the Trump administration.
The economy has been very solid.
The economy has been very strong on the foreign policy sphere.
No major moves have actually been made.
Vladimir Putin is not making major moves yet.
China's not making major moves yet.
Everybody was trying to figure out, is Trump bluffing?
Or is Trump really a crazy guy who might do anything?
After Syria, after Trump hit Syria with a missile, there was a feeling like, we just can't predict this guy.
He might go nuts and he might fire a missile.
Now it looks more like what Trump is is actually very predictable.
He's not Unpredictably crazy, which might actually be a good thing.
This is one of the cases for Trump on foreign policy.
But he might actually be super predictable.
That is, he has a knee-jerk response to aggression, which is he fires a missile, but then he chickens out.
Then he decides, you know what?
I can't do anything here.
I don't want to risk my own image and political capital to do anything.
And you could see America's enemies start to take advantage.
That's why Mike Pence was flying over to a lot of the NATO countries.
Trying to reassure them that they were protected from Putin.
If I were a NATO country right now, I would be a little less sanguine about the prospects that President Trump would intervene should Russia start to actually get aggressive in any serious way.
Trump is the image of the presidency matters.
That's why people elected Trump.
They elected Trump to be the image he was on TV.
The strong, powerful leader, right?
This is still his image according to polls.
The strong, powerful leader who's effective at what he does.
Right now, he has not been effective.
Right now, he does not look strong.
Right now, he looks like he is presiding over a chaotic household.
He looks like a stepfather in a chaotic household where no one knows where dinner is coming from the next night.
That is not what you need from the President of the United States.
It has some predictable effects for healthcare as well.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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So the impression of chaos inside the administration has real policy ramifications.
One of those ramifications, as we saw last week, was the fact that Trump was not able, in any real way, to rally support behind any form of a healthcare bill.
And you saw him, like last week, he tweeted out, Republicans, pass healthcare, make it better, do it.
And Jon Podhors from Commentary Magazine, he said, what exactly is it?
And I tweeted back, it John, it!
And that's sort of the problem.
You don't know what it is.
So when Trump supports something, you don't know what it is that he is supporting.
And so I think Trump actually made a bit of a boo-boo.
So Trump has been saying openly and publicly, we need to let Obamacare implode, let it collapse, let it implode, let it collapse, let it go down in flames.
He's actually not wrong.
Okay, Obamacare is a crappy scheme.
Obamacare is a garbage scheme.
But the idea that you are going to let Obamacare implode, that's something you don't say out loud.
That's something you say in strategy sessions.
So to give you a point of...
Contrast.
Go back to 2013.
Ted Cruz says, we're not going to fund Obamacare from the congressional side, and we're not going to pass a budget that includes funding for Obamacare.
And Obama says, fine, I won't sign a budget that doesn't include funding for Obamacare.
So what does Obama do?
The government shuts down.
And it turns out, when the government shut down, nothing bad happened.
Everyone was pretty much okay.
The zombies did not wander the streets.
There was no foreign invasion.
Members of the military were still getting paid.
Everything was still basic.
Social security checks were still going out.
You know, everything was still basically working because essential services still run in a government shutdown.
Everything was basically okay, but somehow, Obama had to suggest to Americans that true disaster was waiting just around the corner.
So what did he do?
He quietly went out, and he closed open-air war memorials, he closed the national parks.
You remember, this was a big scandal at the time.
This was back in December 2012, I believe.
January 2013.
He was doing it on purpose, right?
He was clearly shutting these open-air war memorials where, again, it's an open-air memorial.
It's literally just a statue in a park, and he was closing them down and putting chains around them and preventing people from getting in, preventing war veterans from getting in to visit memorials to their war buddies.
He was doing all of that in order to up the pain factor, and we on the right were going nuts.
I remember we were saying, he's doing this on purpose because he's trying to make something that isn't that bad into something that is absolutely terrible so that he can put pressure on the American people, and that's gross.
He got away with it because he was smart enough to recognize that he couldn't openly say that.
Now imagine how that would have gone if he had said that.
If he had said, listen, we're in the middle of a government shutdown, you know, and in a government shutdown, I understand things aren't that bad, but I'm going to make things worse.
I want you to feel the pain.
And if you feel the pain, I think that you will be more likely to support my agenda.
It would have undercut his agenda, right?
We all would have gone, that's kind of a douchey thing to do, right?
Like, we all would have said, that seems kind of yucky.
So, that's what has to happen with Obamacare.
So, what Trump really should be doing right now, he should be saying, look, The Obamacare structure is unworkable.
We're seeing in many, many states, Obamacare exchanges don't have even a single provider.
The individual market is being crushed by the weight of these regulations.
And President Obama was signing over illegal subsidies.
He was trying to, he was trying to buck up, he was trying to fill in the gaps in his own crappy plan by doing something illegal.
And I don't care what the Supreme Court has to say about this.
There's nothing in Obamacare that allows me, legally, to give funding to these insurance companies.
And so I'm not going to give funding to these insurance companies.
If states want to fill in the gaps, that's their business.
But Democrats need to relieve the regulations.
If the prices are going up, that's because I am unwilling to cheat.
I am unwilling to spend money that is not allocated by law in order to prop up a Democrat's crappy system.
I'm not going to do that, because that crappy system is foreclosing us from having a better system.
And if Democrats want this system to continue sucking, then it's on them.
It's not on me.
I'm just following the law as it's written.
And I'm not going to participate in bailouts just because the Democrats want me to.
So, that's what he should say.
Here's what he actually says, which is saying what his actual strategy is, maybe in his own head.
Now, that last part, by the way, everything I just said is true.
That wouldn't even be him lying.
All of that is true.
But instead, here's what he says.
Women of ICE are turning the tide in the battle against MS-13.
But we need more resources from Congress, and we're getting them.
Congress is actually opening up and really doing a job.
They should have approved healthcare last night, but you can't have everything.
Boy, oh boy.
They've been working on that one for seven years.
Can you believe that?
The swamp!
But we'll get it done.
You know, I said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode, and then do it.
I turned out to be right.
Let Obamacare implode.
Okay, when he says that, it sounds like he is now taking ownership of Obamacare imploding, right?
That's like the case where, okay, there's a person who's drowning in a river.
And you say, okay, well, how can we save that person?
There are two ways to save the person.
One is there's a person who's a better swimmer than you and you need to incentivize that person to go swim.
So you say, listen, I can't do it, right?
I'm not capable of actually saving that person.
I can jump in the river, but I can't save that person.
There's no way for me to save that person.
You should go do it.
Or we can work together and we can go out there together and try and save that person, right?
Or what you could do is you could say, let him drown.
Let him drown.
The problem with the PR for Let Him Drown is it sounds like you're okay with letting people drown, right?
And this is what Democrats are going to do.
This is a campaign ad for Democrats.
Okay, what they're going to do is they're going to cut Let Obamacare Implode with the rising premiums.
Now they're going to say the rising premiums are Trump's fault because he could prevent this, but he's not going to prevent this.
He tweeted out this morning, Trump, he tweeted, if Obamacare is hurting people, and it is, why shouldn't it hurt the insurance companies?
And why should Congress not be paying what the public pays?
So, I think, so I agree totally with the Congress should be paying what the public pays.
Force them into the individual market so they live with the consequences of the system they've set up for everyone else.
Totally fine with that.
But, why shouldn't it hurt the insurance companies is a Bernie Sanders argument.
That is not a conservative argument.
The reason insurance companies right now are charging higher premiums is because of the Obamacare regulations.
When you say things like, why shouldn't it hurt the insurance companies, that's Bernie Sanders' case.
Bernie Sanders says what we should actually do if we want to hurt the insurance companies is we should just nationalize the whole thing.
Medicare for all!
Medicare for all, right?
That's the routine that they are pushing toward.
So again, how you approach the issue matters.
I want to see Obamacare go probably far more than President Trump does.
I've said from the beginning Obamacare actually corrupts the soul of the country, but You know, President Trump is pursuing the right goal in the wrong way, and every time you pursue the right goal in the wrong way, you end up not achieving the goal and actually undercutting the goal.
You can see how this is all a Democratic ad, right?
Chuck Schumer yesterday starts to use it as a Democratic ad.
Here's the Senate Minority Leader.
President Trump did a tweet last night and a tweet this morning.
Not presidential.
His tweet last night We're going to let the system collapse.
We're going to hurt innocent people because we're angry we lost politically.
That is small.
That is not what a president does.
And I hope our Senate colleagues, our House colleagues on his side of the aisle will turn a deaf ear on that.
Okay, so again, that's the Democratic ad.
You can see it playing out in real time.
And there are going to be Republicans who go along with that Democratic ad, like Susan Collins from Maine, who is a quote-unquote moderate Republican.
She now is trying to take ownership of this whole thing.
She says, health care is in our court, right?
If we don't fix it, it's our fault.
President Trump, as you know, is hoping to revive the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.
He needs the vote of one more senator in order to flip someone's vote, whether yours or Murkowski's or McCain's.
The president appears to be threatening to cut off funding for the health care plans that members of Congress receive.
Would that kind of pressure change your vote?
No, but, you know, the ball is really in our court right now.
There are serious problems with the ACA.
We're seeing collapsing markets in some areas of the country, where even though people have subsidies, they're not going to be able to buy an insurance policy.
So our job is not done.
And what we need to do is to remember my friend Lamar Alexander's words, which is that he says that Congress doesn't do comprehensive well.
We need to go back to the committee, to the health committee and the finance committee.
So what he's doing, so is Trump really driving a unified health plan from the right and the left?
Is he really doing that?
Or is what he's doing actually creating an opposition to himself from the quote-unquote moderate Republicans like Susan Collins and the left that's going to blame Trump for everything now?
It's not good PR.
Bernie Sanders, again, he actually did this last night, right?
This was Bernie Sanders yesterday saying, Trump wants to say, they're trying to dump it on Trump, and Trump is making it easy because he's actually not doing the one part of his job he's supposed to be best at, the imaging, right?
That's the part he's supposed to be a master at.
That's the part where he's supposed to be dominant.
That's the part he's doing the worst.
Here's Bernie Sanders, looking all weird with his tongue out of his mouth here, talking about how, great freeze frame guys, talking about how Trump is going to threaten all Americans as well as my pudding cup and perhaps my second vacation home.
You know, I really think it's incomprehensible that we have a president of the United States who wants to sabotage health care in America, make life more difficult for millions of people who are struggling now to get the health insurance they need and to pay for that health insurance.
Maybe the president should put down his, stop his twittering, tweeting for a while, and understand that America today is the only country, only major country on earth, not to guarantee health care to all people, and the solution is not to throw tens of millions of people off of health insurance that they currently have.
Okay, so this is their whole shtick, and they're going to continue beating those drums.
Trump needs to do a better job with this.
Now, that said, I think there's a critique that's growing among some people who were not pro-Trump during the last election cycle that I think is wrong.
And I think it's actually wrong-headed.
It's kind of interesting.
So John Kasich says that because of John Kasich, God help us, that... John Kasich, the current Ohio governor, a raisin in the sun, John Kasich, talking about how Trump's first six months have him worried for the country.
I'm worried about our country, obviously, Chris.
And here's the thing, you know, the White House is an amazing institution.
It has great power.
But when I think about the people who have been able to lend voice to amplify that power, what we need, and I think perhaps the president can get there, I sure hope so, is sort of the sense of unity, of hopefulness, not of division, but of lifting.
And I think we're not seeing enough, we're not seeing that right now.
Okay, so he's very critical of Trump.
He's always been critical of Trump.
He also looks like a wadded piece of paper that went through your pocket in the wash.
In any case, John Kasich doing this routine, you know, he's just discouraged by the state of the country.
Jeff Flake did the same thing in Arizona.
He says, the GOP has lost its way.
We may have lost what we were supposed to be.
I think similarly today, the party has lost its way.
We've given into nativism and protectionism, and I think that if we're going to be a governing party in the future, and a majority party, We've got to go back to traditional conservatism.
Limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, respect for free trade.
Those are the principles that made us who we are.
Okay, so I agree with his basic principles, but the idea that the party is given into nativism or any of this stuff, I think that's an over-read into what 2016 was.
Listen, I've worried about this stuff too.
I've talked about it repeatedly.
I've said that I think that, you know, the anti-trade tendencies of the Republican Party, they're playing follow the leader.
But what I'm actually seeing, What I'm actually saying, and it's encouraging to me, is I'm seeing that there are still people, people with whom I disagree on a lot of this stuff, who still have standards for Trump.
And that is a big thing.
That's a big thing.
Because the fact is, either your standard is going to be the man, or your standard is going to be the principle.
Now, your principles may differ from mine, but at least if your principles are still there, then we can argue about the validity of the principles.
We're not just arguing about Trump the man.
I don't care about Trump the man.
Trump the man doesn't matter to me.
As I've said before, politics used to exist on the basis of principles, right?
There was a right-left spectrum, it was the x-axis on politics, and it was from right to left, you know, if I was all the way out here on the right.
Now, there is a y-axis, and that is Trump.
And people now judge each other based on whether they are pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
Because I'm at a zero on pro-Trump or anti-Trump, sometimes he's great, sometimes he sucks, I don't care, you know, I'm still all the way out to the right here, but because I'm zero on the Trump scale, there are a lot of people who tend to think that I'm moderate, which is bizarre, because I'm the most right-wing person that I know.
The problem is that if you're on the Y spectrum, and all you care about is the Y spectrum, Then the x-spectrum completely disappeared.
It completely disappears.
That x-axis completely disappears.
You can't argue with people on a different axis than you.
I can't argue with people who are on that y-axis when I'm not even on the y-axis.
I'm on a completely different axis.
And so what I'm actually seeing, and I think it's good, Is that there are people with whom I disagree who still are holding Trump to a standard.
So one of those people is Laura Ingraham.
I've been very critical of Laura.
I think that she was very sycophantic toward Trump during the election cycle.
I thought that she glossed over a lot of the things about him that are not conservative.
I think that she fibbed to her audience sometimes about what Trump's actual agenda was, but Laura, at least, has limits.
And you see that, right?
So Laura, over the weekend, she came out and she said, Scaramucci's an adult, right?
This guy that Trump hired is an idiot, and he's actually undermining the Trump administration agenda.
This is good.
This is encouraging.
Tucker Carlson, Newt Gingrich, they're starting to say the same things.
That means that there is some standard.
Again, I may not agree with their standard.
I may think that they waited until too long to get upset about what Trump is doing.
But at least it means that there is still a rational debate that can be had along that x-axis because I can have a discussion with people who differ from me where they are in the x-axis.
I can't have a discussion with people who just want to talk about why Trump is God or why Trump is Satan.
That's not a conversation that's worthwhile having.
Here is Laura Ingraham basically, for once, being critical of President Trump.
And I think this, I'm sorry, I like Scaramucci, I think he's really talented, but this episode is humiliating to the president.
I think it ultimately humiliates him.
It does not serve the communication of this agenda well.
I'm probably going to tick him off by saying it, but I say it out of deep love and affection.
It's not helping his agenda at all.
So you can see that Elora is still trying to cater to people who are all the way up here on the Y-spectrum, but she at least has a breaking point.
If you have a breaking point, you can be part of the political conversation.
If you don't have a breaking point, if you'll stand for anything, or if you'll stand for nothing from Trump, then you're not part of a rational political conversation.
You're either part of a pro-Trump cult or an anti-Trump cult, and I'm not interested in having a conversation with either of those things.
Okay, before I get to things I like and things I hate, First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
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Okay, time for things I like and things I hate.
So things I like.
I'm obsessed with the mooch.
I will be honest with you.
I think the mooch is the greatest thing that I have ever seen in politics.
Because what the hell?
I mean, just like what in the world?
And as I said on Friday, one of the problems with the Trump administration and one of the glories of the Trump administration is that if you duck out of the room for five minutes to take a dump, you miss three news cycles.
Scaramucci has contributed to this in magical ways.
I do love a man who Who called his book something like Jumping Over the Rabbit Hole and then said that he did that as a reference to Lewis and Carroll.
Not Lewis Carroll, Lewis and Carroll.
You know, like the explorers of the Northwest, Lewis and Clark.
But in any case, it's pretty amazing.
Scaramucci's just a joy.
And since I now root for entertainment, not just policy victory, I'm starting to give up on policy victory, unfortunately, because I don't see this Congress being effective and I think this president needs to get his act together.
Now that I root only for entertainment, Scaramucci must stay.
It is imperative that Scaramucci remain as part of this administration no matter how many times he says that other administration officials are attempting to perform bizarre sex acts on themselves from SNL skits with Will Ferrell performing yoga.
In any case, I've decided to do a whole series of references to Scaramucci this week in honor of the new White House Communications Director.
This one is basically eight versions of Scaramucci in a suit.
It is Wall Street, starring Charlie Sheen.
In the 1980s, Oliver Stone had a series of films that were really quite good, like Back to Back in the 1980s.
This is the film that he made directly after Platoon, and of course has become famous for Michael Douglas' terrific performances as Gordon Gekko.
Here's some of the trailer.
From the director of Platoon, the next battle is in the greatest jungle of them all, Wall Street.
We're going down a drain, okay?
The stock is plummeting.
When it hits 18, buy it all.
Something big is going down.
I want you to fill out the missing picture.
Mr. Gecko, that's not exactly what I do.
Or you can trade your honor.
I could lose my license.
That's inside information.
For power.
You're not inside, you are outside.
I want you with me, buddy.
I'm with you, Gordon.
Trade your peace of mind.
Just the beginning, pal.
If any trouble does arise, you are on your own.
The trail does stop with you.
For a piece of the action.
A hundred million dollars, buddy.
All it takes is a little inside information.
I don't care where or how you get it.
I think you owe me.
And you can trade everything you believe in.
It's you and you can't, but you're too blind to see it.
For everything you've ever wanted.
I got a strange call from the SEC, so this is heavy, but...
This is a very, very weaponist film, obviously.
The take on Wall Street is that Wall Street is all based on insider information, which is not true.
First of all, there's a good libertarian argument that insider information should actually be legal.
The reason that they say this is because they say that otherwise what you end up with is that the public actually has less information generally.
You could follow a few key players, and if you just followed what the investors were doing who actually are at the company, you'd immediately know something was going wrong at the company and sell your stock.
So it'd actually be more transparent.
This is the case made by libertarians.
I think it's actually a pretty strong case, economically speaking, that insider information shouldn't be barred because people are going to do it anyway.
And in fact, the people with the ultimate insider information are people in Congress who know which legislation is going to be passed impacting the economy.
In any case, it's a really cynical take on Wall Street that is far too broad.
The truth is that the vast majority of stock pickers do not actually outperform the market.
One of the great myths of stock picking is that if you invest your money at Goldman Sachs, the particular trader, that that guy's going to be just a wild success for the next 10 years.
The number of people who have been wild successes, who outperform the market, you know, who pick stocks just they're great at picking stocks, Really, really low.
The market is highly transparent, and it is very difficult to beat the market.
The idea that you can just beat the market is, you may do it on a one-off basis, but doing it repeatedly is nearly impossible.
But the film itself is really good, and it's funny because Gordon Gekko is supposed to be the villain, but his greed is good speech, which is basically sort of an Ayn Rand take on economics.
Not a bad summary of Ayn Rand's objectivism, and actually, true.
One of the things that's really funny about this is that they make out, this movie, I could do a whole shtick about the economics of this movie, but they make out the unions as the great winners in all of this.
Okay, the unions in this case, one of the things that happens in this movie is that the union, which is run by Charlie Sheen's dad, Martin Sheen in the film, He's trying to bargain with an airline.
The airline is losing money, and the unions are still trying to claw for their peace.
Now, he makes the unions a lot more conciliatory than they actually are in real life, but Gordon Gekko looks at this and he says, okay, well, I'll buy the airline.
I'll gut the airline.
I can sell it off for pieces.
It's cheaper to do that, and I'll make more money that way than bargaining with these unions.
And instead of you saying, well, maybe the union should cut a better deal with management in order for them to operate an airline at a competitive price, right, and stop losing money, It makes you feel like he's the bad guy for coming in and buying a company and then redistributing the airplanes, basically selling the airplanes to more efficient companies.
But from the perspective of the consumer, what Gordon Gekko does is better from the perspective of the consumer than what the union is attempting to do in Wall Street.
It's really an interesting counter.
If you watch it and then do the economic counter to it, it's actually a really interesting analysis.
But it's kind of cool.
Oliver Stone Who is a complete nutjob.
He's a super talented director.
He made, in this period, he made Salvador with James Woods, which is a very good movie.
The next movie he made was Platoon, which is a very good movie.
The next movie he made was Wall Street, which is a very good movie.
The movie he made after that is Talk Radio, which is a very good movie.
And then he made Born on the Fourth of July, which I'm not a big fan of, and The Doors, which I'm not a big fan of.
Then he made JFK, which again is propaganda, but it's a very good movie.
Talent, as Andrew Klavan likes to say, talent falls equally on the good and the evil.
Oliver Stone is not a good man.
He's backed for years the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela, which is now garbage.
But it's pretty... He is a talented filmmaker for sure.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so first thing that I hate, there's this run-in between Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, and a Cubs fan that's at a Brewers-Cubs game, and Chris Christie's getting a lot of crap for this, but that does not seem appropriate to me.
Here's what happened.
What'd he say to you?
Huh?
- I appreciate that.
- I love you so much.
- What'd he say to you?
- Huh?
- There was a secret service right there.
- What'd he say?
- I don't know, you wanna act like a big stat? - So that Cubs fan basically got owned by Chris Christie, So as Chris Christie was walking through, the Cubs fan started heckling him.
And he yelled his name.
Apparently the guy said, I yelled his name and told him that he sucked.
I called him a hypocrite because I thought that it needed to be said.
Again, I think it is one thing for Chris Christie to catch a ball at a Mets game, which I liked last week, and then he got booed, which I thought was just generally hilarious.
But don't, like, harass the guy on a personal level, okay?
Like, as somebody who is in public a lot, it would be very irritating to me if you just heckled me on a personal level.
Like, I'll live with it.
It's fine.
It comes along with the territory.
But for people to be getting all over Christie because Christie went to him and said, you know, you're a big shot before walking away from the fan, I can't get on Chris Christie's case for that.
I really can't.
And people are all over him for it.
Eh.
Not so much.
Okay, the other thing that I hate today is J.K.
Rowling, people are so eager to nail Trump that they are just saying things about him that are plainly untrue.
So there was a video of, it looked like a kid in a wheelchair trying to shake Trump's hand and then Trump not shaking his hand.
But the problem is that that's not true.
Trump spent more time with the kid in the wheelchair than anyone else.
There's actual video of Trump with the kid in the wheelchair and it is not It's obvious that he's not ignoring the kid in the wheelchair, but that didn't stop JK Rowling We actually what do we have the video?
So this is the actual video of Trump with the kid in the wheelchair So There's that cute little kid in the wheelchair.
And people were trying to suggest that Trump was ignoring the kid.
The kid wanted a handshake.
First of all, the kid's like three.
Kids who are three don't handshake, really.
But he was really nice to the kid.
J.K.
Rowling didn't stop her.
Again, when you are a big-name author in a different field, you feel the need to be a jerk, I guess, like Stephen King or J.K.
Rowling.
She tweeted, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Maya Angelou.
First of all, anyone who quotes Maya Angelou is just a complete bag of annoyance.
Come on.
And she says, Trump imitated a disabled reporter.
Now he pretends not to see a child in a wheelchair, as though frightened he might catch his condition.
Hey, number one, never happened.
Number two, on the imitation of disabled reporter, this is one of those things where the more I've watched, I've watched it now probably ten times.
Do I think it's good?
No.
Do I think that he was obviously imitating the reporter?
I don't think it's perfectly obvious at all.
Because Trump does his imitation of, like, people he doesn't like the same way every time with the this and the weird voice.
But in any case, she says, This monster of narcissism values only himself and his pale reflections.
The disabled, minorities, transgender people, the poor, women, unless related to him by ties of blood and therefore his creations, are treated with contempt because they do not resemble Trump.
My mother used a wheelchair.
I witnessed people uncomfortable around her disability, but if they had a shred of decency, they got over it.
So yes, that clip of Trump looking deliberately over a disabled child's head, ignoring his outstretched hand, was touched me on the raw.
That man occupies the most powerful office in the free world, and his daily outrages against civilized norms are having a corrosive effect.
How stunning and how horrible that Trump cannot bring himself to shake the hand of a small boy who only wanted to touch the president.
Um, yeah, except that that's a bunch of absolute garbage.
That thing has 58,000 retweets and counting.
Actually, I'm sorry, the first one with Maya Angelou has 162,000 likes.
So it just shows you how eager people are to confirm their biases about particular people, including Trump.
Listen, you can be critical of Trump.
I'm highly critical of Trump.
But that does not mean that you get to make crap up about him that makes you a bad person.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
I'll give you the full recap of the debate with Cenk.