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Nov. 8, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:53
The Democratic Tsunami, Or Just Another Ripple? | Ep. 413
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So last night was really crappy for Republicans in Virginia.
We will give you the entire analysis from beginning to end without myth or bias.
Plus, President Trump heads to South Korea, and we will look at a little bit of Bibble Talk.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So as you can tell, I was crying so hard last night that the snot has not yet stopped flowing.
I have a horrible cold that my children keep giving me.
One of the wonderful things about children is that they are delightful.
One of the horrible things is that they constantly get you sick.
They're just giant balls of germs.
In any case, we will soldier through with the bravery of Spartan warriors.
But before we get to any of what happened in Virginia last night, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tracker.
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Okay, so last night, Republicans got their asses kicked in Virginia.
And that really is not an overstatement.
Ed Gillespie ends up losing by almost 10 points in Virginia.
Going into the election, it was assumed that Gillespie was gaining.
Everyone on Morning Joe, you know, your great political analyst on Morning Joe, had suggested that Gillespie was definitely going to win, universally.
I was asked by Andrew Klavan, who I thought was going to win, I informed him I no longer bet on elections after 2016.
But if I had to lean, I would have been leaning toward Northam, the Democrat in Virginia.
It wasn't just Northern winning, it was Northern winning big.
And it wasn't just Northern winning, it was Democrats down the ballot winning in enormous numbers.
So, Republicans going into this particular election cycle had, I believe, 66 seats in the state legislature.
They finished last night with 47.
So they just got shellacked all the way across the board.
And it wasn't just Republicans in Virginia.
Democrats picked up a couple of seats in Georgia.
Excuse me, in the state legislature there, in the state legislature, those seats were so red that Democrats had not run in those districts for the last election cycle.
They ran this time, they ran this time, and they won.
Okay, not just that, the governorship of New Jersey has lost that, you can predict it, but the Washington state legislature turns from Republican to Democrat with the loss of a legislative seat in Washington.
What this means is that Democrats are outperforming the polls.
It means that Democrats are showing up in bigger numbers than Republicans were assuming that they were going to.
There are a bunch of Democrats, including radical Democrats, elected across Virginia last night, including the first transgender delegate to the Virginia House of Burgesses in the history of Virginia.
Obviously, this is the second transgender delegate, I believe, ever to any legislative body.
I think the first one was in 1992.
He was actually a Republican in Atlanta.
But in any case, The Democrats are celebrating this as some sort of massive victory.
So, we're going to analyze this from a couple different angles, because there are a couple of different narratives that are now taking effect.
One is that this was just inevitable.
Okay, Virginia's been moving blue, particularly northern Virginia, near Washington DC.
Everyone who was in Washington, D.C. working commutes out to Alexandria, and that's where they live.
They all live in Alexandria in the northern portion of the state, and that part is becoming more blue and more populous.
And so this was just the natural after effect of all of that.
And there is something to this.
So this is a map tweeted out by someone named Jamie Dupree.
Jamie Dupree tweets out a map showing on the bottom, you can see the 2016 Clinton-Trump map, right, Hillary won the state by about 5 percentage points.
She won it 50-45.
Northern won the state by 54-45.
And then you see the top map.
The top map is last night.
And you do see a couple of big transition points.
The first one you see is if you look at the bottom right-hand corner, facing it anyway, of the map.
What you will see is Virginia Beach, right?
Virginia Beach was red in 2016, now it is blue.
So, Trump had won that.
He lost it last night.
You also see some of the blue areas becoming bluer.
The red area is becoming lighter shades of red.
So, the entire state is moving toward the left, and it has been for quite a while.
The 2016 map, between 2013 and 2017, Virginia moved steadily Democratic, certainly since 2009 when Bob McDonald won by 17 points in the gubernatorial race.
The state has moved dramatically.
To the left.
It's also important to mention that the gubernatorial loss is not unprecedented.
So, Trump is the fifth president in a row to have his party lose both the Virginia and the New Jersey gubernatorial races in his first year in office.
So, he lost this year to Northam and a guy named Murphy in New Jersey.
In 2009, McDonnell won and Christie won.
They were both Republicans after Obama was elected in 2001.
Warner and McGreevy won in the various states.
Republicans have not been winning in Virginia for quite a while.
McDonnell is the only major victory in Virginia, but the state legislature has been heavily red for quite a while.
It no longer is.
Okay, so this is sort of the extent of the analysis that a lot of people who are pro-Trump want to do.
The extent of the analysis is the state was already moving red, what are you whining about?
Trump lost the state by five, so last night Gillespie lost by nine, so Trump is better than Gillespie, so what's the big deal?
The state was already moving in the wrong direction, what are you whining about?
I think this is far too simplistic because Again, off-year elections are bad for presidents.
They are bad for the president of the incumbent party.
And that means that Republicans are likely to be in trouble in the House.
So the average loss in House elections for the last 50, 60 years in off-year elections has been around 25 seats.
Republicans have a 23-seat majority in the House of Representatives right now.
So if just the average swing happens, Republicans lose the House of Representatives.
But we were told that Trump was going to win like no other.
Winning, winning, winning, winning, right?
So that's a bit of an excuse.
But, let's take it at face value.
The question isn't whether Republicans lose 22 seats, the question is whether Republicans lose 30 or 35 seats.
And what we saw last night in Virginia was a wave, and that's a combination of factors, in my opinion.
That is, yes, places like Virginia moving to the left.
But, more importantly, it is a very unpopular president.
Remember, Trump is unpopular right now, and he has 3 to 4 percent economic growth every quarter.
If the bottom falls out on the economy at any point here, that dude's gonna be in the 20s faster than you can say anything.
I mean, they could really fall apart very quickly here.
Unpopular president.
Off your election.
Motivated Democratic base.
The Democratic base is motivated for two reasons.
One, they despise President Trump.
And without Trump on the ballot, a bunch of Republicans didn't show up.
And two, Republicans also didn't show up because Hillary Clinton wasn't on the ballot.
The big difference between 2016 and 2017 is not Trump on the ballot, it's Hillary Clinton not being on the ballot.
Hillary Clinton not being on the ballot was a major boon to Democrats.
There's a solid case to be made that Democrats minus Hillary is greater than GOP plus Trump.
In other words, the Democrats gained more by not having Hillary on the ticket than the Republicans gained by having Trump around, especially in Northern Virginia, where the Republicans just got wiped out.
In Loudoun County, which is the D.C.
exurbs, in 2014, Ida Gillespie, who ran for Senate in 2014 in Virginia, also ran for governor last night in Virginia.
In 2014, Gillespie won Loudoun County by 456 votes.
Yesterday, he lost it by 24,000 votes.
24,000 votes.
That is a massive shift.
And one of the reasons for that shift is that suburban people did not like President Trump.
There were exit polls yesterday showing from ABC News that the people who said they voted because of the president voted 2-1 against Gillespie.
So there's a big move against Trump here, and that does have an effect.
So an unpopular president, a candidate who's trying to run a Trumpian campaign when he's not really a Trumpian, the fact that the Democrats are jazzed up about 2018 in a way Republicans are not.
Republicans haven't done anything with the legislative power they have.
Also, it is quite possible, and this is the contention that I have been making for literally a year since the election, literally one year, because today is the day after the election.
The case that I have been making is that Hillary Clinton won the election for President Trump.
That President Trump did not actually win the election.
Hillary Clinton lost the election.
No one showed up to vote for her.
And the evidence that I base this on is that in Wisconsin, what you see is an actual loss of votes from 2012 to 2016.
Mitt Romney won more votes in 2012 than Donald Trump won in 2016 in Wisconsin.
Trump won the state.
Romney lost the state.
That's because people showed up to vote for Obama who didn't show up to vote for Clinton.
In 2004, George W. Bush won more votes in Michigan than Donald Trump did in 2016.
Trump wins the state.
Bush loses the state.
Why?
Because people showed up to vote for John Kerry who didn't show up to vote for Hillary Clinton.
It's that simple.
Well, that's what you're seeing now.
Democrats did not vote in the last election cycle for two reasons.
One, they thought Hillary was going to win in a walk.
That's what the polls were saying.
The New York Times was saying a 99% chance that Hillary Clinton was going to be president of the United States on the morning of the election cycle.
That's what they were saying all the way up until the evening.
A 99% chance that she was going to be the next president of the United States.
And so people didn't show up to vote because they figured she's going to win anyway.
What does it matter if I go to show up to vote?
And two, Hillary's the most off-putting candidate in the history of American politics.
No one wanted to get out and vote for her.
She's not on the ballot anymore.
You know who's still on the ballot?
Trump.
So now, you get what the Democrats thought it was going to be.
There was a big argument in 2016.
Is this election about Trump or is it about Hillary?
You've got to pick one.
Is it about Trump or Hillary?
I said the entire election cycle is about Hillary Clinton.
Hillary was bouncing around in the polls.
She was going everywhere from 50 to 40.
Where was she going to end up?
That was the big question.
Trump was very steady between 40 and 45.
Always.
Right?
And he was usually between 43 and 45.
And I figured, okay, 45% is not enough to win.
Turns out it is.
But bottom line is that now you get the referendum on Trump.
The referendum on Hillary is that everyone thought she was terrible.
The referendum on Trump, now that no one else is on the ballot, is that Trump is not popular, okay?
And that does have a pretty major impact.
Now, what the Democrats are doing is they're trying to translate this over into a national campaign.
They're basically running Hillaryism without Hillary.
One of the things that's fascinating is that a lot of people were saying last night, what you saw was Trumpism without Trump.
I'm gonna explain why that's not true in a second, and why what you're actually seeing right now is Hillaryism without Hillary in just a second.
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Okay, so there was a lot of talk last night about Trump, and we'll get to Trump in just a second.
But what we actually saw was Hillaryism on the ballot without Hillary.
So, you had a bunch of candidates who ran campaigns very similar to Hillary Clinton's, but they weren't as nasty and off-putting as Hillary Clinton.
Ralph Northam ran a pretty nasty low-down campaign accusing Ed Gillespie of racism and bigotry.
He had a Latino Victory Caucus put out that ad that I showed you, what I think is the worst ad in American political history, showing a Gillespie truck trying to run down minority children.
And then, Northam had the gall to go out there and say that Virginia rejected hatred and bigotry.
Here's Ralph Northam, the new governor of the state of Virginia.
Today, Virginians have answered and have spoken.
Virginia has told us to end the divisiveness, that we will not condone hatred and bigotry, and to end the politics that have torn this country apart.
I want to let you know that in Virginia, it's going to take a doctor to heal our differences.
He, of course, is a doctor, so that means that... Okay, so, in any case, this is sheer nonsense, the idea that they rejected hatred and bigotry, that if Ed Gillespie had won, then people in Confederate flag trucks would be running down children.
And then they say that they're uniting?
Then they say they're uniting?
He's running Hillary's campaign, right?
This is what Hillary said about deplorables.
He's running Hillary's campaign in an off-year election, and he's doing it without Hillary's face.
And this makes a big difference.
It demonstrates how unpopular Hillary Clinton was.
Same thing was happening over in New Jersey.
The guy named Phil Murphy is the new governor over in New Jersey replacing Chris Christie when Christie's term is up and he's doing the same thing.
We have a new unity, right?
Again, this is Hillaryism without Hillary.
Tonight we declare the days of division are over.
We will move forward together.
This is exactly who we are, New Jersey.
We have each other's backs.
To believe in each of us is to believe in all of us.
Okay, so again, they're going to do this whole unity routine running the Hillary campaign without Hillary Clinton, and they can win on that.
Okay, it's not the Republicans' agenda was radically, you know, greenlit over the past eight years.
It was that they're running against Barack Obama.
Well, now Democrats get to run against Donald Trump, and they get to do so without Hillary Clinton's face at the head of their ticket.
That makes a very, very large difference.
So, one of the questions that's being asked is basically, did Gillespie fight hard enough?
So, in defense of Trump, what I'm saying here is that Trump's unpopularity definitely hurts people down ballot, that it drives Democrats to the polls in a way it doesn't drive Republicans to the polls, that Trump's approval rating is historically awful.
Again, that ABC News exit polling showed, quote, voters by a 2-1 margin said they were casting their ballot to show opposition to Trump rather than support for him.
In New Jersey, that margin was 3-1.
People may thrill to Trump's cultural warfare on the right, but it also drives a bunch of people on the left to the polls.
You know, so this is the case that I'm making, that some of this has to do with Trump, not all of it has to do with Trump, but some of it does.
A lot of people on the Trump side are saying, no, no, no, no, no.
The reason that Gillespie lost is because he wasn't Trumpkin enough.
Right, this is always, if your theory is that Trump is God, King, Emperor, then everything bad that happens, there's a new hypothesis that's been created, okay?
The hypothesis that's been created is that when someone wins, it's because they were warm to Trump, and when someone loses, it's because they weren't warm enough to Trump.
It's never about the reality, because Gillespie basically ran a very Trumpian campaign.
He didn't openly campaign with Trump.
If he had openly campaigned with Trump, he would have lost worse in the DC excerpts up in Northern Virginia.
He won exactly the same percentage that Trump won in the state.
The difference is that Democrats showed up to vote for Democrats this time, and so Gillespie won 45%, so did Trump.
Bottom line is, Gillespie ends up losing by 10, Trump ends up losing by 5.
That's because all the Democrats showed up to vote.
In fact, by polls, 41% of people who voted yesterday in Virginia were Democrats.
Only 31% said they were Republicans.
So, what the Trumpian people have been saying is, well, Gillespie lost because he didn't fight hard enough.
If he'd only had a little more Trump in him, then he would have won.
And to support this, they say, look, look at the Democrats.
They're calling him a racist and a bigot, and Gillespie didn't fight back hard enough on that.
They point to people like Terry McAuliffe, the current governor of the state of Virginia who definitely wants to run for president.
Here's McAuliffe ripping into Gillespie.
I'm predicting we're going to win all three statewides.
A bunch of House of Delegates.
It's been a great race.
Ralph Northam is going to be the next governor.
Everybody is happy in the state, as you just say.
We're a safe state.
A record amount of economic investment.
And Ed Gillespie has run really a racist, bigoted campaign.
Horrible ads.
Donald Trump today is now doing robocalls.
Donald Trump's at 31% in Virginia.
We're going to reject that.
And we are going to move forward as a Commonwealth, and Ralph is going to be the next governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Okay, so McCullough's saying that he ran a racist, bigoted campaign.
What he's talking about is Gillespie ran an ad saying that Ralph Northam backed Sanctuary Cities, and he linked that to MS-13.
Okay, that's not a racist ad.
That's a typical political ad.
Gillespie, when people say Gillespie is a milquetoast, that he's an establishment guy, what they really mean is that he's not Trumpian in the way that he fights back.
I would like him to be a bit more Trumpian in the way that he fights back, by the way.
Here's Gillespie, for example, saying last night that Ralph Northam is a good man.
Yeah, a good man who called him a racist and a bigot.
As I said throughout the course of this campaign, Governor-elect Northam is a good man and I appreciate his service to our country and our Commonwealth and I wish him nothing but the best success as our 73rd Governor and told him that if I could be helpful to him in making our Commonwealth better, So there are a lot of people who are saying, well, you know, this sort of conciliatory show by Gillespie demonstrates why he lost.
I think there is something to that.
I think Gillespie should fight back harder.
It's one of the things I always appreciated about President Trump, even when I wasn't supporting him.
You know, the fact is that I think Trump does fight back.
I think he fights back on things that are stupid, and I think he fights back on things that are not stupid.
Gillespie did not fight back nearly as hard as he should have on things like that Latino victory ad.
But is that why Gillespie lost?
It doesn't explain why Republicans got shellacked down ballot.
It doesn't explain why they lost two seats in Georgia.
It doesn't explain why they lost the Washington State Senate.
It doesn't explain why the state of Maine just voted to increase Medicare.
It doesn't explain any of those things.
So I don't quite buy that.
But this is going to be the hypothesis of people defending Trump, is that the reason that Gillespie lost is because he didn't hug Trump hard enough.
And this is actually a crucial distinction.
This is a crucial question.
Should Republican candidates hug Trump really hard, or should they try and distance themselves, or should they try to, like, straddle that line?
I think the only thing they can do is try to straddle the line.
Because if you hug Trump really hard, you are driving Democrats to the polls.
If you do not hug Trump really hard, then Trump could actually crap all over you, which, as you will see, Trump did to Gillespie.
Or, the Trump base could decide that they are going to turn on you because you are not supportive enough of Trump.
This is the problem with cults of personality, is that if you support Trump so much that you're willing to not go out and vote for a typical Republican because they weren't nice to Trump, then you are undercutting Trump's own ability to govern.
It's just foolishness.
But, that means that a lot of Republicans are caught between a rock and a hard place.
They don't want to hug Trump because if they hug Trump, they lose suburban soccer moms.
And if they don't hug Trump, then Trump craps all over them and the base deserts them.
This is a serious problem.
Laura Ingraham last night, she was suggesting what really should have happened here is Gillespie should have just hugged Trump really hard.
And this is going to be the going line that you're going to see more and more.
I'm going to discuss Trumpism in just a second, but first, Trump personally, the typical media line is because the entire politics now revolves around Trump, people like Laura Ingraham and even Chris Matthews are saying Gillespie's big mistake is that he didn't hug Trump hard enough.
Here's Ingraham.
Those big suburban counties around Washington, D.C., just right over there, went even more for Northam than they did for Hillary.
But what does that tell you?
That tells you a populist conservative like Trump, who has a strong personality and a strong message, did do better.
He didn't spend a lot of time campaigning in Virginia, Donald Trump.
And Ed Gillespie tried to do this dance that, I'm not going to campaign with Trump, but he'll tweet for me and he'll do a last minute robocall.
I think in the end that came off as desperate.
Okay, so she's saying that it was too little too late, right?
That yeah, he was trying to embrace Trump.
Yeah, he was trying to be more like Trump.
But it was too desperate, right?
He wasn't authentic.
It didn't really come off.
That was really the big problem here.
The reason that Donald Trump did better than Gillespie in the northern suburbs is because Hillary Clinton was on the ballot.
It's about Hillary, not about Trump.
It's so funny.
Whenever it comes to Hillary being a tool to be used, There are a lot of hosts who will use Hillary as a tool when they wish to misdirect from Trump.
Okay, this is a case where they are using Trump to misdirect from Hillary.
The reality is, Democrats did not show up because of Hillary.
End of story.
Okay, Chris Matthews, though, saying the same thing.
Gillespie pretended to be a Trumpster and he couldn't pull it off, he just wasn't authentic enough.
Get up in the morning, come to the show, come on in here, talk about Uncle Gillespie.
Who's this guy?
Ah!
Go!
I think Democrats should have a morale boost like they've never had tonight.
But they have to say, now we've got to get out there and sell something.
We've got to sell something, whether it's a better health care program, a jobs program, or something.
I think they've got to be—that's just me talking.
I think it's just a good night for the Democrats.
I don't want to take any of the joy out of it.
They beat the hell out of this guy who pretended to be a Trumpster.
Ed Gillespie is a Washington lobbyist.
He's way down, knee-deep, or head-deep in the swamp.
He's part of the problem Trump ran against.
Okay, so now, this is the typical line.
Matthews tends to be more populist.
So again, Ingram and Matthews both being the case that if Gillespie had been more like Trump, then maybe he would have won.
No.
No.
Okay, that's just, the data do not show this.
So, what's the next line of defense for a lot of the people who are advocates of Trump, who want to suggest that what happened in Virginia has nothing to do with Trump?
The next line of defense, the first line of defense was, again, there are three lines of defense.
Line of defense number one was, Virginia was already moving to the left.
True.
True.
Only goes so far, but true.
Very, very dubious.
And final line of defense is that Trumpism requires Trump, right?
He wasn't Trumpist enough, right?
It wasn't just that Gillespie didn't embrace Trump, he didn't embrace Trumpism.
He didn't embrace the nationalist populist movement, right?
This is the line that Steve Bannon is using now, is he's saying that, like, the way that they ran their headline over Breitbart last night is they said that the swamp thing Gillespie was defeated.
Five seconds ago, Bannon was trying to campaign for Gillespie, saying that he was attempting to drain the swamp.
So they're flipping on that one as well.
So I want to talk a little bit about whether Trumpism even exists in just a second, because you have advocates for Trumpism saying, well, that was the problem.
Gillespie just wasn't Trumpist enough.
Not that he didn't embrace Trump personally, but also he wasn't populist enough.
And then you had people on the left saying, well, this shows that Trumpism has failed.
And I'm going to offer a third hypothesis.
Trumpism does not exist.
Something I've been saying now for well over a year.
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So, again, to reiterate, the three hypotheses, right?
One was, Virginia's moving left, true.
Two was, this doesn't have to do with Trump.
It's because Gillespie didn't embrace Trump hard enough.
I think that's wrong.
This is what Trump was saying himself, by the way.
Here's Trump's tweet on this last night.
Trump tweeted, this is danger for Republicans, what he tweeted right here.
here.
He tweeted, Ed Gillespie worked hard, but did not embrace me or what I stand for.
Don't forget, Republicans won four out of four House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before.
Here is the problem.
What you can see from Trump is that Trump now has an interest in not associating himself with the Republicans because if they lose, he loses.
So instead what he's going to do is crap all over Republicans and then suggest that if they just embraced him harder, everything would have been fine.
He's going to play into this false Unfalsifiable hypothesis that every win is a Trump win and every loss is because you didn't embrace Trump hard enough.
So that was hypothesis number two.
Finally, hypothesis number three is about Trumpism.
Trumpists will say, well, Gillespie didn't just not embrace Trump, he didn't embrace Trumpism.
He should have been more populist.
That's the line that he should have used is that he should have just Even if he wasn't going to embrace Trump, he had to embrace Trump's program.
There are a couple problems with this.
One, Trump doesn't have a program.
Two, the people who are saying this are wildly inconsistent as to what Trumpism constitutes.
Steve Bannon, most prominently, has been trying to pose himself, as I have said, for months now.
Well, Trumpism doesn't exist in the absence of Trump.
Gillespie tried to do a Trumpist campaign.
It failed.
So, I think Jake Tapper on CNN goes too far.
He says this was a rejection of Trumpism.
I don't think that's exactly correct, and I'll explain why.
CNN projecting that Ralph Northam, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor, will win.
And it has to be seen to a degree, I think, as a rejection of President Trump, who is the strongest prevailing political figure in the country.
If you look at who turned out, according to the exit polls, and how often people who supported Trump voted for Gillespie, and how often people who opposed Trump voted for Northam, that is a very strong sign of a rejection of Trump.
Okay, so the idea again that Trumpism is being overthrown.
This suggests that Trumpism is a thing.
Trumpism is not a thing.
There's a backlash to Trump personally, but I'm not sure that Trumpism is an actual program.
If Republicans want to win, they're going to have to ask President Trump to do better.
I don't know why this is controversial in any way.
It's not a rip on President Trump to suggest he needs to do better.
Brit Hume, who's been very supportive of President Trump, comes out last night.
He says, look, it's obvious.
Trump's unpopularity hurt Gillespie, clearly.
Trump stirs passions.
And the people who are for him are passionate, and the people who are against him are passionate.
In the state of Virginia, remember, he lost Virginia.
It's the only southern state he lost, really.
So, you know, you think about that.
Virginia really isn't Trump country.
And an aroused electorate in Virginia is going to be bad news for a Republican running in the age of Trump.
Okay, what this says is that in 2018, Republicans have some very solid systematic disadvantages.
They have a serious problem in 2018.
Democrats are going to be energized.
They're going to show up.
The average swing is going to be toward the out party.
Plus, Trump is the most energizing candidate Democrats have faced ever.
Ever.
Okay, so that means that they are going to show up in massive numbers.
It could be a wipeout for Republicans, so Republicans had better get on their horse and start recruiting some people.
Between 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush picked up some 10 to 12 million American voters.
He lost the popular vote by 500,000.
He then picked up 10 to 12 million voters, and he only won the election by a couple of million votes.
Who is Donald Trump picking up right now?
So, I think what this election more than anything else should show in Virginia is that the entire system of thought that we just keep doubling down on the base, the base, the base, the base, the base.
He hasn't lost his base yet.
As long as he doesn't lose his base, he's fine.
Inaccurate.
He can keep his base.
If the base doesn't grow, Trump's going to lose in 2020 and Republicans are going to get slaughtered in 2018.
The base is not big enough.
His base is 35-38% of the population.
That's it.
That is not enough to win a general election.
And the Electoral College is not going to save you in congressional elections.
It's not even going to save you this time around in a popular election when Hillary Clinton is not on the ballot.
So, as much as Republicans love to hate Hillary Clinton, the person they should be most grateful to in 2016 is not Donald Trump, it is Hillary Clinton.
They should be grateful to Hillary Clinton for being such a crappy candidate.
If Democrats don't make the same mistake in 2020 they made in 2016, and just appoint somebody wildly unpopular with the American public, they have an upper hand.
And this is going to require Republicans to do something.
Being in power means that you are more responsible.
There's more risk and there's more reward.
The risk is, if you don't do anything, people are going to assume that you are just a bag of hot wind, and they're going to get angry at you.
And if you do do something, you risk that you're going to do the wrong thing.
But, it's also an opportunity.
It's very high reward.
If you can shift the ground, if you can pass popular legislation, You can move people into your column.
For a year, Republicans have done nothing in Congress.
Again, this is not on Trump.
Republicans have done nothing in Congress.
The backlash against the Republican Party is strong because of Trump, because of Republicans, because of the system, because Democrats are pissed off they didn't win in 2016.
None of this bodes well for 2018.
And if Republicans take the wrong lessons here, if the lesson they take is, Oh, Trump is fine.
Everything's cool.
It's just Virginia.
Heed the warnings, okay?
Heed the warnings.
Because if you don't, a shellacking is coming.
And then I guess we'll play this game where we blame NeverTrump and we blame, you know, people who weren't fully Trumpy enough.
It's just, if that's the game that we're going to play, then we are again not, we are not involved in the realm of reality.
I'm seeing I'm seeing those talking points already.
This idea that never Trump is to blame for what happened in Virginia.
Again, there's no evidence of that whatsoever.
The never Trump movement is like three people.
It was never a movement.
Just because you didn't vote for Trump didn't mean that you were against Gillespie winning.
Okay?
Not everybody's Evan McMillan.
I wanted Ed Gillespie to win.
I wanted Republicans to retain power.
I think it's important that they do.
It's really terrible what happened last night in Virginia.
Trump must do better.
He must do better.
Republicans must do better.
I don't see why any of this is even mildly controversial.
Okay.
So, meanwhile, President Trump is over in South Korea and he is speaking about North Korea at length.
He's talking about China and he's talking about Russia.
And here he was suggesting that it was time to isolate North Korea and directly posing a challenge to China and Russia.
All responsible nations must join forces to isolate the brutal regime of North Korea, to deny it and any form, any form of it, You cannot support, you cannot supply, you cannot accept.
We call on every nation, including China and Russia, to fully implement UN Security Council resolutions, downgrade diplomatic relations with the regime, and sever all ties of trade and technology.
Okay, so what Trump is doing here is the right thing.
And this is the point, okay?
When you're President of the United States, you have a capacity to win people over.
And Trump is actually on the road to doing that if he could just shut his mouth and stick to script.
And when Trump does that, he's doing fine.
This is why a lot of people who love Trump are angry when I comment on what Trump comments on.
They say, well, why are you engaging with that?
Just look at what he's doing, right?
He's cut regulations.
He's not spending as much.
He's not growing the federal government as fast.
On foreign policy, he's attempting to work with the military.
All of that is true.
What makes him unpopular is not this stuff.
It's the crap that he tweets about Ed Gillespie, right?
It's the Charlottesville comments.
That's the stuff that makes him unpopular, not his actual policies.
Here he was again yesterday talking about North Korea in what I think is language that most Americans agree with.
This is a very different administration than the United States has had in the past.
Today, I hope I speak not only for our countries.
But for all civilized nations, when I say to the North, do not underestimate us and do not try us.
We will defend our common security, our shared prosperity, and our sacred liberty.
We did not choose to draw here on this peninsula.
Okay, so again, all of this is stuff that Trump can do just fine.
But he's going to need to cut out all of the ancillary stuff because that's what makes him unpopular.
I don't want to be the dead horse here, but if the takeaway from Virginia is that we should all just blithely go about our business, then we are making exactly the same mistake Democrats made in 2009 when they assumed that all of the backlash to Obama was just a bunch of talk.
Remember, if Republicans just got shellacked in Virginia with 3% growth for the last two quarters, with the economy doing well, with us relatively secure in foreign policy, what's going to happen if something goes wrong?
It could be a disaster.
It's already a D plus 11 congressional generic ballot.
And what happens if they win the House?
Let's say that they win the House.
They'll move to impeach Trump, presumably.
But if they don't move to impeach Trump...
Then you could see them sweep.
I think if they move to impeach Trump, it'll get out of the Trump base.
But if they don't move to impeach Trump, then they could win back the Senate in 2020 and the presidency in 2020.
There's the outside possibility they win back the Senate this year or next year.
If they do that, you can kiss goodbye to the Supreme Court.
Because at that point, they'll just stymie whoever Trump appoints to the Supreme Court.
The whole thing is, it does matter.
Politics does matter.
Elections do matter.
What happened in Virginia last night, it's either going to be seen as a data point or part of a trend.
I think it's part of a trend, not just a data point.
Okay, so before I go any further...
And I want to read you a column from the New York Times that I think is quite ridiculous in a second.
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Okay, so.
There is, you know, with all of this said, I think the Democrats still have the capacity to lose if they focus on intersectionality, if they continue to focus on their social justice warrioring.
So, you know, there's this idea, this is how you got Trump.
That continues to apply.
It's not that that went away last night in Virginia.
So, Democrats have to be very careful.
The campaign the Democrats ran in Virginia was actually a moderate Hillary-esque campaign, not a full Bernie Sanders-esque campaign, and not a full-on intersectional campaign.
Northam did it a little bit, but he really campaigned more as moderate than anything else.
He looked more like Joe Biden than anything else.
And what you're seeing from the left is them tearing themselves open.
So while Republicans are tearing themselves open about Trump, the left is tearing themselves open about what is their centering ideology.
And maybe Trump can help bring them together around that.
I mean, Obama brought Republicans together around anti-Obamaism, and there were some significant breaches in the Republican platform, for sure.
But if Democrats continue to embrace the intersectional theory that they have been embracing thus far, then that could lead to a Trump victory and to a Republican resurgence.
Because culture wars do drive this.
Culture wars do make a difference with regard to how people vote.
So, you know, Democrats could still blow this.
I'll talk a little bit more about how Democrats can blow this, and I'll show you an instance of Democrats seeking to blow it in just a second.
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Okay, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
I have been watching Stranger Things Season 2, and normally I don't see things I like on specific seasons of shows, but since this is such a big phenomenon, the new Stranger Things season is quite good.
I'm through eight episodes.
I'm not through the last two episodes yet, and it is...
Oh, I have one left?
It's nine episodes?
Okay, fine.
So I'm close to the end of this thing, and it is very good.
I think it's better than season one in a lot of ways.
I'm gonna have to do a full season two recap at a certain point on Facebook Live, where I give my criticisms.
I have particular criticisms of one Nancy, but we will discuss that another time.
Here is the preview for Stranger Things season two.
We gotta do this?
Let's engage.
That's never good.
hey guys do you see the whenever you hear that rising noise that's always bad in a previews So in any case, it is less... I would say it's kind of less scary in some ways than season one.
Season one, I think, is a scarier season because you haven't seen any of these things before.
This season is a lot less scary, but it's also faster paced.
So it moves a lot faster.
The pacing in episode one particularly is much better.
And I do find it weird that there's so many people who are nostalgic for an era they never lived through.
I was born in the year that this show takes place.
It takes place in 1984, and I'm sort of nostalgic for it, but that's because the 80s and 90s are basically one long continuation, but there are a lot of people who are nostalgic for this who are kids.
You got 17-year-old kids who love Stranger Things because they're nostalgic for it.
What that shows you is how much pop culture is invested in our perception of the past, because what you're really nostalgic for is not the 1984.
What you're really nostalgic for is E.T.
What you're really nostalgic for is movies that were made about this period, because the movies were better in 1984 than they are today.
It's just the reality of the situation.
So, you know, it is fun to watch.
It is well-written.
I'll be very disappointed if in season three they start with the social justice warrior ring.
There are some rumors to that effect, that they're gonna make one of the kids gay because they have to do that.
That would be really irritating because, come on, not everything has to be about the sexuality of the characters or this kind of nonsense.
But in any case, the season is well worth the watch, so check it out.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So...
I was talking about how the Democrats can lose.
One of the ways the Democrats can lose is if they suggest that their brand is tied up with radical leftism.
Right now, Trump won by being the default not Hillary, right?
He was more than that, obviously, but that's probably why he was unpopular.
Hillary was so terrible that Trump won by being not Hillary, right?
That was his entire campaign was not Hillary, right?
He would say this.
Democrats now can win if they say, we're not Trump.
But instead of doing that, they feel the necessity to go out and make fools of themselves to demonstrate how passionate they are about the cause.
So Ted Lieu, who represents a district over here in Los Angeles, his opponent's a guy named Dr. Kenneth Wright, whom I have endorsed for Congress.
Ted Lieu said that he, here's what happened.
There was this moment of silence for the victims of the Texas shooting.
Ted Lieu walked out of the moment of silence.
Okay, and here's what he had to say.
Well still, a moment of silence.
Some people might say you even politicized that.
I view it as doing my job to highlight this issue because you don't want Congress to just do moments of silences every time a mass shooting happens.
You want us to take action to try to prevent this shooting from happening in the first place.
Okay, so the idea that he's going to walk out on a funeral basically, that he's going to walk out on a moment of silence in order to demonstrate that he wants legislation on gun control is just absurd.
I tweeted him yesterday and he didn't have any very good responses on this.
I tweeted him repeatedly saying, so have you walked out on funerals to go work in a soup kitchen or do you like wait to finish the funeral and then go to the soup kitchen?
Or why are you grandstanding about these victims but you won't grandstand about other victims?
Are they less valuable to you than these victims?
Again, this is all grandstanding.
The more Democrats grandstand, the more they're going to lose.
But if they keep their mouths shut and they just wait for the Republicans to make mistakes, that seems the way our politics works right now.
You just wait for your opponent to make a mistake and then capitalize.
Democrats should be in good shape if they do that, but fortunately for Republicans, there is always the question as to whether Democrats can keep their mouths shut on any of this stuff.
Okay, time for a brief Bible talk.
I've been kind of going through the stories almost at random in the Bible.
I'm going through them sort of in chronological order, but giving a little bit more in-depth than I have over the past couple of years.
So, the next story in the Bible that I think is interesting, after the Cain and Abel story, is the story of Noah.
So, the description of Noah in the Bible is that he's a good man in his time, right?
That he walked with God and he was a good man in his time.
So, there's been a big debate in Jewish theological circles about what it means to be a good man in your time.
Why does it say in his time?
Right?
In whose else time would he be a good man?
So there are two ways to read this.
One is that Noah was a good man even for his time, meaning he was living in a really corrupt, awful time.
And so the fact that he was good in that time demonstrates how great he was.
The other way to read that is to say he was only good for that time.
Like, if he lived today, he wouldn't be that great.
And a lot of that depends on what you think of his tactics.
So what's fascinating about Noah is that Noah doesn't spend a minute trying to recruit other people to fix their ways or build arcs of their own or anything, right?
God says, build an arc, I'm destroying the world.
Noah doesn't argue with him.
Noam says, okay.
Fine.
Cool with me.
Starts building a giant ark.
Right?
That's the idea here.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
This mirrors a debate that happens in religious communities all over the place.
Religious communities have to make a very interesting decision.
The decision is, do you cloister yourself and your children in an attempt to protect them?
Do you try to prevent them from seeing news of the outside world?
Do you try to build a bubble for them so that they're not affected by the diseases of the outside world?
Or do you teach them to go out and engage?
There is danger to engaging.
If you engage, you may lose some people.
If you engage, some people may walk away from your faith and your spirituality.
Some people may be seduced by the dark side, so to speak.
Or do you build a bubble and try to protect your kids?
And I think the answer is supposed to be some of both, and it is time dependent.
Right?
You have to pick your spot.
So I don't think the answer is always the same.
You know, when I was a kid, there was a kid who lived next door.
And the kid was really trouble.
I mean, a really troubled kid.
And my mom had a certain perspective on this kid.
She thought, well, Ben's a good kid.
The kid next door is not a great kid.
If Ben hangs out with this kid, then Ben will make the other kid better.
Right?
The other kid will be better.
And my dad's perspective was, if Ben hangs out with this other kid, this other kid could make Ben worse.
Now, this all came to the forefront, it came to a culmination when I was about maybe three or four years old, probably three, and this other kid convinced me to hide in the bushes a couple of doors down from my parents' house and not to answer when my parents called me.
And so my parents actually ended up calling the police because they didn't know where I'd gone.
They thought maybe I'd been kidnapped or something.
And when I came out, my parents said, you're not allowed to play with that kid ever again.
There are situations where you do have to protect yourself from outside forces.
And then there are situations where you have to reach out.
Right now is a situation where conservatives have to reach out.
Not just because the country is on the brink, but also because they have the opportunity to do so.
And this is sort of the case I've been making about President Trump and about Republicans.
Don't hunker down in your Trumpist bunker.
Don't hunker down in your conservative bunker.
Go out and win converts.
Don't just yell at people.
Don't just yell MAGA MAGA.
Don't just talk about the base.
Figure out how you're going to win new people over.
Because if you don't do that, the Democrats are going to drive out their base at higher rates than we turn out our base in 2018, 2020.
It's going to be a serious problem for Republicans.
Okay.
We'll be back here tomorrow with more deconstruction.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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