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Nov. 29, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:11

Lauer's No Longer | Ep. 426

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	It is one hell of a Wednesday morning.
	A lot of news happening.
	Matt Lauer fired for sexual misconduct.
	North Korea fires a historic missile.
	And President Trump fires at the Democrats.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Okay, so we have a lot to get to today.
	As I say, Matt Lauer is firing, obviously, at the top of the news.
	President Trump is trolling everyone this morning.
	We'll talk about what good trollery looks like and what bad trollery looks like.
	And President Trump did some of both over the past 24 hours.
	I want to look at the news cycle, which should be an amazing news cycle for President Trump.
	I mean, here's the fact of the matter.
	Right now, you are looking at a historically good news cycle for President Trump.
	I'll explain all of that in just a second.
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	Okay, so, a lot happening in the news.
	You know, one of the frustrating things about doing a daily show is that you can plan your show the night before, and the news cycle is so fast that by the next morning, the entire show has been upended.
	That's exactly what happened yesterday.
	Like, when we planned the show yesterday, last night, because I was on a plane to D.C.
	When we planned that show, it was all about North Korea and it was all about tax cuts.
	And then this morning, Matt Lauer was fired.
	So Matt Lauer, of course, is a long-standing mainstay of morning television, always considered kind of the nice guy of morning TV, the guy that women loved and trusted and he was very friendly and everybody liked him.
	Yeah, it turns out that he's a bit of a douchebag.
	So, here is the announcers on NBC were apparently told that Lauer was fired like five minutes before they went on air.
	I thought that the best suggestion today came from Chrissy Teigen, who suggested that SNL should do a skit in which anchors start reading the news and then the teleprompter comes up that they're resigning because they've been accused of sexual harassment.
	Because that's basically where we are right now, is with no notice people are being fired right and left.
	Here is the footage from NBC this morning as they announced that Matt Lauer is now gone.
	Dear colleagues, on Monday night we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer.
	It represented, after serious review, a clear violation of our company's standards.
	As a result, we have decided to terminate his employment.
	While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he has been at NBC News, We were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.
	Our highest priority is to create a workplace environment where everyone feels safe and protected, and to ensure that any actions that run counter to our core values are met with consequences, no matter who the offender.
	We are deeply saddened by this turn of events, but we will face it together as a news organization and do it in as transparent a manner as we can.
	That is the statement from our chairman, Andy Lack, and we just learned this moments ago, just this morning.
	As I'm sure you can imagine, we are devastated and we are still processing all of this and I will tell you right now, we do not know more than what I just shared with you.
	But we will be covering this story as reporters, as journalists.
	I'm sure we will be learning more details in the hours and days to come.
	And we promise we will share that with you.
	Just amazing.
	I mean, you can see that all of this is just breaking stuff.
	It happens one after another.
	So we've had Charlie, in the last week, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Glenn Thrush, the head of news organization at NPR, just a bunch of different people who have been accused of sexual assault or harassment.
	Apparently, the allegation, according to the New York Post, is that Matt Lauer allegedly sexually assaulted a female NBC staffer during the Rio Olympics.
	Apparently, he'd been having affairs with a bunch of his subordinates at NBC, but they were all consensual until now.
	But this one was not consensual.
	A variety in the New York Times were on the road to reporting, apparently, a big story about sexual harassment allegations against Matt Lauer at NBC.
	There's a guy named Yashar Ali, who's a reporter.
	He has been very sort of on top of all of the allegations about various people for sexual harassment, sexual assault.
	And he says that he's talked to many women who have felt intimidated by Matt Lauer.
	So this is not a complete surprise.
	In fact, Barry Weiss of the New York Times Very good op-ed columnist over there.
	She predicted a week ago that Matt Lauer would be the next guy to go.
	Well, this does raise a couple of questions.
	I mean, I think number one, it raises the question of why is it that the treatment of sexual harassers and assaulters in the media is so different than it is in politics, right?
	Here are the people who in the last few months are gone, right?
	Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, Michael Oreskes of NPR, Mark Halperin, and Leon Wieseltier, among many others.
	Glenn Thrush, Louis C.K., Brett Ratner, John Lasseter, all those people are going home.
	All of those people are in the media.
	In politics, the people who have so far been accused are President Trump, Roy Moore, Al Franken, and John Conyers.
	None of them are out.
	So you can see that there is a vast gap between how we treat people who are accused of this stuff in politics and how we treat people who are accused of this stuff in the media.
	There is a logic to it.
	The logic is that in the media, the way that Dislike reflects itself as in ratings.
	No one wants to watch Matt Lauer over their morning coffee knowing that he tried to sexually assault somebody.
	But in politics, we vote once, and that's pretty much it, right?
	The ongoing approval ratings don't matter for the presidency, or for a senatorial office, or for a House member.
	All that matters is the election results.
	And popularity is not really a huge factor, believe it or not, in a lot of these congressional races.
	I mean, the fact is, President Trump won the presidency in the mid-30s in terms of popularity.
	There are a lot of other priorities that impede.
	There are a lot of other priorities that come to bear, right?
	The Roy Moore situation is an obvious example.
	A lot of people, I think, are calculating, and I don't think it's completely irrelevant, obviously.
	I think it's a relevant calculation.
	They're calculating that they have to vote for Roy Moore, even if they find him disreputable, because Doug Jones is a pro-abortion fanatic.
	So politics is not the same game as media.
	Media is just about pure popularity.
	Politics is about what you think you're going to get out of these guys.
	But it is striking the difference between how sexual harassment allegations are treated in the media versus how they are treated in politics.
	Okay, so that's breaking piece of news number one.
	And that means good news cycle for President Trump.
	Because again, another member of the mainstream media, a well-respected member of the mainstream media, is outed for sexual harassment and assault.
	And for President Trump, that's good news because number one, it means that it's very difficult for the media to suggest that Roy Moore is alone.
	And number two, it means that all these people who were yelling at President Trump for being a woman abuser back in 2016, half of them were doing the same stuff themselves, apparently.
	So that's a good piece of news for President Trump.
	Another good piece of news for President Trump is that the GDP is out, the GDP statistics are out, and in the third quarter, apparently there was 3.3% GDP growth.
	That is the best GDP growth that we have seen since 2014.
	That is a big win for President Trump.
	It doesn't matter that President Trump hasn't really done all that much on economic policy.
	What matters is that businesses know that under President Trump and a Republican Congress, there are not going to be a lot of moves to shut them down.
	And so they are investing and they are creating new jobs.
	And all of that is due to the election of President Trump, even if President Trump isn't taking sustained action to actually impact the economy in any serious way.
	So that's a piece of good news for President Trump, number two.
	Piece of good news for President Trump number three from a political side.
	It's very bad news for the United States, but it's good news for whomever is the president.
	Whenever there's an ever-present foreign threat, that's good for the president in terms of popularity ratings.
	Just from a pure political calculation.
	Well right now, we have an ever-present threat.
	Yesterday, North Korea launched a ballistic missile that traveled ten times higher than the NASA International Space Station into space.
	It traveled apparently 11,000 kilometers.
	And that puts New York in range.
	It puts Washington, D.C.
	in range.
	It puts Hawaii in range.
	Basically, the entire world is now under the threat of a North Korean nuclear missile if they can get a nuke affixed to the head of that ICBM.
	And that is a major, major ground shift in the nature of the technology the North Koreans have demonstrated thus far.
	President Trump came out yesterday and he tried to quiet the nation, basically said, don't worry, I'm handling this.
	A missile was launched a little while ago from North Korea.
	I will only tell you that we will take care of it.
	We have General Mattis in the room with us, and we've had a long discussion on it.
	It is a situation that we will handle.
	Okay, whenever there's an ever-present threat, again, it redounds to the benefit of the president.
	And President Trump, you know, is doing what he can here.
	This is not his fault.
	This was a system that was built over the past three decades by presidents, both Democrat and Republican.
	And now Trump's there, and this fell into Trump's lap, right?
	I mean, this is—Trump's gonna have to figure out what to do about it.
	But the fact of the matter is that Trump is not to blame for it, and the American people know that.
	The best that we can do right now is build up our missile defense system, and I think Trump is very much for that.
	So that's piece of news number three that cuts in favor of the President of the United States.
	Piece of news number four that cuts in favor of the President of the United States is that yesterday we discussed at length the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
	This is the CFPB.
	This is this ridiculous organization that was set up by Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats under Dodd-Frank that was basically independent of Congress and independent of the president and it was supposed to crack down on all sorts of anti-consumer fraud by businesses.
	It was supposed to crack down on credit card companies and lending companies and all of this.
	And it very quickly turned into a shakedown unit where the CFPB would basically approach a particular business and instead of coming to some sort of agreed-upon settlement that was fair and just They would try to shake down that business, take that money, and then direct it toward Democratic offers.
	They were renting space from the Obama organization.
	They were funneling money to an Obama-linked PR firm.
	They had staffed up completely with Democrats.
	There's a guy named Ronald Rubin who's written about this extensively at National Review.
	Well, President Trump comes in and he says, we're gonna clean house.
	And he wants to get rid of Richard Cordray.
	Richard Cordray's term is up in 2018.
	So Cordray steps down early and he appoints to replace him a woman named Leanne English.
	The problem is he's not allowed to do that legally.
	So President Trump instead appoints Mick Mulvaney, his head of Office of Management and Budget, as a temporary Stopgap until he can appoint somebody with the approval of Congress.
	So Leanne English shows up to work anyway, right?
	Even though she's not really supposed to be there.
	And Mulvaney shows up anyway, and supposedly we have a constitutional crisis.
	I'm going to tell you how this cut in favor of Trump in just a second.
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	Okay, so we've had, to recap, we've had several pieces of news that cut in favor of President Trump politically.
	Again, that's not the be-all end-all, but it is of importance because it shows that, you know, the news cycle is not against Trump right now.
	Okay, Matt Lauer is fired from NBC.
	That's number one.
	Number two, the economy is booming.
	It's doing really well right now.
	Number three, the North Korean missile launch.
	Number four, The CFPB.
	So as I say, Leanne English shows up to work.
	So here is Nancy Pelosi tweeting about Leanne English.
	Okay, so Nancy Pelosi tweets out about Leanne English.
	Okay, first of all, I do love the idea of the rightful acting director.
	It sounds like something out of Game of Thrones.
	and CFPB, and it's a picture of Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren, and Chuck Schumer, and Leandra English.
	Okay, first of all, I do love the idea of the rightful acting director.
	It sounds like something out of Game of Thrones.
	I really do enjoy that.
	It's like, the usurper Mulvaney will be brought low.
	He will be made to bend the knee before the rightful acting director.
	It's like the restoration of Charles II in the 1600s.
	We're gonna bring back the royal family.
	The glorious revolution is afoot.
	All of this is just silly talk.
	A federal judge ruled against the Democrats yesterday.
	They said that you're making all this up.
	This has nothing to do with reality.
	Richard Cordray cannot appoint his own successor.
	That's not how the system of government works.
	That would mean that the CFPB would be the most powerful agency in American government.
	There was a judge named Brett Kavanaugh on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals who actually rewrote the Dodd-Frank Act because he said, Listen guys, you appointed a director position that is more powerful than the President of the United States inside his own purview.
	That is not constitutional.
	So Trump had the full power to replace Leandra English, and so he did.
	So that's a big win for President Trump.
	That's a big political win for President Trump.
	So that is piece of news number four.
	Piece of news number five is that tax reform seems to be going pretty well.
	It looks like the Republicans are finally going to be able to cram something through.
	Now as I've said, I think there are problems with this tax reform.
	The tax reform is basically structured to lower corporate tax rates.
	That's fine.
	I think it's important to lower corporate tax rates.
	But Republicans really have not made that case.
	Instead, what they keep discussing is individual tax rates and how those are going to be lowered.
	The problem is that this bill is really...
	...structure to lower individual tax rates in any serious way.
	It lowers them marginally, but it really is designed to do is make up tax revenue by getting rid of certain deductions, by getting rid of your ability to deduct your state income tax.
	So I live in the state of California.
	I have like a 10 to 12 percent state income tax in the state of California.
	I usually get to deduct that for my income before I pay my federal income tax.
	This new tax bill would get rid of that, so my taxes would go up by fully 10 percent.
	So that means that Since I'm in the top tax bracket, that means that every dollar I earn in the top tax bracket, I'm going to be paying at least 50%, basically, when you include other taxes.
	More than 50% of that will go to the state and federal government.
	So it's a real shock to the system for folks like me.
	And even if you're not like me in the top tax bracket, if you're in California or New York, then you are going to be smacked.
	If you're in Massachusetts, you're going to be smacked.
	All these high-tax states are going to be smacked now.
	I don't think that's bad policy, actually.
	I think that's good policy, because I don't think the federal government should be sponsoring the states to raise their own taxes.
	I think that's silly.
	But it is true that the individual tax changes here are kind of wishy-washy at best.
	And that's because they are designed to make up for lost revenue.
	I hate using that term, but that's the term that's used.
	Revenue to the federal government.
	It's not really revenue to the federal government, because the federal government doesn't earn anything.
	It's your money that they're sucking out of your pocket.
	The amount of money that the federal government does not take in is lower than it otherwise would be because of the lowered corporate tax rates.
	And so they are trying to increase the individual tax rates in certain ways in order to basically make up for that lost money so that they can pass with 51 votes in the Senate instead of 60.
	That's because they have to use a process called reconciliation.
	Reconciliation requires that the Congressional Budget Office issue a ruling on any law that shows that it does not increase the deficit over time.
	So that's what they're doing here.
	All of that said, the Republicans look like they're on the verge of passing this thing.
	Yesterday, Susan Collins signaled that she would support the tax reform bill, including the repeal of the individual mandate.
	Now, there's a problem with the repeal of the individual mandate.
	The repeal of the individual mandate, which is basically forcing you Two, the individual mandate forces you to buy health insurance or pay a fine.
	And the Supreme Court ruled that it was not a fine, it was a tax because the Supreme Court is a leftist institution and they were lying and Justice Roberts did a real disservice to the American people and the Constitution in that decision.
	But, suffice it to say, that individual mandate is bad.
	However, if you get rid of the individual mandate and you leave all the other Obamacare regulations in place, the prices are going to skyrocket.
	Unless the federal government comes in and jacks up the subsidies.
	So guess what happened?
	Yesterday, basically, Trump endorsed the idea of getting rid of the individual mandate, but jacking up the subsidies through the Alexander, uh, Murray bill, I believe.
	It's this bill that's being pushed by the Democrats and moderate Republicans for the federal government to come in and subsidize all of these, all of these Obamacare regulations, even without the individual mandate.
	It's not good policy.
	It isn't good policy.
	If you're gonna get rid of the individual mandate, you also need to get rid of the regulations.
	That would be getting rid of Obamacare.
	Just getting rid of the individual mandate and then having the government pick up the slack actually is close to nationalized healthcare.
	It's actually close to nationalized healthcare in a lot of ways.
	So that is not a grand and glorious thing, but...
	With all these buy-offs, with all these payouts, it looks like tax reform is in pretty good shape.
	And the Democrats don't know what to do about it.
	Last night on CNN, there was a debate between Tim Scott and Ted Cruz on the one hand, and Maria Cantwell, Senator from Washington, and Bernie Sanders, the new leader of the Democratic Party, that crazed old bat loon.
	You know, he was there talking about taxes.
	And Bernie Sanders was trying to make the case against the tax reform, but having a tough time doing it.
	He basically had to argue that the GOP wants to cut Social Security, which, of course, there's been no indicator that they want to do.
	In my view, I have not the slightest doubt that if this bill, God forbid, is passed, as soon as it is passed, the Republican leadership will come back and say, my God, we have to deal with the deficit, and that's why we're going to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education.
	Okay, now the reality is that I wish the Republicans would say that.
	The fact is the deficit is not going away, the debt is not going away, and the main drivers of the debt are not tax cuts.
	The main drivers of the debt, always and forever, will be these massive entitlement programs that need to be restructured in a very significant way.
	The big drivers of the debt are things like Social Security.
	That needs to be restructured and privatized.
	I need to be able to take my own money and invest it for myself, and I should not have it removed from me and placed into a quote-unquote social security lockbox that does not exist.
	It's basically a transfer of wealth.
	It's me paying my grandmother.
	If I want to give my grandmother money, that's my business.
	But you shouldn't force me to take my money, pay it out to a bunch of old folks who've had 60 years to earn, and then deprive my children of it.
	The best thing that could be done right now is pay off.
	All those commitments have been made, so we keep paying the old people.
	We keep paying the retirees.
	But for people who are not yet retired, we give you the ability to take your money and put it into the stock market.
	We give you the ability to take your money and invest it how you will.
	And then that's it.
	You're on your own.
	I mean, if you want to make it so that it's an opt-out, that you automatically opt into some sort of HSA or some sort of savings account, some Social Security savings account, and you have to opt out of it.
	Fine.
	But the idea that we're going to mandate that you pay your money into a pyramid scheme is really morally egregious.
	And by the time I hit retirement age, I'm not going to see any of this money.
	I mean, this money is gone or they're going to dramatically raise taxes on my children because they're going to have no other choice.
	But again, this is a win for Trump because it looks like tax reform is on its way.
	And final win for Trump, okay, so final win for Trump is that it looks like there may be a government shutdown.
	Government shutdowns, the theory goes, always benefit the president in power because the people who are not allowing the government to continue operating are seen as obstructionists.
	This at least was the theory when the Republicans were arguing that they shouldn't shut down the government and Ted Cruz was arguing, let's just shut it down over Obamacare.
	The Republicans kept saying, we can't shut it down, we can't shut it down, we can't shut it down because it'll benefit Obama.
	Okay, now Trump's the president.
	So that means if there's a government shutdown, the reverse logic should apply.
	It should damage the Democrats.
	So this means that Trump has a series, a series of good headlines that are coming out for him.
	Tax reform, North Korea, the CFPB, the economic boom, the Matt Lauer stuff.
	All of these things are good.
	I mean, it's like a perfect storm of good headlines for President Trump and the possibility of a government shutdown.
	So how does President Trump respond to all of that?
	Well, with trollery.
	Some of that trollery is good.
	Some of that trollery is bad.
	And we will explain the difference between good and bad trollery.
	I'm not coming at this, folks, from a perspective of, I want President Trump to fail.
	If you want Trump to succeed, if you want Trump to be a successful president and get done all the things you want him to get done, you need him to be disciplined.
	One ounce of discipline in this news cycle and Trump would get a five-point bump in his approval ratings.
	He's capable of it.
	Not discipline, I don't think, but he's capable of actually trolling in a good manner.
	So I'm going to show you how he trolled well, and then I'm going to show you how he trolled really, really poorly this morning.
	He trolled well yesterday.
	His trollery today?
	Not so good.
	I'll explain all of that in just a second.
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	Okay, so President Trump has the capacity to troll well.
	The reason I say he has the capacity to troll well is because he did it yesterday.
	So yesterday, President Trump led off by tweeting that the Democrats were not—that they would be able to come to no actual resolution with the Democrats.
	It looked like the Democrats were going to insist on some sort of amnesty agreement in order for them to move forward with funding the government.
	The reason the Democrats are necessary here is because the Democrats can filibuster funding for the government.
	They can shut down the government with a filibuster the same way that Ted Cruz basically did in 2014, I believe—2013.
	Well, the Democrats have been signaling that they're perfectly willing to do a government shutdown.
	Here is House Democratic Chairman, I think his name is Patrick Crowley, and he says maybe we'll shut down the government over DACA.
	You never know.
	Democrats are willing to work to secure the future of the 800,000 plus individuals who are DREAMers who are in the DACA program.
	Democrats are working to ensure the extension of the CHIP program that will provide health insurance for children throughout our country, almost 10 million children throughout our country.
	Democrats are going to work towards keeping government open and we think we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
	These are all legitimate and good issues that need to be addressed.
	Okay, so they say that they're willing to shut down the government.
	That's Joe Crowley, by the way, from New York.
	And they say that they're willing to shut down the government if need be.
	And then Trump tweets out, I'm not sure we're going to come to an agreement.
	And so Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who are scheduled to come to the White House, use that as an excuse to pull out.
	And so Trump does something that is quite imagistically brilliant, right?
	He sets up a meeting, right, Paul Ryan is there, Mitch McConnell's there, and he leaves seats on either side of him, one with Schumer's name and one with Pelosi's name tag in front of them, and he leaves the seats empty, like they're waiting for Elijah the Prophet on the first night of Passover, and he leaves the seats empty, and then he says, listen, they're not here.
	Like, I was willing to negotiate.
	They're not here.
	Where are they?
	So they decided not to show up.
	They've been all talk and they've been no action.
	And now it's even worse.
	Now it's not even talk.
	So they're not showing up for the meeting.
	I will say this, in light of the missile launch, probably they'll be here fairly quickly, or at least discussions will start taking place.
	There's a lot of big differences, so we'll see what happens as to shutdown.
	We'll see.
	But right now, things have changed over the last two hours, because two hours ago a missile was launched.
	I think that will have a huge effect on Schumer.
	Okay, high-level trolling.
	High-level trolling from President Trump right there, leaving the empty chairs.
	Very good imagery, right?
	Trump is good at this stuff.
	He can be good at this stuff.
	And you can see that the Democrats are sort of at a loss, right?
	Chuck Schumer is trying to say, well, you know, we weren't just going to show up for a photo op.
	That's all Chuck Schumer does for a living.
	Nobody believes this.
	So here's Chuck Schumer saying that Trump tweeting, that's what made it just a photo op.
	If he hadn't tweeted that, we would have been happy to show up, but the tweet came out, and then we weren't going to show up just to, you know, sit next to him for a photo op.
	Yeah, sure, Chuck.
	Unfortunately, this morning, instead of leading, the President tweeted a blatantly inaccurate statement and then concluded, I don't see a deal.
	The President said, I don't see a deal, three hours before our meeting, before he heard anything we had to say.
	Given that the President doesn't see a deal between Democrats and the White House, Leader Pelosi and I believe the best path forward is to continue negotiating with our Republican counterparts in Congress instead.
	Okay, and then Schumer went on and he said Trump was a destructive force, and Trump was the end of the world.
	Here he is, you know, going after Trump.
	This is not going to work, okay?
	At least this was the logic, okay?
	If you think this is going to work, then you need to explain why it is.
	For establishment Republicans, if you think that Trump is wrong and Schumer is right, you need to explain why you oppose Ted Cruz doing the same thing to President Obama.
	If you think that Schumer is making the right political move, why was it so bad for the Republicans to stand up for a government shutdown during the Obamacare debate?
	You need to explain that one.
	I think that, you know, I think the logic here is pretty sound.
	That if Trump stands there and he says, listen, you're shutting down the government because you won't build me my wall.
	The American people want that wall.
	You're not willing to fund the government?
	You're not willing to fund the military because you're so desperate to give citizenship to illegal immigrants?
	That's what's going to shut down the government?
	Whoever shuts down the government, this is the conventional wisdom, gets the blame.
	Well, if that was the case during the Obama years, then it certainly should be the case now.
	And I'll show you that it was the case during the Obama years, right?
	When Ted Cruz said that we're not going to fund Obamacare.
	When Ted Cruz said that, here's how the Democrats responded.
	Chris Matthews, or in other words, he said, he said, Ted Cruz, got up in the morning, got up fresh from the show, got him in here.
	Ted Cruz like a terrorist, got a bomb strapped to his chest, a political bomb strapped to his chest.
	Ah!
	Go!
	I believe it's terrorism.
	This is the first time I've seen a political party, or even a fraction of it, saying that their number one goal is a To shut down the American government, it is the American government, kill a bill that's already been passed by Congress, and refuse to pay bills already run up by the Congress in an attempt to basically risk the fall.
	It wasn't just Chris Matthews, it was also the White House, right?
	The Obama White House called Republican lawmakers terrorists.
	Dan Pfeiffer was on CNN with Jake Tapper, and he said, we're for cutting spending, we're for reforming our tax code, we're for reforming entitlements, but what we're not for is negotiating with people who have a bomb strapped to their chest.
	Okay, this is the same game that Republicans can play if they choose to play it, and Trump is happy to play it.
	So, okay, so that is useful trollery, right?
	That's useful trollery.
	Here is, so Trump could have tweeted about all of these things this morning, right?
	And exclusively these things.
	Trump tweets a lot, right?
	What he should do is he should be exclusively focused on the things that are of benefit to him.
	So tweet about the tax cuts.
	Tweet about how you're trying to handle the situation with North Korea.
	Tweet about the fact that the Democrats are trying to shut down the government.
	Tweet, even if you want to tweet about, you know, Matt Lauer and ask if there's a systemic problem inside the media, ask that.
	Here's what Trump did this morning.
	So that was the good trollery I showed you.
	Now it's bad trollery time, right?
	This really is a good Trump, bad Trump day.
	Then there was the bad trollery.
	And it's allowing the media to escape all of these headlines that would be great for Trump and instead misdirect to the fact that Trump doesn't seem like he can control his Twitter thumbs.
	Okay, so Trump starts off this morning by retweeting a bunch of videos from Jada Franzen.
	Who is Jada Franzen?
	Jada Franzen is deputy leader of Britain First.
	Britain First is a white supremacist outfit in the UK.
	I don't mean that in any soft fashion.
	Like, Britain First actually rallies with white supremacists.
	Like, they're so bad that InfoWars was chiding Trump today not to retweet videos from Britain First.
	When InfoWars, when Paul Joseph Watson over at InfoWars is telling Trump, uh, dude, that's not smart, then it's really not smart.
	Okay, that's really stupid.
	So he tweeted out a bunch of videos of Muslims doing bad things, right?
	Video, Muslim destroys a statue of the Virgin Mary.
	Video, Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches.
	There's only one problem with that video.
	Apparently it wasn't a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches at all.
	Apparently it was a dark-haired Dutch boy beating up a light-haired Dutch boy.
	You know, he tweets all of these things from Britain First.
	It became such an issue that over in the House of Commons, there was actually a movement to censure Trump, I believe, from the House of Commons floor for retweeting stuff from Britain First.
	So, Mr. President, no, just stop.
	And then it didn't stop there.
	And for people who say, well, he can walk and he can chew gum at the same time, this is not about walking and chewing gum at the same time.
	It's about walking and stepping in crap at the same time.
	Do not step in the crap.
	Okay?
	Why don't you just walk?
	Like, can we just do the walking?
	You want to walk and chew gum?
	Great.
	Walking is great.
	Chewing gum is great.
	Stepping in crap, not so great.
	Please don't do that.
	You know, Trump should understand by this point that his Twitter account is basically like a laser pointer and the media are like cats.
	But the problem is that those cats are only going to follow the laser points or where he points it.
	So if he points it in irrelevant places, they're going to follow him to those irrelevant places and they would prefer to stay there because it's more fun.
	It's more interesting.
	They're all leftists.
	They're looking for an excuse to cover Trump saying stupid things as opposed to all these headlines that actually benefit President Trump.
	Right?
	Trump tweeted three of these videos from Britain First.
	Then he tweeted out, "Looks like another great day for the stock market.
	Consumer confidence is at a record high.
	I guess someone likes me." And then in parentheses, "my policies." Okay, is that self-aggrandizing?
	Would that tweet be better without the last sentence?
	Absolutely, but that's an acceptable tweet, but that's going to get lost in the Britain First tweets.
	I mean, come on.
	And then, Trump decided that it was necessary not only to troll Matt Lauer, but then to use that as an excuse to troll Joe Scarborough and all the heads of MSNBC and CBS.
	He tweeted this, quote, What does Matt Lauer sexually assaulting people, or allegedly sexually assaulting people, have to do with, you know, fake news exactly?
	I mean, that's a stretch.
	Basically, he's just saying, I hate CBS, or I hate NBC, so smack NBC.
	And then, he continues on to Phil Griffin.
	So now that Matt Lauer is gone, when will the fake news practitioners at NBC be terminating the contract of Phil Griffin?
	And will they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough, based on the unsolved mystery that took place in Florida years ago?
	Investigate!
	So what is he talking about?
	I'll explain what he's talking about in just a second.
	Again, this is so asinine, and it's so confused, and it's so worthless.
	There's no reason for the President of the United States to be doing this.
	Again, there's so many good headlines for him today, and instead he's creating bad headlines just because he's bored.
	Just because he's sitting around, he doesn't have anything else to do.
	Ugh!
	It's so irritating.
	If you'd like the country to be better, if you'd like all the good headlines to actually get some play, you need to stop stepping on your own wiener.
	Like, just stop.
	Stop stepping on your Anthony Wiener.
	Okay, so, before I go any further with what Trump is talking about with Joe Scarborough, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at NatureBot.
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	Okay, so, President Trump You know, he feels the need to sound off on everything because he can't contain himself.
	It's a serious problem for him.
	Again, this should be a time when you're urging discipline for the president.
	North Korea fired a missile yesterday that can hit New York.
	Like now would be a good time to focus and show some leadership.
	Instead, he's tweeting about Terminating the contract of Phil Griffin, no one really knows why.
	Because they're fake news practitioners, I guess.
	And then he says, well, they terminate low ratings Joe Scarborough.
	What's he talking about with Joe Scarborough?
	This unsolved mystery that took place in Florida years ago?
	What he's talking about, specifically, is that Joe Scarborough, when he was in Congress, there was a 28-year-old intern, I guess, in one of his local offices.
	Was found dead in the office.
	The medical examiner did a full examination and what they found is that she had an undisclosed heart condition, that she had a heart attack, she hit her head and she died.
	There was no sign of foul play.
	There was a full investigation.
	Joe Scarborough was not involved in any way according to the police or the medical examiner.
	There was no sign of any sort of force that was used against her.
	She basically had a heart attack and died.
	This does happen, I know.
	It happened to my boss Andrew Breitbart, my friend Andrew Breitbart.
	Trump is now tweeting out conspiracy theories that require investigation from the White House in the middle of a series of good headlines.
	How is that smart?
	And the problem is that when you mix... If you have a crap sandwich, like Trump's Twitter feed, where half of the sandwich is just high-quality roast beef and half of the sandwich is poop, People are going to tend to focus more on the poop that's in the sandwich than the roast beef, right?
	His next two tweets are, Good!
	Good!
	You're the president.
	That's what you're supposed to do.
	of China concerning the provocative actions of North Korea.
	Additional major sanctions will be imposed on North Korea today.
	This situation will be handled.
	Good.
	That's it, you're the president.
	That's what you're supposed to do.
	And then he tweeted about the economy.
	Says economy growing, excluding hurricane effects.
	CEA estimates that real GDP growth would have been 3.9% in Q3.
	Stock market at a new high, unemployment at a new low.
	We are winning and tax cuts will shift our economy into high gear.
	All good stuff, right?
	This is what he should be doing.
	But because he can't focus, instead we're going to get a day of headlines over him retweeting racist groups from the UK and him trying to bring up discredited conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough.
	How that's beneficial to his agenda is beyond me.
	So don't blame—you know, there are a lot of people who get angry at me when I criticize President Trump.
	I'm criticizing President Trump because I want him to do better.
	He's the president.
	I want any president to do better.
	This is not the way that you're going to make the GOP more popular, or get your agenda passed into law, or maintain any long-lasting grip on power.
	There's a poll out today, and people are asking, how do we get young people conservatives?
	How exactly are we supposed to draw young people?
	This is a good question.
	When you look at the poll today, what you find Is that Millennials, okay, Millennials are actually 19%.
	19% and 19% only say that they identify as GOP.
	Okay, that is as compared to 34% who identify as Democrats, 29% independent, and 17% something else.
	And then when you look at, do you think the Republican Party cares about people like you or not, among all adults, the answer, 71% no.
	That's among all college-age young people, among all Millennials.
	Okay, 71% no.
	That is a bad statistic.
	And the way that you increase that bad statistic is by taking the wrong side of moral conflicts, especially when you could be taking the right side of moral conflict.
	And it is taking the wrong side of moral conflict to put out unbased conspiracy theories or retreat white supremacist accounts from Britain.
	It's just, forget about the morality of it for a second.
	It's not smart politically, from a utilitarian point of view.
	Now, I know.
	Every time I say this sort of stuff, it's, you cuck.
	You're a cuck.
	Right?
	You just don't understand the strength and the power.
	Cause hit and fight!
	Okay, well, except that when you punch yourself in the balls, it turns out that that's not actually a good political strategy.
	And it's kind of immoral also, because now your balls hurt.
	It's really not smart.
	It's just not bright.
	So I really wish that we would stop all of this.
	Okay, so before we get to things I like, things I hate, and a little bit of Bible talk, First, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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	Alrighty, time for some things I like, and some things I hate, and then Bible talk.
	So, things I like.
	I have started the new Netflix superhero series, The Punisher.
	And Netflix, I have to say, their productions are very high quality.
	The Punisher is really good.
	I like The Punisher, because The Punisher kills people.
	It's not just because I'm a deviant and I like murder.
	That very may well be true.
	I mean, that may be true.
	I'm not going to deny that.
	But what I will say is that in a comic book universe, where every time you imprison someone, they escape prison and immediately murder 10 other people, the only moral solution is to kill criminals.
	OK?
	That's the only moral solution is to actually kill the criminals.
	This is my problem with Batman.
	He keeps putting people in Arkham Asylum, and they keep escaping.
	And then the Joker kills like 10,000 people.
	And then he's like, I can't kill the Joker.
	If I kill the Joker, that'll make me as bad as he is.
	No!
	If you kill the Joker, he won't go back to a place he will escape five minutes later and murder 10,000 people.
	Just kill the stupid Joker already.
	The Punisher has no such qualms.
	He just goes around killing people.
	The series itself is good.
	The guy who plays the Punisher is the same guy who was Shane in The Walking Dead.
	He's actually starting to make quite a career for himself.
	He's good.
	There is a subplot here that's anti-NRA, which is just irritating, and obviously a sop to the leftists who work at Netflix.
	But the series itself is a better-than-average superhero series.
	Here's a little bit of the preview.
	Dad.
	Dad!
	It's plenty of time now that you're home.
	So I am not a Marvel fan, as you know, but I do like The Punisher.
	I think the Punisher's cool.
	And the series is quite good and very action-packed.
	He's like Batman, except he kills people, basically.
	So, go and check that out over at Netflix.
	It's a good series.
	Okay, things that I hate.
	Let's do some things that I hate.
	So last night at UConn, a guy named Lucian Wintrich, who is the White House correspondent for Gateway Pundit and has sort of made a name for himself in the past for tweeting memes and such, he was speaking on "It's okay to be white," you know, which is sort of the new slogan that's used by some edgier members of the right,
	It's also used by the alt-right a fair bit as sort of like, you say it's okay to be black, I say it's okay to be white, what's the problem?
	So in any case, Wintrich goes and he speaks, and the students act like idiots at UConn.
	So they start chanting that he's a Nazi, and shouting him down, and all the usual forms of stupidity that you expect from the snowflakes at a college campus.
	And then one of these idiot snowflakes, this young woman, she walks up to his podium and she grabs his notes.
	Okay, this is bad.
	This is stupid.
	She should be prosecuted, right?
	You're not allowed to steal other people's property.
	Wintrich, instead of doing the smart thing and saying to the cops who are standing right there, stop her and get my notes back, he immediately charges into the crowd and grabs the notes by kind of reaching around her body and basically pulling her down to the ground.
	You can watch the video online.
	So I tweeted out two things can be true at once, right?
	Because I've spoken at many of these campuses.
	Two things can be true at once.
	One, it is bad.
	And criminals who steal other people's property.
	Second, It's nuts to respond like this in a public way.
	And it's nuts to respond like this when you have a series of police officers, particularly when, if they don't respond, you can then claim, rightly, that the police fail to do their jobs at these universities, which is actually the headline that a lot of folks are looking for, that the police are not doing their jobs in protecting freedom of speech and protecting conservative speakers from being victims of assault and from being victims of petty theft, right?
	That would be the way to treat this.
	It's not smart to do what Wintrich did.
	He got very angry at me.
	No, I was defending my property, and that's my right to defend my property.
	It may be your right to defend your property.
	It's not your right, as far as I know, to pull a girl to the ground over stealing some notes.
	I think that that's an excessive response.
	I think the law would probably see it the same way.
	But beyond that, It's not smart.
	It's not effectively smart in a utilitarian sense.
	Okay, other things that I hate.
	So, I do love that the media, who are trying to fight the fake news charge, keep trotting out Dan Rather as though he's the epitome of journalistic integrity.
	Here is Dan Rather, yesterday, talking about how Trump is moving us into an Orwellian space where truth does not matter.
	Look, previous presidents sometimes have lied, but none has relentlessly, so consistently lied, and I use the word measured, as this president has done.
	And here again, it's proved positive.
	But there's something within Donald Trump that has convinced him, no doubt the election itself, that he can get away with it.
	That we've moved into, at least President Trump is trying to move us into an Orwellian space, where truth doesn't matter.
	And the opposite of truth is truth.
	So stupid.
	So stupid.
	Why would the media keep trotting out the guy who's famous for losing his job over trotting out a fake letter that he still maintains was real?
	Why exactly would they do that?
	Because they're dumb.
	I mean, the answer is because they're dumb.
	And because they think they can get away with anything, and this is why Trump wins.
	This is why Trump wins.
	Okay, so, I don't have a lot of other time for things I hate, so let's do a quick Bible talk.
	So, there's been a lot of talk lately about how God uses bad people in order to achieve good ends.
	Okay, there's a story in 2 Kings about King Hezekiah.
	And I want to talk about it briefly.
	So King Hezekiah is the king of the Jews, and he's basically caught in this conflict between the Assyrians and the Egyptians.
	And it looks like the Assyrians, sometimes he's allied with the Assyrians, sometimes he's allied with the Egyptians.
	And Isaiah keeps saying to him, you need to stop siding with the Egyptians.
	Do not side with the Egyptians, because if you do, then you will fall under their influence.
	Right?
	And Isaiah basically makes the case that you need to follow God instead of following the Egyptians.
	Because the Assyrians invade Israel, and they march toward Jerusalem, and Hezekiah decides to defend the capital.
	This is all true stuff, by the way.
	One of the things that's cool is when you go to Jerusalem, you can actually go through Hezekiah's water tunnels.
	He actually built tunnels through the rock in order to survive the siege, and you can walk through the water tunnels.
	It's actually a very, very cool experience.
	I mean, this is thousands of years old.
	And a lot of Hezekiah's ministers were telling him, you need to go to the Egyptians for help.
	And Isaiah kept saying, no, don't go to the Egyptians for help.
	Rely on God.
	He did rely on God.
	And the Assyrian army, according to the prophets, ends up basically being destroyed outside the walls of Jerusalem.
	The point of this story is that sometimes, you know, it's always easy to do the side with Stalin to defeat Hitler.
	Sometimes the danger of being seduced by the dark side is grave enough that you have to rely on God and yourself.
	And I think that there are cases in, you know, you have to decide for yourself how you're going to vote if you're in Alabama, but I've told you how I would vote.
	I would not go to the polls or I'd vote right in.
	And the reason that I would do that is because I think that sometimes siding with the bad guys dirties your soul.
	Even if siding with the bad guys, you're trying to defeat people who you perceive are going to do worse to you.
	Okay, so that's a story from Second Kings that sort of backs up my point of view instead of doing the, you know, some people are trying to make the case that the Bible demands that you support Roy Moore.
	I think that that is a dicey case at best.
	David French, by the way, wrote an entire column on this segment of Second Kings that is quite good at national review.
	You should go check it out.
	Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
	Tomorrow I will be back in Los Angeles.
	I might or might not have some stories to tell.
	I don't know yet, but maybe I will.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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