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Dec. 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:33
Trump On The Brink Of A Big Win | Ep. 427
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So, President Trump is set to get a very big win.
Tax reform is set to pass.
Plus, rumors that the Trump administration is going to move the embassy to Jerusalem in Israel, which I think is excellent news, and all of the breaking news on sexual harassment and all these sexual allegations.
There's one very big piece of breaking news I will tell you in just a moment.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So, really enjoyed my trip to Washington, DC.
It was very enjoyable.
I cannot tell you anything about it.
That's how secretive it was.
It was magical.
But, in any case, there's a lot going on in politics.
The breaking news this morning is that Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, has finally thrown John Conyers under the bus.
The allegations have simply become too much.
Also, the dude's 88 years old, doesn't know where he is, shows up to meetings in his PJs, and sometimes dresses down in his office.
So, she basically had no choice.
We'll get to that in just a second.
Plus, I'm going to tell you all of the allegations about Matt Lauer, because, yeah, gross.
Okay?
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Okay, so...
The breaking news is that John Conyers looks like he's on his way out.
John Conyers is, at last count, 1,363 years old.
He was actually present not only for the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but he was present for the signing of the Magna Carta.
But he doesn't remember any of that because he's senile.
So John Conyers has been hit with allegations of sexual harassment.
He had to make settlements with congressional money, meaning our money.
And earlier in the week, you recall Nancy Pelosi defended John Conyers.
She said he was an icon.
And then she suggested that he should stay and Al Franken should stay, but Roy Moore should go.
And everybody on the right said, fine, we'll vote for Roy Moore then.
So the Democrats are trying to put the genie back in the bottle now.
Now they're trying to suggest that they actually do have a standard when it comes to sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, reversed herself today.
Here's what she had to say about John Conyers.
Well, the allegations against Congressman Conyers, as we have learned more since Sunday, are serious, disappointing, and very credible.
It's very sad.
The brave women who came forward are owed justice.
I pray for Congressman Conyers and his family and wish them well.
However, Congressman Conyers should resign.
As Dean, Congressman Conyers has served our Congress for more than five decades and shaped some of the most consequential legislation of the last half century.
However, zero tolerance means consequences for everyone.
No matter how great the legacy, it's no license to harass or discriminate.
Okay, so there goes John Conyers.
You can hear his body being dumped under the bus as we speak.
Bump.
That was John Conyers just going right under that bus.
James Clyburn, who's the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, he came out today and said that Conyers should go, but only after spending a week saying that John Conyers had been elected.
So why should he have to go?
So the Democrats handled this in about the worst possible way.
They should have said all of this last week when the allegations first broke, if they wanted to hold the moral high ground.
I said earlier this week, the Democrats had basically given up the moral high ground, and that was a serious problem for them.
That if you give up the moral high ground, then it's very hard for you to argue that the Republicans should somehow take that moral high ground for Roy Moore, for example, or Donald Trump.
The Democrats are trying to set up a new standard, which I think is a good standard, that sexual harassment and assault will not be tolerated, but they're still allowing Al Franken to stay.
So that's going to be the next shoe to drop.
There's a sixth allegation against Al Franken today.
Apparently, Al Franken At some event in 2006, gave a wet, sloppy, open-mouthed kiss to some woman on stage.
She also grabbed another woman's ass.
This is Al Franken's M.O.
We here at The Daily Wire have been hearing rumors that there is yet another woman who is going to come forward in the near future talking about a couple of decades ago, Al Franken acting in sexually inappropriate ways.
In any case, Al Franken's allegations are credible.
He has not denied them.
He has, in fact, admitted them.
And so there's no reason why John Conyers should go, but Al Franken should stay.
They're really It's difficult to imagine a rationale other than Conyers was in the job when he did this stuff, and Al Franken was not in the job when he did this stuff.
But bottom line is that I think Franken will end up going, too.
I think when Franken does go, then it's, you know, I think if and when he does go, that's going to put a lot of pressure on Republicans to dump over Roy Moore, or at least not to seat him in the Senate.
I could be wrong on this.
It could be that Al Franken stays.
And then you have to ask yourself, why is it that Conyers is going and Franken stays?
Kirsten Gillibrand of New York was asked today if Franken should resign from the Senate.
She said, quote, it's his decision, which means, no, he shouldn't resign.
He should stick around.
So one of the things that you have to ask is why Clyburn is going and why Franken is staying.
One reason is because Conyers is going and Franken is staying.
One reason is because Conyers is, as I say, older than Methuselah.
He's actually set world records for his age.
He's in the Guinness Book.
And so he's not really very valuable at this point.
They actually want him out of the House Judiciary Committee because the House Judiciary Committee will oversee any impeachment hearings.
They don't want kook old Conyers presiding over that.
So they want him gone.
Franken is much younger.
He was considered a possible 2020 candidate because we live in an insane world.
So they don't want to dump him over quite so quickly.
If Franken stays, Roy Moore will not only get elected, he will be seated in the Senate.
If Franken goes, then there's a good shot that even if Roy Moore is elected, he won't be seated in the Senate.
But a lot of it depends on how Democrats decide to treat all this.
Now obviously, these are not the only sexual allegations.
These are not the only sexual allegations that are out there.
In breaking news, literally this minute, Texas Republican Joe Parton says that he is not going to run for re-election after a nude photo of him was posted on social media.
That was revenge porn, as you recall.
It was a situation in which he was separated from his wife, and he was sleeping with another woman, and texted a picture of his ding-dong to this lady, and then she revealed it in public.
So now he's saying he's not going to seek re-election.
So we're seeing a huge turnover.
in Congress right now.
And it's not just restricted to Congress, of course.
Now we are finding out all the specific allegations about Matt Lauer.
So Matt Lauer, who was basically fired from Today yesterday, this is according to Variety.com, he once gave a colleague a sex toy as a present.
It included an explicit note about how he wanted to use it on her, which left her mortified.
Okay, if she never reported that and the company never did anything about it, that's insane.
That's insane.
I mean, you know how brazen you have to be to do that to a colleague?
Give somebody a sex toy and write a... Like, first of all, my guess is that what he told her to do with the sex toy, she probably told him to do to himself.
But it's really just horrifying.
On another day, according to Variety, he summoned a different female employee to his office and then dropped his pants, showing her his wing-wing.
After the employee decided to decline to do anything, visibly shaken, he reprimanded her for not engaging in a sexual act.
He would sometimes quiz female producers about who they'd slept with, offering to trade names.
And he loved to engage in a crass quiz game with men and women in the office, F. Marry or Kill, in which he would identify the female co-host that he'd most like to sleep with.
So this is a two-month investigation from Variety.
There's also an allegation that while he was married, he asked an intern into his office and then forced her to have sex with him.
She calls it sexual assault.
On Wednesday, NBC announced that Lauer had been fired from Today.
I guess that they saved $25 million in his annual salary, so he just blew a lot of money in order to harass his employees.
But the allegations are pretty astonishing.
They're pretty astonishing.
According to one of the former producers, they say, there are a lot of consensual relationships, but that's still a problem because of the power he held.
He couldn't sleep around town with celebrities or on the road with random people because he's Matt Lauer and he's married, so he'd have to do it within his stable where he exerted power and he knew people would never complain.
Apparently, he even had, his office was in a secluded space, this is amazing, and he had a button under his desk that allowed him to lock his door from the inside without getting up.
This afforded him the assurance of privacy.
It allowed him to welcome female employees and initiate inappropriate contact while knowing nobody could walk in on him, according to two women who were sexually harassed by Lauer.
According to sources, it extended to when Lauer traveled on assignment for NBC.
Apparently, he paid intense attention to a young woman on his staff he found attractive, focusing intently on her career ambitions.
He asked the same producer to his hotel room to deliver him a pillow.
This was part of a pattern.
Apparently, he would call various women who worked for NBC late at night to his hotel room while covering the Olympics.
So, good stuff from Matt Lauer.
I mean, the guy is basically like the... he's like a James Bond villain.
He actually has a button in his office that locks the door behind you.
Does he have a... he has a hatchet man named Oddjob who's able to actually behead bad employees with his hat.
It's pretty incredible stuff.
I will admit that here at the Daily Wire offices, I also have a button under my desk that locks the door, but that's mainly to keep Michael Moles out.
But it's really...
Like, the idea that nobody at NBC knew this was happening.
There's such a lawsuit against NBC that's burgeoning here.
There's such a lawsuit that's brewing.
Really, really amazing stuff.
So, these scandals continue to play out, and the less anyone has a standard, the more of this there will be.
As I said yesterday, the media actually does seem to have a standard.
Garrison Keillor of NPR has basically been fired from his job over allegations of sexual harassment.
He denies those allegations.
I don't think it's sexual harassment to force somebody to listen to the Lake Wobegon tapes.
I think that's just torture.
I think they actually use that at Gitmo.
But apparently Garrison Keillor was not above average, and therefore he has been fired from NPR as well.
So the fallout continues.
In politics, the question is going to be what our standard is.
Are we going to hold the same standards that the media hold for themselves?
The answer looks like no.
But Conyers at least is on his way out, which is a good move.
He should go.
Franken should go.
Roy Moore should go.
All these people should go.
They should all go, and there should be a writing campaign.
I know it's a little bit late for that in Alabama, but that's just because the Republicans didn't do the right thing the first time.
They should have moved Roy Moore out of this position in the first place.
Okay, so I want to talk to you about some of the good things that the Trump administration is doing, because they are doing some good things, believe it or not.
And one of those good things...
Is a big shakeup that's supposed to take place inside the cabinet.
I'll tell you all about that.
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Okay, so...
The White House is about to make some major shakeups.
And I think these are all good shakeups.
They're about to get rid of Rex Tillerson.
Rex Tillerson has been a garbage Secretary of State.
He's really been inactive.
He's not done much.
He got a $20 million a year salary at ExxonMobil to go over to the White House and be badgered by President Trump.
So, you gotta give him credit for that one.
He's been at odds with Trump over foreign policy because Trump is moving to the right on foreign policy, and Tillerson seems to be center-left on foreign policy.
He has apparently described the president as a quote-unquote moron.
They differ in their approach to North Korea's missile testing and Iran's nuclear program.
Tillerson wants to uphold the Iran nuclear deal.
Trump wants to abrogate it.
Trump is right.
Tillerson is wrong.
So the plan in place is that Mike Pompeo, who's over at CIA and has a good relationship with President Trump, Would move over to state.
That would be a definite upgrade over Rex Tillerson, whom I opposed not only for his Russian ties, but because I did not trust him on foreign policy.
He also had strong ties to oil regimes in the Middle East.
And so Tillerson would go.
He'd be replaced by Pompeo.
And then Pompeo would be replaced at the CIA by Senator Tom Cotton, which is a really interesting move.
It opens up another Senate seat, so it's a little bit risky.
Arkansas is definitely a red state.
And the Republicans would have an advantage going in, but it opens up another Senate seat that really would not be open.
Tom Cotton, I believe, is still in his first term in the Senate in Arkansas.
He's a relative newcomer, but he has a really good record.
And Cotton obviously also has a military background.
So he'd move over to CIA.
Pompeo would move over to the State Department.
It's not clear if Trump has actually made the move yet or greenlit the move yet, but it is clear that he doesn't like Tillerson, right?
He's been tweeting about Tillerson openly.
I talked about this in October.
Just a few weeks ago, on October 1st, Trump tweeted, quote, I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful secretary of state, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with little rocket men.
So this is all a staff shakeup overseen by the chief of staff, John Kelly.
And I think that it's a good move.
I think that somebody who doesn't like Trump, obviously the State Department is leaking this, Tillerson allies probably leaking this, but this would definitely be an upgrade.
And it's pretty obvious that Tillerson doesn't want the job.
He said earlier this year, quote, I didn't want this job.
I didn't seek this job.
My wife told me I'm supposed to do this.
So he wants out.
Trump wants him out.
So get him out.
And that's totally fine with me.
I think that's a good move by the Trump administration.
Other things that the Trump administration that are good, that are happening right now.
So Trump is about to get his tax reform bill.
This looks like this is going to pass.
Today John McCain announced that he would vote in favor of the tax reform bill.
I've gone through some of the pros and cons of the tax reform bill.
It's bad for people like me in California, high-income earners who live in high-tax states.
It doesn't work well for us.
It is an across-the-board tax cut for everyone else.
It's an across-the-board tax cut in small measure for everyone else.
There's some deductions that go away or are minimized.
The child tax credit goes away or is minimized.
There's a proposal on the table from Mike Lee to expand the child tax credit.
That's not a bad move.
But overall, the bill is worth voting for.
It lowers the corporate tax rate.
That's something that definitely needs to be done.
All the focus on individual tax rates is for political gain, but the reality is that individual tax rates are not killing business investments in the country right now.
Individual tax rates are too high, for sure, by a long shot.
But it's the corporate tax rates at 35% that are driving people not to hire.
It's driving people to minimize their business investment because they don't want to be taxed at 35%.
So Trump is out making the case yesterday.
He was making the case on the road in St.
Louis.
It's a good sign they can get tax reform passed because here's the fact.
If they can't pass tax reform, they are passing zero things.
Nothing gets passed if they don't pass tax reform.
And they also need to pass tax reform in order so that there's any momentum going forward on issues like immigration or budgeting.
The beating heart of our plan is a tax cut for working families.
That's what it is.
having to make any serious concessions with spending, then they are in solid shape for legislation in the next year if there is any legislation to be had.
Here's Trump in St. Louis yesterday making the case for his tax cut.
The beating heart of our plan is a tax cut for working families.
That's what it is.
This is not good for me.
Me, it's not so.
I have some very wealthy friends.
Not so happy with me, but that's okay.
You know, I keep hearing Schumer, deuces for the wealthy.
Well, if it is, my friends don't know about it.
He's right about that.
I mean, if you are somebody who is, you know, wealthy, if you're doing well, and you live in New York, then you're not going to do well under this tax plan.
I wish it were an across-the-board tax cut, and not just, you know, tax cuts for people who earn below a certain amount, but it is better than nothing, for sure.
And the main tax cut is not on the individual side, it's on the corporate side.
The Republicans should have been making this case all along.
It's why the tax cut is unpopular, because it was pitched as an individual tax cut, and it really isn't an individual tax cut.
It really is much more a corporate Tax cut.
The Senate adopted a motion to proceed last night, triggering a formal floor debate over the tax reform bill.
All 52 Republicans voted for it, including all of the so-called moderates.
And there's a new tax reform study that is out today showing that the CBO analysis shows that everyone's taxes will be reduced.
Guy Benson has a good write-up on this over at townhall.com.
He's been all over this.
So this basically, he shows that the real numbers show that your taxes would be reduced by A not insignificant amount, particularly if you're in the middle class.
Proportionally speaking, you are going to see a drop in your taxes much more if you're in the middle class than you are if you are at the upper end of the tax bracket.
So right now, if you look at various scenarios, I'm looking at a chart right now that talks about the impacts of the Senate's amended version of the Tax Cut and Tax Job Act from the Tax Foundation.
If you look at, for example, let's take Sophia and Chad, $165,000 combined, married, two earners, two kids.
They defer $20,000 toward retirement contributions.
They itemize their tax deduction.
Under the current law, they pay about $30,000 in taxes.
Under the proposed law, they pay about $27,000 in taxes, so they have an 8% reduction in their tax burden.
Every tax bracket basically sees a reduction in their tax burden of more or less One of the things that was pretty spectacular and hilarious about the way that Democrats are treating this is that they are lying about whether this is a tax cut or not.
And then they're suggesting that it's not good for the middle class.
But what they actually want to do is raise taxes on the middle class, right?
Ted Cruz had a debate with Bernie Sanders the other night on CNN about tax cuts.
And he points out that Bernie Sanders likes to talk about how he doesn't want to hurt the middle class.
He's a liar.
Everything Bernie Sanders wants to pay for, he's going to have to pay for with massive tax hikes.
And Cruz points this out quite correctly.
So you're a single mom working, he says you're going to pay some more.
You're a small business owner, he says you're going to pay some more.
And the reason is there aren't enough millionaires and billionaires to pay for all the socialism that Bernie and the Democrats want to give away.
Okay, so he is exactly right.
And not only that, the Democrats are so bollocked up that they even refuse to denounce socialism itself, right?
They can't because Bernie Sanders is a socialist.
Maria Cantwell, same debate.
She's talking with Cruz and Cruz asks her, can you define the difference between a Democrat and a socialist?
And she refuses to do it.
What is the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist on taxes?
Well, you know, Ted, I really thought about this issue of you trying to divide the Democrats.
But, you know, we're a big tent party.
And there's room for Bernie, and there's room for me.
Okay, no.
Okay, and then you want us to believe that you guys aren't going to raise taxes?
Obviously.
This is your goal is to raise taxes.
Trump is winning on this issue.
Tax cuts are a winning issue for Republicans.
They always have been a winning issue for Republicans.
They're a winning issue for JFK.
They're a winning issue for Reagan.
They're a winning issue for, yes, Bill Clinton, who had to reduce taxes after raising the capital gains tax.
And they're a winning issue for George W. Bush.
Tax cuts are always popular.
Even if people say they don't like it right now, that's because of the media coverage and bad PR done by the administration and by Congress.
But once it takes effect and your check is bigger in the mail, then it's going to be of benefit to you.
So, the tax cut is good policy and good for President Trump for not botching it, right?
Thank you, Mr. President, for not botching this up.
There are some problems inside the tax reform bill.
I wish that Trump would work to fix them, but this is a lot better than nothing.
No question, this is better than nothing.
Well, I want to talk a little bit more About Roy Moore, the fallout there, President Trump doing some bad things with regard to Britain, and the hypocrisy of some in the media about sexual harassment.
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Okay, so, The Democrats, the real reason, I mentioned earlier a little bit, that Nancy Pelosi had thrown John Conyers under the bus.
The real reason that Nancy Pelosi threw John Conyers under the bus was not just because of Roy Moore and they're going to pretend they have a standard on sexual harassment.
It's because Nancy Pelosi is in danger of losing her speakership to a woman named Kathleen Rice.
Kathleen Rice is a Democrat from New York.
She's quite articulate.
She's very good at what she does.
She's much younger than Nancy Pelosi.
She basically said, listen, I'm going to talk about sexual harassment.
I want Conyers out.
I'm going to fight for this.
And there are people who are saying that Rice should replace Pelosi.
So Pelosi moved to cut her off.
This is why.
Kathleen Rice, the Democrats would be very smart if they were to move Kathleen Rice into the top slot and demote Nancy Pelosi.
Let's talk about the big elephant in the room.
And that's why I was done with the meeting.
I don't have time for conversations that are not real.
And I, for one, I'm not going to stand silent even in the face of pressure from leadership not to.
Yep, and the reason that she's doing that is because she's running for the top slot.
Pelosi's afraid of her, and that's why she is running away from John Conyers now.
So basically, don't give the credit to Pelosi for Conyers falling.
Give the credit to Kathleen Rice, who's putting all sorts of pressure on the Democrats to do this.
Maybe it's for political reasons, but whatever the reason, that's the right thing to do.
Meanwhile, if you have any sort of bets down as to who is going to be next in the sexual harassment fallout, I think that You know, let's just say that Geraldo Rivera might not be your worst bet.
The reason for that is because yesterday, after the Garrison Keillor allegations and after Matt Lauer was forced out at NBC, Geraldo had a bunch of tweets in which he basically defended all of this.
this.
He said, sad about Matt Lauer.
Great guy.
Highly skilled and empathetic with guests and a real gentleman to my family and me.
News is a flirty business.
Really?
Okay.
That should be as unacceptably retro as the other way around.
I agree with that.
I agree with that.
But then he says, Yeah.
I humbly apologize.
He did that because Fox News told him, dude, shut it.
Like, what is wrong with you?
Defending Matt Lauer?
Like, the allegations about Matt Lauer are super serious, and news is a flirty business is not a good answer.
Okay, I did a morning show with a woman who I now work with here at Daily Wire, Elisha Krause.
Elisha's like a sister to me.
It's not a flirty business.
Like, flirting only happens when you want to flirt with your co-host.
Okay?
I did not want to flirt with Alicia, nor did Alicia want to flirt with me, and so that wasn't a thing.
That's the way that your business is supposed to work.
The reason that I say Geraldo may be on the chopping block is because Garrison Keillor The day before he was ousted at NPR, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting that Al Franken should not step down from his position defending Al Franken.
The next day he was out at NPR.
Geraldo's defending Matt Lauer.
These allegations have been floating around about Geraldo Rivera.
I did an interview with Chris Wallace yesterday for Fox News Sunday.
I'm going to be featured on his power player segment on Fox News Sunday, I think a week from Sunday.
And we turned to each other and we said, are we going to be like the last two guys in media?
After all, this is finished.
There are a lot of guys, I think, in media who are not doing this, but apparently this was an epidemic.
Okay, so in other news, Roy Moore said something yesterday that it just it shows you how willing people are to believe things.
I had a long conversation with my good friend David Limbaugh yesterday.
David and I have been friends since I was 17 years old.
David is one of the nicest guys in the business.
Somebody who I think is really principled, supported Ted Cruz in the primaries, voted for Trump in the general election.
Very strongly supported Trump in the general election.
He and I disagreed about that.
And David and I were talking, and we talked at length about Roy Moore.
And he said that he was annoyed by the number of people who were basically saying that it was morally inconceivable to vote for Moore.
Again, he made the same argument that he made during 2016.
It's a binary call.
You gotta vote for one or the other.
It's either Doug Jones or Roy Moore.
And Doug Jones is pro-abortion.
Roy Moore isn't.
You may think that Roy Moore is a scuzzbag.
But, you know, acknowledge that it's a bad choice and you have to make it.
I've always said I thought that was the strongest argument in favor of Moore, although I think that, you know, points for honesty, although I think that it doesn't wash for me because I think that you can't treat every election in isolation.
If we keep saying that every election is the only election that matters, then pretty soon very few elections matter because we're just selecting bad guys in every election.
The whole point of this is that you preserve your character so you can fight another day.
You preserve your character so you can have the moral high ground, and that's important.
That's my point.
But I'm not begrudging people who make a different calculation, right?
I think that I understand your argument, I just don't agree with it.
I may not agree with it morally.
I may not agree with it in a utilitarian sense.
But I understand the argument.
I'm not going to pretend that the argument doesn't have some weight.
It obviously does.
But what does bother me is all the people who are trying to convince themselves that Moore is innocent.
That Moore didn't do anything at all.
I think that it is highly unlikely.
Let me put it that way.
Very, very unlikely that Moore didn't do anything, given the fact that there are nine women who have made allegations about Roy Moore.
Yesterday, Roy Moore was trotting out his latest conspiracy theory, and this is what drives me nuts about the partisan hackery of all of this, is that if you wildly allege things, then people on your own side will buy into it, so long as it serves their political purposes.
Here's what Roy Moore had to say about how these allegations came to fruition.
What I say today, who are they?
They're liberals.
They know all conservative values.
They're the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender who want to change our culture.
They're socialists who want to change our way of life, putting men above God, and that government is our government.
They're the Washington establishment that simply wants to keep their jobs, do the same thing, Keep everything sane because they don't lose their position, their power, their prestige.
Okay, so there he goes, essentially saying that the people who are trying to stop him are all liberals.
They're lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgenders who want to change our culture.
The socialists are behind these allegations.
Okay, the two women who are behind the allegations are apparently, who are behind the main allegations.
One says that she was 16 when Roy Moore took her out into his car and essentially tried to rape her.
That's the one with the yearbook.
And then the other woman who came forward and said she was 14 when Roy Moore took her home and tried to molest her.
Both of these women are Trump supporters.
They're white straight Trump supporters.
So no, this is not just about the quote-unquote liberal agenda.
It is about whether Roy Moore did this stuff or not for a lot of these people.
But as long as you're willing to put everything in the box of conspiratorialism, you're able to get away with everything.
And you're seeing that now, Moore's best supporters are moving this direction.
They can't deal with the cognitive dissonance of just saying, Roy Moore may have done some really bad stuff years ago.
Like really bad stuff years ago, but we're going to vote for him anyway, which is what Kay Ivey, the governor of Alabama, was honest enough to say.
Now they're trying to rehabilitate Moore and say that all of this is nonsense, which, again, I think this puts us in a very difficult position if you're trying to be intellectually honest.
Here's Mo Brooks, who ran against Moore in the primaries and lost, saying that the yearbook is forged.
The woman who alleges that Moore signed her yearbook and then tried to rape her, basically, that that yearbook is forged.
There are only two that have asserted that Roy Moore engaged in unlawful conduct.
One of those is clearly a liar because that one forged the love Roy Moore part of a yearbook in order to try to, for whatever reason, get at Roy Moore and win this seat for the Democrats.
There's a lot more to it as to why I believe that the evidence is almost uncontrovertible about whether the yearbook was forged.
So now you're down to one witness.
And you look at the preponderance of the evidence, and then you add Roy Moore's denial in it, you add his long, deeply held Christian beliefs, and I just don't think there's anywhere in the world that a jury would agree with the assertions of the Washington Post.
So the allegations that the yearbook are fake, that it's – I mean, that would be the weirdest story ever if the yearbook were indeed forged.
And there's a second allegation by a woman who has nothing to do with the yearbook.
So, again, deal with the cognitive dissonance, okay?
If you want to own it, own it.
If you want to say, listen, we have to elect bad guys because there are worse guys out there.
We have to stop.
Own that argument.
But do not recast evidence.
Do not pretend bad things didn't happen because it's uncomfortable for you to admit that you're voting for a guy who's done some pretty terrible things, or who has allegedly done some pretty terrible things.
Okay, so, meanwhile, President Trump, who I praised before on policy, I was asked by a member of the administration very recently how I thought that the administration was doing.
Overall.
And what I said was this.
I said if I had to grade them, I'd give them an A on executive policy, I'd give them a C on negotiations with Congress, and I'd give them a D on communication.
And that seems to be the pattern, right?
And that's sort of how today's show is.
On policy, the Trump administration's about to get tax reform done.
They are about to make some good moves with regard to Jerusalem.
There's a strong rumor coming out of the White House that the administration is about to move the embassy, if not move the embassy, to Jerusalem in Israel to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
That would be great.
I have a niece.
It doesn't say Jerusalem, Israel because the State Department refused to recognize that Jerusalem is a part of Israel even though it has been the eternal and will be the eternal capital of Israel for all of time.
In any case, all of this is very good policy, so A for that.
In terms of negotiation with Congress, again, the administration is not totally to blame because Congress has been very fractious, but they haven't been able to get major policy stuff done, but they're trying, and I think tax reform will get through.
So, C on that.
And then D on communication.
And I'm going to give you why it's a D on communication in just a second.
I'm going to show you just another example of bad communication from the White House and why this matters.
What's the argument the White House could make that would actually be... What's the way the White House needs to position itself if they actually hope to win re-election in 2020?
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Okay, so the Trump administration and President Trump, he's very gifted at sounding off against his enemies.
It's what he's very good at.
To put the most flattering spin on it, the President of the United States finds enemies and he hits them.
He doesn't always hit them in the most appropriate way.
In fact, I think he hits them in some pretty morally egregious ways.
He will say things that are not true about them, but he's very good at putting his opponents in a box.
He hits and he hits and he hits until they are down in the corner whimpering.
That's what he did in the 2016 election cycle during the primaries.
That's what he did during the general with Hillary Clinton.
It is not enough to make your opponent look like the villain.
You have to look like the hero.
In politics, if you want to get young people particularly to vote for you, it can't just be you saying the other guy is bad.
It has to be you saying the other guy is bad and this is why he's bad and this is why I'm good.
You actually need to make an affirmative case for yourself.
Trump never makes an affirmative case for the administration.
Instead, he only makes negative cases.
The problem is, now he looks like a villain attacking other villains.
And young people have this sort of faux cynicism about politics where everyone's a bad guy except Bernie Sanders.
Everyone's a bad guy except Rand Paul, right?
Whoever is the most kind of out-of-the-box candidate who is perceived to be pure as the driven snow, those are the candidates that young people like.
And that's because they perceive them as the heroes of these particular morality plays.
Everyone who votes sees politics as a morality play.
Even people who are 60 who voted for Trump in the last election cycle see politics as a morality play.
They just see it as a deeply immoral morality play in which Hillary Clinton is the devil and Trump is the devil you know in order to defeat the devil you don't.
I think that was the majority of people who voted in the last election cycle.
The people who love Trump were able to somehow fit Trump into the hero box, which I don't understand how you could do that in the last election cycle.
Maybe it was just because he was hitting Hillary Clinton that alone gave him the title hero as opposed to sort of anti-hero.
In any case, What Trump needs to do, if he wishes to win the 10 million additional votes that he's going to need between now and the next election cycle to win re-election, is he needs to show people that he is not just anti-media, but that he is pro-truth.
He needs to show people that he is not just anti-radical Islam, but that he is pro-truth about Islam.
He needs to show people that he is not just anti-big government, but that he is pro-a limited government view of the future.
That's what President Trump needs to do.
And if he won't do it, then the Vice President needs to do it, and if the Vice President won't do it, then other members of the administration need to do it.
The bottom line is that you cannot constantly project your most nasty, negative face and hope that you're going to win over young people who are idealistic enough that they will just stay home or vote third party.
This holds true for the other side, too.
Hillary Clinton thought that she could win just by bashing Trump.
It didn't work.
Young people did not show up to vote for Hillary Clinton because Hillary said, I'm not Trump, and young people said, we don't care.
The same thing is true for Trump.
If he wants to win over people who are under the age of 50, then he's going to have to actually start making an affirmative case for himself.
Unfortunately, he's uncomfortable doing that, I think.
He's uncomfortable sort of putting himself out there, because it does take a little bit of vulnerability to put out your own views.
It takes a little bit of vulnerability not to play the villain, but to try and be sincere about the views that you hold.
When you go out there, I know because I speak on a regular basis.
When I go out there and I attack.
When you're on attack, there's very little vulnerability.
When you're on the offensive...
You're not very vulnerable because the other person is on the defensive.
But when you put out your own viewpoint, when you put out your deeply held beliefs, and you subject those to attack and assault, that takes some real strength.
It's harder to do.
And I think that it's also what wins you the most points in the end.
If you can do both, if you can attack where it's necessary to attack, and you can prop up a vision, build a vision for the country, at the same time, that's how you win.
That's what Ronald Reagan did.
I think in his first term, that's what George W. Bush did.
Donald Trump needs to do that.
Donald Trump is not doing that right now.
And I'm going to explain what he did wrong yesterday on Twitter and how it's going to blow back.
I know there are a bunch of people who are saying it's genius, genius, MAGA, MAGA, genius.
It was not.
I will explain in just a second.
But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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So yesterday, President Trump tweets out a bunch of random tweets from this white supremacist account, basically, in the UK.
And it was a bunch of videos of Muslims doing bad stuff.
And it's not smart, and it's not good politics, and it's really dumb.
A lot of people on the right will go, oh, look, it's just—it's secret genius.
As I heard yesterday from no less than our own Andrew Klavan through the grapevine and Michael Mowles through the grapevine, that this was just, it was a work of magnificent unparalleled genius.
Guys, you are this close to being fired.
That is so stupid.
The reason that this is so stupid is because what their suggestion was that Trump had tweeted out all of these idiotic videos because Trump was trying to distract from the tax reform debate.
Number one, why would you want to distract from the tax reform debate when you're about to win?
And two, if you actually want to distract with something, why would you use these videos from this woman who I guess has been jailed, but she's been jailed because she was supposedly engaged in hate speech?
Why would you use that as the excuse?
So, Nolz and Clement were like, well, he was trying to stand up for free speech in Britain.
Yes, I'm sure that's Donald Trump's top priority at the moment, is standing up for free speech in Britain.
Or, alternatively, here's what happened.
There are a bunch of people who tweet at him, at his username, and he sits in the Oval Office, and when he sees something he likes, he retweets it.
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
Which do you think is more plausible?
That he's sitting there and he's going, I have a chess strategy to distract from my winning tax reform play.
My strategy is that I will kill two birds with one stone.
I will retweet a bunch of random, not true videos.
And in some of these cases, the videos ended up, one video particularly, apparently was debunked.
I will retweet all of this stuff.
And I will do it specifically because I will kill two birds with one stone, I will fight for free speech rights of some rando in Britain, and I will also distract from this ongoing tax reform debate which isn't hurting me in any way.
It's all genius.
Woohoo!
Not only that, I will start a fight with Theresa May, a political ally of mine in the UK.
Right, Theresa May is part of the Conservative Party.
She was part of the Brexit Party.
Like, what?
If you think that this is in any way beneficial to Trump, you're wrong.
As I said yesterday, the media are a bunch of cats, and Trump has the laser pointer.
Point the laser in the right place.
Point the laser in the right place.
There are so many ways in which President Trump could draw real moral contrast between himself and other people.
This is not the way to do it.
Now he's in an open fight with Theresa May.
So yesterday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked specifically about the tweets that Trump had made, and here was her answer.
So it doesn't matter if it's a fake video?
Look, I'm not talking about the nature of the video.
I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.
The threat is real, and that's what the President is talking about, is the need for national security, the need for military spending, and those are very real things.
There's nothing fake about that.
Sorry guys, I got to go.
So the videos are fake, but the threat is real?
You don't get to do this in politics.
You want to know why.
The polls show that the media are not trusted with regards to how they cover President Trump.
The polls also show that people trust the media more than they trust Trump.
Trump has done a great job of tearing down the media.
He has not done a good job of propping up in its stead something true and something real.
And it's not good for him when he's getting in fights with his own allies.
Yesterday on the floor of the House of Commons, the British actually raised a point of order about Trump's tweets.
This is what it looked like on the House of Commons floor yesterday.
Point of order, Mr Stephen Doughty.
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for exceptionally taking this.
You may not be aware, Mr Speaker, nor others in the House, but it appears that the President of the United States has, in recent moments, been retweeting comments from far-right organisation Britain First.
Highly inflammatory videos, including some posted by an individual who I believe has recently been arrested and charged relating to certain serious offences.
And I wondered whether you have noticed, Mr Speaker, of any intended statement by the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary on this very serious matter.
I confess I have no advance notice of this matter.
I am not myself one who tends to follow what is said on Twitter.
Okay, so there is a point of order in the House of Commons, and Trump fires back.
He goes after Theresa May, the Prime Minister of Britain, and he tweets this.
He says, Theresa May, don't focus on me.
Focus on the destructive radical Islamic terrorism that is taking place within the UK.
We are doing just fine.
Why are you getting in a fight with Theresa May?
She's your political ally.
Why would you do that?
Why is that a useful thing to do?
There were a bunch of people yesterday saying, this shows that Trump's really on his game.
He's really on the ball.
No, it doesn't.
It shows that he's getting in fights with his own allies.
Why is that a smart thing to do?
And by the way, we're not doing just fine on radical Islamic terror.
I mean, there was a terrorist who just killed a bunch of people in New York the other day.
Trump is doing better than Obama did on it, no question.
This is useless, and it's not setting him up to be the good guy.
You want him to be the good guy?
People want their president to be the good guy.
They don't want their president to be the bad guy.
There's no such thing as a two-term president who is perceived widely to be the bad guy.
Even Richard Nixon in 1972, this is pre-Watergate, was perceived to be a good guy in 1972.
Seriously, go back and look at the campaign.
He wasn't just a bad guy who was defeating George McGovern.
Okay, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and the big idea.
We'll try to fit as much of this in as possible.
So, things I like.
I started watching Mindhunter on Netflix.
I'm about three and a half episodes in.
It is quite good.
It's very graphic.
It is rated R to X. There's some graphic sex for no reason.
The graphic sex is completely superfluous to the plot, but it's like, ooh, we're Netflix, so we're going to show a naked chick on screen.
And then there are a couple of crime scene photos that are pretty graphic.
I used to work in a DA's office, so I've seen worse than this.
It's a really interesting show.
The basis of the show is these two guys from the FBI who, they've never done any serial killer profiling, so they decided to go around interviewing serial killers to determine what exactly makes serial killers tick so they can help profile and identify them before they kill again.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
It's not easy butchering people.
It's hard work.
Physically and mentally, I don't think people realize You need to vent.
You know, there's a lot more like me.
Do you think so?
Forty years ago, your FBI was founded hunting down John Dillinger.
Now, we have extreme violence between strangers.
We travel around the country and teach FBI techniques to cops.
You guys mind if I bother you for a minute?
She was found cuffed and lashed to the bed.
What people won't do to each other, there's nothing people won't do.
How can we help?
We should be using every resource we can.
Talking to the smartest people we find from the broadest possible... Okay, so the series is actually quite good, and very compelling.
The two main characters in the series are a guy who's kind of a nerdy guy who's very into the vagary of all of this, and a kind of hard-charging cop type.
So far, I'll say the first three and a half episodes are very good.
All of the compelling scenes, virtually all of the compelling scenes are the interviews with the actual serial killers.
Those are pretty interesting.
Okay, so that's a show that's worth watching if you can stomach the graphic.
It's one of those shows that I don't think that my wife will enjoy too much.
But it is quite good.
If you like Silence of the Lambs, this is the kind of show for you.
Okay, time for some things that I hate, or a thing I hate.
Okay, so this thing I hate is actually a thing I sort of love.
So there's a Michigan Democrat who is running for Attorney General in the state of Michigan.
Her name is Dana Nessel and she is now running an ad all about why she is qualified for higher office.
The reason she says she's qualified for higher office is because she does not have a penis.
No, I'm not kidding.
This is an actual ad that is actually on the internet and is actually running and is real and this is real life and what the hell is happening.
If the last few weeks has taught us anything, it's that we need more women in positions of power, not less.
So, when you're choosing Michigan's next Attorney General, ask yourself this.
Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting?
Is it the candidate who doesn't have a penis?
I'd say so.
Some people will tell you I can't be the Democratic nominee for Attorney General here in Michigan because we can't have an all-female ticket for statewide office in 2018.
Pundits and insiders are asking, can we afford to have a female governor, a female Attorney General, and a female Secretary of State?
Well, I read the news, and I bet you do too.
And it has me wondering, can we afford not to?
Now, if you want to know more about what I'll do as Michigan Attorney General, head to Dana2018.com.
My goodness.
But right now, I want to tell you what you can expect me not to do.
Have a penis.
I will not.
Wait, I will not have a penis.
No matter what happens that's not happening, there will be no penis.
You know, I hope that she doesn't become a transsexual, in which case she'd have to add one.
But in any case, I don't want to define people's gender for them.
In any case, this is a thing now.
I guess that the way this is going to work is that men are the evil gender, females are the great gender, we never have to worry about women being corrupt in office or doing anything bad in office or covering up for sexual harassment like Nancy Pelosi for years.
We won't have to worry about any of those things because women don't have penises and penises are bad.
Penises make you terrible.
Which is an amazing thing, that penises make you terrible, because I have been reliably informed that there are many women who have penises.
I've been reliably informed of this.
Caitlyn Jenner was a woman with a penis.
How dare you!
Cisnormative.
Heteronormative.
So, yes, this is the culture in which we live.
Okay, time for a quick exploration of the big idea.
So one of the things that Trump has been going around saying is that welfare recipients are making more than some people who work their butts off, that welfare is a system that actually denigrates work.
This is true.
Okay, the left has been very upset about Trump saying this sort of thing.
How dare Republicans say that the welfare system benefits people who don't work as much?
It benefits people who don't work as much.
And I will show you HR demonstrating this.
First, here's what Trump had to say about it.
I know people, they work three jobs, and they live next to somebody who doesn't work at all.
And the person who's not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that's working his and her ass off.
And it's not gonna happen.
Okay, so this is a case where Trump is actually doing the right thing, right?
What Trump is saying is, I'm standing up for the working person, I'm not gonna stand for the deadbeat, right?
I'm not gonna stand for the person who can work, but won't.
So, let me show you a chart of how welfare benefits work in the United States.
So, this is the D.C.
urban, this comes courtesy of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., circa 2014.
This talks about tax and transfer benefits for universally available and additional programs for a single adult with two children in 2015.
What you see is that if you earn nothing, if your wage is zero, If your wage is zero, you will make almost $30,000 in tax and transfer benefits for universally available and additional programs.
And then you see that it sort of goes down, and then it hits a cliff at about a little under $30,000.
When you hit that cliff, the total amount drops, suddenly it's $12,000.
Right, so you're making a little under $30,000, suddenly it's $12,000 of benefits that you're making.
So what you end up with, and this sometimes happens, is that it is actually beneficial for you to work less.
You'd prefer to make $26,000 as opposed to $27,000 on this chart.
If you make $26,000 or $25,000, you're still pulling in $17,000 in benefits.
So let's say you're making $26,000 and you pull in $17,000 in benefits, so you're making $43,000 total.
If you earn $30,000 or you earn $28,000 or $27,000 and you pull in $12,000, $27,000 and $12,000 is $39,000.
$17,000 in benefits.
Let's say you're making $26,000 and you pull in $17,000 in benefits, so you're making $43,000 total.
If you earn $30,000 or you earn $28,000 or $27,000 and you pull in $12,000, $27,000 in $12,000 is $39,000.
So you're actually going to make about the same amount of money for working less, and in some cases, significantly less money for working more.
These programs are difficult to administer.
It's difficult to find the balancing point.
And it is certainly true that the work requirements that are on welfare need to be strengthened by Congress.
They should be strengthened because otherwise you have these income cliffs in which we are encouraging people not to work.
So Trump is not wrong about this.
The welfare system has been a great impetus to people working less over the history of the program.
We'll be back here tomorrow.
They're supposed to vote on tax reform either today or tomorrow, so we should have some big news for you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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