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Jan. 10, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:54
Trump’s Immigration Push | Ep. 450
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So, President Trump holds a big immigration meeting with Democrats.
Steve Bannon is out at Breitbart News and apparently back to bagging groceries where he belongs.
And it turns out that President Obama designed his own library.
It does not look good.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So a lot to get to today.
Obviously, there's a lot of breaking news on immigration, including a judicial ruling that is just absurd.
Also, Steve Bannon is out at Breitbart.
And as you may have noticed, this does not displease me.
Plus, as I have to show the pictures of the Obama presidential library, because they truly are astonishingly awful.
I mean, it's like the guy took a Chinese takeout food box, unwrapped it, and then decided to model his library on it.
That's basically what it looks like.
Mathis is nodding because he knows this is true.
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Okay, so.
Well, I'm desperate to begin with President Obama's presidential library because the pictures are just so astonishing.
You're going to have to wait for that.
First, we're going to start with President Trump having his big immigration meeting at the White House.
So, there were two purposes for this immigration meeting.
Purpose number one is to push back on the Michael Wolff fire and fury narratives.
That narrative, which we talked about at length yesterday, suggests that Trump is just a crazy person.
Trump is a nut job, a child in a man body, a sort of A kook who's escaped from the asylum and is now running amok through the White House destroying everything.
And so Trump wanted to hold this bipartisan meeting to show, no, you know, I'm going to have a basically normal meeting.
And we'll have a bunch of Democrats to the White House and we'll talk and nobody will get hit in the head with a frying pan.
It'll totally be fine.
And in that, he succeeded.
He was fine.
When it came to policy, however, things were not quite so glowing.
The president gave a bunch of mixed signals about what he would be willing to sign or what he would not be willing to sign in terms of DACA.
Now, to review, if you recall, back in 2012, Barack Obama passed into law sort of through executive order, the executive amnesty.
This is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
It suggested that anyone between the ages of 16 and 30, at the time that he signed this into law, that those people would be able to stay if they were brought into the country as children and had been there for a certain amount of time.
And that being the case...
All those people would eventually be legal citizens of the United States was sort of the unspoken promise that Obama was making.
So Trump comes into office and several months into his term, he decides that he is going to overturn DACA.
But at the time, he says, DACA no longer applies.
But if Congress doesn't pass some version of DACA to keep the so-called dreamers in the United States, then come March, maybe I'll just reinstate it.
Which is a weird statement to make because the whole reason for striking down DACA in the first place was based on constitutional grounds.
He said it's unconstitutional for the President of the United States to simply say that a bunch of people are now going to get green cards to stay in the United States or papers that suggest that they can be here legally without the approval of Congress.
So it'd be weird to reverse himself and then say, well, you know what, I decided the constitutional question doesn't matter.
Now I want this policy back in place and therefore it will be back in place.
That'd be a weird argument for Trump to make.
So yesterday Trump is at the White House and he leads off with his actual proposal.
His actual proposal is that he will sign into law an enshrinement of DACA, basically legalizing the presence of the so-called dreamers, maybe giving them a pathway to citizenship, maybe not.
Maybe allowing them to stay in the country permanently without the ability to vote, for example.
It's not clear what exactly he's talking about here, but he says there won't be any staying in the country for the Dreamers unless I get the funding for my border wall.
Now, this is a fairly unremarkable position that Republicans have been taking.
There's some hardliners like Ann Coulter who have been suggesting that under no circumstances should Trump reinstate DACA.
Instead, he should just push for Independent funding of the border wall and said he should just push for an end to chain migration.
Chain migration is the process by which you come here, you drop a baby, the baby's a citizen, and now the baby brings you in as the parent, as a citizen.
That's chain migration.
You bring in your entire family.
In fact, the last terrorist attack that occurred in New York City was by somebody who'd been brought in essentially through chain migration.
Started off as a person who got in through the visa lottery.
That person brought their family over through chain migration.
Trump wants to end chain migration, as well he should.
Chain migration is stupid.
The idea that you get to bring your entire family over just because you're here.
How about we determine whether you bringing your family over is good for the United States, rather than just simply assuming it.
Especially when you're talking not about immediate family, you're talking about cousins, and uncles, and aunts, and grandmothers, and all the rest.
In any case, the Ann Coulters say, no DACA at all.
Now, that is what I would prefer, too.
I would prefer a system where we look at all of these people on a one-to-one basis.
I've said this a thousand times.
Where we look at these folks at a one-to-one level, we decide whether they ought to stay or whether they ought to go, and then they go in the back of the line.
They can stay here while they are waiting for their actual papers, but they have to go to the back of the line because it's not fair to privilege them.
over people who have been waiting diligently in line for years to get their green card and get their citizenship.
But President Trump thinks differently.
He thinks that DACA has to stay.
The reason for that is he doesn't want the ugly pictures of ICE coming in and deporting people, just ripping children out of their mother's arms and then putting them on a plane to El Salvador.
This is not something that Trump really wants to do.
Or the opposite, getting rid of the taking mothers and the baby was born here so the baby is a citizen, taking the mothers and deporting the mothers and leaving the babies here.
Trump doesn't want any of those pictures.
So he says, We want to do DACA.
We want DACA done.
But we're also going to get my priorities done.
So in order for Democrats to sign off on this, Democrats want what is called a clean DACA bill.
Whenever they say clean, clean just means without any riders.
So what they want is DACA re-enshrined without any wall funding, without any curbs on chain migration, without any curbs on the diversity visa lottery.
Trump would like, if DACA is going to get done, all of the above.
He wants an end to chain migration.
He wants curbs on the diversity visa lottery.
He wants it done away with.
He wants his funding for the border wall.
And that's what he said yesterday.
And by the way, as I said a couple of days ago, that deal was not a bad deal.
It's not a terrible deal.
If he ends up basically retaining status quo with regard to the Dreamers, who, by the way, were never really going to be deported, if he ends up retaining status quo but getting all of his policy priorities, that's a win for the president.
He knows it, and that's why that was what his position was yesterday.
Here's what he said.
Just to clarify, is there any agreement without the wall?
No, there wouldn't be.
The wall has to be there.
You need it.
John, you need the wall.
I mean, it's wonderful.
I'd love not to build the wall, but you need the wall.
And I will tell you this, the ICE officers and the Border Patrol agents, I had them just recently, they say, if you don't have the wall, you know, in certain areas, obviously, that aren't protected by nature, if you don't have the wall, you cannot have security.
You just can't have it.
It doesn't work.
No, I think a clean DACA bill to me is a DACA bill where we take care of the 800,000 people.
They're actually not necessarily young people.
Everyone talks about young, you know, they could be 40 years old, 41 years old, but they're also 16 years old.
But I think to me, a clean bill is a bill of DACA.
We take care of them and we also take care of security.
OK, so the reason that he's reshifting at the end there is for a reason that I will show you in just a moment, because the fact is that President Trump doesn't know what clean bill means, and so now he's recapitulating what clean bill means.
Now clean bill is supposed to mean including security, which is not what clean bill means typically.
There are a lot of mixed messages in this press conference.
Now, does he look like he is in control?
Yes, and that's what he wanted, right?
So this gives lie to the idea that Trump doesn't know what he's doing or that he has no capacity to function in this office.
This is the problem with Democrats setting the bar so low.
When you suggest that somebody legitimately does not have the IQ points to function, In a given job, and then the person seems to be functional, then it is a visual rebuke to all of the lines that have been used by Democrats over the past year, couple of years, about Trump being so crazy that he can't be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.
Here is Trump continuing, but the bigger story, I think, for conservatives is the mixed messages.
So Trump, for example, dropped a full-on Jeb Bush line.
He suggested that he wanted a bill of love.
I remember when Jeb Bush said that trying to legalize illegal immigrants was an act of love, and he was ripped up and down for the privilege, right?
One of the people ripping him was Donald Trump.
How dare you say act of love?
And Jeb sort of retreated into the corner.
Well, Donald Trump did exactly the same thing yesterday.
He talked about how he wanted a bill of love.
Now we're going to have a bill of love.
First of all, I don't think that we should have bills of love.
I think we should have bills of good policy, just as a general rule.
I'll show you what Trump said in just a second.
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Okay, so Trump says that he wants a bill of love.
So here's him explaining what he wants from DACA.
And again, you'll see that the message is moving around a fair bit here.
We have a lot of good people in this room, a lot of people that have a great spirit for taking care of people we represent.
We all represent.
I feel having the Democrats in with us is absolutely vital because this should be a bipartisan bill.
This should be a bill of love.
Truly, it should be a bill of love and we can do that.
Oh, the Bill of Love.
And Jeb Bush somewhere just is crying and crying.
Because if only he had been Donald Trump and said Bill of Love, everything would have been fine.
But he said Act of Love, and Trump ripped him up and down a fort.
So here is where the confusion sets in.
So it looks like Trump has a relatively clear position so far, right?
We're going to get DACA, but we're also going to get border wall funding, and we're also going to get the end of chain migration, and we're also going to get the end of the diversity visa lottery again.
Would I prefer that he not do DACA and get all of those things?
Sure.
If you're going to make a trade, though, that's not a bad trade, right?
That's about as good a trade as you're going to get.
I was advising a couple of Republican senators last night on this, and I was saying push as hard as you can.
The reason I was saying push as hard as you can is because Trump actually is not going to take a leadership role.
The great lie of the last campaign is that Trump was going to take a leadership role when it came to actual policy prescriptions, such as on immigration, that he was going to be the great leader here.
He is not, and he made that pretty clear yesterday.
So here is Trump debating with Democrats, and you will see that Trump legitimately does not actually know what he's talking about when it comes to the terminology on DACA.
He actually has to be corrected by Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Majority Whip, on his position, because for a moment here, he actually signals support for the Democratic position that DACA should be passed without any sort of strings attached.
So here's Dianne Feinstein saying something, and then her being absolutely stunned when Trump agrees with her.
What about a clean DACA bill now, and with a commitment that we go into a comprehensive immigration reform procedure like... Can you pause it for one second?
Okay, before we get to Trump's answer, what she's saying, just to clarify, is that she wants deferred action for childhood rivals.
Obama's executive amnesty made law now, and then afterward, we'll negotiate about diversity visa programs, and we'll negotiate about curbing chain migration.
Here's the problem.
If Trump were to do that, he loses all leverage.
The only leverage he has to get Democrats to vote for this thing is that they want DACA, and if they want DACA, maybe they'll give him some of the things he wants.
If he gives them what they want, you think they're going to stick around for a discussion about comprehensive immigration reform?
Are you kidding?
Of course they're not going to.
Of course they'll sink any possibility of curbing some of the more popular methods of illegal immigration.
So that's what she's saying to him.
She's saying, let's do what I want and then later, later, we'll do what you want.
And she's doing the wimpy from the Archie comics.
Give me a hamburger now and I'll give you the five bucks later.
That's basically what she's saying.
And then she's shocked because Trump doesn't know what she's saying and so he agrees with her.
That's what happens right here.
Kennedy was here.
I think that's basically what Dick is saying.
We're going to come out with DACA.
We're going to do DACA, and then we can start immediately on the phase two, which would be comprehensive.
Would you be agreeable to that?
Yeah, I would like to be.
Go ahead.
I think a lot of people would like to see that.
But I think we have to do DACA first.
Mr. President, when we talk about just DACA, we don't want to be back here two years later.
You have to have security, as the Secretary would tell you.
But I think that's what you say.
Okay, you can see Kevin McCarthy steps in and goes, uh, Mr. President, uh, no.
You're totally wrong about this.
So this is the problem with the idea that Trump is going to lead the way on this because Trump legitimately doesn't know what he's talking about.
And so he has to have Kevin McCarthy.
Kevin McCarthy is no hawk on immigration, by the way.
Kevin McCarthy is from California.
He is not an immigration hawk.
And he has to step in and inform the president this is not how negotiations work.
And then Trump basically starts giving away the store.
So this is the problem with the meeting.
You know, Mr. President, just, just, please, pipe down, let Congress do its work, sign what comes across your desk.
You can hear when Trump starts to negotiate, his opening negotiation position for a guy who's supposed to be this master negotiator, his opening negotiation position is, let me give you everything you want.
That was also his opening negotiation position, if you recall, on the budget, where he told the Democrats, here, have everything you want.
And he stunned Paul Ryan, and he stunned Mitch McConnell, and both of them walked out of Trump's office going, what the hell just happened?
That's what happened yesterday, too, on immigration, briefly.
Now, Trump, I think, is going to back down now and let Congress do its work, but you can see why Republicans are a little bit discomfited with the idea that Captain Immigration Hawk over here is giving away the entire store, right?
Halfway through this meeting, Trump actually says, we don't need a wall.
That's what he campaigned on, guys.
Right?
Build the wall.
Build the wall.
And then he says at the White House, build the fence in parts of the border that aren't covered by water or mountains.
Which doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
Here's the president.
I had a big meeting with ICE last week.
I had a big meeting with the Border Patrol agents last week.
Nobody knows it better than them.
As an example on the wall, they say, sir, we desperately need the wall.
And we don't need a 2,000-mile wall.
We don't need a wall where you have rivers and mountains and everything else protecting.
But we do need a wall for A fairly good portion.
OK, so this is a change from what he said during the campaign because people were saying to him exactly this, and he was saying, no, no, no, no, no.
It's because you're a wimp.
It's because you're a wimp that you don't want to build a wall along the entirety of the border.
And now he's saying what everybody else was saying, which is, you can have a wall in places.
You don't have to have a wall in places.
And then it gets worse.
Then he says, listen, you guys, let's be real about this.
I'll sign anything.
I mean, he really says this.
He actually, this came out of his mouth.
So as I say, the meeting was good for him on an image level, because it made him look as though he actually wants to deal, and he can speak full sentences, and he's capable of carrying on a conversation, and he's capable of listening to McCarthy when McCarthy says, Mr. President, whoa there, hold your horses.
But watch Trump say, listen, you send me something, not gonna veto it, comes across my desk, I'll sign it.
This is an astonishing, again, an astonishing negotiation position.
When this group comes back, hopefully with an agreement, this group and others, from the Senate, from the House, comes back with an agreement, I'm signing it.
I mean, I will be signing it.
I'm not going to say, oh gee, I want this or I want that.
I'll be signing it.
Because I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room that you're going to come up with something really good.
Oh gee, I'm not going to sign this or I'm not going to sign that.
It's called the veto power.
If you're not threatening to use the veto pen, what in the world are you doing in this office?
At a certain point, you are going to have to threaten to use the veto pen.
Now, if all of Trump's most ardent supporters, the people who are the in-Trump-we-trust-Ann Coulter types are looking at this, they're going crazy.
And Ann Coulter was, to her credit, going insane yesterday.
Ann Coulter was losing her mind over this press conference, basically saying that it is a Full-on disaster, right?
She's tweeted out this morning, quote, If Trump was FDR, we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but nothing against fear.
Fear is good too, believe me.
If Trump was JFK, ask not what your country can do for you unless you want to, then ask away.
If Trump was Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall or leave it up.
Your call.
I'm good either way.
This is all from Ann Coulter.
She wrote a book called In Trump We Trust.
Right?
Not God.
In Trump.
Well, apparently that trust has been betrayed, according to Coulter.
She says, if Trump was Paul Revere, the British, who are some of my best friends, they're coming and going and it's all very exciting.
If Trump was Churchill, we shall fight on the beaches.
Or if we have a world-class picnic there.
Depends entirely on the weather.
So, she is just ripping him up and down, suggesting that he has completely failed his own base.
That, you know, she called it the lowest day of his presidency.
She says, as he considers the utility of walls and promises, Trump should consider that never Trump was toothless, but former Trump will bite.
She's going on and on here about Trump's big statement yesterday.
Mickey Cowell said, Democrats and Republicans struck notes of cautious optimism after the meeting, with both sides seeming to agree that the wall and border security are interchangeable terms.
Same sellout strategy.
There are a lot of people who are very, very critical of Trump here from his right, and Trump should notice that necessarily.
Now, in reality, is Trump going to be the one who's defining policy?
He is not going to be the one defining policy.
And Trump basically just throws things out there.
Let's be frank about this.
Every time Trump talks, he's throwing crap against the wall.
That's just his strategy, typically.
He's throwing crap against the wall.
So yesterday, in the middle of the meeting, he just throws out there, what if we brought back earmarks?
So if you recall, a few years ago, Congress banned earmarks.
Earmarks are the process by which you add pork to bills.
The case in favor of earmarks is that you can't get anything done without them because you have to pay off all the members of Congress to vote for your bill.
That's the case in favor of earmarks, is what they call pork barrel rolling, that basically you hand somebody pork and then they vote for your bill.
That was banned because people said, why are we wasting all this money on the Robert Byrd Memorial Highway in West Virginia in order to pass a defense bill?
That makes no sense.
Trump says, why don't we bring back the earmarks?
And you can see members of Congress are like, wait, what did he just say?
The other Republicans are saying, wait, wait, you came here to drain the swamp and now you're talking about earmarks?
Really?
The old earmark system, how there was a great friendliness when you had earmarks.
But of course, they had other problems with earmarks.
But maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks.
Because this system... This system... Well, you should do it.
And I'm there with you.
Because this system really lends itself to not getting along.
OK, so much swamp training.
So much swamp training.
Bring back the earmuffs.
My goodness.
So Trump says a lot of stuff.
But here's the point.
In the end, this is going to be negotiated by Congress.
And in just a second, I'm going to explain to you what exactly Congress is saying about this.
Because Congress has a Congress You know, is obviously Republicans and Democrats have very different visions of this.
One of the things that's been kind of hysterical and funny about all of this is the fact that the media were sort of taken aback by Trump speaking in full sentences like a human.
And so they started saying, well, everyone agrees on this.
They don't.
First of all, I think it is important to point out that Jeff Flake is not wrong.
The senator from Arizona, when he says that he was surprised at Trump's flexibility at the meeting, I think everyone was on the right, on the left, because this is the thing.
Trump doesn't actually have a lot of policy beliefs.
This is one of the dangers in Republicans losing Congress.
For all of the Republicans who say Trump is the party, Trump is the entire party, if Trump loses Congress, if the Democrats take over the House, and if they take over the Senate, I'm going to talk about the Senate in a few minutes here, because Joe Arpaio announced his candidacy This is a guy who's very angry.
which is a beautiful way for Republicans to lose another Senate seat in a red slash purple state like Arizona.
But Jeff Flake, he says, I'm surprised at Trump's flexibility.
The reason that's a problem is because if Democrats take Congress, they will start passing bills.
Do you think that Trump's going to sit there with a veto pen?
This is a guy who's very angry.
Well, I wouldn't say angry, very anxious not to use the veto pen.
He wants to get things done.
He likes having his name on things.
And it doesn't matter if it's a Democrat bill, I think, or a Republican bill.
He's not somebody who's going to go to war with Democrats when they run the Congress.
It's easy for him to go to war with them when they're in the minority.
It's a lot harder when they're passing bills and putting them on his desk.
In any case, here's Jeff Flake saying that he was surprised at Trump's flexibility.
Frankly, I went in with pretty low expectations.
You don't put 22 people around the table and expect to really negotiate, and we're at a point now where we really need to negotiate.
But I was surprised at, you know, when the cameras left, at the President's flexibility on the matter, and that he actually went in and explained what he meant by the wall and border security, and that's helpful.
It really is.
So there are a couple different positions inside the Republican caucus.
The position that's hardline says, we're going to get all the things that Trump originally said he wanted.
The position that's softline says, we'll have border security, but no wall.
We'll add a few ICE agents.
We'll maybe curb the diversity visa lottery, but we're not going to make any big changes.
That's how it's going to get hashed out.
Just so you know, that's how it's going to get hashed out.
It's going to be hashed out.
What can you get to 51 with?
And it may be something weak.
It may be something very weak, because there are a lot of weak Republicans in the Senate.
Martha McSally, who's currently running for—she announced yesterday, she's a House member, that she's going to be running for the Senate seat in Arizona to fill Jeff Flake's seat, actually.
She says, listen, we're not going to give them DACA in return for nothing.
We're going to have to get something out of this.
We've been working on this tirelessly for the last four months together, and we expect to be dropping it as early as tomorrow.
And we believe, again, if you look at on the one side, you see the Democrats are asking for the DREAM Act or nothing.
That's a non-starter.
I think most Republicans are willing to have a conversation about DACA recipients, but we've got to make sure that we secure our border and that we don't end up in a situation where we have 800,000 more DACA recipients in one, two, five years from now.
So these are very reasonable requests that are going to be in our bill that are addressing public safety issues like sanctuary cities, strong border security, also the chain migration visa lottery, and some tweaks to asylum reform, unaccompanied minor reform.
Those types of things are going to be in our bill, and this is again us showing that we're willing to be reasonable and address this issue, but we've got to address the root causes as to why we have this issue in the first place.
Okay, this is why we need people like McSally actually there.
This is why it's important that Republicans not lose seats.
And this is why this story about Arpaio running for Senate in Arizona.
McSally could be your senator.
She has voted 100% of the time with Trump.
Not 95%, not 99%, 100% of the time she's voted with Trump.
Now, I want to make something clear.
Yesterday, I was wrong, and I want to apologize to Kelly Ward.
I had suggested that she believed in chemtrails or some such nonsense.
That was a rumor that was put out by the McConnell camp.
It is not true.
She was asked about it at some town hall, and she sort of gave credence to the question mildly.
But that's not the case.
Kelly Ward has some other problems with her candidacy.
That is not one of them.
But Arpaio jumping into the race in Arizona makes it likely that Republicans lose this seat.
Right now, Arpaio jumped in and the polls are now showing that Arpaio is running neck and neck with McSally and Ward.
So before, Ward was defeating McSally by some huge number.
She was up on McSally by 20% or something.
Now, it's McSally at 31%, Arpaio at 29%, Ward at 25%.
McSally's not a moderate.
Kay McSally has pushed a lot of legislation with Democratic co-sponsors, but none of it has been particularly left, for example.
She's very pro-life.
Again, she's voted 96% of the time with the Republican Party and 100% of the time with President Trump.
Her drawback in the primaries is that she was not an ardent supporter of Trump in the 2016 election.
She's a retired Air Force colonel who recently joined the House in 2015.
She's hawkish on foreign policy.
Arpaio, by contrast, is just toxic.
He's 85 years old.
He was pardoned by President Trump.
He was about to go to prison for ignoring a court order to stop racially profiling.
Even if you think that sentence was unjust, there are a lot of other problems with Arpaio's candidacy.
His office, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, failed to investigate hundreds of sex crimes, including child molestations.
They had journalists arrested, and then they had to pay out millions of dollars.
in reparations to those journalists.
He tried to charge political opponents, apparently.
His department at one point burned down a house in search for illegal weapons that weren't found, and killed a dog in the process, and then apparently charged the owner of the home with traffic violations to try and justify it in backwards fashion.
They wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in various ways.
There's a reason that Arpaio, during the last election cycle in 2016, actually lost his sheriff's race by something like 10 points in the same election where Trump won the state.
By three.
And also, Arpaio happens to be a birther.
There are a lot of drawbacks to Joe Arpaio.
He's currently running neck and neck with Kelly Ward and Martha McSally.
The big problem here, the biggest problem here, is that when you look at Ward, Ward, who has suggested that John McCain was, quote unquote, directly responsible for the rise of ISIS, and suggested that after McCain was diagnosed with cancer, he should have stepped down in her favor.
She does support Trump.
She was very supportive of Trump.
She was a Steve Bannon project until his career imploded, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.
She ran against McCain in a primary in 2016.
She lost by 11.
The biggest problem for her, Kelly Ward, is that last month a poll showed her losing to Kyrsten Sinema, who is the Democrat in the state of Arizona, by 7 points.
So Republicans could lose another Senate seat.
They lose one more Senate seat, and it's a 50-50 Senate, okay?
And Mike Pence becomes the tiebreaker, and it's unlikely that Republicans don't lose at least one more Senate seat in the upcoming election, given the numbers right now.
So figuring all of this, you'd figure that McSally would be running away, but it's McSally 31, Arpaio 29, Ward 25.
So basically, it's a three-way dead heat.
Did Republicans learn nothing from Roy Moore?
Did they learn nothing from the Roy Moore debacle?
This is one of my big problems with how people perceive politics right now, and particularly with Arpaio.
Less about Ward, who's actually a state legislator, but certainly with Arpaio, is that when you substitute attitude for any level of political acumen or knowledge, when you substitute attitude for policy, you're going to end up with some of the worst people for the office.
There's this weird feeling that's now cropped up in the Republican Party, and it was true for Trump.
Maybe it'll work out for Trump.
Maybe it works out sometimes.
It did not work out for Roy Moore.
It certainly is not going to work out for Joe Arpaio.
And that is that populist style is more important than your ability to get the job done.
If by populist style we mean that you're non-elite, you wouldn't want a non-elite plumber.
You wouldn't want a non-elite basketball player on your team.
I don't know why you would want a non-elite politician just because it makes you feel like he's one of us.
A he's one of us is less of an important descriptor than it is an actual counterproductive message to put forward about your legislator.
So be a big mistake, I think, for Arpaio, especially because Democrats are going to be intransigent.
Let's get to the Democrats here.
So Democrats are saying openly that they are not basically going to negotiate here, that all of this yesterday was a fraud.
Here is Chuck Schumer.
He says, listen, we don't need a border wall.
We're not going to do a border wall.
It's not happening.
To take away the things that are needed to protect the border for a symbolic and ineffective political gesture, There's nothing to this but politics.
President Trump is fighting for an empty symbol rather than smart policy that will actually produce better security at our borders.
Okay, so there's Schumer saying there won't be any negotiation.
Mark Warner is saying that the Democrat from West Virginia, he says that the DREAMers are integral to our country and that we therefore cannot even consider anything except for a clean DACA bill.
Andrea, for a long time we've said as part of major immigration reform or even part of giving this immediate relief to these dreamers, 97% of them by the way, who are either working in school or serving in the military, they're integral to our country, but that we would be open to some level of enhanced border security.
OK, but they're really not open to any level of enhanced border security.
They're going to hold Trump's feet to the fire and force him to back down.
In March, Pat Buchanan said this yesterday.
I think that is basically correct.
OK, well, I do want to talk about Steve Bannon being out of Breitbart, what that means, in just a second.
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So I do think that there is a little bit of a danger here with regard to people getting too excited about that meeting yesterday with Trump.
Not just because he botched the policy, but also because if you're hoping that the media are going to lay off of him because he had a bipartisan meeting, you got another thing coming.
What they're going to do is they're going to praise him for his bipartisanship up till the point where he goes back to the original policy he was espousing, at which point they're going to rip him up.
And you'll see this in this sort of In this sort of jab and jab and punch pairing from CNN.
So here's Dana Bash on CNN praising Trump's meeting yesterday at the White House saying this is what we'd all hope that Trump's presidency could be.
I'm sure I'm going to get hit for this and I don't really care.
I think that the bottom line is that this is a year ago.
This is the presidency that many people thought Donald Trump was capable of.
We don't know if this is going to be a results driven debate but just the notion of him being In command of him wanting the cameras in there and wanting the cameras to see him sitting at a table with Democrats and Republicans playing the role of a dealmaker, whether it sees fruition or not.
This is what people who had high hopes for the Trump presidency thought it would be.
Meeting after meeting like this.
OK, so you can see CNN's praising him.
Look at that.
He's just going to be meeting with Democrats.
It's going to be great.
Then Jim Acosta, the new chief CNN White House correspondent, whose only job is to yell at Sarah Huckabee Sanders for a living.
He goes in and he yells at Sarah Huckabee Sanders for a living, forcing her to say, listen, I'm not going to negotiate with you, Jim.
I mean, the media, in other words, are going to be pro-Trump so long as they think he's making concessions to Democrats.
The minute that he doesn't, it's over.
Democrats are saying that they may not be in favor of this kind of deal.
If Democrats are in favor of protecting American citizens, then I think we've hit a sad day in American history.
But I don't believe that to be the case, because as we heard many of them say, as they sat around that table, when several of you were in the room, they are committed to border security.
They do want it.
And most of them have voted for it previously before this legislation hit the floor.
So anything different is just law.
They say thanks, but no thanks for a wall.
Jim, I'm not negotiating with you.
I'm going to let Congress take care of that, Andrew.
You can see the media are already pushing Trump on this.
So for all the talk about how Trump won a big PR victory yesterday, it is a PR victory.
It stanches the bleeding on the he's crazy talk.
But when it comes down to the policy discussion, don't worry, the media will always be out to get President Trump.
Just as the courts are, there's a court ruling.
This one is coming from a U.S.
district judge in San Francisco barring the Trump administration from ending DACA.
Okay, that's absurd.
That's absurd.
It's an executive order.
Of course Trump can reverse an executive order.
It is obviously legal for Trump to do that, but the district judge, his name is William Alsup, was appointed by Bill Clinton, and of course he says that it is unconstitutional for the Trump administration to rescind DACA.
He said, "The agency shall post reasonable public notice.
It will resume receiving DACA renewal applications and prescribe a process consistent with this order." There are a bunch of other courts that have already ruled in favor of Trump on this.
He says that ALSEP's justification is that this is arbitrary and capricious.
He says that the federal government can't just renege on all of this, but it's just silly.
The judicial system is now a tool of the left in cases like this, and it is obvious that if a single federal judge can halt an entire federal program based on that That judge being terrible at his job, then we do have a constitutional separation of powers question that must be rectified.
I've always suggested that judicial review is not a power that should be given to federal district court judges at the very least.
I mean, it's absurd that the president of the United States enacts a fully constitutional policy and some judge appointed by Bill Clinton says, now you know what?
We're going to go no on that.
That's sheer nonsense.
OK, in other news, Steve Bannon is out at Breitbart News.
That is a very good thing.
If I have not been clear in my feelings about Steve Bannon, then I would suggest it has more to do with your lack of hearing ability than my lack of clarity.
Because I have been extraordinarily clear that I think Steve Bannon is a snake in the grass, that he is a leech on the ass of power, that Steve Bannon is a barnacle on the wail of others, that he has never built a thing in his life, that he has merely stood on the foundations built by others to glorify himself.
Bannon was finally fired yesterday.
Rebecca Mercer apparently was the one responsible for capping Bannon and putting him out of work.
He will now be occupying a cubicle at your local Salvation Army where he can get those clothes that he wears for free.
And he can hang out with those who dress like he does.
In any case, Bannon being out, I love this story, that he is now going to be getting foreign funding to lobby for trade with China.
Or lobby on trade with China, which should just be really entertaining.
I'll be entertained to see where Bannon goes next.
It is a good moment for Andrew Breitbart.
This was not Breitbart.com, it was Bannon.com.
The great tragedy in all of this is that Andrew Breitbart's memory was smeared by Steve Bannon turning this site into something it was not.
I wanted to play a clip of Andrew Breitbart.
I've never done this before because I really hesitate to speak for dead friends.
I was close friends with Andrew Breitbart.
Andrew was one of the kindest and one of the most garrulous people that I knew.
There were a lot of people who met Andrew and felt like they knew him really well, and that's because they did.
The thing about Andrew that was so unique as a human being...
Is that I knew Andrew from the time I was 26 until he died in 2012.
So until I was 28 years old.
So I knew him for 11 years.
Really, my entire adult life I knew Andrew.
And I was friends with Andrew.
He died in 2012, so until I was 28 years old.
So I knew him for 11 years.
Really, my entire adult life, I knew Andrew, and I was friends with Andrew.
And there are people who had met Andrew once who felt 90% as close to him as I did, and that's because Andrew was utterly transparent about who he was.
He was just as outspoken and friendly and fun with people he had just met as people that he was friends with for years and years.
I want to show you this clip of Andrew from the Nixon Library, this is in 2011, about a year before he died, talking about what he saw as the role for Breitbart News.
Like, what exactly he thought Breitbart News was going to become.
And the thing is, we're starting to learn to divorce ourselves from the Democrat media complex.
We still turn it on and every now and then think that they're telling us the truth as opposed to trying to manipulate us.
And so we're going to have to start asking those questions and asking the hard questions.
And I've seen a candidate who was preordained as electable go through three debates And now he's sinking because he couldn't do what everybody assumed that he could do.
Stop looking to the media to determine what electable is.
OK, so there's Andrew.
And what he's really talking about there with the Democrat media complex was this idea that Democrats in the media were combining to create narratives that they were foisting on the American people.
And what he saw Breitbart as was a way of debunking those narratives.
Instead, Bannon turned it into a personal political weapon against his enemies.
So he would use it against enemies of Trump when he felt that was in his interest.
He'd use it against Jared Nevonko when he thought that was in his interest.
He'd use it against H.R.
McMaster.
Or he would use it against Ted Cruz.
Or he would use it against anybody who he saw as impeding his interests.
And then eventually he ended up using it basically against Trump himself.
Eventually, he ended up speaking to the media out of line, out of turn, and going after the president's children, and then using Breitbart as sort of a funnel for his viewpoint.
It's about time that he was ousted.
It's a shame and a tragedy that he was ever put in place.
I thought that was a terrible idea to begin with, and the fact that Bannon lasted there for so long is a blot.
I only hope that Breitbart News can go back to its original vision as a culture-centric, media narrative fighting site.
It'll be hard for them, I think, to go fully back to that because the place has become so ubiquitously known as sort of a Trump fan site that it's going to be difficult for them to back out of that and go back to being a culture site.
But I think they need to make that transition.
I think that's something that Andrew would have wanted.
Andrew never in a million years would have hitched his wagon to one candidate and made that candidate his site.
It just wouldn't have happened.
He certainly wouldn't have turned his site into a campaign organ.
I said this back in March 2016.
Go back and listen to my podcast.
I talked about what Andrew would have done.
In the middle of that campaign, I think Andrew probably would have supported Trump in the end.
I think Andrew and I probably would have disagreed on that.
But I think that Andrew never would have stood for his site becoming a propaganda outlet or a bullhorn for his own political aspirations or for any particular candidate and sacrificed whatever journalistic integrity remained in order to do that.
I think that would have been completely out of bounds.
I'm glad that Bannon is gone.
I think it's good for the Trump administration.
I think it's good for the country.
I think that we can now have a real debate over which candidates are good and which candidates are bad outside of the personal Darth Vader posturing of a guy who legitimately never built a movement in his life.
He just stood on top of the corpses of other people's political careers, championing himself as their legacy.
So good riddance to bad rubbish when it comes to Steve Bannon.
Okay, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then we'll do a brief Bible talk.
So, things I like.
This one is recommended by our own Mathis Glover.
This is the movie Moon with Sam Rockwell.
I watched it the other night with my wife.
It's really well done.
I mean, I think it was done on like a $5 million budget, and it looks really good.
I mean, it's a very good-looking film.
The basic Premise is that Sam Rockwell is working for a corporation and his job is to mine on the moon.
And then it seems like he's starting to go crazy.
And I can't really tell you more than that without giving away some of the plot of the film.
But it's a very good looking film.
The music is interesting.
I will say, I think it's a little bit overlong.
I think the runtime on Moon is something like an hour 40.
So I think that it's an hour 37.
This really should have been more like a Black Mirror episode, is the truth.
It should have been more like a Twilight Zone episode.
If you had done this movie in an hour 15, then it would have just been fantastic.
It's still a good movie, it's just not a fantastic movie because it's at least 25 minutes too long.
But Sam Rockwell gives a tremendous performance.
I mean, he's really good in it.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
Sam Bell reporting to Central.
Everything running smoothly?
Over and out.
Rock and roll.
God bless America.
Good morning, Sam.
Do you want me to cut your hair?
Lunar Industries remains the number one provider of clean energy worldwide due to the hard work of people like you.
Everything has to be normal.
Three years is a long haul, you know?
I know you're really lonely up there, but I'm proud of you.
Two weeks to go, Sam.
Two weeks to go, buddy.
I'm going home.
Looks like we got a live one.
I'm gonna go out.
Okay, Sam.
I'm going to stop it there because in the next five seconds of the trailer is a bit of a spoiler.
So it is a movie that is worth the watch.
It's a good, creepy film.
OK, other things that I like.
So Trump did comment yesterday on Oprah Winfrey's possible candidacy.
This is the thing that I think everybody likes about Trump is that the guy certainly has no problem speaking out clearly on what he thinks of himself and his qualities.
Here he is going after Oprah Winfrey yesterday.
Yeah, I'll beat Oprah.
Oprah would be a lot of fun.
I know her very well.
You know, I did one of her last shows.
She had Donald Trump.
This was before politics.
Her last week.
And she had Donald Trump and my family.
It was very nice.
No, I like Oprah.
I don't think she's gonna run.
I don't think she's gonna run.
I love the gleam in his eye when he says this.
If there's ever a person who has never lacked for ego, Donald Trump is that person.
So, you gotta love that a little bit.
bit.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So Chelsea Manning should be in jail.
Okay, Chelsea Chelsea Manning is of course the transgender woman who was a traitor to the United States and Barack Obama freed Chelsea Manning because Chelsea Manning was transgender.
If Chelsea Manning had just been any normal traitor, Chelsea Manning would still be in prison.
But Chelsea Manning on Law Enforcement Appreciation Day tweeted out, Disarm the police.
Hashtag we got this.
Hashtag law enforcement appreciation day.
And a lot of emojis because Chelsea Manning is legitimately a person with mental illness.
And Chelsea Manning, again, the fact that this person was freed by the President of the United States to leave prison and then slander law enforcement officers who defend the country as opposed to Chelsea Manning who undermine the country is really despicable.
Okay, other things that I hate.
Shannon Sharp, there's this tendency among folks on the left.
to deliberately misread the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence because they are historicists.
They will do a routine where they suggest that the words in a particular document are bound by the actions of the men who wrote them.
So in other words, when it says all men are created equal, the people who wrote that didn't believe that black people were equal, therefore all men are created equal doesn't mean anything.
Well, no, it does mean something.
It means all men are created equal.
And many of the founders knew that that applied to slaves also, including people like Thomas Jefferson, by the way, who essentially said as much at the time, even though he didn't act properly in that way.
But here is Shannon Sharp from ESPN suggesting that the Constitution was written for white men and all this nonsense.
Rob, you mentioned this.
This very country was found on protest.
There was something going on in Britain, Skip.
Taxation without representation, freedom of religion, and all that other stuff.
Instead of saying they were out, they're called founding fathers.
That's what they're called.
They're not radicals.
Dr. King, he was a radical.
Malcolm X. He was a radical.
Right.
Colin Kaepernick, he was a radical.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Because I think there should be justice for everyone.
You shouldn't be treated better than me because of the color of your skin.
You shouldn't get privileges.
All I want is fair and equal.
The Constitution said it was going to be fair and equal.
Now, I know when you wrote that, you weren't writing it for me, but you said what the Constitution says.
It doesn't say white men.
It says all men.
Well, they put that in there, but there was no blacks at the table.
There were no women at the table.
So in actuality, they meant all men, all white men.
OK, so the idea that they wrote the Constitution only for white men is obviously untrue.
We actually cut a video on this that I think we're going to be releasing in the near future about why this is completely untrue if we haven't released it already, that the Constitution was written for white men.
It's just nonsense.
The idea that it was written for white men ignores All of the Enlightenment philosophy that the Constitution was predicated upon, and the universal principles that the Constitution espouses, just because you are unable to meet your own standards does not mean that the standards don't exist.
The Constitution was not just written for white people, and there are great black leaders like Martin Luther King, like Frederick Douglass, like Booker T. Washington, who would have agreed with me, not with Shannon Sharp.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
Final thing that I hate here, I just have to comment on this.
There's this pastor, and he announced at one of his services, I guess his name is Andy Savage, he announced that he had engaged in sexual incidents with a 17-year-old in 1998 when he was a college student working with a Texas church.
He admitted this to his congregation and said that he had apologized, and then the crowd gave him a standing ovation.
Here's what it looked like.
I'm sorry to Jules, to her family, to my family, to my church family, both then and now, and most of all to the Lord.
My repentance over this sin 20 years ago was done believing that God's forgiveness is greater than any sin.
And I still believe that.
Since then, I have tried to live my life in keeping with that original act of repentance.
For any painful memories or fresh wounds this has created for anyone, I am sorry.
And I humbly ask for your forgiveness.
I love you all very much.
There's a 20-second ovation for that.
Okay, that is completely inappropriate.
You should not be given an ovation for making a public confession.
The purpose of doing repentance is not for other people to forgive you unless you received forgiveness from the person themselves.
And apparently, this guy did not get forgiveness from the girl.
Apparently, Ms.
Woodson said, quote, it's disgusting.
She told the New York Times.
She said that Savage forced her to perform certain acts upon him.
And he said that he thought that the matter had been dealt with.
Woodson said that that was not true.
She had not brought it to law enforcement.
In any case, there is this tendency that we have where we'll say, well, you know, we'll forgive somebody, right?
We'll forgive somebody.
You see this with politicians all the time.
Democrats say, well, I forgive Al Franken.
And you'll see people say, well, I forgive Donald Trump, if they're on the right side.
Or I forgive Roy Moore.
Or if they committed an act of repentance, then we say, well, we forgive them.
It is not up to you to forgive a sin committed by somebody against someone who is not you.
That's not your job.
That's between that person and God and the other person.
In Jewish philosophy, right before Yom Kippur, you're supposed to go around asking everybody for forgiveness.
But the idea is that God is not really going to forgive you unless you actually ask the person that you have wronged for forgiveness.
And you have to ask them for forgiveness at least three times before God has any say in the matter.
Just from a religious perspective, the idea of giving somebody a standing ovation for confessing a sin in front of an entire congregation, a sin against another human being, I find that disreputable.
I find it disreputable, and I don't think religious people should be cheering anybody who committed a sin against another human being and then confessed it in front of a third party.
You're the third party.
You do not have the capacity to do this, okay?
It's one of my pet peeves, actually, that there are people who will say things like, Why don't the Jews just forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust, right?
If they were just a little more forgiving.
It's not your job to forgive, okay?
It's not your job to forgive.
You can say that you think it's good that this guy repented.
I think it's good that he repented, too.
But it's not my job to say that he's off the hook, because he certainly isn't.
And giving him a standing ovation is, I think, really kind of a negative, nasty thing for a religious community to be seen as doing.
So I actually can't believe it.
I forgot to get to the Obama Presidential Library because the design is incredible.
So we'll lead off with that tomorrow, I promise, unless there's some other piece of huge breaking news.
But we will get to it.
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.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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