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Jan. 31, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:31
Trump Drives Democrats Up A Wall | Ep. 465
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So last night, the President of the United States gave his very first official State of the Union address.
And it was, shall we say, huge.
We'll go through all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, we had a lot of fun last night here at The Daily Wire.
We did a full-on State of the Union watch party, and Trump gave a pretty good speech, and we all had a lot of fun.
Well, I had less fun than the others because they were all smoking cigars.
I'm not a cigar-smoking smoker, and so I got to inhale their secondhand smoke all evening long.
Yet, nonetheless, a good time was had by all.
You can go and view that entire thing over at Facebook.
I believe we did it at YouTube as well.
You can check that out, or you can download it, because I think that it's available on our podcast stream as well.
So we'll get to everything Trump-related.
We'll get to the State of the Union, what happened, the blowback, the responses from Joe Kennedy III, you know, that great scion of the Kennedy family, as well as Bernie Sanders' response, the media losing their mind.
We'll go over all of it.
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Okay, so last night, President Trump gives his big first official State of the Union address.
And when I say big, I mean it was huge.
And when I say it was huge, I mean it was long.
Like, super long.
Like, it just ended five minutes before the show.
It was really, really long.
It was an hour and 20 minutes or so.
It was the third longest State of the Union address ever recorded.
In terms of number of words, it wasn't quite that long, but Trump's cadence is relatively slow.
It was also quite successful.
So the poll numbers show, according to CBS News poll, 75% of Americans thought that this speech was good.
75% of Americans thought this speech was unifying.
Fully 43% of Democrats thought the speech was good.
According to the CBS News poll, 91% favored what they heard on infrastructure.
81% said that the president was uniting the country.
75% approved of the speech.
75% favored what they heard on national security.
And 72% favored what they heard on immigration.
That, by any measure, is a massive success for the president of the United States.
So we're going to go through this, because there are really two aspects to the—three aspects, I think, to the Trump speech that are noteworthy.
The good, one is the bad, and one is the ugly.
The good is a lot of what Trump did here.
He did some great storytelling.
Whoever wrote the speech did a great job of getting sympathetic victims in the stands.
Everybody does the Ronald Reagan shtick, where you get a bunch of people who sit up there in their rafters, and then you say, and there's Bob.
Bob's a great American.
Hand for Bob!
And everybody claps.
Well, that's been misused for years and years.
Trump did it right last night.
We'll talk about all the things Trump did right.
We'll also talk about the Democrats' response, because the Democrats apparently had superglue attached to their asses.
They literally did not get up for the entire speech.
I mean, even on things where they agree, even on things like black unemployment is down and everybody's cheering, and then you look over and the Congressional Black Caucus is sitting.
It's like, what are you, against black people working?
What's your problem?
There were times during the speech where Trump was saying things like, we all stand for the American flag.
And you look over, all the Democrats are sitting.
And Nancy Pelosi is chewing on her dentures.
And you're thinking, is this really your strategy?
So we'll talk about the Democratic strategy here, because it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
They basically define themselves as the anti-Trump party, as opposed to even the progressive party at this point.
Even things they agree with, they will boycott if Trump is involved with them.
So that was the ugly.
And then there was the bad.
Trump didn't say word one.
It really was stuff Trump didn't say.
So Trump did not talk at all about fiscal responsibility in the speech.
Because Trump is not a fiscally responsible guy.
Trump doesn't care about deficits.
He doesn't care about debts.
He's more like George W. Bush than he is like Ronald Reagan on that score.
He's certainly more like either of those than he is like Calvin Coolidge.
He's not somebody who deeply cares about entitlements running out of control.
He said this during the campaign, so he's been pretty obvious about the idea he doesn't mean to tamp down spending.
He said in the speech that Obamacare is basically dead, which it isn't.
He suggested in the speech that he wanted to blow out the spending on infrastructure to the tune of $1.5 trillion, which is not a conservative policy.
He said he wanted paid parental and family leave.
That is not a conservative policy, either.
He didn't say one word about reducing the federal deficit or the federal debt.
That's because that's tough political stuff, and Trump doesn't want to touch all that stuff.
So that's the bad stuff.
But we'll go through it a little bit more in detail.
So, last night Trump walks out, and pretty much everybody stands and claps.
There are some Democrats, particularly members of the CBC, who will stand and clap for Louis Farrakhan, but they won't stand and clap for the elected president of the United States.
Trump walks out and he takes the stage.
And the first thing he does is he lays out the fact that he's had a very good economic first year.
Here's what he had to say.
Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone.
After years and years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.
Unemployment claims have hit a 45-year low.
African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.
Now look at the Democrats.
And there they are, right?
Every Democrat is sitting.
Black people working?
No!
Trump's evil!
And then Trump continues, and he's talking about the economy a little bit more.
One of the things that I think was really fascinating about what he said here is he actually makes a case that was not made during the tax cut debate.
This is why the polls were bad on the tax cuts.
If you look at the actual poll numbers on the tax cuts, the poll numbers suggested that most Americans thought they were losing money on the tax cuts, which of course was not true.
Nearly everybody gets money back thanks to the tax cuts.
That's because the Republicans had failed to actually talk about what the tax bill would do for the average American family.
They're talking in broad terms about what tax cuts do generally.
Trump did a good job, I think, of summing that up last night.
Typical family of four making $75,000 will see their tax bill reduced by $2,000, slashing their tax bill in half.
In April, this will be the last time you will ever file under the old and very broken system, and millions of Americans will have more take-home pay starting next month.
We eliminated an especially cruel tax That fell mostly on Americans, making less than $50,000 a year, forcing them to pay tremendous penalties simply because they couldn't afford government-ordered health plans.
We repealed the core of the disastrous Obamacare.
The individual mandate is now gone.
Right, so this is all good stuff that the American people have to hear because the media have been making— A corrupt and untrue case that tax cuts hurt the American economy and that repeal of Obamacare's individual mandate is going to kill millions of Americans and all the rest of all of this.
And Trump, I think, forcefully spoke back against this.
Now the bad side of this is when Trump says the core of the disastrous Obamacare is gone.
What that suggests is he's not going to do anything else on Obamacare, that basically he thinks his work is done here.
That, of course, is untrue.
But this is good stuff from the president.
And then the president says something that I think a lot of Republicans have not been saying, which is, when you lower the corporate tax rate, you are going to make more money.
And the proof is in the pudding.
When we lower the corporate tax rate, jobs come back to the United States.
And not only do jobs come back, you're probably going to get a raise.
So here's what Trump had to say about that.
We slashed the business tax rate from 35% all the way down to 21% so American companies can compete and win against anyone else anywhere in the world.
These changes alone are estimated to increase average family income by more than $4,000.
That last statistic is the one that Republicans really should have been focusing on during the entire tax debate, is why is it that when you lower corporate tax rates, people's income goes up?
Instead, they focused on the individual tax rates dropping.
They should have been focusing on the really major change to the law, which was that major reduction in corporate tax rates.
And it was a major reduction in corporate tax rates.
So Trump starts off, and this is a full 20 minutes on the economy, which is exactly what he should do.
Because if Trump is going to win re-election, if Republicans are not going to get shellacked in 2018, there has to be a feeling that the economy is on the move, and it's on the move because Republicans have done the right things.
And the truth is, it is on the move because of that.
The economy was already improving under President Obama, obviously.
The stock market was up under President Obama.
Job growth in 2016 was better than job growth in 2017 by a couple hundred thousand jobs.
But the reason that wages are rising, the reason why businesses are hiring, the reason people feel a sense of optimism is because there's a sense of trust that the Republicans and Trump are not going to clock businesses in the back of the head.
There's always the feeling with Democrats and with Obama that, from some angle, He was going to find a way to hit businesses because he didn't like businesses.
You don't get that feeling with Trump, and that came out last night.
OK, so I want to talk in a minute about some of the more dramatic moments of the Trump speech, because there were some really—there were some moments of tremendous drama in the Trump speech.
We'll continue going through the State of the Union in just a second.
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Okay, so back to President Trump's State of the Union address, which went over like gangbusters.
So one of the things that Trump does, and he's always talked about doing this, and he actually did it well last night, is he always said that America needs a cheerleader.
When people said, what does the president need to do?
OK, so back to President Trump's State of the Union address, which went over like gangbusters.
So one of the things that Trump does, and he's always talked about doing this, and he actually did it well last night, is he always said that America needs a cheerleader.
When people said, "What does the president need to do?" He'd say, "America needs a cheerleader." Now, listen, the president has to do more than that, obviously.
But one of the things that I think Trump does have the capacity to unify on is he does have a gut-level sense of nationalistic patriotism.
The guy does like the flag.
He does like the military.
He does like the country.
He doesn't feel bad about America.
You always got the sense from President Obama that he was more concerned with the flaws in America's thought patterns and in the American people than in the glories of them.
Trump didn't spend any time lecturing Americans about the better angels of their nature, about this is not who we are, this kind of stuff.
Instead, President Trump talked about the wonderful things about—it was a much more optimistic speech than Obama's.
This is one of the great things about how the media has covered this.
The media said it was a dark speech.
This speech was significantly more optimistic about the state of the United States than anything Obama ever said.
Obama would always say the state of our union is strong, and then he would proceed to list off all of the racial problems that we had in the United States, and discrimination against women, and how America was still a backwards, racist, bigoted, homophobic country, and how we all had to fix that.
Trump last night got up there, he said, listen, America's pretty awesome.
It's pretty awesome.
And now's the time for you to make something of yourself.
This is clip four, so Trump really cheerleading America, and of course, Democrats sitting.
This, in fact, is our new American moment.
There has never been a better time to start living the American dream.
So, to every citizen watching at home tonight, no matter where you've been or where you've come from, this is your time.
If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything.
You can be anything.
And together, we can achieve absolutely anything.
OK, and everybody cheers except for the Democrats, right?
The Democrats won't cheer for you can achieve anything in America because they hate Trump so much.
And it went even further than that.
So Trump calls on this young kid, Preston, who's sitting in the family box for Trump's speech.
And this kid apparently has helped plant, helped put down something like 40,000 American flags on the graves of fallen service members.
And Trump says this, and watch as the Democrats sit.
Young patriots like Preston teach all of us about our civic duty as Americans.
Preston's reverence for those who have served our nation reminds us of why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance, and why we proudly stand for the national anthem.
Okay, and he looks over kind of concertedly at the Democrats as they sit there.
The Democrats have painted themselves into a box.
This is the problem with being both intersectional and anti-Trump.
So, the Democrats have a couple of problems.
Problem number one is that they've decided to define their entire—the personality of their party.
They've decided to define that as, we hate Trump.
That's not enough.
You can dislike Trump.
That's all well and good.
But that's only going to matter every four years.
The real question is, do people have a good sense of your party?
Do they feel like yours is a party that cares about the United States?
And when you see Democrats sitting, when you see Democrats sitting for, we proudly stand for the National Anthem, because they've boxed themselves into this idea that it's bad to say that we should stand for the National Anthem, most Americans don't buy that.
Most Americans don't like that.
Most Americans think that that's stupid.
The fact is that the Democrats are doing this now because they've engaged in this intersectional politics of hate, in which they suggest that if you're a member of a minority group in the United States, then you rightly are sitting for the National Anthem or kneeling for the National Anthem.
Democrats could have taken a middle position.
The middle position would have been, we like to stand for the National Anthem.
We think it's dumb not to stand for the National Anthem, but of course you have the right to disagree and not stand for the National Anthem.
That's what they should have said about Colin Kaepernick.
Instead, people, including Barack Obama, Most Americans don't think America is cruel and terrible.
Most Americans think America is pretty damn great.
You know why?
Because America is pretty damn great.
America is pretty spectacular.
I have a piece out at National Review today talking about all of the wonderful things that we benefit from here in the United States that even our grandparents didn't have.
Like, things that you never think about.
Your cell phone, that didn't exist 10 years ago, the form of cell phone that you have.
The fact that you're listening to a podcast.
Podcasting didn't exist 10 to 15 years ago.
The fact that you may be watching this on a computer, using streaming.
Streaming that didn't exist 15 or 20 years ago.
That's because America is in a magnificent place.
The Western civilization is a magnificent place.
And that's true for people of all colors, and all sexual orientations, and all backgrounds.
But Democrats don't believe that, because that undermines their case against Western civilization.
Trump took full advantage of that.
He knew they weren't going to stand for the national anthem.
It makes them look bad, as well it should.
OK, so that's one of the good things that I think Trump did last night, was tweaking the Democrats on some of their intersectional extremism, and watching Cory Booker sit there and make nasty faces.
Nancy Pelosi chewing her cud while he talks about the glories of the national anthem, Trump.
Pretty amazing and telling visuals.
So, then we get into one of Trump's boo-boos of the night.
I think that Trump's big boo-boo of the night was he was attempting to do his populist shtick by talking about how he was going to spend tons of money on infrastructure.
Again, the more telling point is not that Trump talked about infrastructure.
We've had infrastructure week, at last calculation, seven times, I guess, during this administration.
where we've had infrastructure week and then Trump tweets something and it turns into LeVar Ball week.
But he's been talking continuously for well over a year about how he wants to spend a ton of money on infrastructure.
He says this.
So what do Democrats do?
They said.
Tonight, I'm calling on Congress to produce a bill that generates at least one point five trillion dollars for the new infrastructure investment that our country so desperately needs.
OK, so the Democrats don't even stand for that.
So now he's talking about Democratic priorities, and they won't stand.
Again, Trump is drawing a contrast, and the contrast is really telling.
The most effective portion of the speech, the portion where Democrats do not understand this, they refuse to understand this, they are angry that they are being forced to reckon with it, is that most Americans are not in favor of illegal immigration.
We may think that a lot of illegal immigrants came here for the right reasons.
We may have sympathy for illegal immigrants.
But most of us want to know who's coming into the country.
And every person who is killed by an illegal immigrant is a person who should not have been killed in the United States because it is the job of the federal government to prevent people from entering here illegally.
There are a lot of people, I'm sure, who enter gated communities not to do harm, but because they wander in or because they just want to go for a walk.
But the reality is, if you live in a gated community, and your security doesn't do its job, and someone gets killed in your gated community, you're going to blame the people in charge of the gated community.
America is still a gated community, as it has to be, because we have a welfare system.
And because we have to protect the integrity of our voting process, too.
Well, last night, President Trump did something, and he got booed by the Democrats for doing it.
He pointed out that there are, in fact, people who have been victimized by illegal immigrants in the United States.
And the Democrats were saying, well, this is because he's a racist.
In the same speech, he made a proposal to Democrats that we should let in 1.8 million illegal immigrants, allow them to become citizens.
Democrats sat for that.
Here is Donald Trump making a particular point, which is that there are victims of criminals who come into the United States illegally.
Here tonight are two fathers and two mothers, Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado, and Robert Mickens.
Their two teenage daughters, Kayla Cuevas, And Nisa Mickens were close friends on Long Island.
But in September 2016, on the eve of Nisa's 16th birthday — such a happy time it should have been — neither of them came home.
These two precious girls were brutally murdered while walking together in their hometown.
Six members of the savage MS-13 gang have been charged with Kayla and Nisa's murders.
Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as illegal, unaccompanied, alien minors and wound up in Kayla and Nisa's high school.
Elizabeth, Freddie, and Robert, tonight everyone in this chamber is praying for you.
Everyone in America is grieving for you.
I want you to know that 320 million hearts are right now breaking for you.
But we cannot imagine the depths of that kind of sorrow.
We can make sure that other families never have to endure this kind of pain.
And Democrats, of course, were very unhappy with all this.
This was Trump doing the storytelling routine that Reagan did better than anybody, I think, since Reagan, actually.
I think that what Trump did here by pointing out people in the audience, not just a guy who started a business, but people who have actually been victimized by bad policy, I think it was tremendously effective.
If you watched this and you weren't moved by the plight of these families, if you watched them in their heartbreak and you didn't think, well, maybe we should be able to do something about this, then I don't think that you were watching with an open mind or an open heart.
So Trump, I think, did exactly the right thing.
on this.
Now, in just a second, we're going to continue by talking about a little bit more on illegal immigration, a couple more stories that Trump told.
Again, I think he used the storytelling art at levels that we have not seen, actually, since Reagan in American politics, which is an amazing thing for me to say, because I don't think that Trump's a particularly good speaker.
But we'll get to all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so the president of the United States using his storytelling capacity to do some serious damage to the democratic agenda.
I think that the most polarizing and also the most successful line of his speech last night came when he was talking again about illegal immigration.
And what he suggested is, listen, I have a lot of sympathy for illegal immigrants, right?
People who are trying to come to this country to make a better life for themselves and cross the border illegally.
I'm happy to legalize 1.8 million of them, like today, if Democrats will make a deal, but But we have to protect American citizens first.
And it's this sort of baseline root logic that Republicans see, I think, most independents see.
I think even some Democrats see.
But the Democratic Party refuses to see.
We'll talk about that when we get to Joe Kennedy's response, because it really is quite insipid and insane.
But here last night was President Trump using language that ticked off the media, but I think most Americans heard.
So tonight, I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties Democrats and Republicans, to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion, and creed.
My duty and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber is to defend Americans, to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American dream.
Because Americans are dreamers, too.
Okay, and that line got big applause from Republicans.
Independents liked it.
Democrats didn't like it.
And because Democrats didn't like it, it's a problem for them.
Most Americans still think that Americans ought to be taken care of before we talk about how we take care of foreign citizens, which makes sense.
This is still America.
Now, one of the things that was really incredible about how Trump used storytelling last night, you know, Bush did it, Obama did it.
They all do the Reagan routine, as I say, of putting people up in the rafters and then pointing at them and saying, look at this wonderful person, let's clap.
Trump, you know, he's been using the slogan, the forgotten men and women of the country, throughout the entire campaign.
And I thought that he misused it when he talked about people who are living in small towns, and they've lost their jobs, and these are the forgotten men and women.
I'll tell you who have been forgotten.
People who believe in American values, like sort of traditional American values.
The belief that America is a place of liberty.
The people who make small sacrifices that don't show up on the national scale, but who are doing the everyday work of making America a better place.
And some of the stories that were being told last night were so eloquent in what they said that they said more than even what Trump said.
So one example of that last night was he talked about the Hollettes family.
I thought this was just magnificent.
It's this young family.
Where a guy who's an officer with the Albuquerque Police Department, he tells their story.
This is the most pro-life story that you'll ever hear without mentioning the word abortion.
Just this week, Democrats voted down a filibuster, a bill that would protect babies in the womb after 20 weeks.
They voted that down.
Donald Trump, without ever mentioning the word abortion, without ever suggesting pro-life, without talking about termination of a pregnancy, makes an eloquent case for life by telling the story of the Halletts family, who are true American heroes.
We see a vivid expression of this truth in the story of the Holetz family of New Mexico.
Ryan Holetz is 27 years old, an officer with the Albuquerque Police Department.
He's here tonight with his wife, Rebecca.
Last year, Ryan was on duty when he saw a pregnant, homeless woman preparing to inject heroin.
When Ryan told her she was going to harm her unborn child, she began to weep.
She told him she didn't know where to turn, but badly wanted a safe home for her baby.
In that moment, Ryan said he felt God speak to him.
You will do it, because you can.
He took out a picture of his wife and their four kids.
Then he went home.
To tell his wife, Rebecca.
In an instant, she agreed to adopt.
The Hollettes named their new daughter Hope.
Ryan and Rebecca, you embody the goodness of our nation.
Thank you.
OK, I mean, that is a fantastic story.
It's a fantastic pro-life story.
It's a fantastic American story.
It's the sort of story that President Obama never would have told.
And when I see that as a pro-life person, it reminds me that my priorities still matter.
It reminds me that my values still matter.
And Trump, I think, did that.
And this was a rare moment of subtlety for the president.
I thought it was a great story.
I thought that him bringing those folks to the State of the Union was terrific.
And that, of course, was not the limit of it.
He then went on to talk about North Korea.
And a lot of people were saying, well, what's the point of him talking about North Korea?
Well, not necessarily.
It's quite possible that he was drawing a contrast between North Korea and the United States, particularly in light of the fact that Democrats keep saying over and over that Trump is a sort of Kim Jong-un figure or that America is driving toward a North Korean solution, which of course is absolute nonsense.
So Trump brought the family of Otto Warmbier, you remember.
Warmbier was a University of Virginia student who was tortured and murdered by the North Korean regime.
He brought their family.
But the clip of the night, the one that actually made all the headlines, was him talking about a North Korean refugee, this is clip 11, who was attempting to escape North Korea and what he had to go through in order to reach freedom.
Sung Ho traveled thousands of miles on crutches all across China and Southeast Asia to freedom.
Most of his family followed.
His father was caught trying to escape and was tortured to death.
Today, he lives in Seoul, where he rescues other defectors and broadcasts into North Korea what the regime fears most, the truth.
Today, he has a new leg, but Sung Ho, I understand you still keep those old crutches as a reminder of how far you've come.
Your great sacrifice is an inspiration to us all.
Please, thank you.
Sung Ho's story is a testament to the yearning of every human soul to live in freedom.
That last line is direct from the George W. Bush speech.
This idea that every human soul yearns to live in freedom.
I actually disagree with that line.
I think there are a lot of human beings who desire sanctity over freedom, for example, purity over freedom.
This is obviously true in large swaths of the Islamic world.
But that image...
of this young North Korean lifting his crutches, the ones that he used to walk thousands of miles out of North Korea, is an amazing, amazing image.
And it's a reminder of what America is.
Now, that's what this speech really was last night.
That's not the way that the Democrats and the media treated it.
The way the Democrats and the media treated it was as though it was the worst thing that they had ever seen.
It was just terrible, terrible.
So you can see, the Democrats, for example, booed President Trump when he started talking about the dangers of chain migration.
Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives.
Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children.
OK, you can hear them booing there.
The worst moment, of course, is Luis Gutierrez, the representative who actually fled the State of the Union when people started chanting USA.
You can see that here.
This capital, this living monument, this is the monument to the American people.
You can see, there's Gutierrez, and he's out.
So, Luis Gutierrez can't deal with people chanting USA and he leaves.
Yeah, good look for the Democrats there.
This is what the Democrats refuse to acknowledge, is that Trump can use unifying language.
And when he uses unifying language, you should cheer.
And when he doesn't, you should boo.
But instead, they just decided to boo him all the way through.
In a second.
We're going to get to all the Democratic responses.
We're going to get to Joe Kennedy III.
We're going to get to Bernie Sanders.
We're going to get to the media fallout, which is just insipid and insane.
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Okay, so let's go to the media response first, and then we'll get to the actual Democratic responses to the State of the Union.
So, number one, you can see how insane this made the Democrats.
So Cory Booker, Democratic senator who cried tears of rage, tears of ragely rage, so much rage from Cory Booker, oh!
So he was asked specifically about the State of the Union, and he says that it was ugly and fear-mongering.
And I just want to ask a question.
I showed you a lot of clips.
Did you see anything there that smacked of ugly fear-mongering to you?
Ugly fear-mongering?
Because that's not what I saw last night.
I'm not sure what speech Cory Booker was watching, except that he has on his Tears of Rage glasses, and so all he could see was through those tears of rage, evil and horror.
Here's Senator Booker.
And here's a guy that used religion tonight to divide.
Here's a guy that used patriotism.
Whenever somebody pulls out patriotism, uses it as a way to condemn other people for their patriotic acts, how they choose to exhibit their patriotism, that's a divisive way of going about it.
And so the raw meat was ugly.
And then the appeals to fear-mongering, using MS-13 as a way to cast a shadow around millions of Americans who are looking for a full recognition of their citizenship rights.
There are so many examples of this that were just painful.
Okay, so again, you know, Cory Booker saying all this stuff is just nonsense.
There's really no excuse for him to say this because I just didn't see it last night.
Maybe I missed it, but that's not what I saw.
Chris Matthews did the same thing on MSNBC.
He gets up on MSNBC, he comes out of the show, and then, that Save the Union was so terrible.
It was worse than when I yelled at my interns.
It's worse than when I sexually harassed the help.
It's just garbage.
Get up.
Come in here, don't even shower, and I have to watch this nonsense?
Just awful.
Chris Matthews, I mean, go!
It had a lot of particular things that weren't rough, and then it took a turn halfway through it.
It almost got ugly.
Very tough about saying immigrants are basically killers.
MS-13.
Beginning a discussion about immigration in a country of immigrants with crime.
And that was his way of opening up the discussion, like, I'm protecting us from criminal elements.
I thought that got very ugly about that point.
I'm very ugly that he mentions MS-13 as though it's not a problem in the United States.
Again, Trump did not label all immigrants MS-13.
He said he wanted to let 1.8 million illegal immigrants remain in the country as a whole.
So, we're going to get to more media response.
We're going to get to everything related to the Democratic responses, which were really, I thought Joe Kennedy's particularly was quite terrible.
We'll get to all of that, but first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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So it was just what you would expect from the media, suggesting that this was the worst speech ever— I thought the most hilarious thing was, Democracy Dies in Darkness, The Washington Post.
They ran an original headline, and the original headline said, A Call for Bipartisanship, right?
It was a picture of Trump speaking.
And then they got ratioed.
So being ratioed on Twitter means that you have more comments on your tweet than you have retweets on your tweet.
So it's something like 3,000 comments, because a bunch of Democrats said, no, that's terrible.
Trump didn't deliver a message of unity.
It wasn't a call for bipartisanship.
It was mean.
It was cruel.
It was ugly.
So what did they do?
Well, those brave people, the Democracy Dies in Darkness, they switched the headline.
So now it says, a new American moment.
Trump adopts a gentler approach.
So rallies fiery barbs give way to traditional formality in speech.
Gritted realities of governing and politics await after high-minded talk.
All those headlines change.
Go back to the original page for just a second.
The original headlines say, look at that.
A call for bipartisan.
Trump delivers message of unity.
President highlights military economy.
And then, below that, it says, a chance to act presidentially, at least for a night.
So they just shifted every headline so that it's nasty.
Every single headline changed because people ratioed them on Twitter.
And then we're supposed to believe the media don't have a bias?
Of course the media have a bias.
The good news is that when it comes to the State of the Union Address, so many more people watch it than read about it the next day that it doesn't really matter very much.
But it just shows you the insane level of bias.
Now, the Democrats tried to respond.
The response to the State of the Union is almost invariably terrible.
There has never been a very good response to the State of the Union.
Democrats trotted out Joe Kennedy III, who, of course, is famous for being a Kennedy, not for actually accomplishing anything.
First of all, very, very bad move to have a Kennedy speak in front of a broken car, right?
Just a car with the hood open.
That's just a bad way to start a speech by a Kennedy descendant.
They have a bad history with cars that have been submerged in water, for example.
Other things to point out, you'll see, as Joe Kennedy speaks, that he was supposedly drooling, but he used, actually, like a vat of ChapStick, and so his mouth is shiny while he gives this speech.
Unfortunately, he didn't have the full-on Kennedy-Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons accent, because that would have made it much more amusing.
But he was as radical leftist as possible to be.
He decided to respond to Trump not by saying, You know, President Trump said a lot of nice things.
Like, these people write their speeches before they actually see Trump's.
So what they should have said is they should have said, listen, if I were a Democrat, here's what I would say.
President Trump said a lot of nice things about the economy.
Oh, that's wonderful.
We all want to see the economy grow.
He has not put us on a path to sustainable growth.
Here are the reasons why.
Also, the president talked a lot about unity and bringing the country together.
But no one has been more divisive than this president.
And then I would go down the list of all the terrible, divisive things that President Trump has supposedly done and said.
And I'd point out that there is a character flaw in the modern Republican Party that allows for this sort of thing, right?
You want to make the argument on character grounds, because people vote on character grounds.
Instead, Democrats are trapped in this intersectionality nonsense.
And so, instead of going after Trump for all the things he said, they decide that they have to stand up for all these intersectional groups.
So here is Joe Kennedy pandering to the Me Too movement and the Pussyhat crowd and pandering to Black Lives Matter, a group that is extraordinarily radical.
Here he is.
America, we carry that story on our shoulders.
He's such a bad speaker, wow.
You swarmed Washington last year to ensure that no parent has to worry if they can afford to save their child's life.
You proudly marched together last weekend, thousands deep, on the streets of Las Vegas and Philadelphia and Nashville.
You sat high atop your mom's shoulders and held a sign that read, Build a wall, and my generation will tear it down.
You bravely say, Me too. - You steadfastly say, Black lives matter.
I mean, this is deeply radical stuff.
He's not a good speaker, first of all, so the idea that this guy can speak is just not true.
Every phrase is punctuated by a short gap to demonstrate Emotion.
But it just doesn't work.
It's not good in any real sense.
That line, build a wall and my generation will tear it down, is an insane line.
That's an insane line.
I mean, Dennis Prager pointed this out last night during our watch party.
He said, that's basically Democrats saying we don't want borders at all.
Right?
No walls at all.
Transnationalism at its finest.
Try that in America and see how long that lasts.
You know how quickly America will be swamped by people who want to come here and may not share our values?
Pretty damn quickly.
We're a very wealthy country.
It's a pretty astonishing statement.
Build a wall and our generation will tear it down.
I certainly hope not.
If that's true, then I'd like to know whether the Kennedy family compound has walls around it, whether those ought to be torn down, too.
When he says, you bravely say Me Too, you steadfastly say Black Lives Matter, these are just slogans.
They're just slogans.
Because he doesn't explain how these movements are good, or what they're doing, or why he would support them.
And then he launched into his character attack on Trump.
But it was really weak stuff.
It would be easy to dismiss This past year is chaos.
Partisanship as politics.
But it's far, far bigger than that.
This administration isn't just targeting the laws that protect us.
They're targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection.
OK, again, no, he's not.
In fact, Trump was the one who was saying that Americans are worthy of protection.
It's you who are saying that we're going to tear down the walls that prevent people from entering the country illegally.
And then, of course, Kennedy addressed DREAMers directly in Spanish.
And then he said, you're part of our story, we'll fight for you, and we will not walk away.
Trump was saying in his speech, we will fight for Americans, and Kennedy was saying in his speech, we'll fight for everyone who's outside the country, basically.
That is not a good look.
We're gonna fight also for the most radical elements of American society.
Pretty astonishing that this is what Democrats choose to trot forward with.
If they think that they can defeat Trump with this sort of radicalism, I'm not sure that that's the case.
I think that they are much better off running somebody who at least purports to unify the country, as opposed to continuing the polarization of intersectional politics that Barack Obama pursued.
This is why Bernie Sanders' response Was probably better.
I mean, it was filled with usual stupidities, but it's—this is—I think even Bernie Sanders looked tired last night.
I mean, Sanders gave a response, and Sanders always looks tired because he's a thousand years old and did not have his proper share of pudding last night before he gave his State of the Union response address.
He should have been focusing, as I say, on character issues and also on the 1% and sustainable growth and all the rest of this.
But he has to just go down the progressive talking points list instead.
I mean, it was Trump's night, and it was pretty obvious it was Trump's night from Sanders' response.
Sanders spends time ripping on Trump for not talking about climate change.
When you look at the polls, climate change is like number 11, number 13 on Americans' list of concerns.
But that's where Bernie Sanders chooses to go.
Now I don't understand how a President of the United States can give a State of the Union speech and not mention climate change.
No, Mr. Trump, climate change is not a hoax.
It is a reality which is causing devastating harm all over our country and all over the world.
And you are dead wrong.
Oh yeah, good luck with this.
administrators at the EPA and other agencies who are trying to decimate environmental protection rules and slow down the transition to sustainable energy.
Oh yeah, good luck with this.
I mean, first of all, him looking like he's appearing on a C-SPAN call-in unit in the middle of the State of the Union response is not a good look.
It was Trump's night.
This was the best night that Trump has had in a very long time.
If Trump could sustain it, then I'd be optimistic for 2018 and 2020.
I highly doubt that it will be sustained just because that has not been the pattern thus far.
But there's no question it was a good night for Trump.
It was a bad night for Democrats, and we'll see if they continue to shoot themselves in the foot.
Democrats really shot themselves in the foot last night, even more than Trump won himself a victory.
OK, we're going to get to things I like and things I hate, so let's just jump right in there.
So, time for a quick thing I like.
So we've been doing Bach this week.
So we did Brahms a couple of weeks ago.
This week is Bach.
This is, of course, a very famous piece that you will all know.
This is Bach's Toccata and Fugue, which you will remember from Fantasia as well as every horror movie ever.
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���� ���� So this is a pretty fantastic piece, obviously.
It was written maybe as early as 1704, when Bach was still in his teens.
There's some people who say that it maybe was dated in the 1740s.
In any case, it was only really rediscovered in the 1800s.
And Felix Mendelssohn, a great composer in his own right, will have to do a week of Mendelssohn music, because I love Mendelssohn's music.
It was rediscovered in the 1800s and recaptured.
So much of Western thought is involved in rediscovery of old ideas and renewal of those old ideas.
And that is true in politics as well as in music.
One of the problems with modern music is that we've essentially abandoned all the old ideas about tonality and form and the developed natural ear and all the rest of this.
Instead, we've decided to focus in on what is most convenient.
We've focused in on energy in the pop sphere, or we've focused in on abstruse nonsense in the classical sphere.
And when you listen to great classical music of the past, there's a reason it has driving power, and that's because it resonates with the human soul in a way that modern music simply doesn't.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So, number one thing I hate, Trey Gowdy is apparently leaving the House.
That was announced just minutes ago.
The representative from South Carolina says that he is leaving Congress.
This would make another House chair who is leaving his committee.
It looks like Republicans in the House are foreseeing a Democratic wave in 2018.
We will see if they are right or if they are not.
Gowdy was one of the best prosecutors in Congress.
He was a terrific questioner when it came to the Oversight Committee.
It's a sad thing to see him go.
He says he's going to go back to his practice of law.
A good public servant is Trey Gowdy, and that's too bad to see him go.
In other news, Hillary Clinton, last night—I mean, talk about just a document dump—in the middle of the State of the Union address, or right before it, she dumped a giant Facebook post essentially apologizing for protecting a campaign subordinate who is sexually preying on young women.
So she waited until the middle of the State of the Union to dump it.
I wonder why she was so unpopular and lost to President Trump.
I just can't believe it.
She actually launched into a 1,500-word Facebook post just minutes Before Trump's State of the Union address, she said he needed to be punished.
This is talking about a guy named Burns Strider, her faith advisor.
She says, he needed to be punished, change his behavior, and understand why his actions were wrong.
The young woman needed to be able to thrive and feel safe.
I thought both could happen without losing his job.
But then she suggested that she made a mistake doing that.
She says, I've been given second chances.
I've given them to others.
I want to continue to believe in them.
But she says the second chance was squandered.
And she says she was dismayed by the allegations of sexual harassment.
Again, she is just Awful.
I mean, Hillary Clinton is just awful at everything, and her awfulness extends to launching complete disavowals, essentially, of her Me Too moment in the middle of the State of the Union Address in an attempt to bury it under Trump's big, shining hour.
So, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the fallout.
We'll see if the memo is released.
The famous House Intelligence memo is released.
That's apparently on the brink of release, so we'll talk about that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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