All Episodes
Previous Next
March 1, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:44
Wait, Trump Just Said WHAT? | Ep. 486
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Lots of stuff coming out of President Trump's face.
Yeah, lots of stuff.
And most of it isn't very good.
Plus, some staffing chaos over at the White House.
We'll talk about all of these things and more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So if you sense some ennui in me, if you sense a little bit of tiredness, that's because I was up at 2 o'clock in the morning Pacific Time so I could fly back and do the show.
But never fear!
We shall soldier through!
Because, I mean, that's just the kind of people we are.
Through rain, through sleet, through snow, through hail, we must not let The Shapiro Show fail.
So we will do all of the coverage of the news in just a second, and many a piece of news there be.
So we'll get to all of those things first.
I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
Yeah, you are trying to make a living for yourself.
And more than that, you're trying to increase your living.
You're trying to make a better wage.
You're trying to stomp for that better job.
You're trying to start a side business.
Well, that's where Skillshare comes in.
It's an online learning platform with over 18,000 classes in design, business, technology, and more.
So it's classes in graphic design, social media marketing.
illustration, mobile photography.
People around here, they're taking these classes all the time because if they don't take the classes and make their skill set better, they get fired.
So it's good that they're taking classes over at Skillshare.
It's also a good thing for you to take classes over at Skillshare because now you have a whole set of skills you can put down on your resume.
And all of these classes are taught by experts.
They're 45 minutes long.
They're really top notch.
They are really good.
They really work.
I've used a couple of them.
Let's Took one on SEO marketing.
I also took one on watercolors, which helps me relax after I'm done fomenting rebellion in this show.
Join the millions of students already learning on Skillshare today with a special offer just for my listeners.
Get two months of Skillshare for just 99 cents.
So they're offering my listeners right now two months of unlimited access to over 18,000 classes for just 99 cents.
So you go to Skillshare.com slash Shapiro for that deal.
Skillshare.com slash Shapiro.
Again, when you use slash Shapiro, you get two months for just 99 cents of unlimited access.
You can check it out, see whether you like it.
I promise you will.
It's fantastic.
Skillshare.com slash Shapiro to get your two months for 99 cents.
Skillshare.com slash Shapiro.
Also use slash Shapiro so they know that we sent you.
All right.
So yesterday, the president of the United States decided that he was going to hold another one of these open meetings with Democrats and Republicans in front of the cameras.
Now, usually in front of the cameras, the president tries to please members of both parties.
The president, above all, is a performer, right?
He's a guy who's on reality TV.
He's been on the cover of every magazine.
He's been performing.
He's been performing every single, you know, all the time for years on end.
And that performance does not stop just because he's the president of the United States.
When a camera is on, when the red light is on, he's performing.
And what that usually means is that he's trying to cater to the people in the room.
So when he's performing at CPAC and the red lights are on there, he's saying what CPAC wants to hear.
And when he's in front of the NRA, then he is saying what the NRA wants to hear.
And when he is in front of a bunch of Democrats and Republicans, he's saying what he thinks a lot of the Democrats want to hear.
And that's basically how it went yesterday.
Now, we're going to analyze this on two levels.
One is, did he mean any of this?
Is it real?
And two is, what did he just say?
Because we sort of always have to separate out these two things.
What he said and is it important?
These are two separate questions because the president says a lot of stuff.
A lot of crap comes out of that face.
So, the question is, Was the stuff that he said good, or was it bad?
And two, was it important?
We'll answer the second question first.
I don't think the stuff that he said was important.
He's going to have to get legislation through Congress.
Republicans run Congress.
They're not going to do any of the things that he wants them to do here because they don't have the votes for it.
The reason I say this is because the president did exactly the same thing with DACA.
You recall that he had a meeting with a bunch of Democrats, and at that meeting on DACA, he specifically said that he would be fine with passing a clean DACA bill.
We mocked him up and down for it.
It was ridiculous.
He said that he was fine with a clean amnesty bill and no border security measures.
And Kevin McCarthy, the House Majority Leader, had jumped in and said, Mr. President, you mean that you want border security?
And Trump said, yeah, that's what I mean.
I mean, I want a clean bill with border security.
Which is not originally what he said.
Now, of course, all of his overtures to Democrats in that meeting meant nothing.
The same thing is probably happening here on guns, but it is important to note, the president only became an advocate of gun rights relatively recently.
Up till 2012, the president was a gun control advocate.
The president was not a big fan of guns.
And so, when it goes back to the gut level for President Trump, when he goes back to his gut on this issue, there's certain issues where the president's gut is very much in line with sort of conservative policy.
Guns are not one of those issues.
On guns, this is a guy whose gut is from New York, and New Yorkers, people from New York City, they're not particularly big into the Second Amendment rights of all of it.
So, the president has this meeting yesterday and he says a bunch of things that are just laughably awful.
So, he starts off in a conversation with Pat Toomey.
So, Pat Toomey is the senator from Pennsylvania.
Now, in order for you to understand how absurd it is what President Trump says right here, you have to understand that Pat Toomey is one of the leftmost members of the U.S. Senate on guns.
So, in 2013, it was Pat Toomey who proposed a piece of legislation in the aftermath of Sandy Hook with Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, a Democrat.
And that piece of legislation would have forced federal background checks for any sale of any weapon in the United States except between family members or close friends.
So if I wanted to sell a gun to somebody in the office with whom I was not friendly, then I would have to go to a federally licensed firearms dealer.
Now the only way to enforce that, the problem with this policy, is the only way to enforce that law is that you actually have to have a full gun registry.
Because in order for the government to keep track of how I sold my gun to somebody, they have to know that I owned the gun in the first place.
A federally licensed firearms dealer keeps records with the federal government.
They know how many guns are in that gun shop, and so when that firearms dealer is requested for records by the NRA—rather, by the ATF, then the ATF knows where the guns were, how they were transferred, and all the rest of it.
That would have set up a gun registry in the United States.
Gun registries are a really troubling concept.
You really don't want the government knowing who has a gun and where, because it's none of the government's business.
There are two purposes to the Second Amendment.
One is self-defense, in which case you don't really care about the government knowing you have a gun.
And the second is being free of government tyranny.
And in that case, you really don't want the government to know who has how many guns and where.
And obviously, there's a certain amount of knowledge the government has with regard to federally licensed firearms dealers, but having a full gun registry is not quite the same thing as all that.
The government would have to come into your house and check every so often.
The government would have to figure out whether you were telling the truth.
The government could theoretically charge you with perjury for lying on federal forms if you did not fill out the forms properly in these hand-to-hand transfers.
In any case, the Manchin-Toomey bill went down to defeat.
It got 54 votes in the Senate.
It could not hit 60.
But Toomey, who proposed it, was bucking the NRA when he proposed that.
So Toomey, actually his NRA rating was demoted from an A to a C. And it was demoted from an A to a C. Not only was it demoted from an A to a C, in 2014 the NRA declined to endorse Toomey.
So they had endorsed Toomey in his last senatorial race, and then they un-endorsed Toomey in 2008.
So that's how seriously the NRA took all of this, and that's how much at odds Toomey was with the NRA.
Well, Trump, because he always wants to be the guy saying the brashest thing in the room, he starts ripping into Toomey for some reason and suggesting that Toomey is a tool of the NRA, which is just idiotic.
It doesn't make sense that I have to wait till I'm 21 to get a handgun, but I can get this weapon at 18.
I don't know.
So I was just curious as to what you did in your bill.
Look at all the staffers.
Even Manchin is going, he's not afraid of the NRA.
He and I partnered on the legislation.
It's a big issue right now.
Look at all the staffers.
Even Manchin is going, he's not afraid of the NRA.
He and I partnered on the legislation.
What the hell are you talking about?
But Trump is accusing Toomey of being afraid of the NRA, which is just great press for the NRA, considering the entire Democratic Party and the media have been claiming that the real reason Republicans are pro-gun is because they're afraid of the NRAs.
So well done, Mr. President, for doubling down on that idiotic message.
Then the president went even further, and that's the clip we're about to show you where Dianne Feinstein jumps for joy.
Amy Klobuchar, who's the senator from Minnesota, she suggests that they add an assault weapons ban to Manchin-Toomey.
So not only would there be a full gun registry, now you would not be able to buy an assault weapon, meaning any rifle in the United States that has a couple of features added to it, like a pistol grip and a certain type of barrel, for example, or a sight.
If you added those things, if the gun looks scary, it's an assault weapon.
Republicans have opposed this forever.
Amy Klobuchar says, why don't we do it?
And Trump immediately says, yeah, let's wrap that up into an even bigger gun control package and watch Dianne Feinstein's reaction.
Dianne Feinstein is 84 years old, but suddenly she's a little girl again.
Dianne Feinstein, she's been my senator virtually my entire life.
She's been senator here since I was 10 years old, Dianne Feinstein, or nine years old.
I have never seen Dianne Feinstein smile.
Ever.
Not once.
On tape.
There's this myth that once Dianne Feinstein smiled and a rainbow came out.
She's not a big laugher and a big smiler.
Watch as she turns into a small child clapping for Glee.
Like my kids when I give them chocolate.
When Trump says this about assault weapons.
It's really amazing.
Just doing something on this background check issue and using that as a base, and then I would like to add some of these other things we've talked about, I think would make a major difference.
So if you can add that to this bill, that would be great.
Diane, if you could add what you have also, and I think you can, into the bill.
Joe, are you ready?
Can you do that?
Joe, can you do that?
Pat, can you add some of the things?
You're not going to agree with me, right?
Yep, you help.
Well, no, I'll help, but can you add what Amy and what Diane have?
Can we add them in?
And I know you can add what John has.
Okay, and look at the Republicans.
They're all like, what is going on now?
Like, Cornyn, who's sitting right next to Trump, you can see he's putting his hand to his mouth like, this can't be happening.
This isn't real.
Like, Trump really doesn't know what he's saying here.
And Dianne Feinstein knows exactly what Trump's saying.
Again, she's 84 years old, and suddenly she's my four-year-old daughter.
She's so gleeful.
If you're saying things about guns that are making Dianne Feinstein gleeful, let me suggest that you have undermined the Second Amendment and that you are not standing with conservative ideas on the Second Amendment.
Okay, then it gets even worse.
So he turns to Cornyn, who's sitting right next to him, and he says, you know what we should do?
We should actually do a comprehensive gun reform.
Like a big, big bill.
Like a big historic bill.
And you can see Cornyn going, what the hell is going on?
Like, was he dropped on his head this morning?
Did he wake up on the wrong side of the bed?
Was it an invasion of the body snatchers?
Like, what in the world?
Look at John Cornyn's face here.
And John Fixnick's has some really good things in it.
But it would be nice if we could add everything onto it.
And maybe you change the title, all right?
The U.S.
Background Check Bill or whatever.
But your bill is really good and really important, having to do with a certain aspect.
But maybe we could make it much more comprehensive and have one bill instead of 15 different bills that nobody knows what's happening.
If we can get 60 votes for it, Mr. President, I'm all for it.
I think you can.
Honestly, I think...
So that's when Cornyn steps in and he goes, Mr. President, you're acting like a child.
We need 60 votes.
And we're not going to get it.
So the president, of course, just completely overlooks this.
It was just ridiculous.
Ridiculous on every possible level.
And it gets even more ridiculous.
OK, so this is the thing that is most ridiculous and had people really up in arms, as they should be.
So the president is talking about—so Vice President Pence starts talking about a proposal that was first made by David French, a proposal that I back for gun violence restraining orders.
Gun violence restraining orders are a process that we have here in California where close family and friends can apply to a court to have your gun rights temporarily suspended if they show, past a certain burden of proof, that there is evidence that you are a danger to yourself or others.
And then there is a hearing.
So there's due process.
So the due process can go in a couple ways.
You can have the hearing before the guns are removed, or you could have a preliminary hearing in which all of the evidence is shown, and then the guns are temporarily removed because we don't want people sitting around there with guns, and then the guy realizes that the cops are going to come take away his guns, he goes and shoots up the school.
OK, so you can have due process in the sense that you have the right to confront the accuser, but it's done on a really spontaneous, quick basis.
Or you could have a full, drawn-out hearing.
But both of those are due process.
So Mike Pence explains the proposal, and Trump proceeds to pile-drive the proposal.
Trump proceeds to take Pence's proposal, the gun violence restraining order proposal, the David French proposal, and he proceeds to say something so wildly unconstitutional and so wildly unconservative that it boggles the mind.
I mean, if Barack Obama had uttered these words, we would all be up in arms.
The reason that it's different if Obama had said them than Trump saying them, honestly, is that Obama knew what he was talking about on these issues, and Trump clearly doesn't.
Anyway, here's Mike Pence saying something smart, and then Donald Trump following up with something so egregiously stupid that minds of small children were blown all over the country.
Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures.
I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man's case that just took place in Florida.
He had a lot of firearms.
They saw everything.
To go to court would have taken a long time.
So you could do exactly what you're saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.
Okay, that's not what due process is.
The reason this is a problem is not because anybody wants mentally ill violent people to have guns.
Nobody wants that.
But it is astonishing to me that the same people on the left who are afraid of Trump becoming an authoritarian are sitting there laughing with glee when the President of the United States says somebody applies to have somebody else's gun rights taken away and we should all just shrug.
I mean, honestly, that's what the President of the United States says right there.
The President of the United States just said that you should be able to go into the police.
You should be able to go into your house.
I should be able to go to the cops and say to them, my next door neighbor's crazy.
And not show any evidence, right?
There's no due process.
I just call up and I say, Tip, next door neighbor's crazy.
And the cops go and take that guy's guns and maybe arrest him.
And then later comes the due process.
We fought an entire revolution to prohibit this sort of thing.
We fought an entire revolution so there would be a right to habeas corpus, so you know why you're being arrested and your rights are being violated.
We fought an entire revolution so there are no ex post facto laws, laws that were specifically designed after the fact in order to get certain people.
None of this is part of the constitutional order.
But the president, who is a Republican, was sitting there saying this stuff with a straight face.
Now, this brings us to our—I'll get to the last question as to whether any of this is important in a second.
He didn't even stop there.
I mean, everybody on the right is just looking at this going, what happened?
I mean, what?
It was every WTF gif that you can find online.
I mean, every face that you can make.
Right, that was just—was being made by Republicans yesterday, watching this thing unfold in real time.
It's astonishing.
It's astonishing.
OK, then he goes—he says—he goes after Steve Scalise.
Steve Scalise, shooting victim in the congressional baseball shooting.
And Scalise has proposed and the NRA has proposed and Trump has endorsed in his 2016 election cycle the idea of concealed carry reciprocity.
Concealed carry reciprocity is the idea that when you apply for a concealed carry license in Oklahoma and you are approved by the government for that concealed carry license, you should be able to concealed carry in any other state.
Normally, this sort of thing is fine.
Like if you have a marriage license in one state, it's usually transferable over to another state, right?
If you have a liquor license in one state and it fulfills the obligations of the other state, then it should be able to be fulfilled in that state, I believe.
But when it comes to concealed carry, there's questions as to whether you should be able to take your concealed carry license from Oklahoma and bring it over to California.
And so Trump is told by Steve Scalise that they want this concealed carry reciprocity.
And President Trump's response is, As always, amazing.
Here's the President of the United States responding to Steve Scalise by saying, it's utterly, we can never do this.
It can't be a thing.
And there were a lot of our members that said, look, we want to close these problems and fix these problems with the background check system.
And we came together and actually passed a bill.
But we also felt that, if you look at the concealed carry population, these are people, by and large, who are helping us stop crimes.
These are people who are well-trained, who actually go out there and help prevent crimes.
So I would hope that that's not immediately dismissed, because there is a lot of talk of just putting that on the side and just waiting for it to happen.
I think that maybe that bill will someday pass, but it should pass as a separate.
If you're going to put concealed carry between states into this bill, we're talking about a whole new ballgame.
Look at Klavichar.
Look at her.
OK, the senator from Minnesota, look at the Democrats.
She's sitting there nodding along.
And the Republicans are all sitting there with their arms crossed.
Look at the body language here.
All the Republicans are going, where is this coming from?
This is the guy who, days ago, was talking about how great the NRA was.
This is the guy who was, a few days ago, talking about the value of gun rights.
This is the guy who, a couple of days ago, was talking about how we needed to protect our right to keep and bear arms.
And it does shed some light on something that the president said during his CPAC speech.
During that CPAC speech, he had this very weird line where he said, if you could choose between tax cuts and gun rights, which would you choose?
And he was expecting everybody in the room to say tax cuts.
And everybody in the room said gun rights.
And he was kind of shocked by it.
Because again, the president is not a stalwart on gun rights.
On a gut level, he's not.
Now, one of the nice things is that the President of the United States can be turned to whoever talks to him last.
This is one of the nice things about the President.
He is willing to hear opposing points of view is the nice way of putting it.
Also, the President of the United States can't do all these things because he just doesn't have the votes.
But here's where it does become important.
So this stuff is not important right now.
Because when Trump says stuff right now, who cares?
Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, they're the ones who are putting the legislation together.
When he said dumb stuff about Obamacare, it didn't really matter very much.
When he said dumb things about the tax bill, it didn't matter very much.
When he said dumb things about immigration, it didn't matter very much.
The president saying dumb things is baked into the cake.
We all know that the president is going to say stuff, and we're all going to go...
And we've all gotten used to that.
But what happens if, in November, Democrats take back the House of Representatives?
And let's say they get really lucky and they take back the Senate.
Let's say the Democrats suddenly have control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Then, all of a sudden, the President of the United States saying these things may actually make a difference.
Because you could see a situation in which Democrats are the ones writing the bill.
Right now, the check on the President saying dumb things is a Congress that's not going to write dumb things.
But what happens when the Congress can write dumb things?
What happens when Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, and she's sitting in a meeting like this with the President of the United States, and he says, I want you to put X, Y, and Z into a bill, and it's a comprehensive gun reform bill that's going to require full background checks for every sale in the United States, which will require registry, and everything that the President says about assault weapons will be wrapped into a bill.
And no concealed carry reciprocity, and raising the age to buy a rifle.
And the president says all this in front of Nancy Pelosi, and she says, sure, Mr. President, we're with you.
And what happens when Chuck Schumer is the Senate Majority Leader, and he says to Trump, sounds great, Mr. President.
I'll tell you what happens.
The president gets all of the bad things we don't want him to be saying and having right now.
That's what happens.
How do I know that's what happens?
Because that's exactly what happened on the budget last year.
You recall that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were using the debt ceiling debate as a way to cut some spending.
And the President of the United States had in Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and he said to them directly, listen guys, I don't care about cutting anything, let's just blow out the spending.
And they said fine, and they walked out.
And Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were just stunned, because the President did have the capacity to do that.
He had the votes to do that.
Well, right now it doesn't matter again, because the Republicans are running the show.
But when the Republicans are not running the show, things are going to get pretty dicey pretty quickly.
Which is why it's important that Republicans maintain control of the House as a check on President Trump.
Because the President's instincts are not always good on these sorts of things.
And he's not surrounded by a bunch of Second Amendment advocates.
The people who are closest to the President, aside from Mike Pence, these are not all super pro-Second Amendment people.
It's a serious issue.
And nobody is checking him on the areas where he does have control.
So another area where he has control and where he's saying dumb things is the area of trade.
So today, the president tweeted this out.
This is 17.
The president tweeted this out about trade.
He tweeted, quote, So Charlie Cook over at National Review had a great point about this last sentence, where So Charlie Cook over at National Review had a great point about this last sentence, where it says, we And he says, if you use the words free, fair, and smart about, for example, speech, if you say we want free, fair, and smart speech, you'd realize that this is a violation of free speech principles, right?
Fair speech and smart speech are not requisites.
You just need free speech.
When it comes to trade, the same thing is true.
The notion of fair trade is something comerical.
It's silly.
The reason I say it's silly is because comparative advantages since the days of Ricardo has suggested that you are an idiot if you heighten tariffs on your own just because the other guy has heightened tariffs on you.
As I'm constantly saying, let's say that you are in the business of building shelves at the local grocery store and they stop using you.
They've essentially set up a tariff on you.
They don't use you anymore.
Do you stop shopping at that grocery store if they have the lowest prices?
Only if you want to get poorer do you do that.
But the president doesn't understand how trade works.
The president thinks that trade is not reciprocal.
The president thinks that all of these industries have been quote-unquote decimated.
So today, the president had a meeting with all of these steel and aluminum industry leaders, and he said that he was going to raise tariffs dramatically on steel and aluminum.
He apparently said that he wants to raise the steel tariffs by 25%.
He wants to slap an overall steel tariff of 25% on foreign steel and a 10% aluminum tariff on aluminum.
Disaster area.
Full-scale disaster area.
The reason this is a full-scale disaster area is because these are inputs for other industries in the United States.
For every job in the steel industry, there are 40 jobs in other industries that use steel, which means that if you're in the car industry and you use steel and suddenly the price of steel goes up, Because of these tariffs.
And now you have to sell your car more expensively.
And it is less competitive in the global market.
Unless you tariff cars.
And then if you tariff cars, then you're going to have to increase the price on cars.
And people have to spend money there.
Tariffs are a terrible economic policy.
They've always been a terrible economic policy.
For every job that is saved by steel, by these tariffs, other jobs are lost.
When the Bush tariffs on steel went into effect from 2001 to 2004, about 21 months, when those tariffs were in effect, the United States lost approximately 200,000 jobs by studies.
And not only that, the economy suffered overall because of that.
According to estimates, every single steel job created by a tariff, American consumers paid an additional $200,000 to $2.3 million.
That's how much it costs to preserve a steel job.
And that's what's happening here.
Remember, there are industries in the United States, like the beer industry, uses aluminum to make its cans.
Anheuser-Busch came out today.
They said, this is idiotic.
You just raised the price of beer on everybody who wants to buy Anheuser-Busch beer.
You want to buy a Miller Lite?
Well, now you're going to be paying a higher price for that watered-down beer.
And this is not good policy.
It's also, it's just ignorant.
I mean, when he says that the steel and aluminum industries in the United States have been decimated by decades of unfair trade, it's not true.
It's just not factually true.
In 2016, the steel industry actually did really well, thanks to dramatically increased car sales.
Nucor is the nation's leading steel manufacturer.
It hit $16 billion in sales that year.
Last year, its net earnings increased 65% over 2016.
The average salary at that company, by the way, is $80,000.
Most job loss at Nucor has happened thanks to technological advances, not thanks to foreign trade.
Right now, 70% of all steel sold in the United States is American steel.
As for the argument that we need steel tariffs in order to protect the capacity of our military to have steel to use for its weaponry, that's like 3% of all the steel production in the United States would have to be used for a full-scale military mobilization in the United States.
It's just not true either.
By the way, it's not just Nucor, which their stock price in 2000 was $12 today at $65, so obviously they're not doing that badly.
U.S.
steel boomed in 2017.
In Q4 of 2016, net earnings were $47 million, but by Q4 of 2017, net earnings were $136 million.
They had a massive boom last year.
of 2016, net earnings were $47 million, but by Q4 of 2017, net earnings were $136 million.
They had a massive boom last year.
Steel dynamics showed an operating income of $1.1 billion last year.
As for America's production of raw steel, we're producing about the same amount of raw steel that we were producing in 1980.
It's been pretty consistent for the last three and a half decades.
Almost four decades.
Cato Institute trailer Scott Lincecum points out, again, that U.S.
steel production rose 5% last year.
There are already 160 duties on steel imports, and if you think this is just a way to screw China because China is dumping its cheap steel on us, nonsense.
China ranks 11th in steel importation into the United States.
OK, how about, and again, the most important thing here is the number of jobs this is going to cost in another industry.
The CFO of Anheuser-Busch said this, quote, about two million jobs depend on America's beer industry.
We urge the Department of Commerce and U.S. President Trump to consider the impact of trade restriction tariffs.
But he's not going to reconsider it because this is something that he has power over.
And right now, he's feeling particularly threatened, the president of the United States.
Right now, President Trump is feeling very isolated.
And that means that he is bringing in his toys.
He's bringing his comfort food and his teddy bears.
And his teddy bears, on issues like this, there's a guy named Peter Navarro, who He wrote a book on trade that makes no sense and is supremely foolish.
And he is Trump's guru on trade, because Trump has always felt that America is getting screwed.
Because Trump's vision of what American industry is, is guys who are working a blue-collar job in downtown Manhattan building a building with steel.
He's got a very 1955 version of what American industry looks like.
That's not what American industry looks like right now.
The job loss in the steel industry has been brought about by technological change.
And, of course, the vast majority of jobs in this country are no longer in manufacturing.
They're in the service industry.
Now, when the president says that I'm supposed to pay more for a car to preserve that steel job, what he's really doing is penalizing me for being in an industry that's more efficient than the steel industry has been on a global level.
We, by the way, are still the number two producers of all steel on planet Earth.
But again, this is bad economics from the president.
The president is just saying things, except this time he's actually going to do it.
So next week he's supposed to impose these tariffs.
And the market is reacting just exactly how you would think it is reacting, right?
This is going to be a big trade war because not only is it going to have a—not only is it going to have A significant impact on the steel industry and industries that are fed by steel in the United States.
It's going to have impact on other industries because other countries are going to raise their tariffs on us in retaliation.
They shouldn't, but they will in an attempt to back us down.
They're going to now raise their own tariffs.
So today, as of this point, the stock market has been dropping pretty precipitously.
It has tumbled 600 points.
Over the tariff talks.
So it finally stabilized after a really bad month.
February was a crappy month for the stock market.
Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 490 points to this point.
It's taken a big dip.
It took a bunch of huge dips last month.
So, well done, President Trump.
Just by you announcing these tariffs, you sunk the stock market 500 points.
It won't end there, by the way.
There's still a lot of doubt as to whether this actually gets imposed, because again, Trump says so many things.
It is not true that the president of the United States saying these things does have an impact if he ends up imposing them.
So this is why I say on gun policy, I think people are cutting him a lot of slack because they don't think it's actually going to happen.
But when it comes to trade policy, the president does have the unilateral authority to raise tariffs this way.
And this could be a full-scale disaster for the economy.
It could be a real disaster for a number of industries, especially if he decides that he is going to go to trade war with every country that slaps tariffs on us.
Because you can see this escalating.
You can see Trump saying, we're going to put the steel tariff, the aluminum tariff.
And then you can see France saying to us, well, if you're going to do that to us, we're going to put tariffs on not just steel and aluminum.
We're going to put tariffs on all your other goods, too.
And then Trump says, well, screw you.
I'll put tariffs on our goods.
We're stronger than you.
This zero-sum version of economics is just ignorance.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And it's very frustrating to watch a Republican president do it.
Because it's very dumb.
Now again, one of the reasons I think this is happening is because the president obviously feels isolated.
The president feels like a lot of his favorite people have been marginalized in the last couple of weeks.
So, over the last week, Josh Urfel, who is the comms director for Jared Kushner, has been marginalized.
Kushner himself has been marginalized a little bit, as I said, by the revocation of his interim top-secret security status.
There's a story today in The New York Times that's very damaging to Kushner about his family business receiving loans after he held meetings with business people.
So, according to The New York Times, early last year, a private equity billionaire started paying regular visits to the White House, Joshua Harris.
A founder of Apollo Global Management was advising Trump administration officials on infrastructure policy.
During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior advisors.
Among other things, the two men discussed a possible White House job for Harris.
The job never materialized, but in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Kushner's family real estate firm, Kushner Companies.
The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper.
This is one of their bigger deals.
It's triple the average size of their property loan.
It's one of the largest loans Kushner Company received last year.
An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent the firm and one of its partners $325 million.
to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn.
That loan was made in spring of 2017, right after Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup's chief executive, Michael Corbett.
According to people briefed on the meeting, the two men talked about financial and trade policy and did not discuss Kushner's family business.
This is one of the problems with having people in the White House who are deeply connected to their businesses still.
And it's one of the reasons why his interim security clearance has not been granted at this point, is because of these business connections.
I mean, this is not good.
If this were happening under Hillary, it would not be good.
It's happening under Trump, and it's not good.
It doesn't matter whether you like the people who we're talking about personally.
It doesn't matter if you like the policies they're espousing.
The media obviously have an agenda, which is to knock Kushner off the hill.
Right now, they want to see chaos inside the Trump administration, but they're holding this.
But that's not something that Kushner should have been doing.
If Trump wanted him to have meetings with Citigroup and financial leaders, then Kushner should have basically become disassociated in entirety from all of the Kushner companies.
That apparently has not happened.
So, Kushner has been marginalized, and now Hope Hicks is gone.
So Hope Hicks was his comfort blanket.
Hope Hicks, who started off as a runway model, who joined Trump in 2016.
She was part of Ivanka's team.
She was his top aide.
And she's now 29.
And one of the best-liked people in the White House, everybody I know in the White House, who knows...
Hope Hicks says that she's a wonderful person.
Well, she was, according to CNN, excoriated by the president, because a couple of days ago, she went in front of Congress and she was asked whether she'd ever had to lie on behalf of the president.
She said, well, she told some white lies, like about audience size, like crowd size.
And that apparently ticked off Trump, according to CNN, and supposedly Trump yelled at her, and then Hope Hicks quit.
That's the CNN story.
Now, the New York Times says that she's been preparing for weeks to leave.
That's not a giant shock.
People in the White House are routinely talking about leaving because it's a very chaotic place, a very high-stress job.
There's a lot of turnover at any White House, but particularly in a White House that's run from the top this way.
So, Hope Hicks leaving has some impact on the administration.
I'll explain what impact it has and what it means for Trump in just a second, but you're going to have to go over to Daily Wired and subscribe for the rest of it.
So for $9.99 a month, you can get your subscription to The Daily Wire.
That means you get the rest of this show live, The Andrew Klavan Show live, The Michael Molls Show live.
You get to be part of my mailbag, which is happening tomorrow.
So now's a great day to subscribe so you can ask all the questions that your little heart desires and make your life that much better.
Also, if you want the annual subscription, finally, here in my hands, I have it, the greatest tumbler in the history of mankind.
I'm back in L.A., and I can feel the warmth and the energy surging through me as I hold this, the Best Beverage Vegetables.
You can hold it, too.
You can get one that's just like this.
You can't have mine.
This is mine.
But you can have your own for $99 a year when you get the annual subscription.
Or if you just want to listen later, go over to iTunes, SoundCloud, YouTube.
Please go over there and subscribe.
Please leave us a review.
It always helps us.
We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
So as I say, Hope Hicks has sort of been pushed to the side.
Jared, right now, is being pushed to the side, apparently, according to reports by General John Kelly, the chief of staff, which means that Kelly is the guy who's sort of bringing people into the center of the room.
And that means that Trump is more likely to reach out to other people that he wants to talk to.
If he feels like Kelly is shutting him off from Jared Kushner and that Hope Hicks is going to leave, then he's going to start reaching out to other people he's comfortable with.
Well, one of the people he likes a lot, apparently, is Peter Navarro.
Peter Navarro, this trade guy.
And it's not a coincidence that while all this chaos is taking place, Peter Navarro is suddenly making appearances in the Oval Office, and Trump is hanging out with him.
The people that Trump feels personally comfortable with are the people he's going to want to talk to, and unfortunately, a lot of those people have pretty bad ideas, because personal comfort should not be the gauge of whether somebody's policy is good, but the president doesn't know a lot about policy, and he's very susceptible to being told things by people that he likes.
So, Hicks being out has more of a personal impact on Trump than it does a policy impact.
But she is known as sort of the person—she's sort of the Trump whisperer.
She's the person who can handle Trump and has been able to hem him in a little bit, make him feel better about his presidency, make him feel better about things.
Her being gone is not going to be a good thing.
Again, Josh Raffel—I think it's pronounced Erfel—is a press aide whose initial portfolio is primarily focused on Kushner and Ivanka, and he apparently is leaving also.
And apparently, Dina Powell left a few weeks ago.
So, high turnover at the White House.
That means a lot of faces Trump doesn't recognize.
As he gets more uncomfortable, he's going to look for friends.
And the friends around him are going to define what he does.
Which is sort of an uncomfortable place.
He's meanwhile busily attacking his own Attorney General.
So yesterday the President went on Twitter and he attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
This I've always found really frustrating.
Attorney General Sessions, I've met him a few times when he was Senator Sessions.
I think that Senator Sessions is a rock solid Red state Republican.
I disagree with him on trade.
I disagree with him in certain areas of immigration.
But he was the very first guy to endorse Trump.
I mean, the first major voice to endorse Trump.
Very, very early in the campaign.
A real Trump loyalist.
And as AG, Trump has just beaten the crap out of him publicly.
So, this is really in bad taste.
One of the things I like about Sessions is that Sessions does have a strong sense of what he is supposed to do as the Attorney General.
That his job is not to just be the wingman for the President.
Now Trump doesn't like that because he looks at the Obama administration and he says Eric Holder was Obama's wingman.
Why can't you be my wingman?
And the answer is because the AG is not supposed to be the president's wingman.
The AG is supposed to administer the law.
Jeff Sessions actually takes that rather seriously.
So one of the areas where this has happened is that Jeff Sessions asked the inspector general to investigate potential FISA abuse.
There's been a lot of talk about FISA abuse, their supposed abuse by the FBI and the DOJ of the FISA warrant process in the attempt to get a warrant on Carter Page, that former Trump campaign aide, that former Trump foreign policy aide.
And Sessions said, listen, I don't want the DOJ investigating itself.
I don't want the DOJ investigating the FBI.
Let's set somebody else who's independent, because here's the thing.
If I, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, come down with the conclusion that the Obama DOJ and the Obama FBI went ahead and invaded the campaign, people are going to note a couple of things.
One, I was a member of the campaign.
Two, I was appointed by President Trump, and so they're not going to take it seriously.
So we'll set up an IG.
I have a conflict of interest.
Trump doesn't appreciate that, and he wants Jeff Sessions to just do what he wants him to do, which I think is wrong.
So Trump tweets out, "Why is the AG, Jeff Sessions, asking the inspector general to investigate potentially massive FISA abuse?
Will take forever, has no prosecutorial power, and already late with reports on Comey, et cetera.
Isn't the IG an Obama guy?
Why not use Justice Department lawyers?
All caps, disgraceful." No, what's disgraceful is the president of the United States berating his own attorney general publicly.
I assume he has Jeff Sessions' phone number.
What does he think is going to happen here?
Does he think Sessions is going to quit if he just humiliates him enough?
I mean, Sessions knows Trump isn't going to fire him because Trump's been threatening to fire him for over a year.
He's not going anywhere.
So he'll just sit it out.
He'll sit tight.
He'll protect the law.
Good for Sessions for doing that.
So there's no purpose here other than Trump venting and then mobilizing his allies to vent at Sessions.
But maybe that makes his base feel good.
Maybe it makes them feel like it's the DOJ's fault that we haven't seen any prosecutions.
But again, this is just not being—not only not presidential, it's not effective.
Attacking your own attorney general is just bad policy.
So, in a rarity, Sessions actually fired back.
So, he actually issued a statement ripping Trump.
Good for him.
him.
He said, we have initiated the appropriate process that will ensure complaints against this department will be fully and fairly acted upon if necessary.
As long as I'm the attorney general, I will continue to discharge my duties with integrity and honor, and this department will continue to do its work in a fair and impartial manner according to the law and the Constitution.
I'm good for Jeff Sessions.
That's his job.
That's exactly what he should be doing.
So, it's an absurdity that the President is attacking his own Attorney General.
So, very bad 48 hours for the President.
He's attacking his own Attorney General, dumping all over gun rights, and then talking about raising tariffs dramatically that would have a serious impact on the economic growth that he's attempting to reach.
So, very bad 48 hours for the President.
And, again, I think this is what the President looks like when he's unmoored, which is why you have to have checks in the White House.
It's why you have to have good people surrounding him.
It's why you need a Republican Congress.
If you had a Democratic Congress and a bunch of advisors around the president telling him to do the popular thing with Democrats, this presidency could go sideways very quickly.
So while there was talk last week about the president being an ideological leader of the conservative movement, that is not true.
The president has governed like a conservative so far.
But he's not an ideological leader, he's a vehicle for the conservative movement.
That means that if the conservative movement doesn't call him out, if the conservative movement doesn't provide a check when he commits anti-conservative heresies, then there's a possibility that Trump moves significantly to the left.
And again, if the Democrats were smart, they would know this.
If the Democrats had any brains at all, they would spend all day just praising Trump.
It's what they would do.
They'd spend every day, all day, talking about how Trump is generous, Trump is kind, Trump is wonderful.
They'd be like all of the characters in Manchurian Candidate talking about Raymond Burr and what a wonderful, generous human being he is.
And Trump would buy that.
Because the man doesn't—I mean, this is the danger of having someone in the Oval Office who doesn't have an ideology.
So far, it hasn't hurt.
Those checks and balances have worked.
I only hope they continue to work.
I'll praise the president when they do work and when he does the right thing.
The last 48 hours has not been that time to do the right thing.
Now, speaking of the radicalism of the Democrats, When you look at the Democrats themselves, they have radicalized.
So if they were smart, as I say, they'd be triangulating with Trump.
They would be attempting to make overtures to Trump.
They could probably get half their agenda done with Trump if they did that.
But they're radicalizing pretty quickly.
So there are a bunch of top Democrats who attended a Louis Farrakhan speech.
Jake Tapper, Over at CNN, who I criticized pretty heavily last week for what I thought was an egregiously awful town hall, and then I praised this week for doing an interview with Sheriff Scott Israel in Parkland, Florida.
He did a tweetstorm yesterday that I think is quite good, where he attacked Democrats who attended Louis Farrakhan's speech.
It is an amazing thing that the mainstream media think it utterly not worthy of note that Louis Farrakhan, an open anti-Semite, an open racist, I don't care what they put on me.
The government is my enemy.
as a celebrity by so many top-level Democrats, including Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus.
Here are some clips of Louis Farrakhan talking, and there were Democrats at the speech, top-level Democrats at the speech.
I don't care what they put on me.
The government is my enemy.
Yes!
The powerful Jews are my enemy.
Yes!
Okay, top-level Democrats have praised Louis Farrakhan.
They've taken pictures of Louis Farrakhan.
Barack Obama took pictures of Louis Farrakhan.
There were two co-sponsors of the Women's March who were present at this speech.
At this one, right here.
Okay, and Democrats apparently had nothing to say about that.
They will be at the Women's March again.
The radicalism of the Democrats — there was a lot of talk about the alt-right in the last election cycle.
I think it was fully merited.
I was one of the people doing the talking.
The Democrats are equally radical when it comes to Louis Farrakhan.
They have a blind spot for anti-Semitism, so long as that anti-Semitism is coming from parts of the community that are not white.
So here is Louis Farrakhan doing more of this, just really disgusting stuff.
White folks are going down!
And Satan is going down!
And Farrakhan, by God's grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew!
And I'm here to say, Your time is up.
Your world is through.
I mean, the man's a pig.
I mean, he's one of the worst people on planet Earth.
This is the guy, Keith Ellison, who could have been the head of the DNC.
He was endorsed by Chuck Schumer to be the head of the DNC.
He was a member of the Nation of Islam.
He defended Louis Farrakhan for years.
The Congressional Black Caucus has defended Louis Farrakhan.
The Democrats are so radical that it's unlikely they would have the brains to actually triangulate with Trump, but their radicalism is also—they're allowed to get away with it.
There was a poll yesterday that showed 57% of Americans supposedly think Trump is a racist.
It's like 20% of Republicans and 80-plus percent of Democrats.
OK, how many people think that Louis Farrakhan is a racist and therefore the people who associate with him are racist?
The reason that people think that Trump is a racist is because of the associations with the alt-right during the last campaign and some of the comments that he's made.
Well, if you're going to hold a standard, that standard has to be held on both sides.
I don't see a lot of people in the media doing it.
Good on Jake Tapper for doing it.
OK, time for a quick thing I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
So, thing I like today, I'm in the middle of a book by Mikhail Bulgakov.
Mikhail Bulgakov was a guy who lived in the Soviet Union.
He died, I believe, in 1941.
But he'd written a book in secret that was essentially a parody of Stalin's Russia.
It was recommended to me, actually, by Jordan Peterson, and it's quite an interesting book.
I'm only about halfway through it, but it is a funny book.
Basically, the concept is that you are in Stalin's Russia, and suddenly Satan shows up and starts having conversations with all the people there.
And simultaneously, there's a retelling of the story of Jesus, not along biblical lines, but with parallels to what's going on in the Soviet Union.
It's an interesting book.
It's a well-written book.
It's a funny book.
As I say, I'm about halfway through it.
I look forward to giving you my full analysis of it when I finish the book, but Jordan has good taste in literature.
So, whatever Jordan recommends on literature, I'm always apt to read.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
All right, so let's begin with a flashback.
So in the 2012 election cycle, you will remember that the president of the United States at that point said that the 1980s had called him one of their foreign policy back because Mitt Romney said Russia was a geopolitical threat.
And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.
OK, and then Vladimir Putin today announced that he had developed invincible nuclear weapons that can hit anywhere in the world and cannot be stopped by missile defense systems.
So while the president of the United States, Obama, was sleeping on Russia, Russia not only interfered in our election, they also were building these weapons.
Now, President Trump has been a lot harsher on Russia.
He should be even harsher than that.
But, again, Democrats don't have a lot of ground to stand on when they talk about the Russian threat and then talk about how terrible Trump is on Russia.
OK, other things that I hate.
So Chuck Schumer—I talked about the radicalism of the Democrats on race.
Chuck Schumer demonstrated it full-scale yesterday.
So he was talking on the floor of the Senate about a judicial nominee that President Trump had put forward, and he issues just a blatantly racist statement, and everybody overlooks it because it's racism against white people.
The nomination of Marvin Quattlebaum speaks to the overall lack of diversity in President Trump's selections for the federal judiciary.
Mr. Quattlebaum replaces not one, but two scuttled Obama nominees who were African American.
It's long past time.
that the judiciary starts looking a lot more like the America it represents.
Having a diversity of views and experience on the federal bench is necessary for the equal administration of justice.
I'll be voting no on the Quattledown nomination.
Okay, this is quite disgusting.
What he is saying, of course, is that if you are white, you shouldn't have a judicial job.
If you are black, then you should have a judicial job.
He is judging people specifically based on the color of their skin and then suggesting, just as Justice Sotomayor once did, that if you are a wise Latina woman, you have a different perspective on the law.
The whole point of law is that it's supposed to be a rule of law, not of men or women.
You're not supposed to use your personal experience to decide cases.
You're not supposed to use your race to decide cases.
You're supposed to use the words of the law to decide cases.
Unfortunately, Democrats don't care about that any longer.
They've moved into this intersectional quagmire from which they're having difficulty escaping.
If they want Trump to win re-election, they should keep going with exactly this kind of stuff.
But if they also want the country to be ruined, they should continue to polarize this race from race and suggest that skin color should be the chief qualifier for being a federal judge.
Just insane.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow, and we'll have mailbag for you.
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.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection