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May 3, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:34
Stormy Weather | Ep. 531
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Rudy Giuliani breaks some interesting news about President Trump's payoff to Stormy Daniels, Hillary Clinton finally stumbles on a true statement accidentally, and Democrats are actually having some problems in the polls.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so there's a lot of breaking news on the Donald Trump Stormy Daniels front.
I'm going to break it all down for you.
I'm going to give you all the legal information that you need to understand exactly what's been happening with the Trump payoff to the porn star that Trump once had sex with and why this is important or why it's not important.
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Okay, so Rudy Giuliani is the newest member of the Trump legal team.
The Trump legal team has been seeing some turnover in recent days.
So Ty Cobb is no longer with the Trump legal team.
He takes his 366 lifetime batting average, and he leaves the Trump legal team.
Napoli Joy left along with him.
But he's being replaced by a guy who was instrumental in helping Bill Clinton fight impeachment charges and criminal charges.
So there is an upgrade, I think, in the legal house for President Trump.
But then Rudy Giuliani goes on TV.
And this is real weird.
Because, remember, that the whole Michael Cohen scandal is the one that is most likely to hurt President Trump.
The Trump-Russia collusion stuff, I really don't think that's going anywhere.
I think that it's very unlikely that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has any serious information that links President Trump to collusion with Russia over the election.
I think a lot of the talk about obstruction is going to be very, very difficult to prove.
It's more of a political matter than it is a criminal matter.
So I really doubt that Robert Mueller has the goods on President Trump.
And when I say really doubt, I mean, I would be astonished if he has the legal goods on President Trump, which is why he wants to interview President Trump, because he wants Trump to fall into a perjury trap.
He wants President Trump to lie to him, or fib to him, or make a mistake that reveals something to him.
So that means that if the real threat is not Robert Mueller to the Trump administration legally, then the real threat is from Michael Cohen.
So remember, Michael Cohen is the president's personal lawyer, and his offices a couple of weeks ago were raided by the FBI.
Now, the rationale for that raid was supposedly that the FBI was looking for proof of campaign finance violations in the Stormy Daniels payoff.
The going legal theory was this.
Michael Cohen had given $130,000 to Stormy Daniels to shut her up about an affair she had with Trump back in 2006.
It was right before the election.
And Trump said he knew nothing about it.
So the legal theory was that Michael Cohen had made an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign.
That the reason that he paid Stormy Daniels to shut up is because it was the very end of the campaign, and he wanted to protect his friend, and so therefore he paid off Stormy Daniels, and this was a campaign payment, essentially, a contribution that passes the $2,700 maximum amount that you're allowed to give, and so Michael Cohen had violated campaign finance law.
Now, if Trump had said, listen, I paid for it myself, Then you wouldn't have violated that particular campaign finance law, because Trump is allowed to spend as much on his own election as he wants.
Trump ended up spending something like $66 million in the last election cycle on his own elect effort.
So if he had said, listen, I paid off Stormy Daniels and that was my thing and I'm allowed to do that, that would have been totally fine.
So Michael Cohen was sort of on the hook in terms of the in-kind contribution question, But if Trump had paid for the thing directly and then revealed that to the FEC, that would have been no problem.
Which raises a second question.
Did Trump pay for it?
And if Trump did pay for it, does that get Michael Cohen off the hook?
Or does it sort of shift the blame from Cohen to Trump?
So here's what Rudy Giuliani said.
We'll talk about what Rudy Giuliani said last night.
Giuliani is, of course, a new member of the Trump legal team.
And we'll talk about what Rudy Giuliani said last night that was different and stunning and new.
And then we'll talk about the legal ramifications of what he said.
So he was on with Sean Hannity, and he said publicly that President Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payoff, which is new.
Because remember, flashback, Trump was asked directly by the media about whether he knew about the payoff to Stormy Daniels.
This is clip four.
And he said no.
Do you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?
And he says no.
It's hard to hear him there, but he says no.
So Giuliani says basically that's not true.
Trump paid off Stormy Daniels via Michael Cohen.
He at least reimbursed Michael Cohen.
Now, there's a little bit of wiggle room here, but it's kind of hard to believe.
The wiggle room here would be that Trump gave a bunch of money to Michael Cohen, not knowing what Michael Cohen was using the money for because he's just that kind of a dude.
No.
I mean, I don't buy it.
I just don't think that that passes the smell test.
But here's Rudy Giuliani explaining.
I knew how much money Donald Trump put into that campaign.
I said, $130,000?
He's going to do a couple of checks for $130,000.
When I heard Cohen's retainer of $35,000, when he was doing no work for the president, I said, that's how he's repaying it.
With a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes.
Okay, so the idea here is that Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen in the months after the payoff.
Okay, now that could actually be a problem.
Giuliani then continued, and he tried to backpedal.
So he tried to backpedal, he tried to say, listen, Trump paid, but he didn't know what he was paying for.
So Michael Cohen just sort of, he has sort of a slush fund and he uses it for what he wants to use it for.
So according to John Roberts over at Fox News, Giuliani said that while Donald Trump reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 Stormy Daniel payment, Maybe?
I kind of doubt it.
The White House obviously is in a little bit of chaos over this because they're not sure what legal strategy Giuliani and Trump are running together.
Folks at the White House seem to be out of the loop.
The White House was asked about this last night and here is what they had to say.
We've addressed this many times.
Sarah has done that from the podium.
I've done it on many shows.
Raj has done it as well.
But what I can tell you about this instance is it is ongoing legislation.
We have nothing to say about it.
The president has outside counsel, and that's who I'd have to refer you to.
OK, so they say it's ongoing litigation.
The problem is that it was ongoing litigation when Giuliani talked about it publicly.
So it's very weird that Giuliani is out there talking about this publicly.
So what exactly does all of this mean?
So there are three ways in which you could theoretically violate campaign finance law in this situation.
Way number one is that Michael Cohen gives an in-kind contribution to Trump by giving Stormy Daniels $130,000.
In this case, the violation is Michael Cohen's, right?
He's as a good friend going above and beyond what you're allowed to do in the middle of a campaign.
Now, Cohen's defense on this would be, listen, I'm friends with Trump.
I pay off his floozies all the time.
This had nothing to do with the campaign.
It's a little bit difficult to say that because Rudy Giuliani then came out and he actually said publicly That President Trump had wanted this done because it was October and this story shouldn't have broken right before the election.
So Giuliani is not doing the president any favors by running his mouth.
But the original problem here was Michael Cohn's problem, not Trump's.
The original problem here was that Michael Cohn might have violated campaign finance law by giving too much money to the campaign, even if you considered that a campaign contribution, which it may or may not have been.
Okay, now Trump steps in and he says, no, it was me, right?
I paid off.
Michael Cohen.
So it's not Cohen on the line anymore, now it's me on the line.
Well, yes and no.
So there's two ways to read the law.
Way number one is to say, okay, Michael Cohen was basically just a cutout, Trump was paying Stormy Daniels, Trump's allowed to pay Stormy Daniels, but this puts Trump in a little bit of hot water because he didn't report the contribution to his own campaign to the FEC.
So Trump, theoretically, if he had paid, let's say there had been no Michael Cohen, he just paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to shut up before the election and then not reported that to the FEC, would that be a campaign finance violation?
So, maybe yes, maybe no.
The case for yes is that it's right before the election, it's a payoff that's meant to shut somebody up right before the election, it sounds like it's a payoff to shut somebody up right before the election, Okay, so that's possibility number one right now in terms of campaign finance violations for Trump.
reported it.
The counter is Trump pays people off all the time, exactly as the counter would have been for Michael Cohen.
Okay, so that's possibility number one right now in terms of campaign finance violations for Trump.
Possibility number two is that Michael Cohen is not actually off the hook.
So the popular theory is that Cohen was off the hook now that Trump has said he paid for it, but not utterly clear.
So George Conway, who's Kellyanne Conway's husband and who is in fact a prosecutor, he says, he tweeted out a section from the FEC website talking about personal gifts and loans.
Quote, if any person, including a relative or friend of the candidate, gives or loans the candidate money for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office, the funds are not considered personal funds of the candidate, even if they are given to the candidate directly.
Instead, the gift or loan is considered a contribution from the donor to the campaign, subject to the per-election limit.
In other words, even if Michael Cohen paid off Stormy Daniels and was reimbursed by Trump, that is now considered a loan to the campaign by Michael Cohen, which surpasses the amount of money he was allowed to contribute, so he may still be in trouble.
He still may have made an unlawful campaign contribution to President Trump.
Now, all of this sounds like it should be secondary to the major issue, which is that the President of the United States was paying off a porn star in the middle of the election cycle and then lying about it to the American public for months.
This is a serious moral problem.
But this is not going to damage Trump in any way, realistically speaking, because everybody knows what Trump is.
So it's funny, the left today, they're saying, well, you know, why isn't the right turning on Trump?
The right isn't turning on Trump because—is anyone shocked by this?
Is anyone surprised?
I didn't believe for one solitary second that Trump had not paid off Stormy Daniels.
I don't believe for one solitary second that Trump didn't screw Stormy Daniels.
I am sure he did.
I don't believe for a solitary second that Trump has clean hands in all of this.
But why is that surprising?
I mean, he's Donald Trump.
This goes to my strong market sufficiency theorem about President Trump.
Which is that President Trump, everything is priced in.
All the garbage, all the nonsense, all of it is priced in.
So if Trump's at 49% in the approval ratings right now, and he's somewhere in the 40s, All of this is priced in.
None of this is really going to damage him in any serious way, just as the Monica Lewinsky scandal only damaged President Clinton a little bit because everybody already knew that Bill Clinton was scum with women.
So this is not a real shock at all.
But nonetheless, the media are treating this like a major revelation because, in fact, it is a serious problem for law, right?
I mean, there could actually be a prosecution on the basis of this for campaign finance violations, although The predicate for such prosecutions is pretty slim.
Remember, John Edwards was prosecuted for something very similar after he did the same thing in the 2008 election cycle.
If you recall, John Edwards had a mistress, he impregnated his mistress, and then he had his donors give a million dollars to shut her up.
He was prosecuted on six counts federally.
There's a hung jury and then the charges were dropped.
Presumably this would be a very, very similar case, although it's for a lot less money.
And if you're talking about people violating the extent of the campaign finance regulations, Barack Obama Well, everybody on the left is suggesting this is the downfall of Trump.
I really highly doubt that.
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So the White House is apparently in a little bit of chaos over all of what Giuliani has had to say.
So, according to Politico, Giuliani joined Trump's legal team with a mandate to quickly and aggressively stamp out the various investigations dogging the presidency.
Instead, he's causing new migraines for the White House.
Giuliani appeared to stun Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night by revealing that Trump reimbursed his personal lawyer, Michael Cohn, for a $130,000 payment Cohn had made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels for her silence about an alleged affair.
The statement, along with Giuliani's comment that Trump didn't know about the general arrangements of the payment, Appeared to contradict the President's denial of any knowledge of the deal.
Now, the difference here, of course, is that President Clinton committed perjury.
Trump may have lied, but he didn't commit perjury because he wasn't in any testimony, right?
He wasn't testifying before Congress.
He hadn't talked to the FBI yet.
Just another reason why you should not have the President speaking to Robert Mueller and the FBI.
If you do, the chances that he fibs, at least a little bit, are 197% out of a possible 100%.
Okay, the chances that Trump says something that is wrong in those hearings— I've been talking with some folks from the White House, and what I've been saying is, look, if Trump is subpoenaed by Robert Mueller, all he should do is go in and say, I don't recall.
Whenever you watch the movies and you see people say, I don't recall, the reason that that sounds like an admission of guilt is because you think that they're trying to escape the truth.
But in Trump's case, the reason that you would say, I don't recall, is because you can't actually be prosecuted for saying, I don't recall, and Trump is likely to step on his own toes.
And I'm using toes euphemistically there.
The president of the United States has a bad habit of saying things that get in his own way.
And so you don't want him in a room with with Robert Mueller for 12 hours talking about Stormy Daniels.
The chances of some sort of perjury charge coming out of that are a lot higher than Trump just going in and saying, I don't remember.
Right.
This is what any lawyer would say, by the way.
This has nothing to do with PR.
The PR spin is a completely different spin.
But the lawyerly spin of any client that I had as a lawyer, if they were in this sort of situation, I would tell them, you don't talk to anyone, right?
This is the first rule of lawyering.
If you're ever arrested by the police, okay, I'm not talking about whether you're innocent or guilty here.
I'm talking about good legal strategy.
If you are ever arrested by the police, or if the FBI comes to talk to you, your first answer is always going to be, I need my lawyer.
And your second answer is going to be, I don't know.
I don't recall.
I plead the fifth.
Talking to the people who are presumably going to prosecute you is never a particularly smart move.
Okay, this is not me playing OJ Simpson's lawyer here.
This is me just saying that any lawyer worth their salt would say the exact same thing about any client they had under any circumstances.
Okay, so, meanwhile, damage control is underway at the White House.
So, Trump on Twitter has tried to bring attention back to the argument that such a payment would not be a violation of campaign finance law.
So this morning, President Trump is tweeting about it.
Then he tweets, Clearly, Trump has his lawyer actually tweeting for him in this case.
I mean, this is clearly not Trump tweeting.
It's obvious from the grammar.
It's obvious from the syntax.
But that's fine.
I mean, what he's saying here, he's making his case.
a private contract between two parties known as a non-disclosure agreement or NDA.
Clearly Trump has his lawyer actually tweeting for him in this case.
I mean, this is clearly not Trump tweeting.
And he just, it's obvious from the grammar, it's obvious from the syntax, but that's fine.
I mean, what he's saying here, he's making his case.
He says these agreements are very common among celebrities and people of wealth.
Okay, well, I mean, to be fair, NDAs where you pay off porn stars for having sex with them while your wife was just recovering from a pregnancy, is it very common among celebrities and people of wealth?
I mean, it might be like some of them do it, but I'm not going to pretend that everybody does it.
In this case, it is full force in effect and will be used in arbitration for damages against Ms.
Clifford Daniels.
The agreement was used to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair, despite already having signed a detailed letter admitting there was no affair.
Okay now, it is important to note here, she signed that detailed letter admitting there is no affair under the terms of the settlement agreement.
Prior to its violation by Ms.
Clifford and her attorney, this was a private agreement.
Money from the campaign or campaign contributions played no role in this transaction.
Okay, so all of that is, you know, that's Trump's case, right?
And then that goes to the legal case that I was talking about.
The suggestion is by Trump that he was just giving Michael Cohen a bunch of money, didn't know where that money was going.
Michael Cohen then used that money out of the goodness of his heart, having nothing to do with the campaign, right?
That's the way that everybody escapes legal liability here.
It doesn't help Trump in the PR war, but I'm not sure Trump needs help in the PR war, because, again, Trump is Trump.
I mean, you can clock the guy with 87 porn star charges, and no one is going to care, because everybody already assumes he's doing all of this stuff.
So White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders went on Fox & Friends.
He said, I think this is a distraction and a distraction to the American people.
I think it's a real disservice to them about not hearing about a lot of great things taking place in the administration.
Well, that would be true, except for the fact that Giuliani was sent out there by Trump to say things on Hannity.
Again, I agreed.
There's a lot of great stuff happening inside the administration.
For example, here's a news story that nobody is talking about today because we're all talking about Rudy Giuliani.
Three Americans held in North Korea could be freed soon.
Trump tweeted out yesterday, As everybody is aware, the past administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean labor camp, but to no avail.
Stay tuned.
So there's solid rumors today that North Korea is going to release these three people in the run-up to their negotiations with the president of the United States.
Trump was apparently referring to Tony Kim, also known as Kim Sang-duk, an American teacher detained by North Korea in April 2017.
Kim Hak-song, known as Jing Ju-song, whose detention was announced the following month.
And Kim Dong-chul, who was arrested in 2015.
They right now are supposed to be in a North Korean labor camp.
So, now it appears that the North Koreans may in fact be working to release these three Americans.
Is that a Trump triumph?
Well, without any other information, sure, of course it is.
I mean, without any other information, of course it's a Trump triumph.
Now, if Trump makes a bunch of concessions to the North Koreans based on that, then of course it's not a triumph, but this is a very good story for Trump.
Just on its face, it's a very good story for Trump.
But the fact that Giuliani decided to run out there and talk openly about the Stormy Daniels payment is a distraction created by the White House, and it just gives more air to people like Michael Avenatti, who is, of course, the attorney for Stormy Daniels.
Avenatti has appeared in the last month 59 times on CNN.
59 times.
The previous record had been held by Adam Schiff at like 10.
But apparently, Michael Avenatti now has actually rented out the green room.
Like, he actually has a bathroom there.
He's brought in a sleeping bag.
He basically just hangs out on the set at CNN waiting for Trump to say stuff.
And so Michael Avenatti on MSNBC yesterday, he's also on MSNBC a lot, he says that he was speechless about Giuliani's revelations.
You know, obviously he believes that this gives more impetus to his claims that Trump was innately involved with the Stormy Daniels payoff and that it was a campaign finance violation.
You know, I have to tell you, I am rarely, as your viewers know, rendered speechless, but I am absolutely speechless at this revelation and this admission.
And I hope that your viewers and I hope the American people, upon hearing this and watching that clip, they should be outraged.
Okay, I'm not sure why they should be outraged except for the fact that Trump lied, but again, is anyone shocked by the fact that Trump lied about sex?
Like, again, do I think it's bad?
Yes.
It's so funny.
We're now repeating the exact arguments from the 90s.
So, the Democrats used to say in the 90s about President Clinton's sexual peccadilloes, it's just about sex.
And then Republicans would say, no, it's about lying.
And the Democrats would say, well, everybody lies about sex.
Well now just reverse the parties and you have the exact same argument being made.
Republicans saying it's just about sex and Democrats saying, well no, he lied about the sex.
And Republicans are saying, well everybody lies about the sex.
Okay, here's the reality.
Not everybody lies about the sex.
Trump is not good when it comes to women.
He's a very immoral man when it comes to his treatment of women in his personal life.
He has been for 40 years.
Okay, that's nothing new.
But that's the point.
It's nothing new.
OK?
End of story.
So is that going to have any serious impact on him politically?
Probably not, unless something criminal is on the back of this, which I seriously doubt.
Again, I don't think that the case is quite solid enough.
Now, meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani wasn't just talking about that.
Rudy Giuliani seems to be setting up the possibility that President Trump is going to fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and then fire Robert Mueller along with him.
I don't think that Trump is going to do that.
I don't think Trump should do that.
But Rudy Giuliani is speaking in Rather militant tones about about Robert Mueller.
It's pretty amazing, actually.
Here's Giuliani yesterday saying that saying that saying that, well, first of all, Rudy Giuliani did say that Robert Mueller was obviously trying to trap Trump into perjury.
And then he was trying to say that Trump fired Comey over over his failure to clear Trump of Russia.
This, of course, is my theory all along.
The reason that Giuliani talking about all this, being not particularly useful, is because all of this is going to come out in the wash.
I really believe that if the administration just sits, and they just sit and they wait, and they don't try to force things, that Mueller has no evidence that Trump fired James Comey to cover anything up, because Trump wasn't actually trying to cover anything up.
This has been my contention all along.
The reason that Trump fired James Comey is because he was pissed that James Comey wouldn't clear him on Russia.
And I don't mean that he wouldn't shut down the investigation, but that he wouldn't say publicly that Trump wasn't under investigation.
Trump has basically said as much.
Well, Giuliani reiterated that last night.
He fired Comey because Comey would not, among other things, say that he wasn't a target of the investigation.
He's entitled to that.
Hillary Clinton got that.
And he couldn't get that.
So he fired him, and he said, I'm free of this guy.
And he went on Lester Holt.
Lester Holt's interview was as good as anybody could do, better than I think any of the people around Mueller could have done.
Lester Holt asked him, why'd you do it?
He said, I did it because I felt that I had to explain to the American people their president was not the target of the investigation.
Okay, now that is obviously true, what Giuliani is saying here.
But rehashing this entire case, you could see this easily as President Trump sending Giuliani out there to make the case that there's nothing for Mueller to find, so we ought to fire Mueller.
And Giuliani went further than this.
He said James Comey is a liar.
He calls him a pervert, which is really interesting.
So here's Giuliani going after James Comey hammer and tongs.
I know James Comey.
I know the president.
Sorry, Jim, you're a liar.
A disgraceful liar.
Every FBI agent in America has his head down because of you.
Well, he lied about his conversation with McCabe.
He knew all of McCabe's conflicts.
McCabe should testify against him.
He lied about his conversations with the president.
He lied about the fact that they talked about whether the president was a subject or a target.
Then he immediately changed it.
OK, so the reality is that when James Comey, the one thing he lied about is the idea that he didn't leak to his friend.
He obviously leaked to his friend.
That's James Comey's biggest lie.
But in terms of general honesty, I don't think that James Comey is a giant liar.
I just think that James Comey is rather spineless.
I think that James Comey is a guy who at every step of the way was madly incompetent and made a lot of mistakes, and then is acting righteously indignant after he was fired for, I think, pretty decent reason.
But the question is why Giuliani is doing all of this now, and the answer may be that Maybe, in fact, Trump is thinking of firing Mueller.
Now, if that's the case, Mr. President, please do not do this.
Do not do this.
It will all be OK.
Don't rush the game.
And the fact is that Robert Mueller is going to come out one way or another with something or nothing.
If he comes out with the stuff as weak as it sounds like he's going to come out with, everybody on the right and people in the middle are going to say this is a big, fat nothing.
This has been a witch hunt.
This has been a waste of time.
It's been a waste of money.
Firing him precipitously would only allow the left to claim that you are, in fact, obstructing justice by shutting down the investigation.
Don't shut this down precipitously.
I don't think that it's that Mueller has a right to finish his investigation.
He doesn't.
I mean, the fact is the president can fire him, and that would be perfectly legal.
And then it would be up to Mueller to show that it actually was obstruction, that this actually was an attempt to shut down an investigation, not just pure frustration on Trump's part.
But if the idea here is to set the sort of framework for Trump firing Mueller, firing Rosenstein, I think that'd be a big political mistake.
And I don't think the president needs to follow that right now.
I don't think the president needs to make that sort of political mistake, because I think the president's doing OK.
I mean, his approval ratings right now are as good as they've been.
The Democrats continue to flounder.
And there's a new pullout yesterday showing the Democrats are only up three on the congressional generic ballot.
That's an incredible thing.
Why exactly are they only up three?
Part of it is because President Trump's economy is so fantastic.
I mean, the economy under President Trump has been excellent.
Part of it is the fact that the Democrats suck at everything, and the Democrats are so radical.
So this is an amazing thing.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton was out there talking about, again, why she didn't win in 2016.
And it's everybody else's fault.
It's not Hillary Clinton's fault.
But she stumbled on something true.
She stumbled on something true.
And it's pretty amazing.
So here's Hillary Clinton admitting that the entire Democratic base, or at least large swaths of it, are full-scale socialists who hate capitalism.
You may be the only presidential candidate since World War II that actually had to stand up and say, I am a capitalist.
And you did.
Did it hurt you?
Probably.
I mean, you know, it's hard to know, but I mean, if you're in the Iowa caucuses and 41% of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I'm asked, are you a capitalist?
And I say yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability, you know, that probably gets lost in the, oh my gosh, she's a capitalist!
Okay, so this is exactly right, actually.
What she is saying here, that her base cannot tolerate the fact that she is a capitalist, demonstrates how far left the Democratic Party has moved.
Hillary Clinton was too right-wing for her own base, which is why they didn't show up.
What we're watching inside the Democratic Party is a radical shift to the left.
President Trump has taken advantage of that, because President Trump is not nearly as radical on any of these issues.
The Democrats, their response to President Trump has not been to moderate, to move to the center, to take back that center that they think that Trump had abandoned.
They've been calling Trump far-right.
Trump has been governing as a very conservative president.
Instead of them moving to the center to try to take advantage, which is what a smart political party would do, instead the Democrats have been moving further and further to the left.
This is the first time that Hillary Clinton has really recognized that she may be out of step with her own constituency.
And she is out of step with her own constituency.
Something really bad is happening in the United States among people on the left, and that is this wild, this full-scale embrace of socialism itself.
There's a poll from Rasmussen.
It shows that 46% of Americans now say they favor government-guaranteed jobs for all.
So according to Rasmussen reports, Senator Bernie Sanders is looking ahead to the 2020 presidential election with a proposed federal government program that guarantees all Americans a job with health insurance.
Nearly half of voters like the idea.
46% of voters say that they like all of this, that they think this is a great idea.
That's an amazing, amazing statistic.
And again, it demonstrates that the American people are being ill-served by their thought leaders who refuse to explain to them why capitalism is good.
The reason that Hillary Clinton could not be a good representative of capitalism is because she really does not believe in capitalism in any serious sense.
She believes that capitalism is effective, but she doesn't believe that capitalism is moral.
And so Bernie Sanders comes along and he seizes her entire base by saying, listen, capitalism may be effective, but it is immoral.
And Hillary Clinton is immoral.
And anyone who backs capitalism is immoral.
This is why it's incumbent on Americans to stand up and say no to socialism and say that socialism itself is immoral.
Because socialism itself is immoral.
The idea that you were born and therefore you deserve crap from the government is nonsense.
The idea that you sit there and you exist and therefore everyone who is around you ought to give you things.
That is a purely selfish idea.
It is immoral.
It's a violation of at least three of the Ten Commandments.
The Ten Commandments include the idea that you're not supposed to worship government as God.
They include the ban on theft.
It is indeed theft if you and your friends vote to steal my money.
And the Ten Commandments ban jealousy.
You're not allowed to envy your neighbor's donkey.
You're not supposed to be looking at your friend's property and eyeing it for seizure.
But because people have stopped speaking in moral terms, there's an upswing on the socialist left, and that upswing ended up toppling Hillary Clinton.
It was a serious problem for Hillary Clinton.
The radicalization of the left is a serious problem for the Democratic Party in general, not just for Hillary Clinton.
I'll explain that in just a second.
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So the same radicalization of the Democratic Party that threw Hillary Clinton out of power is also leading to a bit of a backslide for Democrats in terms of their reach, particularly for young people.
So according to a new poll from Reuters, enthusiasm for the Democratic Party is actually waning among millennials as its candidates head into the crucial midterm congressional elections.
The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters aged 18 to 34 shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years to 46% overall, and they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.
Now, nearly two-thirds of young voters say they don't like Trump, but their distaste for him does not extend to all Republicans, which presents a potential problem for Democrats who are counting on millennials as a core constituency, because Democrats have moved really far to the left, Millennials are looking at the Democrats' identity politics, and they're looking at the Democrats' full-scale Bernie Sanders socialism, and they're not quite as enchanted as maybe they once were as the economy booms.
And they certainly don't like the identity politics of all this, which I'm going to get to in one second.
But the bleed over for Democrats, Democrats figured, OK, well, maybe our coalition is fractious, but Trump should unify that coalition because everybody hates Trump.
It ain't happening.
The polls aren't showing this.
Terry Hood, 34, an African-American who works at a Dollar General store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said he voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, but he'll consider a Republican for Congress because he believes the party is making it easier to find jobs, and he applauds the recent Republican-led tax cut.
So the Reuters, Ipsos poll surveyed young voters during the first three months of this year and the same period in 2016.
Only 28% of those polls expressed overt support for Republicans in the 2018 poll, about the same percentage as two years earlier.
But that doesn't mean that everybody's going to show up to back Democrats.
So Democrats, once again, So much of our politics right now revolves around President Trump and what the Republicans are doing because they run the government.
The reality is that just as in 2016, the Democrats lost because the Democrats were terrible, in 2018, the Democrats could easily lose because the Democrats are terrible.
There's another poll out there, by the way, that should be shocking to a lot of folks on the left, and that is that their identity politics are not working increasingly among young black men.
So according to a poll taken on April 22, 2018, Trump's approval rating among black men was at 11%.
The same poll a week later pegged the approval rating at 22%.
So, it should be noted that the margin of error there?
is pretty significant, considering that there are only about 200 black males each week who are surveyed by the Reuters running poll.
But Trump is experiencing a jump in approval among black people overall.
It spiked 8.9% from 8.9% April 22nd to 16.5% on April 29th.
Black males were also far more likely to say that they had mixed feelings about the president on the 22nd.
1.5% said they had mixed feelings.
on April 29th.
Black males were also far more likely to say that they had mixed feelings about the president.
On the 22nd, 1.5% said they had mixed feelings.
7.1% said the same on the 29th.
So it's very possible, by the way, that a lot of this is due to Kanye West saying, "Listen, you're allowed to think for yourselves, "and it doesn't mean that you're a bad black person "if you decide that you want to vote for President Trump "or that you like Republicans." I think that the crack in the wall that Kanye West actually presented was an important cultural moment.
So, I'm not saying, again, Kanye West is a conservative thought leader because I don't think he is.
I'm not saying that Kanye West knows that much about politics, because I don't think he does.
I'm saying that Kanye West ain't kooky, because I think that Kanye West's a pretty kooky guy.
But Kanye West, a major cultural figure, standing up and saying, listen, you don't have to think the way the left wants you to think, is breaking down a significant barrier for a lot of people.
And as my friend Eric Weinstein, who I will correct this, he's a Harvard Theoretical mathematician.
When he said that there are a lot of people whose preferences are being hidden by the prevailing politically correct orthodoxy, and that Kanye had shattered that politically correct orthodoxy, or at least cracked the wall, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
And the polls are showing it.
I think people are tired of the identity politics.
I think people are bored with the identity politics.
I think people want to have conversations.
I'm seeing it in my own life.
I'm seeing it in my own life.
People who I would not have been able to have conversations with Three years ago, suddenly are interested in talking seriously about political issues that afflict the country because they are tired of being boxed into this area where if you talk to somebody who is just a mainstream conservative, this somehow makes you bad.
Now, I'm not a person who believes that all views are created equally valid or equally useful or that everybody has to talk with everybody, but I do think that it's important that for people who have mainstream views to talk to each other, And not consider each other evil or bad or terrible.
That is a useful thing and not only a useful thing, a necessary thing if we hope the country survives.
I think increasingly that's happening.
Something is changing.
You can feel it in the air.
You can feel it in the air.
You can feel that there's a whole group, particularly of young people, who are tired of the pat answers being given by parties on all sides.
They're tired of the tribalism.
They're tired of the idea on the right that everything that President Trump does ever is wonderful and great.
But they're much more tired on the left.
Of the idea that everything they say has to be boxed into a particular little group identity.
I don't want to harp on Kanye West too much, but I do think that what we're watching right now is something really, really important.
And I think that it's important to note it as it happens.
I don't think that everybody in the black community is suddenly going to agree with Kanye West about taxes, or certainly about his comments on slavery.
I don't think everybody in the black community is going to agree with Candace Owens.
But I do think that when people see major cultural figures saying, listen, I can have a conversation with anybody and you're allowed to, I think that's breaking the mold.
It's changing things.
And that's having a market impact insofar as our elections.
Pretty incredible stuff.
So, meanwhile, speaking of that, speaking of the left to overreach, we talked a little bit this week about the crazy controversy that had broken out over this Utah girl who had worn a historically Chinese dress to a prom.
And the left went nuts.
The hard left said that this girl had done something deeply wrong.
It was cultural appropriation.
It was terrible in every way.
How could she?
She's a bad person.
And she refused to apologize, as well she should.
Showing, once again, that strong people should not apologize in the face of overwhelming pressure when they are right.
She was not wrong.
Now, here's the part that's hilarious.
It just goes to show that the identity politics of the left, I think, is boring people.
There's an article from the New York Times, and here's the title of it.
Prom dress that caused a furor in US draws head scratching in China.
Okay, so in other words, there are a bunch of people in China and they have no idea why this is even remotely controversial.
So Chinese people are looking at this high school girl wearing a historically Chinese dress, and they're going, so what?
Like, why is that bad?
Like, great, now we can sell more prom dresses.
What's the big problem here?
Here's the article.
When Kezia Daum wore a Chinese-style dress to her high school prom in Utah, it set off an uproar, but not because of its tight fit or thigh-high slit.
After Ms.
Dahlma 18 shared pictures on social media of her prom night, a Twitter user named Jeremy Lamb hotly responded in a post that has been retweeted nearly 42,000 times.
My culture is not your prom dress, he wrote, adding profanity for effect.
I'm proud of my culture for it simply to be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience is parallel to colonial ideology.
Okay, but when the Fuhrer reached Asia, many seemed to be scratching their heads.
This is the New York Times reporting, not the Daily Wire, right?
Far from being critical of Ms.
Dallam, who is not Chinese, many people in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan proclaimed her choice of the traditional high-neck dress as a victory for Chinese culture.
Quote.
I am very proud to have our culture recognized by people in other countries," said someone called Snail Trail, commenting on a post of the Utah episode by a popular account on WeChat.
It's ridiculous to criticize this as cultural appropriation.
Zhao Yijun, a Hong Kong-based cultural commentator, said in a telephone interview, from the perspective of a Chinese person, if a foreign woman wears a qipao and thinks she looks pretty, why shouldn't she wear it?
If anything, the uproar surrounding Ms.
Dalm's dress prompted many Chinese to reflect on examples of cultural appropriation in their own country.
So does that mean when we celebrate Christmas and Halloween it's also cultural appropriation?
Asked one WeChat user, Larissa.
Others were quick to point out that the kipow, as it is known in China, was introduced by the Manchus, an ethnic minority group from China's northeast, implying that the garment was itself appropriated by the majority Han Chinese.
In its original form, the dress was worn in a baggy style mostly by upper-class women during the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China for more than 250 years until 1912.
It was only in the 1920s and 30s.
When Western influence began seeping into China, that the kipow was reinvented to become a seductive body-hugging dress that many think of today.
For many cinephiles, it has become inextricably associated with Maggie Cheung, the actress who wore a stunning array of cheongsangs in War Kai-Wei's 2000 film In the Mood for Love.
These days, it's rare to see Chinese women wearing kipows in the street.
Western fast fashion has taken over.
So in other words, people are wearing each other's clothing from their different cultures, and no one cares.
But the fact that the left They have to declare Kanye West appropriated by the white community.
The fact that they have to declare this girl from Utah a cultural imperialist is an amazing thing.
It's an amazing thing.
And it's driving people out of their arms.
The crazier they are, the more people are going to be listening to shows like mine.
The crazier they are, the more people are going to say, really guys, this is the best you have to offer?
The more the left lies about the idea that we're not brothers, the more the left suggests that we're not brothers and sisters, we're enemies who have to be boxed off into our own little ghettos and we can't talk with each other and we can't look at stuff in each other's culture and say, wow, that's pretty cool, let's do some of that.
The more we do that, the more people say, well, hold on a second, hold up.
So you're saying that According to the left, you're saying, I can't wear a Chinese-style dress, but it is better if I import products from China and people from China into the United States as a general rule.
So you want us to bring people here, but then you don't want us to assimilate to some of their culture and then to assimilate to some of our culture.
You don't want any of that.
You don't want any of the cross-cultural exchange.
McDonald's is cultural imperialism, but it's very good when a bunch of illegal immigrants come into the country and don't learn to speak English.
That's a great thing, according to the left.
That's unreasonable.
It's an unreasonable position.
And there are too many people in America who are reasonable to fall prey to the stupidity of this nonsense from the left.
So, good for them.
Good for Kanye.
Good for this girl for not bowing to politically correct pressure.
And again, I think that kudos to the left for being as crazy as they are, because without them, I think Republicans would be losing a lot more elections.
Okay, time for a thing I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Yesterday I did a Tower of Power song, and I referenced another Tower of Power song, so we'll do that other one.
What is Hip, which is their best song.
I don't know why.
I'm on a Tower of Power kick.
I'm on a funk kick.
So here is Tower of Powers, What is Hip?
We'll be right back.
Okay, so Salas, South Carolina.
So check out Tower of Power.
It's amazing how little music has changed in the last 50 years.
Like, really, this is not that different from a lot of the music that's being released today.
There's been kind of a stagnation, I think, in a lot of the music world.
Funk is coming back, and you can hear the sort of riffs of Tower of Power in a lot of today's modern music.
It sounds very similar, actually, in certain ways.
What was that song that I played a while back that's It had all of the hidden references, the Easter eggs in the video.
Oh, forget it.
I'll talk about it later.
But in any case, you can hear the cultural influences of Tower of Power resonating still, just like you can hear earth, wind, and fire in a lot of modern music as well.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So I'd be remiss if I did not discuss the situation that arose yesterday with Alex Jones.
So this is just, frankly, hysterically funny.
So yesterday, there was an announcement by Alex Jones that Candace Owens and Kanye West were going to appear on his show.
And I tweeted out, no.
No, God, no, basically, right?
No, Kanye.
No, no.
It was a joke, right?
Like, don't do it.
Don't go out and don't do Alex's show.
Alex is a crazy person, right?
Alex Jones is a nut job.
Alex Jones is a guy who thinks that the frogs are being turned gay purposefully by the government.
Alex Jones is a guy who suggested that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation.
Alex Jones is a crazy, he's a crazy person.
He's a crazy human, okay?
And I don't mean that in a clinical sense.
I just mean that I look at him and, um, what?
So, and I don't think that I'm out of bounds in saying this, right?
I mean, if you spend any time listening to Alex Jones, this is not somebody who seems like all the, all of the lights are on in the attic, shall we say.
Well, Alex Jones got very angry at me for saying that Kanye West should not do his show because it would be a bad move for Kanye West.
Okay, Kanye right now is trying to do the whole, let's have a reasonable conversation with reasonable people, let's all get together.
Why would he want to fringe himself out by going on Alex Jones' show?
Now, there are people who say, well, what Kanye West is really arguing is that every argument should be let in the front door.
Everybody should have a conversation.
Okay, I don't think that's what Kanye West is arguing.
Maybe he is.
Maybe he is.
If so, then he should make that clearer.
I also think that Kanye West would easily be seen as a guy who had fringed himself out the minute that he went on Alex Jones.
So if his goal is to open doors, I think he closed his doors by doing Alex Jones' show.
That was my basic argument.
It's the reason why I would never do Alex Jones' show, because I think that Alex Jones, again, is a kook and a fringe fellow.
This is not a newfound belief.
Go back to my interview with Piers Morgan back in 2012.
It came right after Alex Jones had done an interview with Piers Morgan.
And one of the first things Piers Morgan tries to do is lump me in with Alex Jones.
And I say, I'm not Alex Jones, nor do I agree with Alex Jones on many things.
Okay, so, this drove Alex to a distraction yesterday, apparently, on his show.
I was hearing about this.
And he did an impression of me on his show.
All I can say is, spot on, dude.
Just spot on.
I mean, just eerily, eerily good.
Here is Alex Jones doing his Ben Shapiro impersonation.
I'm Shapiro, and I'm very smart.
I measure my words very carefully.
So, you went down to the border.
You're not Ben Shapiro, Millie Weaver.
What'd you do, huh?
Everyone who's listening right now, please, please share the video.
Get the word out there.
People need... And so, a bunch of people are now jumping onto the caravan, and you're gonna have more and more and more people showing up at the border, trying to fraudulently gain entrance into the United... Bye-bye, Ben Shapiro.
Bye-bye.
Can I go potty during the break?
My God, it's like looking in a mirror.
I mean, just like the impersonation is so spot on.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, listen, I'm as critical of myself as the next guy, right?
I will say that I have the second most annoying voice in America after Michelle Wolf, but I really don't think that's a very good impersonation by Alex.
I feel like Alex can do better.
Alex, I think you need to up your game a little bit.
I mean, I'm not one to talk about my impersonation skills, but I will say that my Alex Jones is significantly better than Alex Jones' Ben Shapiro.
So here's a flashback.
This episode, what, was two years ago, maybe?
And here's me doing my Alex Jones impersonation a couple of years ago.
This guy, by the way, is considered a leading Trump ally, Alex Jones.
I don't know why!
I can't understand it!
Look at this!
Look what's underneath here!
It's another shirt!
Why?!
Why?!
Because I don't want to go to the cleaners that often, that's why.
Come on.
Okay, so...
So, by the way, the best Alex Jones impersonation is actually Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan does a fantastic Alex Jones impersonation.
But, you know, all of this is crazy and just another evidence that we are living in an alternative universe constructed by aliens in order to torture us.
So, I don't know why any of this is happening, but I both love and hate it because it's really funny.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
So, The New York Times has an editorial today saying Mahmoud Abbas has to go.
Mahmoud Abbas, of course, is the leader of the Palestinian Authority.
He is now in his 14th year of a four-year term.
So he's a dictator.
He was elected, I believe, back in 2004, and he's been there ever since.
He made a speech the other day in which he suggested the Holocaust was the fault of the Juden, which is not a shock because Mahmoud Abbas is a lifelong anti-Semite.
Which is also not a shock, because the Palestinian Authority is an organization that is anti-semitically devoted to the destruction of the Jewish state and the murder of Jews.
Which is also not a surprise, because this has been a program among Palestinian leadership for as long as there has been a Palestinian leadership.
So that is not really a shocker.
What's hilarious is the New York Times coming out and saying, Abbas has to go, because he's really brought shame upon the Palestinian leadership.
Oh, you mean their grand legacy of people like Yasser Arafat?
You mean the grand legacy of Hamas being the government in charge of the Gaza Strip?
Yeah, like, I agree, Mahmoud Abbas is a poop show, but I am not sure why that is any different than the leadership of the Palestinian Authority over its entire history, nor why Israel should be making concessions to a group of terrorists who lead a purported government.
Alrighty, so, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the legal updates and all the rest.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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