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June 11, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

51:35

The Art Of The Deal | Ep. 557

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Time	Text
	Donald Trump goes international.
	He hobnobs at the G7 and he hangs out with Kim Jong-un.
	We have all the latest.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Many things to discuss here today.
	The Tony Awards also happened.
	We also have to talk about this insane editorial from the Washington Post from a professor of gender studies.
	Shocker.
	But first, I want to explain that we have a couple of things coming up.
	So tomorrow, June 12th, 7 p.m.
	Eastern, for your viewing pleasure, not for our doing pleasure, we are doing a special live stream in honor of Father's Day.
	Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring hosts a roundtable discussion with me, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Molls.
	Plus, we have special guests Alfonso Rachel and Nick Searcy.
	We're going to discuss the role of fathers in our society.
	So a lot of fathers, plus Michael Mowles.
	We'll be live streaming on Facebook and YouTube.
	And if you're a Daily Wire subscriber, go to dailywire.com to submit live questions to us, which will be moderated by Alicia Krauss.
	Again, that is tomorrow, Tuesday, June 12th, 7 p.m.
	Eastern, 4 p.m.
	Pacific.
	And do not miss it.
	Plus, our next episode of The Conversation is almost here, so on Tuesday, June 19th at 5.30 p.m., 2.30 p.m.
	Pacific, all of your questions will be answered by me.
	Wait, I'm doing one of these again?
	Okay.
	With our host, Alicia Krauss.
	Our live Q&A will be available on YouTube and Facebook for everybody to watch, but only DailyWire subscribers can ask me questions in real time.
	To submit those questions, log into DailyWire.com, head over to the conversation page to watch the live stream, type your question into the DailyWire chat box to have it read and answered on air again.
	You have to subscribe to ask me those live questions on Tuesday, June 19th at 5.30 p.m.
	Eastern, 2.30 p.m.
	Pacific, and join the conversation.
	It's fun when you find out about things right as you're reading about them.
	It's just great.
	Before we even get to today's news, it was a long weekend, folks.
	It really was a long weekend.
	My kids woke me up at 3.45 in the morning on Saturday morning.
	I'll explain it in the things I hate.
	But before we get to any of that, first I'm going to say thanks to our sponsors over at ManCrate.
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	All right, so finally, on to the news.
	And you would think that the news would be less ridiculous than that opener.
	You would be wrong, my friends.
	President Trump is headed over to Singapore for his meeting with Kim Jong-un, the human time bomb, a man who looks as though he was built in the model of fat man and little boy.
	So he apparently is meeting with President Trump one-on-one.
	Which is just the way you want this meeting to start.
	What you really want in a meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, a dictator of a country and a guy who is most famous for not reading his morning briefings, is a one-on-one meeting.
	Now listen, I think that President Trump is good at a great many things.
	I do not think that he is a great negotiator one-on-one with people armed with nuclear weapons.
	Just a hunch.
	I'm not sure that this is the way you want this meeting going.
	Now, maybe President Trump surprises us all.
	Maybe what's actually happening here is that Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea, blew up his nuclear mountain.
	Maybe he destroyed his nuclear mountain, right?
	There's been talk about this.
	He has a nuclear mountain that was hollowed out so that he could actually do bomb tests in there.
	And he blew the thing up, apparently.
	So it's possible that he's now coming to the West and saying, guys, I'm ready to disarm.
	Because he disarmed himself by blowing up his nuclear mountain.
	And Trump is just the beneficiary of that.
	We're going to find out.
	But President Trump is meeting with him.
	And it's not clear what the agenda is going to look like.
	So first of all, I love this.
	Vice President Pence was asked about President Trump's preparations for all of this.
	And it's pretty spectacular.
	What he said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition is, quote, now comes the historic summit between the presidents of the United States and Chairman Kim of North Korea.
	As President Trump said this week, he approaches the summit with confidence.
	The truth is he's been preparing for this his whole life.
	When?
	Like, honestly, I just have to ask.
	Was President Trump preparing for it when President Trump was, like, posing for the cover of Playboy?
	Or was he more doing it when he was banging around, like, the clubs in the 1970s?
	Or was he mostly doing it when he was on the set of The Celebrity Apprentice?
	Like, I'm fine with President Trump handling these negotiations.
	He can't handle negotiations with a There's no way to do that.
	armed country better, worse than President Barack Obama handled negotiations with the Iranians, right?
	There's just no way to do that.
	So I'm not saying that this goes horribly, but Vice President Pence has a dramatic tendency, I think, to overstate the genius of the man for whom he works, even even though he's really elected by the American people and he really works for us.
	But his boss, right, the president of the United States, he's very fond, you may have noticed.
	In any case, President Trump did a presser as he was leaving the G7.
	This is the last presser that he has done before he headed over to the Singapore meeting.
	I know there are a lot of people who are really optimistic about this thing.
	I'm far less optimistic.
	I don't think that you ought to give a meet-up to a dictator of a country without actually going in with some preconditions, like, here's what you're going to give up.
	Kim hasn't really given anything up.
	He gave up a few hostages.
	I guess that's something, but I'm not sure that you had to guarantee a meeting in order to make that happen.
	You probably could have done that with a little bit of cash or with some low-level negotiations.
	Elevating a dictator who's enslaving millions of people in a giant gulag to the status of world leader doesn't seem to me like a great move.
	You know, I was angry when Barack Obama met with the Iranians.
	I was angry when Barack Obama met with the Cubans.
	You remember, he went over to Cuba, which is another gulag state, and then he hung out there and went to a baseball game and everybody on the right was angry about it.
	They're fighting mad about it.
	Same people on the right who are fighting mad about that are not fighting mad about President Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un with no preconditions and really no agenda.
	When I say there's no agenda, it's not really me who's just saying this.
	Here's President Trump explaining what the agenda is and how he thinks this thing is going to go.
	Well, it's always everything.
	It's really, you know, this is probably rarely been done.
	It's unknown territory in the truest sense.
	But I really feel confident.
	I feel that Kim Jong-un wants to do something great for his people.
	And he has that opportunity.
	And he won't have that opportunity again.
	It's never going to be there again.
	OK, so obviously they're going in with a clear agenda.
	And I love that President Trump explains the clear agenda.
	He's asked, what is the objective of these meetings?
	Here is his explanation.
	I have a clear objective, but I have to say, Eliana, that it's going to be something that will always be spur of the moment.
	You don't know.
	Okay, so which is it?
	Is there a clear objective or is it going to be spur of the moment?
	I know that that's how I go into all my contract negotiations.
	I say, I have a clear objective, but I'm going to go and just, you know, spur of the moment.
	Just going to wing it.
	Bring a disco ball, maybe some sangria.
	Just have a good time.
	I mean, that's what I do.
	So it's, I don't know what this is supposed to accomplish.
	You know, again, maybe I'm wrong.
	Maybe this accomplishes everything.
	Maybe we end up with a denuclearized North Korea.
	I am skeptical at best, because the fact is that Kim Jong-un is not going to give up his nuclear weapons.
	The reason he's not going to give up his nuclear weapons is the minute that he does, he's now vulnerable to a Western coup attempt.
	That's the reason he's pursuing this thing in the first place.
	According to the Associated Press, President Trump plans to depart early from his unprecedented summit with Kim Jong-un, the White House said on Monday, declaring the nuclear talks with North Korea have moved more quickly than expected.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Trump had been scheduled to fly back to Washington on Wednesday morning after spending Tuesday with the North Korean leader in Singapore.
	Around the eve of the summit, he altered his schedule, opting to return about 8 p.m. on Tuesday after a full day of meetings with Kim, almost 15 hours earlier than previously anticipated.
	This is probably a smart move by the White House, because what you don't want is for Trump to stick around and for Kim to go out and say something publicly, and then Trump says something publicly, and then they get into a fistfight or something.
	In fact, only hours before the White House announcement, U.S.
	Here's the problem with President Trump generally when it comes to negotiations.
	President Trump is a great marketer.
	I mean, it is the thing he is best at.
	He's amazing at marketing.
	Well, if you are very good at marketing, one of the things you tend to do is over-promise.
	You tend to do this, right?
	Every commercial you have ever watched is a case of somebody over-promising, right?
	When you watch a commercial on TV and they show you those nice, juicy burgers that look amazing, what those really are are those plastic mock-ups that have been sprayed with water so they look all moist and juicy, and if you ate them, you would literally choke and die.
	Right, because virtually every ad on television is an oversell.
	Well, President Trump does a lot of overselling.
	He says he has the biggest crowds ever.
	He said that his campaign movement was the biggest ever.
	He says that this negotiation is going to be the biggest.
	Everything is the biggest ever.
	Everything is unprecedented, the biggest ever.
	Well, the problem is when you oversell an international negotiation, people sort of expect that's going to happen.
	Pompeo said on Monday, we are hopeful the summit will have set the conditions for future successful talks, which is really him saying we didn't really get much done here.
	And then President Trump said, What was his actual objective?
	Well, he explained again at the G7 what his actual objective was.
	He said he had a clear objective, but it's gonna be spur of the moment, which is weird.
	And then he said that the minimum would be, and this is really what Trump thinks about the art of the deal.
	You know, his book, The Art of the Deal, which was not written by President Trump.
	That's really not how he negotiates.
	President Trump Well, I think the minimum would be relationship.
	You'd start at least a dialogue.
	I mean, I know a lot of people who know President Trump, knew him before he was president.
	President Trump is very reliant on him forging ties with the person with whom he is negotiating.
	He likes to have a good personal relationship with the person with whom he is talking.
	And that's essentially what he said about Kim Jong-un. - Well, I think the minimum would be relationship.
	You'd start at least a dialogue.
	'Cause, you know, as a deal person, I've done very well with deals.
	What you wanna do is start that.
	Now, I'd like to accomplish more than that.
	But at a minimum, I do believe at least we'll have met each other, we will have seen each other, hopefully we will have liked each other, and we'll start that process.
	So the President of the United States is very much focused on whether he gets along with foreign leaders.
	We'll see that this comes up in a different context when we get to the G7, because his relationships with foreign leaders at the G7 are not going so swimmingly.
	But if he believes that he's going to forge some sort of personal tie, With Kim Jong Un, that I think is a mistake.
	Again, I do not think that negotiations generally are based on personal ties between leaders.
	I don't think that it was that Ronald Reagan had this wonderful relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, and that's why he got an end to the Cold War.
	It's really more like the Soviets had bankrupted themselves and they were attempting Really, I mean, you look at their internal documents, and this is what they were saying.
	They were attempting to hold on to their Soviet empire, but they just didn't have the money or the resources to do so.
	This was also true with regard to, for example, South Africa, which wanted to disarm.
	The reason they wanted to disarm is because they wanted to be reintegrated into the family of nations.
	It wasn't that the leadership of South Africa had wonderful relationships with the West, and so they decided to do a deal.
	I've been part of several major business deals myself.
	A good relationship is not harmful, but if there's no confluence of interest, then a personal relationship is not going to mean very much.
	I've gotten along with a lot of people with whom I've tried to do a deal, and the deal just never comes together.
	I've done a lot of deals with people who I don't particularly like, but there's a confluence of interest, and so that happens.
	Now, President Trump's view of a deal, which is that you get in a room, you hash it out, you make friends with people, it means that President Trump is very good in the room.
	But it also means that he could be suckered.
	And this is why I don't like the idea of him being alone in a room with Kim Jong-un and just their translators.
	First of all, you never know what the translator for the North Koreans is actually going to say back to Kim Jong-un.
	I mean, I assume that Trump's translator will know, but that's pretty much it.
	And second of all, Trump alone in a room with people has not ended well in terms of negotiations.
	The last time Trump was alone in a room with somebody, he was alone in a room with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and he offered them a budget deal that broke the bank and overruled his own Republican Party.
	The time before that, he was alone in the room with foreign leaders.
	He was alone in a room with the foreign ambassador from Russia, and he ended up saying to him that he fired James Comey over the Russian investigation.
	I just think this is a situation rife with the possibility for problems.
	Maybe nothing comes of it.
	But if nothing comes of it, then what was the purpose of any of this other than, I guess, a photo op that makes Kim Jong-un look stronger in the world as a parallel leader with the most powerful leader on planet Earth?
	The entire media treating it as a coup, that Trump is meeting with Kim Jong-un, I just don't understand that mentality.
	It's a coup for Kim Jong-un that he gets to meet with the President of the United States.
	It'd be a coup for you if you got to meet with the President of the United States.
	It would not be a coup for you if you got to meet with Kim Jong-un.
	It would likely mean you were about to be shot.
	Yes, I have a few more thoughts on this in just a second.
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	Okay, so.
	What's the outcome going to be from all of this?
	Well, here's what you hope the outcome is not.
	What you hope the outcome is not is denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
	So there's been a lot of talk about the president of the United States going in and removing troops from the mainland, from taking troops off of the South Korean peninsula and allowing the North Koreans essentially free reign over the peninsula with Chinese pressure.
	President Trump has pursued a rather isolating foreign policy.
	There are certain allies he's grown close to, like Israel.
	His Middle East policy, I think, has been quite good because it's been anti-Iran.
	But his Asian-Pacific policy has been really a shambles.
	It's been a shambles since he decided to reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
	Now, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as negotiated by President Obama, had some very serious flaws, had some very serious holes in it.
	And those could have been rectified by working to fix the deal, by working to make it better.
	But TPP was a trade partnership with a bunch of countries that did not include China.
	It was directed against China and by proxy against North Korea, because obviously North Korea is just a proxy state for the Chinese.
	The Chinese have been gaining in power in the region for the last two decades, thanks to American benevolence in the region.
	And the fact that President Trump pulled out of the TPP threw a lot of countries into the arms of China, or at least under the outstretched missile umbrella of the Chinese, none of that is particularly good.
	And so when President Trump talks about removing troops from the South Korean peninsula and allowing the North Koreans to have essentially military parity with South Koreans on the peninsula, I'm not saying they're going to go to war.
	I am saying that the North Koreans and the Chinese then have the ability to pressure South Korea in a way they otherwise would not.
	And there are a lot of South Koreans who are not particularly happy with the Americans as it is.
	None of this is particularly good policy.
	If the president really wants to force North Korea's hands, he's going to need to do what he likes to do, which is be more muscular, not less muscular.
	And meeting with Kim Jong-un under these circumstances without any clear agenda — there's talk that President Trump wants to have a follow-up meeting in Mar-a-Lago, and Kim Jong-un is going to come in and play golf with him.
	Presumably, the final score for each of them will be 18.
	Because Kim Jong-un, famous for having scored 18 holes in one, one of the things about the cult of personality in North Korea that's somewhat amusing, if you can call amusing a giant dictatorship, is the fact that they put out all these press releases about how Kim Jong-un is the best golfer who ever lived.
	They've literally put out... Seriously, they put out actual...
	Press releases saying that Kim Jong-un has golfed like 18 on a full golf course.
	He's had 18 holes in one because of this cult of personality.
	President Trump is known to inflate his own golf prowess on a fairly regular basis.
	So if they go golfing together, at the very least, we'll get some amusing headlines out of it.
	But I'm not sure, again, that we should be spending our time and effort Really attempting to reach out to a regime without any clear plan for what goes forward.
	Again, I'm happy to be proved wrong here, but I'm going to have to be proved wrong because I just don't think that meetings for the sake of meetings are good.
	And until five minutes ago, neither did most conservatives.
	Now, speaking of meetings that seem to have gone wildly wrong, President Trump went up to the G7 in Canada and things did not go well.
	So the G7 is a trade group.
	They're supposed to get together where they discuss all sorts of important international issues and This group does not include Russia.
	So the president last week said that he wanted the group to include Russia, that he would prefer that the group include Russia.
	Russia has been cast out of the G7 ever since they invaded Ukraine.
	President Trump, for no apparent reason, wants Russia back in.
	Hey, that's foolish.
	And then he goes up to the G7.
	He did a couple of things that are good and he did a couple of things that are bad.
	I mean, this is just a beautiful example of good Trump, bad Trumps.
	So a couple of things that he did that were good is the president refused to get together for the female equality summit, where we all get together and we pretend that in the West, there's all sorts of institutional barriers to women succeeding.
	That is not true in the United States.
	It's certainly not true in Europe either.
	But all of these leaders like to get together and mouth off about it because all of these European leaders are to the left.
	That was the good.
	The bad was that the president went there and decided that he was going to start a trade war.
	So the president has a very peculiar notion on trade.
	His peculiar notion on trade is that America is better off if it doesn't do it.
	That America is stronger if we trade less with other countries.
	And we have to be clear, when we say America should trade less with other countries, We don't mean the American government should trade less with other countries.
	We mean that the American people should trade less with other countries.
	So you should not buy a product that was made in Korea or China or Indonesia or England or France or Germany.
	You shouldn't buy a German luxury vehicle.
	You should buy American, dammit!
	And this somehow is going to make America stronger.
	Now the problem with that, of course, is that means that you are spending more money for an inferior product in many cases.
	Many of these foreign companies have bases in the United States where they manufacture parts that go into their own cars.
	Mercedes has factories in the United States.
	Toyota has massive factories down in the southern United States.
	And when you boycott Toyota, you're not necessarily helping Americans.
	In fact, what you're doing is shifting your own money from the pockets of Americans who are in more efficient industries and more efficient businesses.
	to the pockets of Americans in subsidized industries.
	Effectively, it's a backhanded tax.
	You are being taxed to benefit particular industries.
	Well, President Trump thinks that that makes a country stronger, and so he likes to look at the so-called trade deficit.
	The trade deficit is where Americans spend more on products from China than Chinese folks spend on products from America.
	Now, people who have paid attention to the trade deficit, it's a complete waste of time, it's really stupid.
	Paying attention to the trade deficit makes no sense, because again, you have a trade deficit with every business you do business with who does not buy from you.
	You have a trade deficit with your gas station.
	You have a trade deficit with your Starbucks.
	You have a trade deficit with your local grocery store.
	You have a trade deficit with every business that you buy from, but does not buy from you, you have a trade deficit with.
	Does that mean you should stop shopping there?
	And instead of going and getting a cup of coffee at Starbucks or Coffee Bean, instead you decide to grow your own coffee trees in the backyard and hand grind your coffee?
	Is that efficient?
	Of course that's not efficient.
	The whole reason that trade is efficient is because of comparative advantage.
	Starbucks is better and cheaper at making coffee than you are.
	And you can take that extra time where you didn't grow the coffee beans and then grind them up and make a crappy brew, and instead you can get the somewhat less crappy brew from Starbucks.
	They can make all that happen for a couple of bucks.
	There's a reason that we trade with each other.
	There is a reason why capitalism and free markets have raised half the globe from abject poverty.
	Subsistence economies are giant fails.
	But the premise of President Trump's view on trade is that every time you trade with somebody, it's a zero-sum game.
	There's a winner and there is a loser.
	That is not true.
	But that is how the president feels.
	And so he's constantly talking about the trade deficit.
	Well, what's happened inside the Trump administration is this weird sort of gap where Trump says, I love tariffs.
	They're great.
	He says things like tariffs make us stronger.
	And then you got Larry Kudlow, who is a free trader and somebody who actually understands basic economics 101, who says, you know, Mr. President, trade is actually quite good.
	If you cut down on trade, the people that hurts most are people in the rust belt who actually need to export product in order to make a living.
	And maybe if you like tariffs, what you should do is you should use it as a retaliatory measure.
	So use it as a way to ratchet down tariffs from other countries.
	So President Trump tends to give two sort of conflicting messages with regard to trade.
	And they really do conflict.
	One is tariffs are great.
	And the other is tariffs are bad and I'm going to use tariffs to fight those tariffs.
	The problem is those mixed messages Because if the president actually wanted to negotiate a lowering of trade barriers, a lowering of tariffs, he obviously could do that.
	But he'd actually have to spend some time negotiating that.
	He couldn't just start raising trade barriers and then suggesting the trade barriers themselves are wonderful.
	So in just a second, I want to talk about what President Trump had to say at the G7, and why it ended up undercutting a lot of his agenda, why it was actually kind of foolish.
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	OK, so President Trump, as I say, has been issuing conflicting messages about trade.
	And at the G7, he did this on a routine basis.
	So he starts off this press conference.
	He held sort of this impromptu press conference at which he talked about trade and how the G7 was going.
	And he says, there's no reason that we should have had a trade deficit in the first place.
	It's ridiculous.
	It's unacceptable.
	Here's what he has to say.
	There was no reason that this should have happened.
	Last year, they lost 800, we as a nation, over the years.
	The latest number is $817 billion on trade.
	That's ridiculous and it's unacceptable.
	First of all, that's ridiculous and unacceptable.
	It's not true.
	We did not lose $817 billion on trade.
	When I give my money to a Chinese company, that Chinese company cannot spend those dollars in China.
	It has to then spend those dollars on American products or services or investments.
	The Chinese have largely been using that money to buy American bonds and fund the national debt that nobody in the government seems to give any craps about.
	So that's just not true.
	Trump continues along these lines.
	But now, here's the conflicting message, right?
	So on the one hand, he says, we have these trade deficits that are really bad.
	If you think trade deficits are bad, the solution is tariffs.
	Then he says, but I hate tariffs.
	Tariffs are terrible.
	So you've got Trump at war with Trump now.
	So here is Trump talking about how he wishes to get rid of all the tariffs.
	No tariffs, no barriers.
	That's the way it should be.
	And no subsidies.
	I even said no tariffs.
	In other words, let's say Canada, where we have tremendous tariffs.
	The United States pays tremendous tariffs on dairy, as an example.
	270%.
	Nobody knows that.
	We pay nothing.
	We don't want to pay anything.
	So which is it?
	Do you want tariffs higher or lower?
	Are tariffs good in and of themselves?
	Or are they bad in and of themselves?
	Again, Trump back and forth.
	So here's Trump saying that he doesn't like trade deficits and we can't lose.
	He says if we increase tariffs, we can't lose.
	Well, no, that's not the point, right?
	The idea here is that if you're increasing tariffs, you are losing, but you're attempting to leverage the other side into stopping their own tariffs.
	But Trump seems to be a little confused on the policy.
	And as an example, with one country, we have $375 billion in trade deficits.
	We can't lose.
	You could make the case that they lost years ago.
	But when you're down $375 billion, you can't lose.
	And we have to bring them up.
	So there's very bad spirit when we have a big trade imbalance, and we want to bring it up to balance.
	Just balance.
	And they keep raising it so that you never catch.
	That's not a good thing to do.
	And we have very, very strong measures that take care of that because we do so much The numbers are so astronomically against them, in terms of anything, as per your question.
	We win that war a thousand times out of a thousand.
	Right, so on the one hand he keeps saying, I want zero tariffs, I want no barriers, and on the other hand he says, we can go to war and we can win, and trade wars are very easy.
	They're very easy.
	And then he says that we're actually going to strengthen America through tariffs.
	So which is it?
	Are tariffs just a measure that we're using to ratchet down other nations' tariffs?
	That makes a certain amount of sense, and I'm OK with that.
	OK, so Trump obviously likes tariffs.
	OK, here's the reality.
	He's had this perspective on trade since the 1980s.
	He believes that America is being screwed by trade or whatever.
	OK, it's not economically literate, but that's the way that he feels about all of this.
	Now, none of this would have made a huge difference if the president had just gone and signed this GA7 statement.
	There's this vague statement you're supposed to sign at the very end, in which they talk about why free trade is great.
	And Trump refused to sign it because he got miffed.
	And why'd he get miffed?
	He got miffed because, as I said with regard to Kim Jong-un, the personal relationships went south.
	So at the beginning of this press conference, where he's talking about how this meeting went, that the relationship he has with all of these world leaders is just great.
	Well, this is not true.
	Most of these world leaders can't stand him, and he can't stand them.
	President Trump does not get along with these world leaders, which in many cases is fine.
	I don't think that's particularly important.
	But to Trump, it's important.
	So here is Trump talking about the relationships that he has with all of these people, the leaders of these countries.
	This is a clip nine.
	The relationship that I've had with the people, the leaders of these countries has been, I would really rate it on a scale of zero to 10, I would rate it a 10.
	That doesn't mean I agree with what they're doing, and they know very well that I don't.
	So we're negotiating very hard tariffs and barriers.
	A lot of these countries actually smile at me when I'm talking, and the smile is...
	We couldn't believe we got away with it.
	That's a smile.
	So it's going to change.
	It's going to change.
	They have no choice.
	If it's not going to change, we're not going to trade with them.
	I love this.
	He doesn't actually have an actual goal here, right?
	His goal, supposedly, is to lower their tariffs.
	But if they don't lower their tariffs, he's going to raise tariffs.
	And then even if they do lower their tariffs, he still kind of likes tariffs.
	He says it doesn't change.
	Does anyone really believe, by the way, that all of these countries sit down across from the president of the United States and he says, you guys are screwing us on trade?
	And they start smiling knowingly, like, yeah, we know we're screwing you on trade, dude.
	Or is it they're smiling because he doesn't know what he's talking about on trade?
	Now, again, as I say, you can use tariffs as a way to ratchet down other tariffs.
	This is Larry Kudlow's point.
	Larry Kudlow is the president's chief economic advisor.
	And here is what Kudlow had to say on Trump's plan, standing next to Trump, right?
	The president reduces barriers.
	In fact, go to zero.
	Zero tariffs.
	Zero non-tariff barriers.
	Zero subsidies.
	And along the way, we're going to have to clean up the international trading system, about which there was virtual consensus of agreement on that.
	And that will be a target.
	And these are the best ways to promote economic growth.
	We'll all be better at it.
	We'll all be stronger at it.
	Okay, so Kudlow is speaking of Trump I, right?
	This is the perspective that you use tariffs in order to ratchet down other tariffs.
	Trump is speaking Trump II, which is his real perspective, which is let's raise tariffs on everybody at every time.
	He's already talking about raising tariffs on cars.
	He's already raised it on steel and aluminum.
	Okay, so all of this would have been okay, except that the other countries decided to kick back.
	And Trump does not take kindly to other countries kicking back, which created for him some pretty good images, actually.
	So a lot of people on the left in the United States say, oh, Trump humiliated himself at the G7.
	It's really going to hurt him at the G7.
	I will explain why it's not going to hurt him at the G7 in just a second.
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	So as they say, President Trump is all over the place on trade, right?
	Sometimes he is very pro-trade, right?
	Zero tariffs, zero barriers.
	And other times he says, tariffs are wonderful in and of themselves, right?
	They're all great.
	But none of this really would have mattered in terms of the outcome from the G7.
	Everybody sort of would have futzed their way through it, except that the other countries were not willing to sit by and let Trump do this routine.
	So Justin Trudeau, who's handsome Bernie Sanders, he is still more pro-free trade than President Trump.
	There was talk yesterday about his eyebrow coming down his face, that his eyebrow actually came loose.
	That is not true, okay?
	His eyebrow is not actually loose.
	If you can see this visually, then you see that his left eyebrow appears to be sliding down his face as though he's wearing weird fake eyebrows that are sliding down his face.
	That's actually his natural eyebrow, oddly enough.
	In any case, that is beside the point.
	Justin Trudeau ripped into President Trump on tariffs and he said, listen, we're not going to do this trade war thing.
	If he wants to do this, then I guess that we're going to have to retaliate.
	And Canada's already announced retaliatory measures on some of Trump's tariffs.
	It would be with regret, but it would be with absolute certainty and firmness that we move forward with retaliatory measures on July 1st, by equivalent tariffs to the ones that the Americans have unjustly applied by equivalent tariffs to the ones that the Americans have unjustly applied I I have made it very clear to the President that it is not something we relish doing, but it is something that we absolutely will do.
	Because Canadians, we're polite, we're reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.
	Okay, so this set Trump off, right?
	This set Trump off.
	So Trump got very angry because Justin Trudeau said that Trump had basically started this trade war, which is kind of true.
	I mean, we didn't have a trade war until five minutes ago, and then Trump decided that he was going to raise tariffs, supposedly because he wanted to lower tariffs in Canada, but really because he kind of likes tariffs.
	And this caused President Trump to start tweeting, right?
	The tweet storm began.
	Category five, hurricane tweet storm.
	He said, Okay, the truth is, trade barriers have been lowered over the course of many decades to the point where the average trade barrier Canada to the U.S., their products are like 1.6%.
	companies by sending their product into our country tax-free.
	We have put up with trade abuse for many decades, and that is long enough.
	Okay, the truth is trade barriers have been lowered over the course of many decades to the point where the average trade barrier Canada to the U.S., their products is like 1.6%.
	Okay, these are not massive trade barriers in most cases, and the ones that are there are bad.
	Raising our own tariffs in other areas in retaliation would be one thing, but doing it because you sort of like the tariffs is another.
	Here's President Trump continuing, and again, the conflicting message.
	Based on Justin's false statements at his news conference and the fact that Canada is charging massive tariffs to our U.S.
	farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our U.S.
	reps not to endorse the communique as we look at tariffs on automobiles flooding U.S.
	markets.
	And now he's talking about massive tariffs on automobiles coming into American markets.
	How is that beneficial to the American consumer?
	He can't explain.
	It's not going to be good for the economy.
	The White House's own report suggests this won't be good for the economy.
	If you were arguing, again, that you're raising the tariffs in order to knock Canada so that they knock down their own tariffs, that's one thing, but that's not where Trump goes next.
	Trump continues along these lines, and then he suggests Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our G7 conference only to give a news conference after I left saying U.S.
	tariffs were kind of insulting and he will not be pushed around.
	Very dishonest and weak.
	Our tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy.
	Okay, so.
	He picks out one tariff, and then he says we're going to raise tariffs on, like, everything, and then he says it's Justin Trudeau's fault for kicking back on all of this stuff.
	See, this is why you should have a negotiation, not a Twitter fight, or go in there with an actual agenda, which President Trump obviously did not do.
	And, again, like, I am not a Justin Trudeau fan.
	I've mocked Justin Trudeau as hard as anybody on the air.
	Finally, the president continues.
	Again, this is a massive tweet storm.
	So President Trump this morning was continuing with all of this.
	He just, he was in Singapore and he still wouldn't stop.
	And so he was continuing along these lines in Singapore this morning.
	And here is what he tweeted.
	He tweeted, fair trade is now to be called fool trade if it is not reciprocal.
	According to a Canada release, they make almost $100 billion in trade with U.S.
	Guess they were bragging and got caught.
	They don't make $100 billion in trade with us if we have a trade deficit with Canada.
	Then Justin Axe Hurt when called out.
	They don't make $100 billion in trade with us if we have a trade deficit with Canada.
	He says, "Why should I, as President of the United States, allow countries to continue to make massive trade surpluses as they have for decades?
	Not fair to the people of America." Again, this is wrong.
	This is not wrong.
	And then he says the EU has a $151 billion trade surplus with the United States and they should pay more for their military.
	This evidences lack of knowledge about trade.
	And it once again evidences that the real reason that Trump is mad here is because people said that they didn't have great relationships.
	Right now, this led to some really untoward language by members of the Trump administration.
	So here is Larry Kudlow.
	We're going to war with Canada, guys.
	I mean, I'm excited about this.
	I want a piece of Quebec.
	So Larry Kudlow says that Justin Trudeau stabbed us in the back.
	Until five minutes ago, the Canadians were our friends.
	Now I guess we're going to have to go to war with our northern neighbors.
	I mean, this has now turned into an episode of South Park with President Trump shouting, blame Canada.
	Here is Larry Kudlow saying that Justin Trudeau stabbed us in the back.
	Here's the thing, I mean, he really kind of stabbed us in the back.
	He really actually, you know what, he did a great disservice to the whole G7.
	He betrayed- Trudeau did.
	Yes he did.
	Because they were united in the G7.
	They came together.
	OK, so they came together, but then Trudeau ripped it all apart?
	Not the president?
	Yeah, right.
	OK, so here's Peter Navarro, who went even farther.
	Peter Navarro is an idiot.
	I mean, I'm just going to put that out there.
	Peter Navarro is a dummy.
	And Peter Navarro is one of the president's trade advisors who believes that a giant trade war will lift the United States.
	He actually believes this.
	And then he said that there was a special place in hell for Trudeau.
	So I guess there's a special place in hell for women who don't defend other women, according to Madeleine Albright.
	There's now a special place in hell for leaders like Justin Trudeau, which is really exciting.
	We're running out of, like, regular hell.
	What happened to regular hell?
	I guess it's now been subdivided up into special places.
	There's so many special places in hell.
	It's like the Epcot Center in hell.
	There's just a bunch of weird little food stands, and they sell crappy garbage, apparently, to Justin Trudeau and women who don't defend other women.
	Here's Peter Navarro saying that Justin Trudeau has now a special place in hell where everyone, I guess, says, I guess that's just called Canada.
	Here he is.
	Chris, there's a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.
	And that's what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.
	That's what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did.
	Okay, so, look, the reality is that a lot of the people on TV are performing for President Trump, demonstrating that they agree with President Trump, this is how you stay in good with President Trump.
	It's one of the problems I have with his style of governance, which is that the President likes to feel like a strong man, and so he likes when people around him say yes to him and say, yes, Mr. President, what you did was so genius, Mr. President.
	If Larry Kudlow wants to impact free trade, he has to go on TV and pretend that Trump is actually a free trader.
	But, if anybody believes this is going to hurt Trump, they are wrong.
	They are totally wrong if they believe this is going to hurt Trump in any serious way.
	I will explain why in just a second.
	So, from the G7, there was this picture that came out.
	And here was the picture.
	This was passed around in a lot of media circles.
	This was taken by the German delegation.
	And if you can't see it, what the picture shows is Angela Merkel, who is standing over a table, gazing down, glaring at President Trump.
	And President Trump has on his F.U.
	smile.
	Right, he's got his arms crossed and he's looking back up here like, what you gonna do, lady?
	And they're surrounded by a bunch of other foreign leaders.
	You can see Shinzo Abe, who's from Japan.
	He's kind of apparently thinking about why Westworld sucks now.
	He's kind of gazing off into the distance, not understanding what's going on.
	John Bolton is like, uh, like what's going on?
	But Angela Merkel is staring down angrily at President Trump.
	And a lot of people on the left are like, this is what America has become.
	If you think that hurts President Trump domestically in any way, you out of your mind.
	You're crazy if you believe that hurts Trump.
	Trump standing up to foreign leaders is why President Trump was elected.
	Trump standing up to foreign leaders and not backing down is why people like President Trump in the first place.
	So, is this going to hurt President Trump?
	No.
	Is any of this going to matter in the end?
	Only if President Trump decides to pursue these tariffs.
	If he decides to pursue the tariffs, he's going to put a damper on the economy that has been booming under his watch.
	There's no reason for him to do this.
	He will be blamed if the economy goes south.
	And if the tariffs go into place and the economy goes south, He should be blamed.
	I mean, he should have a part of that blame.
	OK.
	Now, meanwhile, I have to bring you this story from The Washington Post, because it's just insane.
	There's an opinion column by Susanna DeNuda Walters, a professor of uselessness, sociology, and director of the Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, where they study a bunch of crap that they pay her for.
	And she wrote a piece.
	This is for The Washington Post.
	It is literally called, Why Can't We Hate Men?
	Why Can't We Hate Men?
	That's the name of the piece.
	Suffice it to say that if you name that piece, why can't we hate the blacks?
	People might be like, um, that's horrible.
	Or we say, why can't we hate women?
	That might be sexist.
	Why can't we hate the Juden?
	That might be Nazi.
	But why can't we hate men from Feminist Totally Fine?
	Now, you might think that that's just an over-the-top title for clickbait.
	Nope.
	That's the entire piece.
	It says, it's not that Eric Schneiderman, the now former New York Attorney General accused of abuse by multiple women, pushed me over the edge.
	My edge has been crossed for a long time, before President Trump, before Harvey Weinstein, before mansplaining and incels, before live-streaming sexual assaults in red pill men's groups and rape camps as a tool of war and the deadening banality of male prerogative.
	Seen in this indisputably true context, it seems logical to hate men.
	Really?
	Does it?
	Because I have not been a part of a rape camp?
	Red pill men's groups?
	I don't know who she's talking about.
	If that's people who believe that women are not generally being discriminated against in American society, I guess that's me, but I don't know why that's sexist.
	Mansplaining in incels?
	Like, what?
	I can't lie.
	I've always had a soft spot for the radical feminist smackdown.
	No.
	Shocker.
	Can't believe it.
	Just for naming the problem in no uncertain terms.
	I've rankled at the but-we-don't-hate-men protestations of generations of would-be feminists and found the men-are-not-the-problem-this-system-is obfuscation too precious by half.
	But of course, the criticisms of this blanket condemnation of men from transnational feminists who decry such glib universalism to U.S.
	women of color who demand an intersectional perspective are mostly on the mark.
	These critics rightly insist on an analysis of male power as institutional, Not narrowly personal or individual or biologically based in male bodies.
	Growing movement to challenge masculinity, built on domination and violence, and to engage boys and men in feminism, both gratifying and necessary.
	Please continue.
	So, a bunch of gobbledygook.
	Plus, teach boys to be feminists.
	But, this recognition of the complexity of male domination should not, must not mean, we forget some universal facts.
	Pretty much everywhere in the world, this is true.
	Women experience sexual violence, and the threat of that violence permeates our choices, big and small.
	Women in America do not experience pervasive sexual violence.
	They do not.
	There is sexual violence in the United States, but the notion that women across the United States are victimized by sexual violence is just bullcrap.
	The statistics do not bear this out.
	Women are raped.
	It's awful.
	The men should be castrated or killed.
	To believe that women across the United States are experiencing this stuff is just not true.
	And if you're going to boil down sexual violence to a catcall or a whistle, then you're an idiot.
	Look at actual sexual violence.
	All those things are wrong.
	Catcalls, whistles, these are not good things.
	But to proclaim that this is sexual violence, that means that all men are evil, is idiotic.
	In addition, she says, male violence is not restricted to intimate partner attacks or sexual assault, but plagues us in the form of terrorism and mass gun violence.
	So apparently when there's a mass shooting, it's women who are being targeted, which we have no evidence for.
	And then she finally concludes, it is long past time to play hard for team feminism and win.
	Step away from power, men.
	We got this.
	And please know that your crocodile tears won't be wiped away by us anymore.
	We have every right to hate you.
	You have done us wrong.
	Well, I have every right then to hate intersectional feminists like this who are vile and make the society worse.
	Amazing the Washington Post would print this garbage, but not all that amazing since they are indeed the Washington Post.
	OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So things that I like, this is really a thing that I hate, but the announcement is a thing that is amazing.
	So Charles Krauthammer is the dean of conservative columnists.
	He is sort of the heir to William F. Buckley.
	He was his generation's William F. Buckley, a columnist for the Washington Post, a Pulitzer Prize winner.
	And he has now put out a statement.
	He only is expected to live for a few weeks, and he put out a beautiful statement at the end of last week.
	He concludes his statement this way.
	He says, "I thank my colleagues, my readers, and my viewers "who have made my career possible "and given consequence to my life's work.
	"I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas "through honest debate and rigorous argument "is a noble undertaking.
	"I am grateful to have played a small role "in the conversations that have helped guide "this extraordinary nation's destiny.
	I leave this life with no regrets.
	It was a wonderful life, full and complete with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.
	I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.
	And would that everybody...
	He not only has this grace, but lives the life that they intended.
	With it, everybody dies with that sort of feeling of accomplishment as Charles Krauthammer.
	As well, he should.
	I mean, Charles Krauthammer is an amazing guy.
	So Charles Krauthammer, when he was in Harvard Medical School, he was in a diving accident, and he was paralyzed from the neck down.
	And he went on to get his psychiatric degree from Harvard Medical School.
	He worked on the DSM-II.
	And then he became a columnist on politics and culture and won the Pulitzer Prize.
	And, of course, you saw him every night on Fox News.
	So he will be passing away in the next few weeks, according to his doctors.
	A tremendous loss for not only the conservative movement, but for the cause of gentility and decency.
	A really decent human being.
	I met Charles Krauthammer twice.
	Once was in his office, where he asked probing questions between talk about baseball And once was actually over at the PragerU offices where he was cutting a video for them.
	And I was over in the offices at the time.
	We had a little bit of time to chat.
	Just an amazing person.
	Depth of mind, depth of curiosity, and a truly profound soul.
	So the world will be lesser for his loss.
	Thank God that we all had the experience of getting to watch Charles Krauthammer at work.
	A wordsmith and a deep thinker at the same time, which is an amazing thing.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So speaking of people who are not wordsmiths or deep thinkers, let's talk about the Tony Awards last night.
	So the Tony Awards happened last night and apparently the deep thinkers at the Tony Awards felt the necessity to virtue signal to all of their friends in the theater industry.
	This began with Robert De Niro.
	So Robert De Niro gets up and he gives a very eloquent statement of why he opposes President Trump.
	Like a very eloquent, deep statement of why President Trump ought to be ousted and is a grave threat to the system of American democracy.
	I'm gonna say one thing.
	F*** Trump.
	Okay, we bleeped it out.
	He says F*** Trump right there.
	Standing ovation.
	Standing ovation.
	I'm just gonna say one thing.
	F*** Trump.
	Such bravery.
	Stunning bravery.
	If you're down with Trump, it's F*** Trump.
	No longer down with Trump.
	It's F-Trump.
	Oh, bravery.
	Bravery beyond all measure.
	Bravery beyond all capacity.
	I'm sure that everyone in that audience hated Trump until that moment, and then Robert De Niro spoke truth to power.
	And suddenly, all of the love that they had had for Trump up until then turned to hate.
	Wow, what unbelievable bravery.
	Just speaking truth.
	And the explanation, I mean, the real fulsome explanation of why he opposes President Trump there really is quite meaningful.
	I will say, like, I thought it was a convincing case, a beautifully convincing case by Robert De Niro for why you shouldn't support President Trump.
	And good for, what an amazing dude Robert De Niro is.
	And then Andrew Garfield gets up.
	So Andrew Garfield, who you'll recall from such great movies as Spider-Man, the reboot that was then rebooted, Andrew Garfield, It's in Angels in America.
	So Angels in America, you'll remember as a tendentious, overlong, ridiculous, crappy TV series from HBO starring half of Hollywood.
	It was like a nine-hour meditation on homosexuality in America from like 1960s on.
	And they made a seven-hour Wagnerian production of it for Broadway in which Andrew Garfield plays a young gay man suffering from AIDS.
	And Andrew Garfield gets up at the Tony Awards where A quarter of the audience probably is gay.
	And he starts lecturing Americans in front of the cameras about the Masterpiece Cake Shop case because he doesn't know anything about law or about, apparently, decency.
	So he gets up and then he starts talking about, let's down with the Supreme Court.
	So we had Robert De Niro, F. Trump, and now we have Andrew Garfield speaking from the heart about why Christians should be forced to violate their own religious precepts.
	We are all sacred and we all belong, so let's just bake a cake for everyone who wants a cake to be baked!
	So let's just bake a cake.
	Fine.
	I ask you, Andrew Garfield, I'm going to write a play about Masterpiece Cake Shop.
	It's about how the Christian family in that case was victimized by vindictive LGBT activists and who almost ruined their business and destroyed their lives.
	I would like you to play the lead.
	I would like Andrew Garfield to play the lead as the Christian man who refused service to the same sex wedding out of religious conviction and then almost had his life destroyed by a bunch of vindictive bureaucrats.
	And you should play that lead.
	Act the part.
	You know, why can't we all just act the parts that we're asked to act?
	I'm happy to pay your salary.
	I'll raise the money to do it.
	And you can star in it, Andrew Garfield.
	I mean, I'm serious about this.
	I will go raise the money right now.
	If he pledges to act in this play, I will write it, and then we'll go get the money, and Andrew Garfield can act.
	It'll be great.
	Because he shouldn't have any say as to what sort of parts he acts.
	He should just act whatever part comes in front of him.
	And if he has moral scruples about that part, well, why can't he be tolerant?
	Why can't he be a more tolerant person?
	Why can't he just act the part that people want him to act and are willing to pay him to act?
	I'm willing to even pay him his money.
	I'm not saying do it for free.
	This is the stupidity of this position.
	This idea, just bake the cake, just bake the cake.
	What if I don't want to bake the cake?
	It's a free damn country.
	I get to not bake the cake if I don't want to bake the cake.
	And the fact that Andrew Garfield stands up there and is lecturing everybody about what cake to bake, he's an artist too.
	He should know.
	He should know when it is appropriate and when it is not to force people to do things.
	As an artist, I do not get to force my perception of what Andrew Garfield should act upon Andrew Garfield.
	That's not the way this works.
	Even though he's in the public square, even though he's operating in the area of commerce, I don't get to do that.
	But according to Andrew Garfield, everybody else should have to do that because he is upset that gay weddings aren't going to get the cake from the Christian shop as opposed to the cake from every other bake shop in America owned by a gay person.
	It's ridiculous, and it's over-the-top, and again, it's virtue signaling in front of a bunch of people who agree with him, and so he gets big cheers for that.
	If he wanted to actually be brave, he should have gone out there and said, we all need to tolerate one another, and that means that I'm willing to tolerate the Christian baker who doesn't want to cater to my same-sex wedding, and the Christian baker should tolerate me when I come in and ask for a cake.
	He doesn't want to do that.
	Instead, he wants to engage in a bit of, let me tell you what to do, which is what the entire left apparently wants to do now, so that's just wonderful.
	Okay.
	Final thing that I hate.
	So Bill Maher, who is good on some issues and bad on some issues.
	I will give him credit for honesty here.
	Bill Maher is not a fan of President Trump's.
	That's his prerogative.
	But then he just drops it that he would like to see an economic downturn to House Trump.
	I'm old enough to remember when Rush Limbaugh said in 2009, right after Barack Obama's election, that he hoped Obama fails.
	And what he meant by that is he hopes that President Obama failed in his attempts to implement Obama-esque policy.
	Not that he wanted to see the economy downturn.
	Not that he wanted to see the fiscal state of America collapse or America's power on the foreign stage collapse.
	He just didn't want to see Obama's policies promulgated.
	He wanted him to fail in pursuing his policies.
	Well, Bill Maher is a little more open than that.
	Bill Maher just says, I want the economy to fail.
	I want millions of people thrown out of work so Trump will be ousted.
	I feel like the bottom has to fall out at some point.
	And by the way, I'm hoping for it.
	Because I think one way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy.
	So please, bring on the recession.
	Sorry if that hurts people, but it's either root for a recession or you lose your democracy.
	Okay, so, root for a recession or you lose your democracy, or maybe you just make the case against Trump in terms that are rational, and then we can all decide whether that's convincing or not.
	But, you know, when you're now rooting for millions of people to be thrown out of work because you want to see it have a bad impact on the president of the United States, I would say that's probably not a good thing.
	Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

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