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July 17, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:47
The Russian Connection | Ep. 582
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President Trump does a presser with Vladimir Putin and the world goes insane.
Democrats cry treason and we deconstruct some culture.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so.
President Trump did a press conference with Vladimir Putin yesterday.
It was bad.
It was not a good press conference.
The President of the United States essentially sided with Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies who, lest we forget, work for him.
These are the people who work for him.
If he doesn't like how the intel agencies are doing their job, he can replace their leadership, which he has already done with the FBI.
Yeah, he has his own CIA hidden there.
The dude has all of the people he wants in place.
So if he doesn't like his own intel agencies and what they're telling him, he has every capacity to find new, more honest intelligence agencies.
He's not actually doing that, which suggests that he knows full well that the idea that the Russians were attempting to interfere in the election is true.
Now, does that mean that the Russians actually swung the election to Trump?
No.
Does it mean that President Trump colluded with the Russians?
No.
But the problem for President Trump
is that he is personally so egotistical that he believes that any sort of aspersion that is cast at the presidential election of 2016 must be false, because he believes that he won fair and square, and that means that anything anybody says about what went wrong in 2016 with the Russians, all of that is an attempt merely to undermine his grand victory, and therefore anyone who claims that the Russians were attempting to hack into the election system, basically, all those people are simply unwilling to accept that Hillary lost.
Listen, I'm willing to accept that Hillary lost, and it is also true that the Russians were attempting to monkey with our electoral system.
And they're attempting to monkey with our election cycle, with the news cycle, by hacking into the DNC, the DCCC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Well, all of this manifested itself in a pretty awful way yesterday when President Trump got up to the podium with Vladimir Putin.
There are a lot of people soft-pedaling this today.
A lot of people, on the right particularly, suggesting that this wasn't a big deal and none of it really matters.
Yesterday I said, I'm not sure that it matters a lot in terms of Vladimir Putin invading other countries.
I'm not sure that it matters a lot in terms of actual hard-headed foreign policy.
But it does matter in terms of the American perception of our own intelligence agencies.
And it matters with regard to Vladimir Putin's perception that he can play with Trump when it comes to monkeying with our news cycle and hacking into enemies of President Trump.
President Trump did a real disservice yesterday.
What he did was really rather unprecedented in modern American history.
I don't mean completely unprecedented, because you do have Barack Obama who sent pallets of cash to the Iranian mullahs.
You do have Barack Obama who pledged flexibility on a hot mic to the Russian government.
But to go before the entire world and suggest that your own intelligence agencies are wrong, and a thug piece of human debris like Vladimir Putin is right when he lies about how he didn't hack into the DCCC or the DNC or Hillary Clinton's campaign, When you do that, you're doing a real disservice to the American intelligence agencies, as well as to America in general.
You can't do that.
Well, President Trump did do it.
So Trump had this presser with Vladimir Putin, and he starts off by saying, our relationship has never been worse, but he solved it.
Our relationship has never been worse than it is now.
However, that changed as of about four hours ago.
I really believe that.
OK, well, if you really believe that four hours ago the change happened, then you're in the same category as George W. Bush, who said he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his soul, or Barack Obama, who sent Hillary Clinton to bring a reset button that was mismarked.
It said something else on the button.
That's the same category.
So that in and of itself, it's foolish, but it's not particularly damaging.
Then we get to the damaging stuff.
So President Trump is asked about the sort of decline in the relationship between Russia and the United States.
And he did something that if it came from the lips of Barack Obama would have been perfectly predictable.
He said everyone is to blame, particularly the United States.
I hold both countries responsible.
I think that the United States has been foolish.
I think we've All been foolish.
We should have had this dialogue a long time ago.
Not a long time, frankly, before I got to office.
And I think we're all to blame.
And nobody signed up for this.
When President Trump says, America first, when he says, make America great again, it doesn't mean blame America first.
America is not responsible in the decline of the relationship with Russia.
Vladimir Putin invaded two sovereign states in the last 10 years.
Two of them.
And the United States did very little about it.
Vladimir Putin turned Iran into a sphere of influence, and Syria into a sphere of influence, and the United States did very little about that.
Now, was the United States wrong not to do more about these things?
Of course the United States is wrong not to do more about these things, but that's sort of like saying that the bus and the person run over by the bus are equally responsible for the accident.
Pedestrian has the right of way.
The United States is not responsible for Vladimir Putin actually invading surrounding countries and murdering dissenting journalists and murdering dissenting politicians.
The United States is not responsible for any of that stuff.
And for Trump to suggest anything different is Howard's in Noam Chomsky territory.
And then it gets worse.
So the president is obviously very upset with the Mueller collusion.
Investigation.
And he has a right to be upset about that because he says I didn't collude.
There's not a lot of evidence to suggest that he did collude at this point.
And so he launches into a rant about how the probe is a disaster for the country.
Well, the problem is the probe is doing a couple of things.
The probe is looking into the possibility that the Trump campaign works with Russia.
And Trump, I think, has a right to be upset about that.
I think he has a right to be upset with the idea that the intelligence agencies, as led by people like Peter Strzok, were biased against him in their attempt to pin Russian collusion on him and his campaign.
I think he has every right to be upset about that, but he does not have a I have a right to be upset about intelligence agencies coming up with an estimate that says that the Russians hacked the DNC and the DCCC and the Hillary campaign.
All of that is very well verified.
All of our intelligence agencies agree on that.
So when Trump says that the probe is a disaster for the country, what he really should be saying is any suggestion that I colluded with Vladimir Putin is a disaster for the country because it's not true.
But when he undermines the intelligence agencies by throwing out the baby with the bathwater, you got a problem.
Here he is talking about the probe.
I think that the probe is a disaster for our country.
There was no collusion at all.
It was a clean campaign.
I beat Hillary Clinton easily.
There was no collusion.
I didn't know the president.
There was nobody to collude with.
There was no collusion with the campaign.
Okay, all of that is not great, but it's not the worst thing in the world.
Then we get to the actual worst quote.
Okay, the worst quote is, he says, Vladimir Putin protests.
And Putin says, listen, I have nothing to do with this hacking.
It's not me.
Niet.
Right?
It's not, I had nothing to do with any of this.
And Trump, instead of saying, listen, Vladimir, you and I disagree about this.
My intelligence agencies came to a different conclusion.
They're my intelligence agencies.
And I have to take what they say at face value because they're the ones who are doing this hard work.
Instead, Trump takes his intelligence agencies and he dumps them directly under the bus.
It's really bad.
It's really bad.
My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia.
I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia.
I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server.
But I have, I have confidence in both parties.
So I have great confidence in my intelligence people.
But I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful.
Okay, this is weak, mean stuff.
This is weak.
It looks like Trump got unmanned by Putin here.
That's what it looks like, just for any objective viewer.
If you're not a Trump fan, if you are a Trump fan, you at least have to try and be objective as to what happened yesterday.
Trump looked like he was bullied by Vladimir Putin on that podium.
He looked like Vladimir Putin owned him on that podium.
He makes a couple of statements that are worthy of explication in that particular quote.
So first, the president says, I really do want to see the server.
Now, this goes to his suggestion that the DNC has not turned over its servers to the FBI because the DNC is hiding something.
So the theory goes something like this.
The FBI goes to the DNC and they say, listen, we think you've been hacked by the Russians.
And the DNC says, no, we're not going to show you anything.
Which would be suspicious if that had been the case.
If they had said, we're not going to show you anything because we are trying to hide something, because we actually leaked out these documents ourselves, because it was Seth Rich or something, then you'd be suspicious.
But that's not actually what happened.
OK, let me give you the facts on the DNC server, because there's a lot of fiction that's going around today.
And I think that fostering that fiction is not useful.
So the theory on the right seems to be, by some on the right, and Sean Hannity talked about it last night on his show.
I think Sean is wrong.
Basically, the theory on the right is, That the DNC is hiding something so they didn't turn over their servers to the FBI, but the FBI somehow came to the conclusion it was the Russians anyway.
And here's what Trump said yesterday.
He said, I've been wondering that.
I've been asking that for months and months.
I've been tweeting it out, calling it out on social media.
Where is the server?
I want to know, where is the server?
And what is the server saying?
Okay, so here is the real story about the server.
Okay, a server is a physical entity.
You do not have to grab a physical entity that has on it computer materials and bring it outside the offices of the DNC in order to examine those materials in the same way that you can remotely access your computer from home The FBI has the capacity to remotely access the material on those servers.
The Daily Beast has a pretty good look at this today.
They say when cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture the evidence in a process called imaging.
They make an exact byte for byte copy of the hard drives.
They do the same for the machine's memory.
They capture evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim's network.
This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades.
The images, not the computer's hardware, provide the evidence.
Both the DNC and the security from CrowdStrike hired to respond to the breach have said repeatedly over the years they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016.
So the DNC didn't have to turn over its physical servers because they were still using those during the campaign.
The FBI had access to the imaging via CrowdStrike and via the DNC.
James Comey said as much in his testimony.
He said he wanted direct access to the DNC servers for purposes of accessing their live network, and this is where the DNC turned the FBI down.
Now, is that suspicious?
Apparently, it's not all that uncommon.
According to the Daily Beast, when the computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizing the machines is pretty much out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked on a 2009 breach at Google that's been linked to the Chinese government.
In most cases, you don't even ask.
You just assume they're going to make forensic copies.
So this isn't anything nefarious, per se.
The DNC was not covering for a leak of material to the Russians.
we have a computer company here.
We have an internet company.
If the FBI wanted to investigate, what we would allow them to do is image all the material.
We wouldn't allow them to take all the servers out of our office.
We couldn't do our work then.
So this isn't anything nefarious per se.
The DNC was not covering for a leak of material to the Russians.
There are a bunch of people saying, well, CrowdStrike, CrowdStrike's a democratic firm.
Well, not really.
CrowdStrike is also used by the RNC.
So I think it's important to get rid of misinformation because it prevents clarity.
I want everything that we believe to be based at least on a certain number of facts.
Now, in just a second, I'm going to get to Vladimir Putin's response to all of this.
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Okay, so, Vladimir Putin responds to President Trump, and you can see, he looks like the cat that just ate the canary.
I mean, he is so gleeful, he is so happy about all of this.
Here is Putin, a dictatorial thug who murders dissidents, talking about how, you know, there's no reason why President Trump shouldn't believe me.
I mean, he's such a weasel.
You're gonna hear the translator here, here's what Putin had to say.
As to who is to be believed and who is not to be believed, you can trust no one if you take this.
Could you name a single fact that would definitively prove the collusion?
This is utter nonsense.
Okay, you have to see the body language here.
I mean, Putin is so comfortable, he's so happy up there.
I love that line.
As to who is to be believed, and who's not to be believed, you can trust no one.
Okay, spoken like a former KGB agent.
And then, he was asked specifically if he wanted Trump to win the election, and here's what he had to say.
Isn't it natural to be sympathetic towards a person who is willing to restore the relationship with our country, who wants to work with us?
Now, do I really think that Vladimir Putin was attempting to rig the election for Donald Trump in any serious way?
No.
I believe the intelligence community's assessment that he was attempting to mess with the election in order to create chaos.
And guess what?
He just created a lot more chaos yesterday, because now half the country believes that Donald Trump is in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.
Now, I don't think Donald Trump is in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.
I think that Donald Trump is an egomaniac who likes being complimented, who likes having his shoulders massaged.
Putin massages his shoulders, and Mueller doesn't, so he doesn't like Mueller and he does like Putin.
I think it really is almost that simple.
And Putin knows this, which is why he says, of course I was trying to get Trump elected.
He knows what kind of chaos that's going to cause at home.
He knows that that causes gridlock and anger in the American political system.
That is Putin's goal.
So what that requires is for people on the right to recognize that Trump needs to put his ego behind him and recognize who Putin is.
We'll talk about who Putin is in just a second.
And at the same time, folks on the left have to understand that every time they scream collusion to the sky without any evidence, every time they suggest that we are in crisis mode or that Trump has committed some act of treason, all they are doing is giving Putin what he wants in a certain sense, which is a certain level of chaos in the American political system.
OK, so how bad a guy is Putin?
So Putin was on with Chris Wallace.
And Chris Wallace at Fox News really grilled Putin.
He started off by asking Putin about NATO.
And Putin essentially said that NATO should never expand because NATO is a threat to Russia.
There is an opportunity for bilateral contacts with member states, which was done with Poland, with Romania, which now station and deploy elements of the strategic anti-missile defense of the United States.
Moving this NATO infrastructure towards our borders would be a threat, and the reaction would be extremely negative.
Okay, and then Putin follows that up.
He's asked specifically about whether they have compromise on Trump, right?
This is the theory from the left, is the reason Trump is doing all this is because Putin has the p-tape or some such nonsense.
And Putin says, no, I don't have any compromise.
Now, can you trust Putin saying he doesn't have any compromise?
Of course not!
The guy's a KGB spy!
Like, why in the world would you trust Vladimir Putin?
That said, he does say that he doesn't have any compromise material on Trump, though.
If he did, would you expect him to announce it on Fox News?
That would be great, right?
In the middle of the interview, they say, do you have compromise on Trump?
He goes, of course!
I have tape of Trump being pinned on by a Russian prostitute.
That's not going to happen.
Anyway, here's him talking about it with Chris Wallace.
Whether we have something on them.
We don't have anything on them.
There can't be anything on them.
I don't want to insult President Trump when I say this and I may scum.
Okay, my favorite part of this interview is the part where Chris Wallace tries to hand Vladimir Putin the indictment, right?
This indictment put out by the Mueller investigation of these 12 Russians, and Putin refuses to look at it.
He says, utterly ridiculous, just utterly ridiculous.
And this is the guy that Trump says he believes as much as the intelligence agencies.
Do you really believe that someone acting from the Russian territory could have influenced the United States and influenced the choice of millions of Americans?
This is utterly ridiculous.
I'm not asking whether they influenced, I'm asking whether they tried.
Okay, and Putin refuses to answer that question.
Look how clever Putin is there, right?
So, Chris Wallace asks him, did you try to influence the election?
Putin says, we never could have influenced the election.
If we influenced the election, then Trump would lose.
So we never influenced the election.
He's playing to an audience of one there, and the audience he's playing to is President Trump.
Okay, the worst part of this interview, and also the best part, is the part where Putin is specifically asked about him murdering his political opponents.
His answer here is such a Bond villain answer.
And you can just see that the camera slowly pulls back, and Vladimir Putin is petting a hairless cat.
It's really unbelievable.
Here is Vladimir Putin being asked whether he murders his political opponents.
Well, haven't presidents been killed in the United States?
Have you forgotten about it?
Well, has Kennedy been killed in Russia or in the United States?
Or Mr. King?
What happens at the clashes between police and civil society and several ethnic groups?
Spectacular stuff from Vladimir Putin right there.
So do you kill your political opponents?
Well, Kennedy killed in United States.
Martin Luther King killed United States.
Right, they were assassinated by criminals.
You're the government of Russia.
I'd make fun of Vladimir Putin more except that I know that he kills people.
So I'm a little bit, I'll be honest with you.
I'm gonna steer clear of that one because I'm fond of breathing.
But this is the guy who Trump decided that he wanted to favor in these negotiations.
This is the guy that Trump wanted to compliment and pat on the head during these negotiations.
If you had watched that press conference with the sound off, what you would have assumed is that Putin was the powerhouse in the room and Trump was the weakling.
Okay, we had the same sort of phenomenon when Obama was president.
He always felt like the weakest guy in the room.
Well, Trump, that's supposed to be the opposite of what he is, right?
He's the brash, bold, rude American who goes in there and knocks heads together.
He's the guy who goes into NATO and Tells the Germans they better pay up.
He's the guy who goes up to Canada and tells Justin Trudeau that he looks stupid with that hair, right?
That's that's the guy who the American people elected.
They didn't elect the guy who goes in there and then talks about how Vladimir Putin is really a nice guy when you get to know him and how Vladimir Putin's assessment of the 2016 election is more accurate than that of his own intelligence agencies.
Now, what's the practical impact of any of this?
Does Putin actually believe that Trump is such a weakling that he can now walk into Lithuania or Latvia or Estonia?
He can walk into the Baltic states and he can just take them over and that Trump will do nothing about it?
I don't think that's what he thinks.
But I think that Putin is just really happy that the United States seems embroiled in this chaos that he has helped create and that is exacerbated every day by the dual problem of Trump's ego and the left's Brutal and ridiculous attempt to paint Trump as a Russian colluder.
Those are two sides of the same coin, and both of them are pleasing Vladimir Putin infinitely.
They're really, really pleasing Vladimir Putin.
of all of that.
In just a second, I want to get to a new indictment brought by Robert, brought by the Mueller investigation by Robert Mueller.
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Meanwhile, Robert Mueller has brought a new indictment.
The person charged in this indictment is a lady named Maria Butina.
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Okay, so meanwhile, Robert Mueller has brought a new indictment.
The person charged in this indictment is a lady named Maria Butina.
She's 29, and she is basically this redheaded, supposed gun rights activist who spent an awful lot of time since 2013 going to Republican functions and ingratiating herself with pro-gun rights people.
And then she was using those pro-gun rights people to get to politicians.
So she'd say, I want you to fix me up with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, for example.
And somebody at the gun rights organization would say, Well, this seems like a nice pro-gun rights lady from Russia.
I'll fix her up with Dana Rohrabacher, and then she would go and try and create a back channel between those Congress people and members of the Russian government.
This is what the indictment basically says.
So according to law and crime, the woman who the Department of Justice has charged for allegedly failing to properly register as a Russian operative...
Well, in the United States, apparently bragged several times she helped the campaign of President Trump communicate with the Russian government.
Maria Butina, 29, was charged Saturday.
The complaint was not unsealed until Monday, July 16th.
Butina's alleged bragging about the Trump campaign connections was reported in February 2017 by the Daily Beast.
The original report is now getting renewed attention due to the criminal complaint.
The Daily Beast report says she was in business with Republican activist Paul Erickson and previously worked with Alexander Torshin, a member of Vladimir Putin's political party, who once served as a Russian senator before becoming a leader of the Central Bank of Russia.
So Paul Erickson, it should be said, is a very active member of sort of upper-ranking Republican circles.
Now, Paul Erickson hobnobs with a lot of prominent Republicans.
I've met Paul Erickson at, like, a David Horowitz Freedom Center event, and always seemed like a nice guy.
Apparently, he had formed some sort of company with this Maria Butina, but there are no allegations that he actually violated the law.
So the big question is whether people who are fixing up Butina with actual members of the American government knew she was a Russian agent, and whether the people in the American government knew she was a Russian agent, and even if they did know she was a Russian agent, There's nothing wrong with the back channel so long as no actual illegal activity took place.
So there are a bunch of holes that still have to be filled in.
The left, however, is jumping to the conclusion that Butina is the go-between between Trump and the Russian government and that she is the nexus of all collusion.
Those charges are not in this indictment.
So this is people jumping to conclusions in a pretty significant way.
Butina reportedly bragged about the Trump campaign twice.
Once during a November 12, 2016 birthday party said to have been attended by Erickson and Trump campaign aides at a cafe near American University in Washington, D.C., she brazenly claimed she'd been part of the Trump campaign's communication with Russia to individuals who were present said, according to the Daily Beast.
However, Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya, who is a professor at American University, said that Butina made the same claim in class.
That was the second time she bragged about the alleged connection.
Supposedly, she tried to broker a meeting between Trump and Putin in 2016.
Okay, but that doesn't necessarily mean election collusion.
They could have met for any reason.
You know, presidential candidates meet with a lot of foreign powers.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they are colluding with those foreign powers to change the effects of an election.
People, however, are jumping to the most ridiculous conclusions about all of this.
My favorite is this political reporter today who tweeted out this morning a picture from the Oval Office, a picture of President Trump moving to shake hands with Sergey Lavrov, who's the foreign minister of Russia, as well as Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
And then in the very, very background, there's a redhead.
There's a redhead in the background.
It's kind of a pretty redhead.
And Emily Singer, who reports for Mike, tweeted out, Okay, thousands and thousands and thousands of retweets.
Only one problem.
It's not that lady.
with Tina arrested for being a Russian spy in the Oval Office with Trump.
Okay, thousands and thousands and thousands of retweets.
Only one problem, it's not that lady.
It was Kerry Lutkins from the National Security Council.
And then she deleted the tweet.
So, you know, people jumping to conclusions trying to paint Trump as a Russian collaborator when in reality, Trump is just an ego, an egotist driven by that ego to say silly things from time to time and say dangerous things from time to time.
Again, one of the big problems I see here is that because President Trump is so invested in countering the narrative that the election was monkeyed with, It's led him down a path of defending some pretty bad people.
So here's President Trump defending Paul Manafort.
Paul Manafort has been under investigation by American intelligence agencies for years and they have a lot of goods on him.
But here's Trump defending Manafort when really what he should be doing is saying, I didn't know anything about Manafort when I hired him.
I was told by the RNC that he'd be a good guy to hire.
So I hired him and then he turned out not to be a good guy and I fired him.
Hey, all of which is accurate.
Manafort was walking around the Republican halls of power for years and years and years and years.
He's closely associated with Elliot Brody, the former finance chair of the Republican Party.
He had connections at the highest level of the Republican Party.
All Trump has to say here is, I didn't know much about Manafort.
I hired him.
And then I fired him when something went wrong.
Instead, he now finds himself defending Paul Manafort because he wants to rebut any accusation that the Russians had any part in the election.
So now he's become a press agent for the Russians, which is, why is Trump doing this?
Like, why?
How is this productive in any way?
With Paul Manafort, who really is a nice man, you look at what's going on with him, it's like Al Capone.
Well, I mean, it sort of is like Al Capone in the sense that Manafort broke the law.
So there's that.
And then President Trump was on with Sean Hannity last night.
And I can tell you this.
There are a lot of folks in the White House who were not supremely happy with the president of the United States' comments yesterday.
And they were dreading the fact that Trump was going to go on with Sean Hannity, not because they dislike Sean, they love Sean, but simply because they knew that Sean has a tendency to double down on every worst excess that Trump has.
And that's what happened on national TV last night.
Trump bragged to Hannity about Putin denying the Russian meddling.
Why exactly?
Why is this good for Trump?
Why?
If you want to help President Trump's administration, why is this good?
One week ago, one week, eight days ago, the President of the United States nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
And I was pretty happy about that.
So were the vast majority of Republicans.
It was a winning moment for President Trump.
A couple of weeks ago, the President of the United States was on the upswing.
And now the President of the United States had a very bad two weeks, and I think he had the second worst day of his presidency yesterday after Charlottesville.
And yet he was on national TV doubling down on all of this.
Doubling down on it.
Why?
Because when you have an echo chamber, you tend to double down on the things you believe, whereas if you were to open your ears a little bit, you might recognize that two things can be true at once.
One, Trump did not collude with Russia.
Two, Russia did attempt to influence the election.
Both of these things are true.
The left can't accept that Trump didn't collude, and Trump can't accept that Russia interfered.
As I hear as Trump defending Vladimir Putin on Sean Hannity's show last night, I hate this so much, I can't even tell you.
I think it's a huge mistake by President Trump, and I think that it's driving a lot of Americans to believe things that are just not true.
And I am more committed to the truth than I am to a political agenda.
The truth is that the Russians, as an American, The Russians attempting to interfere in our election is a bad thing.
It was bad when the Russians attempted to interfere by providing President Obama more flexibility in 2012.
And it is bad that the Russians were attempting to hack all of these various democratic sources during the election cycle.
But here is Trump defending Putin to Hannity.
First of all, he said there was no collusion whatsoever.
I guess he said as strongly as you can say it, they have no information on Trump.
We get questions on the witch hunt.
And I don't think the people out in the country buy it, but the reporters like to give it a shot.
I thought that President Putin was very, very strong.
Okay, what is this very, very strong nonsense?
It's the same thing about Kim Jong-un.
Of course he's strong, he's a dictator.
But he's a dictator of a third-rate country.
Okay, Russia, as a nation, has the same GDP as Italy.
And we're treating Russia as though it's some sort of grand world power that Trump has to cope with on the world stage in the weakest possible way.
I saw Judge Jeanine came out today, and she said, what would you expect Trump to do?
Go out there and shoot Putin?
I didn't realize that these were the two options.
Shooting Putin in the face, Or surrendering to him publicly.
I didn't realize these were the two options.
I thought there was a whole range of options between those two.
By the way, if Trump had shot Putin in the face, I think even Putin would have appreciated the manliness of that.
If Trump had actually just gone up there and shot Putin on Fifth Avenue, I think that Putin probably would have said, more power to you, Mr. President.
At least you have the balls to do it.
But instead, what we got was President Trump acting very foolishly.
Now, with all that said, There are two sides to the coin when it comes to the promulgation of a nasty politics in the country.
What Trump did yesterday is inexcusable.
In a different way, just as bad, is the Democratic overreaction.
And the reason I say that is because when you have people claiming treason, instead of, this is stupid, this is a problem, it's really terrible, when you have people claiming treason or making claims that the Russians would be happy that you're making, That's not helpful either.
I'll talk about that in just a second.
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So the reaction to President Trump's press conference with Putin should be twofold.
One, it should be people saying, that was really inappropriate.
The President of the United States should never be dumping his own intelligence services under the bus for a KGB agent.
And number two, let's look at the practical ramifications of what he did.
So, does it mean that Putin's going to invade surrounding countries?
Probably not.
Does it mean that Vladimir Putin is going to get more aggressive on the world stage?
Maybe, maybe not.
Although, last time he got aggressive on the world stage, we bombed Syria.
Does it mean that the intelligence agencies are going to feel a lot more unjustified heat?
Yes.
Does it mean that there's going to be more political dissension in the United States?
Yes.
Was a good no.
That, I think, is a relatively objective take on what is going to come out from all of this.
Because President Trump operates pretty independently of his own administration.
His own administration, when it comes time to make policy, actually goes and makes the policy, and Trump says a lot of stuff.
I've been saying it for literally years, literally years, that his slogan shouldn't be, make America great again, it should be, I say a lot of stuff, because Trump says a lot of stuff.
Okay, and that means that a lot of people don't take the stuff he says particularly seriously.
I don't think Vladimir Putin takes Trump seriously enough on policy that he's gonna go invade surrounding countries, believing that Trump is gonna allow him to do that.
And, it is important to mention, that in this terrible press conference, Trump did say at least one good thing.
He said, listen, we still have our disagreements about Crimea.
So he didn't come out and say, listen, Putin gets to keep Crimea.
He said that the United States and Putin disagree on Crimea.
So when it comes to territorial aggression by the Russians, Trump did not signal weakness.
He signaled weakness when it came to Russian interference in American elections.
And he signaled weakness because his own egotism got in the way of his better sense, I think.
Okay, so that's the practical take.
The non-practical take is that Trump is a traitor, Trump is a Russian agent, all of this is because Trump is some sort of Manchurian candidate, and yet that's exactly what Democrats are suggesting, which is what Putin wants.
What Putin wants is to drive chaos in the United States.
His actual goal is to make us all hate each other, and suspicious of each other, and think that we are all foreign agents of an evil power.
That is exactly what Vladimir Putin wants, and the Democrats are eager to jump to that because they think they're going to make electoral gain off the back of that, and they may be right.
Hey, there was a generic ballot, a generic congressional ballot out yesterday.
It shows Democrats are back up to an eight point lead, which is wave territory for Republicans.
So Democrats think that the more overboard they go on this stuff, the better it is for them electorally.
It may very well be, but it ain't good for the country.
Here was Chuck Schumer yesterday saying millions of people are going to wonder if Putin has dirt on Trump after Trump's behavior.
Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous behavior is the possibility that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump.
Why would you give credence to that?
There's not a lot of credence to that.
Why wouldn't you just say the obvious?
Again, the obvious thing is that it's the unifying feature of all of the silly things he's done.
Whether it is firing Comey precipitously, or whether it is attempting to defend Mike Flynn, or whether it's attempting to defend Paul Manafort, or whether it was what he did with Putin yesterday, or whether it's him talking about firing Rod Rosenstein.
There's one unifying thread.
Trump's ego.
That's the unifying thread.
Now the left is seeing a unifying thread in Trump colluded with Russia.
That is a lot more far-fetched than Trump is an egomaniac, which he has been for legitimately his entire life.
This is a guy who used to call the New York Post to report on them his amorous adventures with various starlets, and he would make things up and claim that his name was John Miller and he was his own PR agent.
That's the guy we're talking about.
Is it more likely that that guy is an egotist who will say stuff to protect his ego, or is it more likely that that guy is a secret Russian agent moving around the back channels of the Kremlin in order to do Vladimir Putin's dirty bidding?
Which one is more likely?
Which one is more likely?
Okay, in any case, the left decides that it's worthy of going nuts, so John Brennan, who legitimately voted for a communist party candidate in the 1970s.
So I'm not sure what he's whining about.
He tweeted out, Donald Trump, Brennan, of course, the CIA director under Barack Obama, Donald Trump's press conference performance in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors.
It was nothing short of treasonous.
Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he's wholly in the pocket of Putin.
Republican patriots, where are you?
Three question marks.
Okay, so every time you say treasonous, there's such a thing as treasonous behavior.
I I get that.
And I get that there is such a thing as using the word treason colloquially.
You don't actually mean that Trump should receive the death penalty.
But the overwhelming use of the word treason yesterday on the part of the left suggests that there are some people who really believe that not only should Trump be removed from office, but that he has committed acts of treason.
Coming from the same people who cheered when Barack Obama sent blank pallets of cash to terrorists in Iran, I find all of this more than slightly irritating.
But this was the line last night.
Stephen Colbert did the same thing.
He said that this was, this was treason.
This is great comedy here from Stephen Colbert, one of our, one of our great American comedians.
We got, uh, what did he say?
He said egotism.
Hold on.
Egotism plus naivete.
All right.
Times false equivalence equals... Yeah, it's treason.
All right.
Yeah, it's treason.
So that's treason.
Again, the double standard when it comes to treason is pretty stunning right here.
And if people were just using this colloquially, I think that'd be one thing.
I think it's also rich coming from people who believe that it was totally fine when Barack Obama was pledging flexibility to the Russian government in 2012.
I don't buy it.
Okay, that was not the worst of it.
It got even worse.
Okay, so the worst of it actually came courtesy of some woman named Jill Winebanks.
I'd never heard of her.
But Jill Winebanks, apparently a former Watergate prosecutor, and she's on with Ali Velshi over at MSNBC.
So she is talking about how terrible this was, and she runs out of ways to call this terrible.
Here's what she has to say.
And I would say that his performance today will live in infamy as much as the Pearl Harbor attack or Kristallnacht.
And it's really a serious issue that we need to deal with.
The Pearl Harbor attack, 2,400 Americans dead, Kristallnacht, the murder of 90-plus Jews, and the beginning of the run-up to the Holocaust.
Yeah, it was exactly like that when the President of the United States said some dumb crap about the intelligence agencies.
Exactly, exactly the same thing.
It didn't stop there, okay?
It just, it got worse and worse over the course of the day, and it's gotten worse even today.
The left's desire to go above and beyond on this stuff is really astonishing.
So let's take, for example, CNN's Jim Acosta.
So Jim Acosta, The left has this bizarre tendency to attribute gay feelings to people that it doesn't like.
So the same left that will say, not that there's anything wrong with that, that homosexuality is something worthwhile and wonderful, and if you ever make a gay joke, then this means you are a dramatic homophobe, We'll make gay jokes about Barack.
We'll make gay jokes about Donald Trump on a regular basis.
So here's Jim Acosta, the most obnoxious reporter over at CNN.
Jim Acosta loves that dude, so Jim Acosta, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
Here's Jim Acosta on CNN yesterday explaining that it looked like a marriage, but it was unclear who was the wife between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
I don't know which side is the bride and which side is the groom, Anderson, but it sort of feels like we're at a wedding here.
And on the other side of the room are friends from the Russian Federation.
It feels like we are at a wedding between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
This is actually before the press briefing, right?
That was actually before the press briefing.
So he was already foreseeing that there was going to be some sort of a consummation of the wedding night on stage.
Very weird to see reporters do this sort of stuff.
Then, of course, there is the New York Daily News, which, of course, hates President Trump.
They put out a cover, and the cover looked something like this.
It said, And then it shows a picture of Donald Trump shooting Uncle Sam in the head while holding hands with Vladimir Putin.
Is this sort of stuff going to raise the temperature such that there'll be a serious assassination attempt on Trump?
I gotta say, I don't think that would surprise me at this point.
When you spend all your days thinking that Donald Trump is essentially Thanos, and that he is gathering infinity stones, and he's gonna snap his fingers, and everyone's going to die, or at least half the people are going to die, Would it surprise me if somebody takes a pot shot at Trump and that the temperature has been raised because of this?
That would not surprise me in any real way.
Now, would that be the fault of the New York Daily News?
No.
But what they're doing here is immoral.
It's immoral to suggest that Trump is shooting Uncle Sam in the head by doing this.
Is what he did wrong?
Yes, it's wrong.
I spent the first half hour of the show today talking about just how wrong this is.
But to suggest that Trump is murdering America by attacking the intelligence agencies, I find a little bit much.
And then, of course, there's Trevor Noah over on Comedy Central, officially named the second unfunniest person in the world.
Samantha Bee, of course, is the least funny person on planet Earth.
Here is Trevor Noah going after President Trump using the vulgar language to which he has become accustomed.
So now, the formerly purposeless meeting between Trump and Putin had a meaning, right?
It was time for Trump to put his foot down.
And he did, right on America's dick.
Just classiness all the way through.
And super funny because he said the word dick, right?
When you say that word, then that means that you are really, really funny, is what I've come to learn from our comedic masters over at Comedy Central.
Okay, with all of this said, what's the final outcome?
Here's the final outcome.
In two weeks, nobody remembers any of this.
Really, that's the final outcome.
This looks like a black splat on Trump's resume, and nothing materializes barring some sort of precipitous action by Putin that Trump doesn't counter.
That is the actual outcome of this.
How do I know this?
Because after Charlottesville, everybody forgot about it in three weeks.
And it's only been one week since we selected a Supreme Court justice and nobody remembers the dude's name.
Because the news cycle is just this fast.
So people suggesting this is the end of the world, we're never going to recover.
No, we'll recover and we'll go on.
And if anything, there's a good case to be made that Trump's behavior actually increased the perception of the intelligence agencies around the country, except with regard to people who think that every word that comes out of Trump's mouth is invariably true and wonderful, and that he's playing 17-degree underwater, upside-down, hungry, hungry hippos.
But I think the likelihood is that most people do what you are doing today, what most people are doing today.
They look at Trump saying stuff and they say, look at that dude.
Dude says a lot of stuff.
Dude says a lot of stuff.
And because he says a lot of stuff, I'm not going to take any particular thing that he says on an individual level incredibly seriously.
And I don't think that's inappropriate.
I think discounting what President Trump says is something that's been done domestically.
I think it's being done on foreign policy.
It was done with regard to NATO just last week.
President Trump ripped into NATO, and there was a suggestion that Trump was going to pull out of NATO.
And you know what the NATO folks said?
They said, yeah, we had a great meeting.
NATO's doing great.
Because they just ignored him.
And I think when it comes to what Vladimir Putin said about the intelligence agencies and Trump siding with him, is it a bad moment for Trump?
Yes.
Does it demonstrate a lack of character in President Trump?
Yes.
Does it have any long-lasting ramifications?
Does it undermine the entire presidency?
Does it mean that Trump can't get good things done anymore?
No, it doesn't mean any of those things.
But I think it would be worthwhile for Republicans to note when President Trump does bad things because it is intellectually dishonest not to do so.
And also, don't push President Trump to double down on the bad.
Even Newt Gingrich and Laura Ingraham were on Trump over this thing.
It's not about people being anti-Trump, being all over Trump for what he said.
It's about anybody with any sense of objectivity realizing that if Barack Obama had said the same thing, we would have been all over his ass.
OK, and when Trump says that kind of stuff, then he deserves the flack he gets.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things I hate, and then we'll deconstruct the culture in a pretty serious way.
So let's start with things I like.
So I just read a great compendium of sports pieces by the columnist Gay Talese.
The book is called The Silent Season of a Hero.
And so all these old essays, there's some particularly good ones.
He has some really great writing about the boxer Floyd Patterson from the 1960s, who was eventually defeated by Muhammad Ali in an attempted comeback.
He has a great piece about Joe DiMaggio and sort of the waning of Joe DiMaggio in his 50s.
And he writes really well.
Not only does he write really well, he was described by Tom Wolfe as one of the founders of sort of the new journalism.
The new journalism was this idea of narrative journalism, this long form journalism where it wasn't just about the who, what, where, when, why.
Instead, it was also about drawing characters and writing nonfiction in a way where you could actually feel the characters.
The book is really fun and worth reading.
Again, The Silent Season of a Hero, a sports writing of Gaytolis, who's actually quite a good columnist.
Interesting guy, Gaytolis.
He actually came out and he suggested that he understood why Trump won.
He's a real New Yorker, Gaytolis, and so I think he sees Trump as sort of a 1960s Rat Pack figure, which, come to think of it, is not a terrible description of the president for all the good and all the ill.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Alrighty, so, today we begin, again, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Got her name right this time.
So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she said, we played her yesterday on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover, talking specifically about how she knew nothing about the Middle Eastern conflict.
It turns out she knows nothing about economics either.
Here she is explaining that capitalism is something that didn't exist in the past and someday won't exist again.
And I will explain why she is both wrong and possibly right.
Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.
And so I do think that right now, when we have this no-holds-barred, Wild West hyper-capitalism, what that means is profit at any cost.
Capitalism has not always existed in the world and it will not always exist in the world.
Okay, she says the beginning of that is so unbelievably stupid it is almost impossible to describe how stupid it is.
She actually said in this interview that unemployment is low because people are holding two jobs.
That would make unemployment high.
You idiot.
Because if one person holds two jobs, one person is out of work.
Presumably.
So, yes, that makes no sense at all.
Thank you for that.
Also, I like how she strings together all of these buzzwords from Occupy.
It's hyper-capitalist.
Tell me, Alexandria.
Tell me, what is the difference between capitalist and hyper-capitalist?
I mean, is it like with, like, the Millennium Falcon?
There's, like, drive, and then there's hyperdrive?
Like, you sit there with Chewy, and you pull the lever, and boom!
Zoom!
You're gone, and now you're in hypercapitalism?
What the hell is she even talking about?
The highest tax rate in the country is, like, over 40%.
People who are making a lot of money in this country are paying 45% of their income to the government.
But we have a hypercapitalist system here in the United States that is heavily regulated in virtually every aspect of the system.
It's hypercapitalist.
So that's idiotic.
The part she says about capitalism not always existing and it won't exist in the future, that part is true.
Okay, it is true that capitalism has not always existed.
That's why most of the world was impoverished for most of human history.
Then we got capitalism.
And guess what?
Capitalism is freaking amazing.
Capitalism raised half the world from abject poverty since 1980.
The number of people on planet Earth living in abject poverty since 1980 has been sliced in half.
The reason that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to make a living as a barkeep with a degree in economics from Boston University, which obviously is worth nothing, is because she's living in a capitalist society and she has to wear nice dresses and have her special lipstick that everybody loves.
Capitalism is the greatest force for human prosperity ever and it is not closed.
Jonah Goldberg basically says that capitalism is artificial because it says you have to respect other people's property rights and that centralized planning is not the way to do things even though there are a bunch of people who believe they're so wise they can run the entire economy from top down.
It's unnatural for capitalism to thrive.
He's correct.
It is unnatural for capitalism to thrive.
When capitalism dies, what you're going to see is not going to be a return to wonder in the economy because there was no wonder in the economy before capitalism.
Capitalism is free markets.
They are the greatest, most moral economic system ever devised by man, specifically because they were not devised by man.
They were devised by the idea that you were supposed to leave each other alone, which I thought was a good thing.
Okay, time to deconstruct the culture.
So each week, when we can, we try to go through a piece of culture that you or your kids are listening to, and we try to deconstruct what is happening in the culture because, as my good friend Andrew Breitbart used to say, culture is upstream of politics.
Many more people will watch this garbage Ariana Grande video.
Grande?
Grande?
Video?
God is a woman.
And first, before we even play the video, I want to show you how immature Ariana Grande is as a person.
Not just because she actually went to a donut shop in Lake Elsinore, California a couple years ago, licked one of the donuts behind the display case and put it back, which is just gross, but because she's a puerile child.
Okay, she's not a child, she's a woman.
She's a woman, but she acts like a child.
So here's what she tweeted out.
Somebody tweeted at her, God is a woman tonight.
So her new song is called God is a Woman.
We'll analyze just how stupid this nonsense is in a second.
It says, God is a woman tonight.
What's your favorite word?
And she tweets back, P-U-S-S-Y.
She tweets back the curse word for the vulgarity that President Trump famously used with regard to female genitalia.
If that's your favorite word, I would suggest that you are an 11-year-old.
Like really, if your favorite word is a curse word for a genital, then you are a small child who's obsessed and in an arrested stage of development.
It's like how my two-year-old's favorite word right now is poop, because he's two.
Okay, Ariana Grande's favorite word, if your favorite word describes your genitals, and it's not just genitals, it's your genitals, then I would suggest that you need some meaning in your life.
And that's not all she tweeted.
She then tweeted, P-word is, it's a privilege.
I-S-S-A.
P-word is a privilege, not is a.
P-word, ISSA Privilege.
So, somebody notified Daryl Issa, whose name is spelled exactly the same way, the House Chairman on Government Oversight, to let him know, the Congressman from California, because apparently, P-word, ISSA Privilege, which is very exciting.
Okay, so, she did all of this in advance of a new song that she has put out called God is a Woman.
Now, God isn't a woman.
God isn't a man.
God isn't a person.
God is an eternal being who exists beyond space and time.
This has been true for every deist who has ever lived.
Anyone who believes in a one God, any theist, believes that God is not a man, God is not a woman, God is an eternal being who exists beyond space and time and who designed the universe in which we live and is the force holding up that universe.
That is the basic idea of God.
But because we are now pagan, and we have entered a pagan period in which everything can be devolved down to your genitals and how much pleasure they give you, God is apparently a woman.
So here is Ariana Grande, Grande, Grande-goo, singing, God is a woman.
And she is, of course, hijacking all the great elements of Western civilization in order to do this.
So you'll see at the very end that there is a picture from the Sistine Chapel in which she has substituted herself for God reaching out to Adam in the Sistine Chapel.
Because this is what we do now.
What we do is we take great works of art, we take the history of Western civilization, and then we destroy it on the shoals of our own hedonism.
So we have Beyoncé and Jay-Z talking about ape crap.
In the Louvre, in front of some of the great sculptures ever created.
And then we have Ariana Grande hijacking the Sistine Chapel to talk about her vagina, which is just lovely.
I mean, it really spells, I think, it's a good descriptor of where we've gone with our civilization.
Perhaps when she realizes this doesn't actually generate any sort of meaning in your life, that your genitals don't give you meaning, and that anybody who lives by their genitals will also likely die by their genitals from an STD, then perhaps we'll get a society that cares about meaning again.
But here is Ariana Grande making the case for why God is a woman, which does, if, by the way, if God is a woman, why osteoporosis?
Yeah, just, just wondering.
So here is Ariana Grande warbling God is a woman.
You, you love how I move you.
You love how I touch you, my one.
When all is said and done, you will believe God is a woman.
And I feel it after midnight.
I feel that you can't fight my one.
It lingers when we're done.
You believe God is a woman.
Okay, so for those who can't see, she's naked in paint.
And then here she is on a bed with like 73 other people because this is what God is, right?
God is a woman having sex with lots of people.
Now, my favorite part of this is that Ariana Grande says sex is amazing because sex gives life.
Right, but she's pro-abortion, so I'm wondering how that works.
And then there's, in this video, a bunch of fat white guys who are yelling at her.
So I guess that she will eventually use this video of me talking about her to suggest that I don't appreciate that God is a woman.
You're right, I don't appreciate God as a woman because that's the stupidest garbage I've ever heard in my life.
God isn't a woman, God isn't a man, and God certainly is not Ariana Grande, an idiotic 22-year-old who can't warble more than an octave.
That's just ridiculous.
And boiling down, by the way, spirituality and decency and life-giving and the universe to sex is just...
It's such a teenage, stupid point of view.
If your life revolves around sex, you have the emptiest life.
You have an empty life.
Sex is wonderful in the right context.
Sex is a glorious thing in the right context, but boiling down all of human enjoyment and meaning in the world to sex makes you an animal.
It's not that God is a woman.
It's that people are animals, okay?
In her world, this is a better view of what God is in her world, right?
These little chipmunks, these ferrets.
What is this here?
Groundhogs popping out and making weird faces at the camera.
Very exciting stuff here from Ariana Grande.
What I love is that this thing's already been viewed tens of millions of times, of course, because the reality is nobody's actually going to imbibe the message.
The message is in her clothing.
The message is in the fact that she's there in body paint.
I'm old enough to remember when people used to worship at the altar people like Ella Fitzgerald.
This is the very closing image, is her in the Sistine Chapel, reaching out, surrounded by a bunch of women.
Of course, it has to be women of color so that all of the Rolling Stone folks can say that this is a recreation of great art, but in a more diverse way.
Very important to do that.
Really, it's upsetting that so many young people watch this sort of stuff and think there is some sort of empowerment or meaning in this.
If you find empowerment in this, you're a fool.
This is the least empowering thing.
If you are empowered because you have genitals, guess what?
Dogs have genitals too.
Virtually every living creature has genitals.
It's not empowering to have genitals.
It's empowering to use the stuff between your ears.
It's empowering to use your reason.
It's empowering to live a life that has actual meaning beyond sticking your genitals in particular places.
And if God is your genitals, then not only does God not exist, you don't exist as a human being.
You're just an animal rutting around in the dirt.
Okay, so.
I'm sure she'll use that for her next music video, or if not, then oh well.
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.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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