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July 18, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:18
Is Honesty Dead? | Ep. 583
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Time Text
President Trump reverses himself on Putin, sort of.
Barack Obama re-emerges to remind us why President Trump won in the first place.
And environmentalists fret over whether to have babies or not.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Another packed news day because the news cycle never stops Remember that it was like nine days ago?
Nine days ago when the President of the United States nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court?
Nine days ago because time is now moving backwards?
Because we have 73 news cycles every single day?
We'll get to the latest news cycle in just one second.
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Okay, so, President Trump has now walked back his original statements with regard to Vladimir Putin.
So you remember that on Monday, the President of the United States appeared alongside Vladimir Putin, and this is what he said.
This is clip 11.
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.
I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful.
Okay, so Trump was not particularly unclear about his perspective on this.
He believes that the Russians didn't actually hack, or at least if they did hack, then he's not going to grant that credibility to the intelligence services.
He takes Putin and the intelligence services.
He trusts both of them.
He was not unclear about this.
He was very clear about this.
Well, yesterday, in what was a necessary move, he tried to walk this back.
But as is typical with the president, when he tries to walk something back, he then walks back the walk back.
He started off by saying that he does have full faith in the American intelligence agencies, right?
This is something he should be saying, because the reality is there is unanimity among the intelligence agencies that Russia was involved in attempting to hack the DCC, as well as the DNC, as well as the Hillary Clinton campaign.
So here's President Trump yesterday suggesting that he has full faith and support with America's intelligence agencies, and then you'll hear at the very end of his attempted walk back, he walks back to walk back.
Let me begin by saying that, once again, in full faith and support for America's intelligence agencies, I have a full faith in our intelligence agencies.
Whoops, they just turned off the light.
That must be the intelligence agencies.
There it goes.
Okay.
You guys okay?
That was strange.
But that's okay.
So I'll begin by stating that I have full faith and support for America's great intelligence agencies.
Always have.
And I have felt very strongly that while Russia's actions had no impact at all on the outcome of the election, Let me be totally clear in saying that, and I've said this many times, I accept our intelligent community's conclusion that Russia's meddling in the 2016 election took place.
Could be other people also.
There's a lot of people out there.
There was no collusion at all.
And people have seen that, and they've seen that strongly.
I will say the president's pathological incapacity to just walk something back.
Like, it's the simplest thing.
All he has to say is, yeah, I screwed that one up.
What I really meant was that we obviously should trust our intelligence.
And I was trying to be polite to Putin, right?
It was a mistake, and I shouldn't have said that.
It's the easiest thing in the world.
But instead, the president says that he has full faith in our intelligence services.
He accepts their conclusion that it was the Russians.
But it could be other people also.
So we're back to the 400-pound man in his mother's basement who's hacking the DCCC and the DNC.
So, a lot of people jumped on this.
They say, obviously, Trump's apology, it's not really an apology, his sort of walk back here is not genuine.
Yeah, you think?
You think?
Yeah, right.
Of course, his walk back isn't genuine, but it's something that's necessary.
Now, the reason that the walk back is necessary, obviously, is because when you keep signaling to Russia that you are not going to take seriously their election meddling, then that gives them the impetus to meddle more.
It makes them think they can get away with it.
And it also means that they think maybe they can get aggressive on other fronts.
We'll talk about that in a little while.
Well, the president's explanation for why he was walking this back was even less convincing than that unconvincing walk back itself.
This part is just spectacular.
We played you the clip of what he actually had to say, and the direct quote was, as you recall, the direct quote was, I have President Putin, he said it's not Russia.
I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be.
And here is President Trump attempting to walk that back in the most awkward possible fashion.
A lot of people have come out strongly on that.
I thought that I made myself very clear by having just reviewed the transcript.
Now, I have to say, I came back and I said, what is going on?
What's the big deal?
So I got a transcript.
I reviewed it.
I actually went out and reviewed a clip of an answer that I gave.
And I realized that there is a need for some clarification.
It should have been obvious.
I thought it would be obvious, but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn't.
In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn't.
The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't or why it wouldn't be Russia.
Just to repeat it, I said the word would instead of wouldn't, and the sentence should have been, and I thought it would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video, the sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia.
Sort of a double negative.
So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.
I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.
Well, thanks for that clarification, Mr. President.
Okay?
My favorite part of that is where he goes on for like five minutes in the original Monday Presser saying that Russia did—he believes Vladimir Putin, and he explains in fulsome detail why he doesn't trust our intelligence services.
And then he says, well, I thought I was pretty clear about this, that I trust the intelligence services and I don't trust Vladimir Putin.
I thought I was pretty clear about that, guys.
I mean, I thought I made myself clear by having just reviewed the transcript.
You know, I got the transcript, I reviewed it, and then maybe there was a need for some clarification.
I meant the exact opposite of what I said the other day, but you guys should have gotten that.
I mean, come on, how could you not get that?
Like people going crazy over the thing I said as opposed to the thing that I didn't say?
How dare you?
How dare you, sir?
Pretty spectacular.
By the way, this is something I'm definitely going to try on my wife.
I will see how this goes.
The next time she asks me if I would want to have sex with another woman, I'll say, I absolutely would.
And then when she says, what?
I'll say, no, no, no, you misheard.
I said wouldn't.
And we'll see how that goes.
We'll see how well that goes.
Honey, I want you to take out the garbage.
Well, I would like to take out the garbage, but I can't.
Oh, sorry.
I meant I can.
What?
Okay.
Pardon me for being slightly confused, Mr. President, but I feel like that's more on you than on me at this point.
But listen, I'm glad that he's quasi-walking this back.
Now, here is the part that actually matters from what he said, and this is the part where he requires a fulsome commitment from the President.
All this stuff right now is just, the President said something dumb, then he tried to walk it back, then he half-walked back the walk back, and as we'll see, he Almost completely walked back the walk back.
It's a mishmash because that's what President Trump does.
He'll say he did the exact same thing with Charlottesville.
He said something dumb about Charlottesville.
And then he had a walk back on Monday in which he said, I should never have said that.
That's not what I meant.
Here's what I meant.
And it clarified and everybody was like, oh, OK, I guess we're done.
And then the next day he was like, I didn't like how you reacted to that.
I'm going back to my original statement.
And he does this kind of thing over and over and over again, which is why people don't take these sorts of comments seriously.
To begin with, the part that we should take seriously is this last comment that he makes during this presser yesterday.
In which he says that he is going to aggressively attempt to stop Russian interference in future elections.
Now the question is, do you take that seriously?
Because that's the part that matters.
The policy is what matters.
Not what the president has to say about his own personal conspiratorial beliefs about DNC servers.
The part that matters is, you're the head of the United States Executive Branch.
Are you going to do what you can to stop Russian election meddling?
Are you going to do what you can to stop Russian foreign aggression?
And here's what the president had to say about that yesterday, and this part was actually quite good.
Unlike previous administrations, my administration has and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts and repel.
We will stop it.
We will repel it.
Any efforts to interfere in our elections.
We're doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018.
And we have a lot of power.
As you know, President Obama was given information just prior to the election.
Last election, 2016, and they decided not to do anything about it.
The reason they decided that was pretty obvious to all.
They thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.
And they didn't think it was a big deal.
When I won the election, they thought it was a very big deal.
And all of a sudden they went into action, but it was a little bit late.
So he was given that in sharp contrast to the way it should be.
And President Obama, along with Brennan and Clapper and the whole group that you see on television now, probably getting paid a lot of money by your networks.
They knew about Russia's attempt to interfere in the election in September.
And they totally buried it.
So what President Trump has to say there is not completely wrong.
When he talks about how the Democrats basically didn't do enough to stop the Russian election interference, he's right about that.
And it's his job to stop Russian election interference from now on, since he's the President of the United States.
It is worth noting here.
That if the Obama administration had come out fulsomely and said Russia's attempting to interfere in our election by attempting to swing votes behind Trump, Trump and everyone in the media would have suggested that the Obama administration was trying to rig the election results by letting all that information slip.
So it is true that Obama should have done more.
There's no question Obama should have done more.
The question now is, will Trump do more?
And that really is a major question, as we'll talk about in just a second.
You know, Trump needs to be pretty clear about what he means to do, rather than this kind of wishy-washy, walking back the walkbacks.
I mean, he's basically doing the Michael Jackson moonwalk all over his own position, and it's very confusing.
It's very confusing from any objective point of view.
We'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to his interview on Tucker Carlson in just a second.
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Okay, so.
The President of the United States completed the walkback of his walkback on Twitter this morning when he decided that after the presser, it was necessary for him to clarify that he didn't mean what he said in the presser.
So here's what he tweeted out.
He tweeted out this morning.
This is 20.
He tweeted out, people loved my press conference.
He says, so many people at the higher ends of intelligence loved my press conference performance in Helsinki.
Putin and I discussed many important subjects at our earlier meeting.
We got along well, which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match.
Big results will come.
So there are people who are misinterpreting this tweet to suggest that he was saying people in the intelligence community loves his press conference.
No, that's not what he means.
What he means is that smart people loved his press conference in Helsinki.
And when he means smart people, what he means is people who like President Trump and agree with him on everything.
And then when he says that we got along well and that bothered many haters, no, I'd like for the president to get along well with Putin without actually compromising our position vis-a-vis Putin.
I don't really care whether he gets along with Putin, to be frank with you.
You know, let me reverse that.
I'll walk that back.
I don't care whether he gets along with Putin.
I don't think it's important for foreign leaders to get along with each other.
I think it's important that we not go to war with people, and I think that it's important that we stand up for our interests abroad.
Also, when President Trump says big results will come, he said the same thing about Kim Jong-un.
I think it's fair to say that Kim Jong-un, when he said that he would denuclearize, what he actually meant was wouldn't.
I think what he meant to say was wouldn't.
And maybe we should clarify that.
Maybe y'all got that wrong.
Well, no, I'm not interested in going to war with Russia.
Some people hate the fact that it got along well with President Putin of Russia.
They'd rather go to war than see this.
It's called Trump derangement syndrome.
Well, no, I'm not interested in going to war with Russia.
I'm also not interested to kowtowing to a second-rate power that has the economy of Italy.
And that's not something that I'm interested in doing at this point.
I don't think that most Republicans, most conservatives, most Americans are interested in doing that at this point.
Nobody cares that he gets along with Putin.
The only thing we care about is whether he's dumping our own intelligence services under the bus in order to kiss Putin's rear.
Right?
That's what people are concerned about.
And this false dichotomy that he's drawing here, it made me angry when Obama does it.
It makes me angry when Trump does it.
The alternative to not getting along with, the alternative to getting along with Putin or Iran is not going to war with Putin or Iran.
I don't get along with a lot of people.
The alternative is not me shooting them in the face.
The alternative is I don't get along with them.
And then we go about our daily business with competing interests.
This happens all the time.
How many people in your life don't you like?
Is the alternative you go to their house and burn it down?
I didn't realize those were the only two alternatives on the table.
Was fly the bombers or give Putin a big bear hug.
Like there's no reason for that sort of logic.
Now, the reason this has an impact is because Vladimir Putin could be watching.
And I've been skeptical that this is what Putin's going to do.
But Vladimir Putin could be in a position where he basically says Donald Trump's a weakling.
Now I'm going to start pushing him around.
And that was exacerbated last night by an interview that Trump did with Tucker Carlson on.
on Fox News.
Now, the interview actually was done before Trump's walkback.
So Trump's interview in time was before the walkback, but it is also more representative of his true views.
This is one of the problems.
I think Tucker's a deeply, deeply talented dude.
I think that Sean Hannity is a really talented guy.
I like both Tucker and I like Sean as well.
But I do think that there's a tendency among a lot of folks to have Trump double down on his worst excesses and And Tucker really pushed him along that path in this interview.
It is not good for the United States.
It is not good for President Trump.
If you want to see Trump be a successful president, you can't have him making these kind of overtures toward Russian aggression.
And that's basically what he did last night.
So, Tucker went on last night and he started off his show by saying that this was basically a hostage tape, that Trump's walk back was a hostage tape.
In the first place, he wishes that Trump had stuck with his original position, which is that the intelligence community is wrong and Vladimir Putin is right.
I don't know why Tucker would say this.
It really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Does he really believe that all 17 American intelligence agencies who all agree that Russia attempted to hack the DCCC, DNC, and Hillary Clinton campaign, all of them are lying?
All of them are conspiratorial.
All of them are wrong.
But Vladimir Putin, who literally murders dissidents in his own country and interferes with elections all over the world, that guy is not lying to us.
Here is Tucker saying that Trump was basically taken hostage by, I guess, the quote-unquote Republican establishment, another term that bothers me deeply.
If you want to say establishment, you have to define establishment.
Is Newt Gingrich the establishment?
Because Newt was ripping on Trump over this.
Was Laura Ingraham the establishment?
Because Laura Ingraham was not happy with Trump over this.
But here is Tucker basically ripping on the establishment and suggesting Trump should have gone along with Putin.
So that's the hostage tape.
The president buckled to criticism.
I don't know what they're saying, that's exactly what happened.
He buckled.
And that happens.
This is politics, after all.
Okay, so the idea that this is a hostage tape, it's true that Trump didn't want to walk it back, but I'm not sure why him walking back a bad idea is a bad idea.
It actually is quite a good idea.
And then Tucker went on to suggest that Trump bowed to the intelligence community, and he said the intelligence community is trying to destroy democracy.
Now, I have a lot of questions about the intel community.
I have a lot of questions about Peter Strzok.
I have a lot of questions about Lisa Page.
I have a lot of questions about James Comey.
Those questions have not been answered yet.
We don't have the full Inspector General report on the Russian collusion investigation.
But if the suggestion is that anything the intel community does is trying to destroy democracy, because some members of the intel community are bad, so in other words, you don't like the Russian collusion probe, and therefore the Russian interference probe is bad, this is a logical fallacy.
The intelligence community is fully capable of deriving the fact that the Russians were attempting to hack into the DCCC, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign without you having to accept the legitimacy of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
It's not like you either accept all or none.
You can say what they are doing, trying to track down all of the bad action by the Russians in the election cycle, That stuff is fine.
It's when they started targeting President Trump in overt fashion, when they started stretching the law in order to get Trump.
That's the bad stuff.
But Tucker apparently wants to wrap the whole thing up in a ball and then suggest that Trump bowed to the intel community and the intel community is trying to destroy democracy, as opposed to whom?
Vladimir Putin, who hates democracy and has been in power since 2000?
He's been in power for nearly 20 years as a dictator in Russia?
Well, as the rage storm swirled, the president bowed to the inevitable, genuflecting before U.S.
intelligence agencies whose judgment must never be questioned, and recited the now-obligatory oath of loyalty to the spy bureaucrats now in charge of our country.
This is about democracy, whether or not voters rule their country.
It turns out the very people telling you they are saving our democracy are working overtime to destroy it and scolding you as they do.
Okay, that is such an overstatement.
It's not the very same people working overtime to save our democracy.
Those people are not Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
That is not those people.
It's not James Comey.
There are lots of people in the intel community working overtime to prevent Russian interference in our elections and many other bad things.
And to watch this sort of blanket condemnation of the intel community, it's this sort of feel that is going to allow Putin, I think, to feel like he can interfere in our elections without a lot of blowback.
Because if we think our enemies are the intel community, then I guess that he's not our enemy anymore.
After all, he's the one being targeted unfairly by our intel community, apparently.
Tucker's support of President Trump on his original Helsinki presser, I think is deeply counterproductive for President Trump.
And again, I respect Tucker.
I think Tucker's a smart guy.
But I think his perspective on this is skewed by the fact that Tucker tends toward isolationism on foreign policy.
We're going to discuss President Trump and isolationism and NATO in just a second because he got into it with Tucker on his show last night.
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Okay, so, President Trump is on with Tucker Carlson last night, and it wasn't just Tucker mouthing, I think, what were basically platitudes about the intel community trying to destroy democracy, and how Trump was now being held hostage by the intel community.
Egged on by Tucker Carlson, Trump made some, I think, very ill-advised comments about NATO.
Now, there are a lot of people who, last week, were worried about Trump and NATO.
And I said, there's not really a reason to worry that much about Trump and NATO, because Trump's going to say a lot of stuff, right?
My theory about Trump has been pretty consistent here, which is Trump says a lot of stuff, most people ignore most of that stuff, and then policy sort of gets done in the background.
There's one area where this is not true, and that is if the President of the United States signals weakness to foreign adversaries, and those foreign adversaries take those signals seriously and then get aggressive.
We saw this happen with Crimea and Barack Obama.
We saw this happen with Georgia and George W. Bush.
We saw this happen with Saddam Hussein and George H.W.
Bush.
When an administration signals they're not going to do anything about aggression by a foreign adversary, foreign adversaries, foreign dictators, they start to get aggressive.
This is not unique to any administration.
It's true for every administration.
Trump has not been pushed yet.
Usually what people say is that every new president is pushed with some sort of foreign crisis in the first couple of years.
Trump has avoided that so far, but he is almost egging it on in some of these comments about NATO because, let's face this, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was put in place after World War II in order to check against Soviet aggression, that has been the key keeper of peace in the region for the last 70-odd years.
For the last 73 years, that's been the key keeper of peace in the region.
Remember, Europe was one of the most war-torn places on planet Earth for literally centuries.
And then came NATO.
In the century before NATO, there were two world wars.
There was a Franco-Prussian war.
There were several Balkan wars.
There were a bunch of different wars that were happening on the European continent in this time.
Since NATO, there have been zero major wars on the European continent, the only exception being Yugoslavia, where NATO actually took an active role in bombing.
So the idea that NATO has been some sort of net negative for the United States or for world peace is just foolish.
But here's what President Trump had to say about NATO.
And this is actually, this is troubling stuff because if you're Vladimir Putin, you're sitting back and you're hearing Trump say this, you might be saying to yourself, hey, maybe I ought to get aggressive.
Here's what Trump had to say to Tucker Carlson.
NATO was created chiefly to prevent the Russians from invading Western Europe.
I think you don't believe Western Europe's at risk of being invaded by Russia right now.
So what is the purpose of NATO right now?
Well, that was the purpose.
Pause there for one second.
First of all, the original creation of NATO to protect against Soviet interference in Western Europe Now applies to Russian interference in Eastern Europe.
Eastern Europe still matters.
East Germany was a part of Soviet Russia.
Just because the Soviet Union collapsed doesn't mean that we should allow Poland and Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Albania and all these countries on the border of Russia to suddenly become Soviet client states again, Putin client states again.
That's the actual answer here.
Here's the answer Trump is going to give.
Well, that was the purpose.
And it's OK.
It's fine.
But they have to pay.
And they weren't paying.
And other presidents went and they'd make a speech and then they'd leave and nothing would happen.
And, you know, the fact that they didn't pay is not, you know, new.
It's not a new fact.
This is something that people have known for a long time.
Other countries were delinquent.
You know, in the real estate business, we use the word delinquent.
They didn't pay.
They didn't pay for past.
So I went there three, four days ago, and I said, folks, you got to pay.
Because we're not going to pay from 70 to 90, and I think 90 is really the right, you know, depending on the way you define it, 90%.
We're not going to pay 90% of the cost to defend Europe.
And on top of that, the European Union kills us on trade.
We lost $151 billion last year on trade.
Okay, so what he has to say there is not actually accurate.
The way that NATO works is that people have a pledge to spend a certain percentage of their GDP on defense.
He is right that people should increase their defense spending, but it's not like they owe us money, okay?
That's not how it works.
It's not that they pay us and then we actually go out and defend them.
The idea is they're supposed to keep a certain level of defense readiness.
The worst part of this interview is what Trump actually said right after that.
So, Tucker Carlson asks him why his son should go die for Montenegro.
Okay, and I don't think we actually have this clip.
So Tucker Carlson asks him, why should his son die for Montenegro?
And here's what Trump says, quote, I understand what you're saying.
I've asked the same question.
You know, Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people.
And by the way, they're very strong people.
They're very aggressive people.
And they may get aggressive.
And congratulations, you're in World War III.
But that's the way it was set up.
Remember, I just got here a little over a year and a half ago and I took over the conversation three or four days ago and I said, you have to pay, you have to pay.
It was very unfair.
They weren't paying.
So not only were we paying for most of it, but they weren't even paying and we're protecting them.
So add that to your little equation on Montenegro.
He's basically saying there's no reason why we should defend Montenegro.
Right?
He's saying that Tucker Carlson is right.
Why should my son die for Montenegro?
Now, I heard Tucker Carlson say the same thing to Max Boutin in an interview about a year ago, and I thought that it was really an asinine point, this idea, why should my son die for Montenegro?
Well, why should your son die for Poland?
Why should your son die for Germany?
Why should your son die for England?
Why should your son die for New York?
Why should your son die for anything?
Right?
I mean, the whole point of having a military is that you are to defend your allies.
No one is calling on Tucker Carlson's son to die and nobody is calling on American soldiers to die.
Every single foreign policy decision has to be made on the basis of whether we think that it is positive for the United States to intervene or whether it is negative.
But one of the things that prevents us from having to intervene is a perception that we will if we have to.
This is what Reaganism was all about.
Reaganism was about the idea of mutually assured destruction and peace through strength.
You're not going to cross that trip wire, because if you do, we will mash you.
You're not going to invade Montenegro, because if you do, we'll kill you.
And it's this notion that prevents us from actually having to expend soldiers in Montenegro.
It is when the other side walks over the line that American soldiers die.
It's in Vietnam, when the United States does not have a credible threat of retaliation, and then we gradually escalate to lots of American soldiers die.
It's when that happens in Korea that American soldiers die.
It's when that happens in the Gulf War that American soldiers die.
It does not happen when there's a perception on the other side that if you cross us we will break you, that we will absolutely shatter you.
When that is the perception, then Vladimir Putin has no interest in crossing those borders.
Beyond that, Trump's suggestion that Montenegro is aggressive with Russia is Russian propaganda.
It's just nonsense.
Montenegro is a tiny little country that has no aggressive instincts vis-a-vis Russia.
In fact, it was the Russian government that in 2016 tried to assassinate, allegedly, the prime minister of Montenegro and replace him with a Russian proxy.
So it's Russia that's aggressive toward Montenegro.
I don't understand what Trump's deal with Montenegro is.
I mean, that's kind of a weird one.
And then Trump's suggestion, this is the worst thing of all, right?
Trump's suggestion that mutual defense under NATO is a problem.
The NATO Charter has been invoked one time.
One time.
Okay, NATO Charter has been invoked one time.
What was that one time it was invoked?
After we were attacked on September 11th.
Montenegro currently has troops in Afghanistan because Montenegro came to the common defense of the United States after we were attacked on September 11th.
So ripping on Montenegro and ripping on NATO is so foolhardy.
And not only is it foolhardy, it sends a signal to Putin that you might be able to walk in.
Now, maybe Putin doesn't take that seriously.
Maybe Putin doesn't move forward with that.
But if I'm an Eastern European ally, I'm going to have my doubts.
I'm going to have some serious questions.
Now, I said the same thing about Barack Obama.
When Barack Obama pulled missile defense out of Poland, I said, this is a signal to Vladimir Putin he can get aggressive.
And the Polish took it that way, too.
And it created a rift in American-Polish relations.
Well, the same thing could easily happen here with President Trump saying this sort of stuff.
And it gets worse in a certain way.
Trump was specifically asked about who is better, Angela Merkel or Vladimir Putin.
Now, I'm not a fan of Angela Merkel.
I think Angela Merkel has been a garbage chancellor of Germany.
She's opened Germany's borders.
She's helped subvert its welfare state.
She's done an awful lot of bad in Germany.
But if I have to choose between Angela Merkel and a murderous dictator like Vladimir Putin who literally went on national television a night ago and said that he kills people, but so what?
Kennedy was killed in the United States.
I'm going to choose Angela Merkel every time over Vladimir Putin.
And people who don't believe that, I think, don't know enough about Vladimir Putin.
But here was Trump basically demurring on the question.
I don't want to say who's better and who's not better, but I will say this.
She's been very badly hurt by immigration.
Very, very badly.
I don't want to say who's better and who's not better.
It's a pretty obvious question.
Okay, I know who's better.
You know who's better.
Everyone knows who's better.
This sort of signaling to Putin is really, it's bad stuff.
It's just bad stuff.
Okay, now that doesn't mean that Trump's activity vis-a-vis Russia has been weak in practice, but that's not the entire question.
The question is also how much Russia is going to take away from this that Trump is a pushover and somehow they can push him around.
I don't want Trump to be this.
I want Trump to be stronger.
I want Trump to succeed.
I want him to be a successful president.
I want every president to be successful in defending the United States and our allies.
And when President Trump signals weakness out of a sort of Pat Buchanan-esque isolationism, I think that it is a deep mistake.
I think it's a serious mistake for the president, and it's not helping him in any serious way.
Now, there's been a lot of talk about President Trump's dishonesty over the last 36 hours.
I want to talk about that in just a second because I have another name for you and it rhymes with Shmarak Mobama.
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In a world where families are torn apart between left and right perspectives, on the Ben Shapiro Sunday Special, I'll be talking to Ben about above-ground nuclear testing, trade, immigration, and how to make America viable into the future.
impresario of the intellectual dark web.
In a world where families are torn apart between left and right perspectives, on the Ben Shapiro Sunday special, I'll be talking to Ben about above-ground nuclear testing, trade, immigration, and how to make America viable into the future.
Join us, won't you?
Best promo yet, guys.
Really appreciate it.
Okay, so, go check it out.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
Okay, so a lot of people very bothered about the perception that President Trump was dishonest in his walk back and then his walk back of the walk back and then his walk, walk, walk back, right?
I mean, he walks off in his Barry Bonds.
That's, I understand.
I also found that off-putting.
However, let's be real about something.
The same people crying about Donald Trump's dishonesty, the same people crying about Donald Trump's weakness on Russia from the left, are people who cheered Barack Obama's weakness on Russia from the left, who laughed and scoffed when Mitt Romney said that Russia was a geopolitical threat, and then Obama said, well, The 1990s called.
They want your foreign policy back.
Remember that?
Yeah, I remember that, too.
And then Barack Obama had the temerity to give a speech yesterday in South Africa in which he talked about politicians shamelessly lying.
You want to know why Trump is president?
He's president because this guy was the president before he was.
I mean, Donald Trump is a direct response to the the the imbecility of the Obama administration and Barack Obama's own egotistical mode of fibbing, lying and considering himself a great truth teller at the same time.
We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they're caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more.
Wow, I mean, the utter lack of shame.
Who would have such a lack of shame, Mr. President?
Who in the world would tell a lie and then just keep doubling down on the lie?
Who would do that?
I don't know.
If you like your doctor.
You can keep your doctor under the reform proposals that we put forward.
If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep it.
If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.
If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor too.
We will keep this promise to the American people.
If you like your doctor, You will be able to keep your doctor.
Who would lie shamelessly to the American public?
Shamelessly!
Who would do that?
Who would lie shamelessly to the American public over and over and then go out and lecture about the lack of self-awareness among America's leadership?
Who would do such a thing?
Like, who would say, like, 22 times that he couldn't unilaterally grant amnesty and then grant amnesty and then praise himself for doing so?
Who would do such a thing?
Can you imagine anyone who would do that?
I don't know.
Could you?
I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States.
We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.
I do have an obligation to make sure that I'm following some of the rules.
I can't simply ignore laws that are out there.
I've got to work to make sure that they are changed.
You know, I'm not a king.
I am the head of the executive branch of government.
Shamelessness?
Dishonesty?
No, no.
Barack Obama was an emissary of truth and good and kindness and happiness.
That's who Barack Obama was.
You wonder why the right looked at this guy and they went, you know what, we'll put up any shameless person who is willing to smack the Democrats in the head.
You wonder why the right went in that direction?
It's because Barack Obama was this self-satisfied, smug guy who lied to us over and over and over about the Iran deal, and about healthcare, and about the IRS, and about immigration, over and over and over again.
Now, that wasn't the only thing that Barack Obama said that was dishonest yesterday.
So he said something that is pretty amazing, actually.
So, Barack Obama says something that sounds like it's coming out of my mouth.
Right, really.
Like, what he's about to say right here is a message that I have been saying on college campuses for literally years.
And I've been called a white supremacist for saying it.
I've been called a racist for saying it.
Because I am a member of the white privileged class.
Barack Obama said it yesterday in South Africa and he's 100% right.
There's only one problem.
For eight long years, he promoted exactly the opposite message.
So here's Barack Obama talking about why identity politics is flawed.
We're able also to get inside the reality of people We're different than us, so we can understand their point of view.
Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they'll change ours.
And you can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you, because they're white or because they're male, that somehow there's no way they can understand what I'm feeling.
That somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.
Okay, that's exactly what I say.
In like every speech, virtually word for word, that's what I say and then people on the left say I'm a racist for saying that because I'm a white male saying that white males can have perspectives on things too and that the basis of a functional republic is the idea we can have conversations with one another.
And in just a second I'm going to show you how often President Obama lied on this particular issue.
You wonder why so many Republicans seem not to care all that much about President Trump's flip-flops on various issues and his vagaries and why they take him seriously but not literally?
You wonder why?
Well, it's because Barack Obama fibbed to everybody's face for eight years and the media went along with it and they smooched him repeatedly over it.
So, for example, here at Barack Obama, you just heard him rip on identity politics.
Well, here's Barack Obama talking about Hispanics, right?
He's talking to a Hispanic group, and he says that Hispanics as a group should actually punish other people.
If Latinos sit out the election, instead of saying, we're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's going to be harder.
But I thought tribal identity politics were bad.
He just said so, and he was the great emissary of non-tribal identity politics.
I mean, it's not like Barack Obama ever would have said that, for example, black people should vote as a bloc, and that they should only ally with people who represent quote-unquote black interests.
It's not like Barack Obama ever said anything like that, like he's about to do in clip 9.
It's never like he ever said anything in that range.
We have achieved historic turnout in 2008.
And 2012, especially in the African American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election.
You want to give me a good send-off?
Go vote!
Go vote, right?
I mean, black people.
Go vote and go vote as a black bloc, not as a group of individuals who actually agree with the agenda.
If black people don't vote, it's an insult to him because obviously Barack Obama is a black president.
You know, it's not like Barack Obama, after spending years using identity politics, would then turn around and rip identity politics for political gain.
It's not like he would ever do that.
The lack of honesty on the part of Obama defenders is what led to Donald Trump.
It led to the right saying, listen, you guys ripped down Mitt Romney in 2012.
He was a clean candidate.
You ripped him down.
You said that he was going to put y'all back in chains.
You suggested that he was a racist who wanted to make binders full of women because he was a sexist.
Not because he wanted to hire women, but because he hated women.
This is what you did.
And then if you're going to do that, we'll just run the guy who is going to slap you as hard as he can across the face.
And if he fibs some, then he fibs some.
But we're not going to play along with this.
Every time you see Obama, you realize why Trump was elected president in the first place.
You realize it.
Right?
The same guy who is now saying that we can't have a tribal identity politics in the United States spent his days talking about how the United States was not cured of racism and then suggesting that people who disagreed with him were emissaries of this racist America.
Racism.
We are not cured of.
It's not just a matter of overt discrimination.
We have to... societies don't...
Overnight, completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior.
And then his suggestion constantly, politically, was that if you disagreed with him, it's because you were an emissary of the bitter clingers.
Now this sort of reversal, listen, I'm happy that Obama has reversed himself.
The real reason Obama has reversed himself on all of this is because he sees that the identity politics coalition that he built is not replicable for other Democratic candidates.
That's really what's going on here.
There are other Democrats like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker who want to use Obama's model.
They want to cobble together an intersectional coalition of blacks and Hispanics and LGBT people and women and Jews and Asians, and they want to cobble that together and form a majority.
And Obama's realizing that it doesn't work for anybody except Obama.
Obama was a grand and glorious politician at getting himself re-elected.
He was terrible at helping his agenda.
In the first two years, he pushed forward his agenda, which, by the way, did not include immigration reform, and then He basically got nothing done for the subsequent six years, except for promoting himself at the expense of his own party.
And now he says, hey, guys, maybe we shouldn't have gone in that intersectional politics dynamic direction.
Well, it's a little late, Mr. President.
It's a little late.
Now, am I glad that he said this?
Am I glad that Barack Obama said this?
Yes.
I'm glad when anybody says something true.
I'm glad that Barack Obama said something true.
I'd like for the Democratic Party to pick up that banner.
But he let that genie out of the bottle.
I'm not sure that genie is going back in that bottle.
I think that the genie is out of the bottle.
And you can see this by the fact that Joe Lieberman has now written an op-ed in favor of Joe Crowley.
Joe Crowley, as you recall, was the Democratic congressperson from New York who was probably going to replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House should Democrats win a majority.
And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that's the socialist Latino woman, she beat him in his district.
Joe Lieberman has written this op-ed suggesting that Ocasio-Cortez's victory seems likely to hurt Congress, America, and the Democratic Party.
And he talks about the fact that she's a radical and the fact that there's this intersectional politics that's taken over the Democratic Party.
I think Obama sees the same thing.
But it's too late.
It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle.
You want to know why so many on the right are willing to overlook flaws with President Trump?
It's because the left continues to do what the left has always done, which is embrace the most radical elements of its own base.
Time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So I've been reading a great book on sort of the physics of time called The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, all about why it is that time moves forward, not backward.
Whether it is true that time actually flows forward or whether time is merely a sort of human perception, that we perceive things wrong.
And reading the book is really fascinating because All of the physics of time suggests that the sort of theistic notion that God can exist outside of time and space, or that God at least exists outside the timeline, if time is actually just a human notion to a certain extent, and there is no actual hard-line timeline, then that lends credence to the idea that existing outside of time is not all that uncredible, actually.
It's really kind of fascinating.
But the basic theory is this.
When you think about it, you and I are not existing in the same moment.
We don't actually exist in the same moment.
There's my timeline and there's your timeline.
By the time you hear my voice, my voice has already stopped resonating in my vocal cords.
You are living, even the people in this room are living a slight fraction of a millisecond behind me, because even if their perception of me is actually slightly behind what I'm doing right now, is obviously true in the case if we had a person on Mars, there'd be a 15 minute delay between any communications.
You actually see this with regard to clocks.
If you fly in a very, very fast airplane around the Earth, and then you measure your clock against a person who stayed on the ground, your clock will actually be slower if you were in the airplane.
Time moves slower when you move quickly.
This is Einstein's special theory of relativity.
Time is relative.
The reason that it's called theory of relativity is because time is relative.
There is no absolute correct time.
There's a time for each individual.
The same thing is true of space, which can warp time because space and time are really part of a seamless fabric.
The book is really well written and I think simple enough for dummies like me to understand.
Go check it out.
Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time.
He's also the author of a good book called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
It's fascinating stuff.
I really enjoy that kind of stuff.
Okay, other things that I like.
You know what?
I've run out of things I like.
Let's do some things I hate.
Alrighty, so things that I hate.
James Comey has now emerged to explain that everyone should vote Democrat.
So, the guy who probably lost Hillary Clinton in the election, hilariously enough, now says everyone should vote Democrat to undo his big boo-boo, which was completely botching both the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russia investigation.
Here, Comey tweeted out, This Republican Congress has proven incapable of fulfilling the founder's design that ambition must counteract ambition.
All who believe in this country's values must vote for Democrats this fall.
Policy differences don't matter right now.
History has its eyes on us.
The self-aggrandizing nature of this douche is just insane.
History has its eyes... He's always tweeting stuff like this.
History has its eyes on us.
Well, history had its eyes on you when you decided not only to botch the original Hillary investigation, but then re-botch it right before the election, and then to stay around for Donald Trump's administration rather than quitting out of pique, supposedly.
And then you decided not to tell the truth about the investigation publicly, and then Donald Trump fired your ass.
And now you're saying history has its eyes on us?
Worst FBI director in modern history.
I mean, really, just an awful, awful FBI director.
And James Comey suggesting that the Republicans must be thrown out of Congress so that Democrats can come in and check Trump.
I'm wondering how Trump hasn't actually been checked.
Really, like, in terms of policy, where has Trump been unchecked?
I would say one area, and that really is tariffs.
But otherwise, has the Mueller investigation been shut down?
No.
Is that investigation continuing?
Sure.
Does Trump say what he wants?
Yeah, but guess what?
So did Obama.
The idea that Democrats are going to check Trump in any serious way other than passing a bunch of bad legislation I think is foolhardy.
You think you can trust Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer?
Listen, I understand the tendency for Americans to like split government because they like the gridlock.
I get it.
But James Comey suggesting that ambition must counteract ambition and Republicans aren't doing it so now we have to elect Democrats is just, it's so silly that even Brian Fallon, former Hillary Clinton campaigner, he came out and he said basically to Comey, we don't want your help, you're an idiot.
So, there's that.
Okay, meanwhile, I have to tell you about this piece over at the New York Times by a guy named Roy Scranton.
So Roy Scranton is the author of a book called We're Doomed, Now What?
Essays on War and Climate Change.
Real picker-upper.
And he has a piece over at the New York Times called Raising My Child in a Doomed World, which is, I gotta say, I have two kids.
That's not something you want to convey to your kids.
So here's what he says in his piece.
He says, I cried two times when my daughter was born.
First, for joy, when after 27 hours of labor, the little feral being we'd made came yelling into the world.
And the second, for sorrow, holding the Earth's newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-thrus and drainage ditches and asphalt in the waste fields that had once been oak groves.
A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed.
My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way Okay, what I like about this particular paragraph is it doesn't say, I looked around the hospital room and I saw the IV that was connected to the person birthing my child, and I looked around and I saw the doctors and the nurses who had modern medical equipment, and I looked around and I saw the antiseptic room in which we were sitting that did not have germs that could infect this person or my baby so that my baby wouldn't die of a disease before the baby turned eight days old.
He doesn't say that.
Instead, he looks out the window and he sees some cement and he's like, oh my god!
I wish you were all oaks.
But guess what?
If you were living in the middle of the forest right now, the chances that the woman who birthed your child and the child would die would be a lot higher than you sitting in a beautiful antiseptic hospital connected to an electrical grid created by all of the environmental catastrophe that you think happened.
And were you writing this on a laptop?
I assume the answer is yes.
So, the whole thing is just inane, but he continues, like, this idea that we're living in this dystopian future, where it's Logan's run, the environment has been so overrun, it's soil and grain that we're going to have to eat people?
We're going to put down Edward G. Robinson and turn them into potato chips?
Like, that's where we are now?
It's just so stupid.
It's so stupid, it's beyond description.
I understand you're worried about global warming.
Okay, well then let's discuss solutions to the possibility of global warming.
Okay, and those actual solutions should not be just pie in the sky, what if we all live like it's 1850 solutions?
Maybe they're market-oriented.
Maybe we're talking about, yes, cap and trade, even though I disagree with cap and trade.
Maybe we're opposing solutions.
But this, how do I bring up a child in a world as horrible as this?
Understand, if you were born at any point in human history, any point in human history prior to about 1950, and you visited now, You would think you literally died and went to heaven.
You would literally think that.
That baby that just came out can expect to live to 80 years of age.
80!
Okay, the life expectancy a century and a half ago was like 40.
80 years of age you can expect to live to.
That's not because of the oak trees, you idiot.
Okay, the oak trees have always been there.
Along with poison oak.
Which we now have creams for, which didn't exist before.
This doofus Roy Scranton continues, anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim.
It is not unreasonable to say the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted.
That's a little unreasonable.
I mean, we did wipe out one third of the species with the Black Plague, and then we also had the risk of nuclear war, as well as two world wars that killed literally tens of millions of people, also the scourge of communism that wiped a hundred million people off the planet.
Yeah, it's a little overstated to say that if the temperature changes by 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, that that's the worst challenge we've ever faced, I think.
Because anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we're almost certainly going to botch it.
To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next 5 or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that's scarcely imaginable, much less feasible.
It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration, and global coordination on a scale never before seen.
Right, because we're not actually going to stop carbon emissions completely, because number one, we still have questions about the sensitivity of the climate to carbon.
I do believe that carbon emissions affect climate change, but there are still questions as to how much that is, and what are the outliers?
What's the possibility that it's big?
What's the possibility that it's small?
And also, the climate's been changing routinely over the past several billion years on this planet, and so there's quite the possibility that people just move.
There are water levels that rise and there are water levels that fall.
This is not to make light of the impacts of climate change.
It is to say we should have a reasonable expectation of what exactly is going to happen, as opposed to this day after tomorrow, there's going to be a giant tsunami that washes over the Statue of Liberty and freezes it with Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal underground.
And then he continues, barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns.
Unpredictable biological adaptation, so you're going to turn into a fish.
It's going to be weird.
And a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war.
War is literally at an all-time low in human existence right now.
And if you think that that's going to increase radically because the temperature changes three degrees Fahrenheit over the next 20 years or a degree and a half or two degrees, I would be surprised.
This is just like the doom and gloom predictions that Paul Ehrlich was making in the 1970s with the population bomb where billions were going to die of starvation.
And then he, this is the best part, he says, some people might say the mistake was having a child in the first place.
As Maggie Astor reported, more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change.
This concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States' record low birth rate.
No, it isn't.
No, it isn't.
The number of people who are stupid enough not to have a kid because they're afraid you're going to have to run the A.C.
a little more often in the United States is like you.
Like you and a couple of your friends.
It's the same people who said, how can I bring my child into a polluted world in 1970?
And then the world actually got less polluted.
So there is that.
The reason the U.S.
birth rate has gone down is because of the availability of contraception, the fact that it costs a lot of money to raise a child, and the decline of marriage.
Those are the real reasons that the number of children being born has dropped dramatically.
It's happened in every industrialized society, including the United States.
It is not because of climate change.
He says, "Nobody really needs to have children.
It just happens to be the single strongest drive humans have, the fundamental organizing principle of every human society and necessary condition of a meaningful human world.
Procreation alone makes possible the persistence of human culture through time." Well, I don't know why you'd be that interested in the persistence of human culture through time, generally, considering that you really, really like those oak trees.
Why is he not a deep green?
There's a whole group of people called deep greens who think that if human beings ceased to exist, the world would be better off because then the squirrels could play and live with the unicorns freely in the forests of Albania.
This whole thing is so self-involved and so ridiculous.
Every day brings new pangs of grief.
Seeing the world afresh through my daughter's eyes fills me with delight, but every new discovery is haunted by death.
Boy, take a Prozac, dude.
Reading to her from Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear, a book I've read to my daughter, I can't help marveling at the disconnect between the animal life pictured in that book and the mass extinction happening right now across the planet.
By the way, the polar bear population is not in danger of mass extinction.
I believe it's increased, actually, over the last 10 years, if I'm not mistaken.
When I sing along with Elizabeth Mitchell's version of Froggy Went to Courtin', I can't help feeling like I'm betraying my daughter by filling her brain with fantastic images of a magical non-human world when the actual non-human world has been exploited and despoiled How can I read her Winnie the Pooh or the Wind in the Willows when I know the pastoral harmony they evoke is lost to us forever and has been for decades?
There are more trees in the United States now than there were 50 years ago.
And by the way, Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows were written by people who had just experienced World War I, which was a hell of a lot worse than any of the environmental degradation that you're talking about.
Literally, Winnie the Pooh was written by A. A. Milne, who had just returned from World War I, where he had watched his friends get gassed.
Okay, that was it.
And watch the entire continent of Europe basically despoiled.
Watch France turn into a giant mud pit of flaming hell.
And you're talking about how rough it is because you look out your parking lot of your hospital and you see a light pole?
My goodness.
This essay is extraordinarily long.
He finishes up, I can't protect my daughter from the future.
I can't even promise her a better life.
All I can do is teach her.
Teach her how to care, how to be kind, how to live within the limits of nature's grace.
I can teach her to be tough but resilient, adaptable and prudent because she's going to have to struggle for what she needs.
But I also need her to teach to fight for what's right because none of us is in this alone.
I need to teach her that all things die, even her and me and her mother and the world we know, but that coming to terms with this difficult truth is the beginning of wisdom.
So yeah, tell your three-year-old that you're gonna die.
Good luck with that conversation.
And that you're gonna live in a dystopian hellscape where Viggo Mortensen roams around with a cart, right, and then ends up dying at the end of the movie.
Spoiler alert.
So, yeah, I can't imagine that this kid's gonna have any problems in life.
I can't imagine with parents like that this kid's gonna have any problems in life.
Okay, time for a quick psalm.
So, on the uplifting note, it's a Wednesday, so we do a little bit of psalmage.
So we are up to Psalm 3.
This one says, Basically, his son tried to depose him, King David, and he got in a big war with his son, and his son was basically chasing him around with half the generals.
Oh Lord, how many have my adversaries become?
Great men rise up against me.
Great men say concerning my soul, he has no salvation in God's eternity.
But you, oh Lord, are a shield above me, my glory, and he who raises up my head.
With my voice I call to the Lord and he answered me from his holy mount to eternity.
I lay down and slept, I awoke, for the Lord will support me.
That last injunction that is incumbent on the Lord to save is such a hopeful injunction, right?
That it's God's job to save us, that it's God's job to reach out and take care of us and take care of our souls.
broken the teeth of the wicked.
It is incumbent upon the Lord to save.
It is incumbent upon your people to bless you forever.
That last injunction that is incumbent on the Lord to save is such a hopeful injunction, right?
That it's God's job to save us.
That it's God's job to reach out and take care of us and take care of our souls.
It's such a hopeful note.
And I really believe that.
I believe that God put us here so that we would reach out to him and so that he would restore our souls to us every morning.
And we'll lay down and sleep and then we'll awake because God supports us.
And that doesn't just mean, it doesn't just mean the actual physical function of sleep.
It is that very often we lay down and we sleep.
We go to sleep on God.
We basically ignore him.
But then we...
When we realize that the Lord supports us, when we realize that God supports us, that you don't get a civilization this great without something designing it, then we awake and we realize just how much we have been blessed and why it is incumbent upon His people to bless Him forever.
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 Caramina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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