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July 23, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:11
Trump Goes Full CAPSLOCK | Ep. 586
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President Trump threatens Iran with fire and fury, the long-awaited FISA warrant application against Carter Page is released, sort of, and President Trump's poll numbers still look solid.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so, today everyone is in a sheer state of panic.
We're all going to die.
Well, it is true.
We will all eventually die.
What everyone is apparently very afraid of is that we are going to get into a nuclear exchange with the Iranians, who we were told, by the way, don't have nuclear weapons.
Why is everyone so worried today?
Well, because Iranian dictator Hassan Rouhani, who really is just a stand-in for the mullahs, He said over the weekend that if the United States got into a shooting war with the Iranians, then it would be the quote unquote, mother of all wars.
Now, this is something that the Iranians have been saying frequently since 1979, the mother of all wars.
We're going to take on the great Satan and all the rest of it.
Well, President Trump was in kind of a bad mood over the weekend.
You can just tell, like from his Twitter feed, you can tell that he was in a bad mood.
One of the nice things about the president, it's so funny, everybody is always doing this sort of Kremlinology on the administration.
Kremlinology is what people used to do in the 1980s, 1970s, where you were trying to figure out by the public statements of the Russian administration, the Soviet Union, you were trying to figure out what it was they were thinking.
So it was all this kind of puzzling out, what exactly are they doing behind the scenes?
With President Trump, ain't no Kremlinology.
Okay, it's just what the guy says on Twitter.
So President Trump goes on Twitter and he tweets out this.
To Iranian President Rouhani.
And then this is all in capitals.
All in capitals.
And it's all in capital letters.
This is apparently the sort of DEFCON 2 of Twitter.
If Twitter actually had a bold or italics function, then we'd presumably be in the middle of a nuclear exchange already.
Now, people on the left take this tweet and they say, well, this means that the president of the United States is going to start a war with Iran.
He's going to go into Iran to distract from his domestic scandals.
First of all, why would he possibly want to distract from the fact that his poll numbers are pretty good, as we're going to get to in just one second?
But second of all, I think that we need to take a little bit of a deep breath when it comes to President Trump's tweeting.
I have been saying this consistently for more than two years, that just because the president tweets something doesn't mean that it means anything.
I'm old enough to remember when the president of the United States said about North Korea that there would be fire and fury and fury and fire and fire fury fire fur fury.
I remember that.
And everyone was like, oh my God, we're going to war with North Korea.
We're all going to die.
And then there was a missile alert, a fake missile alert over Hawaii.
And everybody said, oh, we're on the brink of massive thermonuclear war.
And then it turns out that President Trump, all he really wanted was to go to South Korea and play golf with Kim Jong-un.
That's really all he wanted out of the thing.
And then he came back and he said that Kim Jong-un had been disarmed, which he hadn't.
And that was pretty much the end of it.
We went back to what we were doing before, which was waiting around.
The idea that Trump is about to go to war with the Iranians because the Iranians said something is so ridiculous that it is beyond compare.
All of the people out there who are doing the panic attack stuff, oh, he's got his finger on the nuclear button.
We're all going to die.
He's been in office for a year and a half.
We have never been close to any sort of serious military activity.
We haven't.
And all of the talk about how we're five seconds away from the nukes flying?
First of all, I think that's an implicit rebuke to the Obama administration, which has said that the Iranians are definitely trying to moderate.
You remember, Obama said this.
They're definitely trying to moderate.
They don't want nuclear weapons.
All they want is nuclear power.
All they really want is to be brought into the family of nations.
All we have to do is drop billions of dollars in cash at their front door on pallets, and everything will be hunky-dory.
Well, so much for that idea.
It turns out that if you're going to talk about failed administration policies with regard to Iran, you might want to start with the prior administration, not with the current administration.
If you want to talk about Trump's rhetoric, you may want to talk more about the fact that President Obama handed actual cash to terrorists.
With the suggestion that this was somehow going to turn them into a bunch of moderates.
And now here they are talking about the mother of all wars.
Okay, so President Trump says all of this and everybody goes nuts over all this.
Now, is all of this really good?
Should the president be tweeting all of this stuff?
I don't think it makes much of a difference, except that...
American credibility when it comes to military action is not at an all-time high.
The president of the United States, he was the one who said during the campaign, you don't want to telegraph your intentions all the time.
You sort of want to surprise people with what you're going to do.
You want to be unpredictable.
Well, the president is predictably unpredictable.
What that means is when he says stuff like this, he can fairly guarantee there's no war coming.
The president has the opposite approach of Teddy Roosevelt.
Teddy Roosevelt famously said that you have to speak softly and carry a big stit.
For President Trump, it's tweet loudly and then get together with some FaceTime and pat each other on the back.
So I think the chances are much better that there is some sort of summit in Dubai between Trump and Rouhani within the next year and a half than any sort of serious military activity happens between Iran and the United States in the next year and a half.
But it just goes to show you the tenterhooks that Democrats are on.
Democrats are so concerned.
Everybody is so concerned.
And here's the thing.
I don't think that that's true.
I don't even think that the Democrats are all that concerned about this stuff.
I really don't think the Democrats think that the missiles are a fly and that we're this far away from nuclear war.
I think they are just trying to promote a notion that we are very close to some sort of destabilizing event, even though things are relatively stable.
And here's the thing.
The American people are not buying this.
The American people aren't buying this in any real way.
And the way you can tell this is you can look at the president's poll approval numbers.
So.
According to a brand new Rasmussen poll, President Trump's approval numbers have now climbed back to 46%, which is near the highest of his presidency.
All the other polls have reflected that bump as well.
The NBC Wall Street Journal poll over the weekend showed Trump at an all-time high of 45%.
Now, it is important to note that 45% is not 50%.
But it is also important to note that the President of the United States won his election when his approval rating was about 42-43%.
So you don't have to have really high approval ratings in order to win a presidential election.
And all of this despite the fact that President Trump's moves with Vladimir Putin last week at a Helsinki conference were not wildly popular with anybody except for Republicans.
The poll showed 53% of Republicans approved of Trump's behavior at his meeting with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, which isn't a good number among Republicans.
Only 6% of Democrats did.
But none of that mattered much to the overall approval for President Trump.
The overall approval among Republicans for President Trump currently stands at 88%.
That is the highest intraparty approval ever polled.
Ever polled.
So among Republicans, no president has ever been more popular than President Trump is right now.
And that has something to do with President Trump.
It has a lot more to do with President Trump's opponents, as we'll talk about in a little while.
So what exactly is bolstering Trump's high approval rating?
Or at least decent approval rating right now?
Well, the NBC Wall Street Journal poll suggests that Trump is very, very reliant on the economy.
So 50% of Americans like the way he is handling the economy, as opposed to only 36% of Americans who don't.
So all the Democratic talk about how the economy is going to collapse because of the tax cuts Around the verge of an economic breakdown.
Most Americans don't believe that.
They believe the economy is strong and President Trump is feeling the effects of that.
51% of Americans dislike the way that Trump has handled Putin overall.
58% disapprove of his immigration policy.
53% approve of his tariff policy.
What this adds up to is about 45% of Americans overall approve of President Trump, which for President Trump is a very good number.
45, 46%.
And here's the thing.
Those poll numbers have really not budged much for the President of the United States in the last two and a half years.
Trump's approval rating has been remarkably stable since long before he was president of the United States.
He began his presidency at about 44 percent.
He is now at 45 percent.
After a year and a half, not a lot of volatility in those polls.
News coverage simply doesn't touch Trump.
It doesn't touch him, because pretty much everything is baked in.
People have an image of particular people, and they jump to that image whenever they are in doubt.
So Republicans have an image of President Trump as a fighter who's willing to take on the media and who's being wrongly maligned by a bunch of people on the left.
And so whenever anything bad happens to Trump, they jump right into that framework.
And Democrats have a framework of Trump where everything he's doing is simultaneously buffoonish and evil.
It's manipulative and clownish.
Those are the two things that Trump is according to the left.
And so anything that Trump does has to fall into one of those two categories.
But the bottom line is that Trump is basically the Super Bowl of public opinion.
Everybody has an opinion about the Super Bowl.
Everybody watches the Super Bowl.
Everybody watches the commercial.
President Trump is the center of the universe, of the political universe right now.
He's the thing everybody is watching and everybody is talking about.
And so that means that everyone already has an opinion on him.
I mean, there are no undecideds when it comes to President Trump.
You can't find one.
Seriously.
Can you name anyone in your own personal life who doesn't have an opinion about President Trump?
Of course not.
And that means that his approval ratings are going to be relatively stable.
Now, is that good for Republicans or bad for Republicans?
Well, it's good for presidential elections.
It's good for presidential elections because it means that the presidential election won't actually be a referendum on President Trump.
It'll be a referendum on who the Democrats pick.
And this was true in 2016.
If you look at 2016, the media got it completely wrong about who the referendum was about.
Now, I got the election result wrong, just like every other pollster, but...
What I did get right is I said this was not going to be a referendum on President Trump.
It was going to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton because Trump was very stable, but Hillary was bouncing around all over the place.
The truth is that Trump, his election, his electioneering played a lot more like an incumbent.
Incumbent presidents usually win.
And the reason they usually win, when I say usually, I mean that only one president has ever been defeated after one term without a serious third party challenger since 1932.
It's been nearly a century.
Since somebody lost without a third party challenger, the only exception being Jimmy Carter in 1980.
The reason for that is incumbents are well-known.
We know them.
We have opinions about them.
And that means that we are really more thinking about, would the other guy be better than this person?
Would you take the devil you know over the devil you don't?
And so for President Trump, that's how the 2016 election acted, right?
People already were saying, OK, we know who Trump is.
We just don't know who Hillary is.
And people eventually decided we don't like her enough to elevate her above Trump in the Electoral College.
Well, the same thing is going to happen in 2020.
The same thing is going to happen.
But there are other ramifications as well.
I'll talk about those in just a second.
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Okay, so, President Trump's approval ratings continue to be fine no matter what he does.
There is one area, however, where his approval ratings do actually tend to go.
So I think politics is sort of like a balloon.
If you squeeze one area of the balloon, the pressure is going to emerge in another area of the balloon.
And right now, the pressure with regard to President Trump is tremendous, which means there's no air in that part of the balloon.
Trump has squeezed all the air out of this part of the balloon.
So where is all that air pressure going?
It's going into the congressional races.
So every time Trump does something that is not great, What happens is not that it affects President Trump.
It actually doesn't.
It instead affects congressional elections.
And I'm saying that because I don't think that it's unique about Trump.
I think it's true for virtually every president.
Virtually every president is baked in.
So George W. Bush was baked in, which is why he won re-election.
Barack Obama was baked in, which is why he won re-election.
Well, I mean, baked in.
I mean, people already have their opinions, and those opinions are remarkably stable about who the president of the United States is.
That means that when things go wrong, it doesn't actually reflect on the president of the United States.
Instead, it tends to reflect on the congressional races.
And you can see that.
So in the last month and a half, Trump's approval rating has basically been the same or higher.
But the congressional generic ballot has changed radically in favor of Democrats.
So at the beginning of June, Democrats led Republicans in the generic ballot by three percentage points.
Now that number is 7.4% according to RealClearPolitics.
So looking at President Trump's approval numbers and saying that he is successful or unsuccessful based on those approval numbers, I think is a bit of a misdirect.
You know, President Obama also had remarkably stable poll approval numbers.
They were always around 50%.
They never sank lower than about 47%.
And they never went higher than about 53%, right?
Obama's ratings were stable.
But because the presidency is not where we put our energies, because we are already invested in the presidency, Our feelings tend to come out in congressional races a lot more.
So Barack Obama wins reelection relatively easily over Mitt Romney, and he loses congressional seats in virtually every election, right?
He gets blown out in 2010.
Democrats have not held the House since 2010.
They proceeded to lose the Senate.
They proceeded to lose another 12 governorships.
They proceeded to lose a bunch of state houses.
In other words, the presidency of the United States is not the best indicator of whether a president is successful in his political agenda or not.
I think that the polls that actually matter and the results that actually matter are some of those congressional down-ballot races.
Now, the good news is Democrats are absolutely blowing it on every front.
So, if this isn't a referendum about Trump, and it is a referendum on Democrats, then perhaps Democrats ought to get their act together, but they're not getting their act together.
And here's the thing.
When President Trump does something unpopular, when he does something that isn't good, it's not going to reflect on President Trump.
It isn't going to reflect on Congress.
Unless Democrats decide to make fools of themselves.
So, for example, President Trump does this meeting with Vladimir Putin, and it doesn't go particularly well.
And when I say it doesn't go particularly well, he said some things that I think were quite egregious.
There are a lot of Republicans who are not supremely happy with President Trump's performance with Vladimir Putin last week in Helsinki.
One of those Republicans was, for example, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican from South Carolina.
He slammed President Trump over his Russia equivocation.
This is clip 9.
And here's what Trey Gowdy had to say.
There was this equivocation during the press conference that, I'm glad he corrected it, but when you're the leader of the free world, every syllable matters.
And you really shouldn't be having to correct it when you're the leader of the free world.
So this would be an opening for Democrats, right?
You would assume that there are a bunch of Republicans who aren't super happy with what Trump did in Helsinki, and so they would be kind of warm to a Democratic message that said, you know, the president really shouldn't have acted like that.
But Democrats are so reactionary at this point.
We are in the midst of a velocity increase in politics.
What I mean by that is that when you heat up a gas, Then one of the things that happens when you heat up a solid, one of the things that happens, the reason that ice melts, for example, is that the molecules start moving faster.
They bounce off of each other.
They expand.
This is what makes air expand as you heat it up.
And that means the velocity of the molecules is increasing, if I'm not screwing up my basic physics.
The same thing is happening in politics.
As we have increased the temperature in politics, everybody's ping-ponging off of each other harder and harder.
So instead of people reacting, With statesmanship and some level of decency or some level of moderation to other people's screw-ups, instead, we get people reacting as wildly as possible, which means that, again, not screwing up my physics here, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
What that means is that if the Democrats are ping-ponging off Republicans incredibly hard, Republicans are going to recoil in the exact opposite direction.
So, Trey Gowdy criticizes the president in somewhat measured tones, And then Democrats lose their minds and suggest that Trump is actually in the pay of the Russians.
So Susan Rice, who you will recall is the lady who went on national television and lied repeatedly about Benghazi.
She was the lady who said that it was actually a YouTube video responsible for a terrorist attack that ended with the murder of four Americans.
She lied to the American people about Iran.
She lied to the American people repeatedly.
She was back on national television, this time suggesting that Trump was in the pay of the Russians.
He's taken a series of steps that, had Vladimir Putin dictated them, he couldn't have mirrored more effectively.
What his motivations are, I think, is a legitimate question, one that I trust that the special counsel is investigating.
But the policies that this president has pursued globally have served Vladimir Putin's interests in dividing the West, undermining democracy.
increasing fissures within NATO and has done very little to advance U.S.
interests.
Okay, do you really think that any Republican, any moderate is going to respond to that sort of language?
And he's doing the interests of Russia and that there's something nefarious going on.
You think that's really going to help?
Especially from the administration that essentially did the bidding of Iran.
Not essentially, did the bidding of Iran.
They did the bidding of Iran.
That administration, the Obama administration, became the PR outlet for the Iranian mullahs.
And here they are criticizing Trump over this and suggesting that it's because something deeply corrupt is going on.
Maxine Waters, anti-Maxine, the beloved face of the New Democratic Party.
She goes around saying that Trump is Putin's apprentice.
You think that this is going to somehow cool down the temperature and make me believe the Democrats are reliable?
You gotta be kidding me.
I'm not surprised about this president standing up for Putin.
As a matter of fact, I think he is Putin's apprentice.
He's been under his toolage for a long time now.
Under his toolage.
And he intends to get it done.
And the American people are sitting idly by.
Okay, so Maxine Waters says that Trump is basically like Mickey Mouse and the Sorcerer's Apprentice, that he puts on the wizard's hat and then proceeds to break up all the brooms.
But in any case, if you think that this is not going to drive Republicans more into the arms of President Trump, you're out of your mind.
When Michelle Wolf, supposed comedian, alleged comedian, when she suggests that ICE is like ISIS, you really think that Republicans are going to respond the way you think they are?
I really don't think so.
Here's Michelle Wolf doing just that.
Do you believe your way of life is under attack?
And are you ready to finally do something about it?
Then apply now to join ICE.
ICE is rooting out the foreign enemy.
ICE is terrorizing the invaders.
ICE is attacking when they least expect.
ICE is blowing up the status quo.
I'm Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
It's popular nowadays to say ISIS is bad, but there's no better representation of American values right now than ISIS.
And as an equal opportunity employer, we accept all levels of experience and education, from low to very low, and actively welcome those with diagnosed— Okay, and then they create an ICE flag that's black, and all these people are wearing masks, so it looks like ISIS, right?
ICE is—get it?
Yeah, that is definitely not going to repel Republicans.
Good job, guys.
Just really well done, Michelle Wolf.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about the moderates in the Democratic Party who are struggling and trying to figure out exactly how to prevent their party from being taken over by exactly the sort of sentiment that leads to Republicans retaining their majority.
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So, even Democrats are beginning to realize that their radicalism is wearing thin.
And this was, I think, the funniest thing that happened all weekend.
James Comey tweeted out a plea to Democrats.
Please don't move to the left.
Please.
So James Comey, the most self-serving FBI director and former FBI director in American history, he tweets out, Democrats, please, please don't lose your minds and rush to the socialist left.
This president and his Republican Party are counting on you to do exactly that.
America's great middle wants sensible, balanced, ethical leadership.
Well, when Comey runs for president on the Democratic side in 2020, it's gonna be lit, as the kids say.
But the fact that he is actually saying something true here is pretty amazing.
It's the first time he's said something true in a while, actually, but that's pretty amazing stuff.
People are beginning to realize that the Democratic rush to the left is actually going to hurt them.
And so Democrats have been struggling to push a third-way message.
So over the weekend, the Democrats held a big conference in Columbus, Ohio, where they were attempting to force back against the sort of Okay, so here's what the Miami Herald and McClatchy say.
against her wing of the Democratic Party.
Okay, so here's what the Miami Herald and McClatchy say.
Leading moderate Democrats forcefully argued this week that the party can embrace the robust agenda of change while still praising capitalism and downplaying income inequality.
In other words, everything the empowered liberal base has spent a year and a half mobilizing against.
Democrats gathered here in Ohio's capital city on Thursday and Friday in what was an opening salvo of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, part of a conference organized by the center-left think tank Third Way.
The longtime Washington-based group was unveiling the findings of a year-long assessment launched after 2016, hoping to convince potential presidential contenders that they don't have to adopt the hard-left agenda and style of a Bernie Sanders progressive, included in the report.
This is a giant fail.
No major Democrat showed up for this thing.
This is a giant fail.
No major Democrat showed up for this thing.
Zero.
Okay, because they are all afraid of the base.
And let's be real about this.
Politics has become a referendum on culture.
It is not a referendum on actual policy anymore.
And so there are too many people in the Democratic Party who resonate to the cultural critique posed by the intersectional left, by the Ocasio-Cortezes and Bernie Sanderses of the party.
It's become a bumper sticker party that is mainly focused not on it's the economy stupid or the Clintonian third way.
Instead, it is heavily focused on this virtue signaling I go to Whole Foods and I put an anti-Trump bumper sticker on my car feeling.
That's why the entire Democratic Party has been hijacked by this radical left that has better bumper stickers.
Because let's face it, who had better bumper stickers?
Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton?
No question.
What's sexier?
Talking about a third way in which capitalism is good, but we need better unemployment insurance?
Or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking truth to power about males in the legislature?
Here she is, the new face of the Democratic Party in those in those Crazy eyes.
I'm allowed to say crazy eyes about her because the Democrats did about Michelle Bachmann, so turnabout is fair play.
Here's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I've gotten her name right, I think, four straight times on this show today, so good for me.
And here she is on Face the Nation, or Eyes the Nation as the case may be, talking about the male legislatures that are hurting women.
Congress right now is 80% male and that creates blind spots in our legislation.
It means we don't have family leave.
We don't have paid maternal and parental leave.
It means that we don't get the equal pay that we want.
So I think those issues certainly were important.
OK, if you think that the reason that there aren't enough giveaways is because males run the government, you're out of your mind.
You're out of your mind.
It has nothing to do with that.
It's not that men are sitting around going, you know what?
I would really like my wife to be paid less when she goes on maternity leave.
I would really like for women to be paid nothing when they go on maternity leave.
It's just there are some of us who believe that the market is not designed to actually force businesses to pay for people not to work, that that's not what companies do.
Like, I believe we have a maternity leave policy at this company, I'm not sure, but that is only because we want to retain our employees, not because we think that it's actually great policy to pay people not to work.
But according to this sector of the Democratic Party, it's all about evil males, and this makes certain people feel good.
It makes you feel better to target other people in politics than it does to maybe acknowledge that there are forces in the market that don't benefit you.
But it's going to be very difficult for Democrats to overturn this sort of cultural feeling of the Democratic Party.
Here's the proof.
OK, so there's a guy named Tim Ryan.
Tim Ryan is a Democratic representative from Ohio.
He's served in Congress since 2002 as a rep from the 13th District, which covers Youngstown and the surrounding area.
And he poses himself as sort of the moderate Democratic responder to all of these radical left party members.
But how is he planning on?
Apparently, according to The Intercept, he's planning on running for president.
But how exactly is he going to run for president?
Is he going to run as a rust belt, blue collar guy who's going to bring opportunity back to Ohio through unemployment insurance?
No, he says that he wants to run with the yoga vote.
Not kidding.
Here's what he says.
He says Ryan's district, this is according to The Intercept, is one of the few poor majority-white districts that is represented by a Democrat.
But he won't be running on a stereotypical working-class persona.
Instead, he believes his path to the White House runs through the yoga vote.
This is a downward-facing tactic.
Ryan has long been a champion of mindfulness, meditation, and similar pursuits, and has even created a quiet-time caucus in the House of Representatives.
Yeah, it's going well.
James Gimian, publisher of The Mindful Magazine, who knows Ryan, said he isn't sure whether Ryan will run for president, but that the yoga vote has gone mainstream in recent years.
The so-called yoga voters are the kind of folks who realize that while they grew up with their mom saying, pay attention, nobody trained them in how to pay attention and used their mind to focus on what's important.
That's a growing population.
It's no longer just lululemon yoga women.
He said anyone who's negotiating the emotional landmine of modern day living could be someone Ryan's message would resonate with.
Yes, definitely.
This is going to cut against the perception that Democrats are a bunch of pansies who engage in yoga and mindfulness meditation in their spare time.
I can't imagine why they would possibly lose.
I don't know, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
Remember, Hillary Clinton said that those 30,000 deleted emails were all about yoga.
OK, so so yoga and Democrat.
But this is the thing.
The Democrats, whenever you have a party that appeals to a particular base, you have to think, who is sort of the person you're appealing to?
When you make a TV show, if you're in Hollywood, There's somebody that the creator of the TV show has in mind, right?
Who is the ideal audience for this TV show?
So ESPN, the ideal audience is probably a minority male, okay?
Because minority males tend to watch more sports than non-minority males, so that is their target audience.
The same thing is true with regard to, you know, the hunting and fishing network.
If there is one, that is targeting white males disproportionately.
Lifetime is targeting a middle-aged woman who's probably at home during the daytime to watch Lifetime, right?
Everyone has the target audience.
So is your target audience—do the Democrats really think their target audience is going to be women who go to yoga classes?
It seems to me they already know that they won those people.
What they actually need to target is that blue-collar guy living in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, because if Hillary Clinton had spent any time doing that, she wins the election.
But she didn't.
And so Democrats are now going to double down on this cultural gap between the yoga folks and the pipefitters.
Yeah, real bright, real bright.
I can't imagine why they're losing election after election.
I just can't imagine why that's happening.
OK, in just a second, I want to talk about the other big news of the weekend, which is this released FISA warrant application regarding Carter Page.
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All righty.
So let's talk a little bit about the release of this FISA warrant application against former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page.
So over the weekend, the DOJ, the FBI, they released via a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, they released the application for the FISA warrants against Carter Page.
Now, if you haven't been following the Mueller investigation and all the collusion stuff for a long time, quick reminder, Carter Page was a foreign policy advisor for President Trump.
The FBI and the intel community thought that Carter Page was actually acting as a go-between for maybe, maybe the Trump campaign and the Russians.
At the very least, they thought that he was working with the Russians to do their work as some sort of foreign bidder, basically.
That he was an advisor to the Kremlin and they were paying him.
That was the suspicion.
Of the foreign policy intelligentsia, of the intelligence community.
And that had been their opinion since 2012-2013.
Well, they took out a warrant application against Carter Page in October 2016.
The suggestion by some on the right is that the reason that they went after Carter Page is because Carter Page was attached to the Trump campaign and because they were attempting to drum up some sort of evidence against Trump in advance of the election.
I've always been more than slightly skeptical of this particular allegation, simply because it turns out that the Russia investigation, according to Devin Nunes, not according to me, according to Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee, was launched on the back of the George Papadopoulos investigation.
That was another low-level advisor to the Trump campaign who supposedly was meeting with a London professor who actually was a Kremlin cutout, and then was trying to coordinate with the Trump campaign, right?
And Papadopoulos has pled guilty to lying to the FBI, and he'll spend a little bit of time in jail.
So, everyone is focused in on this FISA warrants application because the suggestion is that this is good evidence the intelligence community was trying to get Trump.
Well, over the weekend, they released a very, very redacted version of this Carter Page FISA warrant.
The argument is that the Carter Page FISA warrant was basically gotten on the back of the so-called Steele dossier.
You'll recall that the Steele dossier was a dossier compiled by Hillary Clinton and the firm Fusion GPS.
It was an OPPO research file, and then eventually it was supplied to the FBI, and that was used to go after Carter Page.
So this was a way to sort of officialize Now, the suggestion by Republicans was that all of this was trumped up in order to make Trump look bad.
Now, the information was not released before the election.
We didn't actually see any of this stuff before the election.
However, the suggestion is that the intelligence operatives were politicized in some way.
Now, is there some credibility to the idea the intelligence operatives were politicized in some way?
Well, sure.
Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, top members of the FBI, were in fact anti-Trump.
Is it possible that they went above and beyond the call of duty?
toward personal bias in targeting people like Carter Page.
That's certainly possible.
But we don't know that from this application.
So you're going to hear a lot today on the radio and in the media from people on the right that this FISA warrant application is clear evidence that the FBI was attempting to target Trump members of the campaign in order to get Trump.
That's not really what this application shows.
Maybe the application will show that when we get at the whole thing, but what this application really shows is a few things.
So let's go through it.
First of all, it does show that the FBI relied heavily on the so-called Steele dossier in taking out this application for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page.
The dossier was compiled by Christopher Steele, as you recall, at the behest of Hillary Clinton and Fusion GPS.
It was allegedly handed over to the FBI in September 2016 and served as a key component of the FISA warrants application.
It played a major role, okay?
It was not a minor role, it was the key component.
With that said, most of the Steele dossier had to do with Trump and Paul Manafort, and none of that stuff made it into this warrants application, but it didn't, but the part about Carter Page did, which suggests that the FBI took it seriously.
We don't know how much of the Steele dossier was corroborated.
So what you're hearing from a lot of folks on the right is that the entire Steele dossier was absolute tripe, and that none of it was corroborated.
We don't know the answer to that.
We know certain parts have obviously not been corroborated, the most inflammatory parts about Trump being peed on by Russian whores and all that.
None of that's been corroborated, but we don't know what's been corroborated because all of the corroborating evidence was redacted in this FISA warrants application.
And they're just pages and pages of blacked out material, so we don't actually know what the FBI was doing there.
OK, one thing we do know is that when when Devin Nunes suggested that the application didn't warn the FISA court that this was based on an OPPO research file from Hillary Clinton, I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's true.
Because here is what it actually said in the Pfizer warrants application.
Quote, It's pretty obvious what they are saying is that a U.S.
based law firm, this would be Fusion GPS, had hired the identified U.S.
person, that would be Christopher Steele, to conduct research regarding candidate one's ties to Russia.
That would be Trump.
The identified U.S.
person hired Source One to conduct this research.
That would actually be Christopher Steele.
The identified U.S.
person to conduct research was Fusion GPS.
The U.S.-based law firm was Perkins Coie.
The identified U.S.
person never advised Source One as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate One's ties to Russia.
And this is the key sentence.
The FBI speculates that the identified U.S.
person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate One's campaign.
So it says clearly in the application that this was an OPPO research file.
So the talk about it was a big lie, the intelligence community lied in order to get the application through.
I don't see the evidence of that.
The FBI did suspect Carter Page being a Russian agent.
And here's the part where it starts to get dicey.
The FBI, the intelligence community, they've been all over Carter Page since 2012.
Has he been prosecuted?
They surveilled him.
Have they come up with anything?
We've seen no evidence that they did.
Now, does that mean that the original investigation was bad?
No.
I mean, the police and the detectives, they investigate stuff all the time.
The FBI investigates stuff all the time.
It doesn't pan out.
But the fact they were never able to get anything on Carter Page Suggest that maybe this was a case of overzealousness.
A final myth that has to be put to bed, the FBI warrants application here did not use a Yahoo News file in order to go after Carter Page.
They used the Yahoo News story that was leaked by Christopher Steele.
Not in order to corroborate Christopher Steele's story, but in order to talk about what exactly Cairo Page's response to the actual dossier was.
So, that's what you need to know.
The answer, really, is that we don't know enough to suggest whether this FISA warrant was real or not.
We just don't know enough.
At this point, you can see that this has broken out into a conversation between Republicans over all of this.
House Republicans asked for these redactions to be removed.
The truth is the president of the United States ought to simply remove all redactions and release the file.
That's what really ought to happen here.
OK.
Meanwhile, and this is, I think, a bit ridiculous.
So there are some reports over the weekend that President Trump had engaged in womanizing behavior over the course of his life.
Why anyone would be shocked by this is beyond me.
Of course, the president did that.
We all know that already.
That is not any shock at all.
However, Robert Jeffress, who is a pastor, he came out and he then threw Ronald Reagan under the bus, suggesting that if you're worried about Donald Trump's womanizing, perhaps you should be worried about Ronald Reagan's womanizing.
Back in 1980, evangelicals chose to support a twice-married Hollywood actor who was a known womanizer in Hollywood.
His name was Ronald Reagan.
They chose to support him over Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist Sunday school teacher who had been married faithfully to one woman.
The reason we supported President Reagan was not because we supported womanizing or divorce.
We supported his policies.
OK, so this is a stretch.
OK, to compare Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump is rather insane.
The fact is that Ronald Reagan was divorced by Jane Wyman, not the other way around.
And then he was shortly thereafter married to Nancy Reagan.
So the idea that he was, you know, a womanizer in the same league as President Trump is a slander on President Reagan.
And it's unnecessary in the first place.
To go after Reagan in order to protect Trump seems unnecessary in the first place.
Meanwhile, the president of the United States is targeting Amazon.com again.
So he is going after Amazon.com.
This is one of his favorite things.
To do again.
I don't know why the president is really all that concerned right now.
Like, really, he seems he seems worried about a lot of things.
And I'm not saying why he's so worried right now.
I mean, to be frank with you, there's no bad situation on the horizon.
There's nothing terrible happening right now.
And if you were not on Twitter, everybody would have a certain sense of stability that they lack right now.
But he tweeted out this morning, the Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me ever since they lost the Internet tax case in the US Supreme Court two months ago.
Next up is the U.S.
Post Office, which they use at a fraction of real cost as their delivery boy for a big percentage of their packages.
In my opinion, the Washington Post is nothing more than an expensive lobbyist for Amazon.
Is it used as protection against antitrust claims, which many feel should be brought?
The president of the United States should not be going after Amazon.com this way.
First of all, Amazon.com, OK, you want to call me a lackey for Amazon?
Fine, do it.
OK, Amazon is the best company in America.
Amazon makes everybody's life better.
Amazon is awesome.
Amazon is a fantastic company.
They allow you to get anything you want at any time.
And the idea that they're somehow Operating off the back of the Postal Service is just ridiculous.
First, Amazon does pay state taxes in 45 states plus the District of Columbia.
The law does not require companies without a physical nexus in a state to pay taxes in that state.
Amazon does anyway.
They also pay property taxes on their facilities in all of these states.
Also, when Trump talks about the Post Office, this is... I don't understand why you would think that Amazon is hurting the Post Office.
Amazon may be the only company in America keeping the U.S.
Postal Service afloat.
Most companies now ship via FedEx, and eventually Amazon will stop using the U.S.
Post Office, at which point the U.S.
Post Office will simply go bankrupt.
Finally, Trump may be right about Amazon competing other businesses out of the market, but this idea that the Washington Post is a lobbying outfit for Amazon is absurd.
The Washington Post was the anti-Republican going back decades.
I just don't understand.
Here's what I think.
I think the president ought to calm down.
He ought to calm down.
The reason he ought to calm down is because right now the biggest obstacle to President Trump's success is President Trump Giving a feeling, a strong feeling of chaos.
There is no chaos going on.
There may be chaos inside the administration, but there is no serious chaos going on in the United States right now.
The economy is solid.
We're not in the middle of any foreign crisis.
Everything is basically okay.
The biggest obstacle to Trump's success is this feeling that everything is variable, that everything is volatile, that everything is changing at all times.
But things aren't actually changing all that much.
It's incredibly tiring.
And there's no reason for us to be tired.
There's no reason.
When things are this good, the level of panic in the country should not be this high.
And President Trump is contributing to that with these tweets.
The president has done a fairly good job of governing.
The stuff he says and the stuff he does are two very different things.
When it comes to policy, the president's policy has been overall quite conservative.
And the results can be seen in the strength of the United States right now.
If we could just dispense with the feeling of chaos, I think everybody, honestly, I think he'd waltz to re-election.
I think Republicans would be in much better shape in the Congress.
I really think it's almost, it's almost that simple.
Okay, time for a Thing I Like, and then we'll do a couple of things that I hate.
So, Thing I Like, we're gonna do some jazz this week.
The reason we're going to do some jazz this week is because I'm annoyed.
And one of the reasons that I'm annoyed is because there was this whole hubbub last week in which a bunch of people on the left suggested that I was a racist.
Why did they suggest that I was a racist?
Well, they couldn't actually come up with any evidence that I was a racist.
The reason I was a racist was supposedly because I don't like rap.
Guilty.
Guilty.
I hate rap.
I think rap is garbaggio.
I've thought rap is garbaggio since I was a small child, because it sounds to me like rhythm and talking with no actual melody or harmony.
The small elements of melody and harmony that exist do not make up for the actual bulk of rap, which is somebody speaking rhythmically to a beat.
That's what distinguishes rap from other forms of music.
I've said I don't think it's a form of music, and this got me in all sorts of... So people say, how dare Shapiro not like rap?
If you don't like rap, it means you don't like black people.
Which is really weird, because there are a lot of people who don't like classical music.
I wouldn't suggest they don't like white people.
What a weird argument.
If you don't like mariachi music, do you not like Latino people?
What is this nonsense?
You don't like Klezmer?
Do you hate Jews?
What?
What?
Also, if I don't like black people, why do I like jazz so much?
So it's time to do some jazz this week.
And this is not an attempt to prove I'm not racist.
I don't have to prove anything to you people.
I'm not a racist.
It is to prove that there is an actual great form of black music, right?
Jazz was historically a black art form, and it's actually awesome.
Okay, like, you want to listen to some good music made by black folks?
Don't listen to some of the crappy rap that's out there that dehumanizes women and treats drugs as something good.
Instead, why don't you listen to some awesome classical jazz?
Okay, so here is the Oscar Peterson Trio.
Love the Oscar Peterson Trio.
This is a cut called Blue's Etude from the Oscar Peterson Trio, and it's just awesome stuff.
Thank you.
Man can pull out the ball.
to play.
His left hand here is ridiculous.
So, my dad is a jazz pianist.
He's actually really terrific, my dad, as a jazz pianist.
You can go find a couple of cuts of him on YouTube.
We have a couple of cuts that we put up that are really great.
But Oscar Peterson is just fantastic.
If you want more kind of user-friendly jazz from Oscar Peterson, go listen to his West Side Story album, which is really terrific.
So go check that out.
OK, time for a couple of things that I hate.
All righty, so a bunch of people from the movie Fantastic Beasts got up at Comic-Con and started lecturing about how it's time to impeach Trump.
Because that's just what I need to hear.
What I need to hear is Zoe Kravitz, who plays Leta Lestrange, say that she would impeach Trump.
And apparently they came up with their own impeachment spell.
I am not kidding.
It was impeachius maximus.
Okay, number one, read another book.
Read another book.
Okay, the reason that everybody was doing this was apparently Johnny Depp, who appears as Grindewald in the movie, made a surprise appearance after the panel in full makeup and character as Grindewald and delivered a fascist speech that borrowed from President Trump, because of course Trump is a fascist, with a magical supremacy twist.
He said, we who live for freedom or truth, the moment has come to rise up and take our rightful place in the world.
And then the star of the film, Eddie Renmayne, who plays the magizoologist Newt Scamander, What's happened is Grindelwald's belief that pure blood should reign over the non-magical beings.
It's a political thing.
He's rallying more and more people and it causes divisions across families.
And the current political landscape said, I'm enlisted by Dumbledore to try and track him down and capture him.
What's happened is Grindelwald's belief that pureblood should reign over the non-magical beings.
It's a political thing.
He's rallying more and more people and it causes divisions across families.
He's pretty hypnotic.
It's all about Trump is by Emily Zanotti over at Daily Wire.
Okay, if you wonder why people on the right are annoyed by the folks in the culture who insist on inserting themselves into politics, and then suggest that they're not actually political, they're just speaking out on behalf of human rights, well, this is why.
If you've decided to make a metaphor about how President Trump is actually Hitlerian, and then you create a spell called Impetuous Maximus, and then you go in front of Comic-Con and you brag about it, We're going to make fun of you.
We're going to.
It's just, it's just a thing that's going to happen.
It's really... Okay, and then here's, as I've said before, the left wants to claim the commanding heights in the culture, the right wants to claim the commanding heights in politics, and both of them are getting their wish.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So apparently people are touting Elizabeth Warren as the, as the next kind of great hope.
For the Democratic Party.
And there's an article in New York Magazine with a picture of her fist at the top.
I mean, she's looking pretty gaunt there.
And the whole idea here is that Elizabeth Warren is the new populist leftist.
That she's going to make all of this happen and she's going to run for president.
That's exactly what you need.
That's really what you need.
You don't need Elizabeth Warren You know, sort of moderate as she was back when I was at Harvard Law School.
She was sort of a moderate Democrat back when I was at Harvard Law School.
What you actually need is Elizabeth Warren, the radical leftist, who will be how old?
How old is she right now?
I'm going to look this up.
Elizabeth Warren is currently 69 years old.
So what you actually need, they ran last time a, what, 70-year-old woman?
Held was Hillary Clinton in the last election cycle.
I believe she was 70 years old or approaching 70 years old.
I think she was 69, right.
She was 69 years old.
She was 68 years old.
What we actually need next time is we need a 72-year-old woman who sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton and acts a lot like Hillary Clinton and is just about as sincere as Hillary Clinton but also thinks she's a Native American.
That's what we need.
Yeah, that's definitely gonna beat Trump.
Go for it, guys.
Just enjoy yourselves.
Go full-scale Elizabeth Warren.
Let's see how that goes for you.
Okay, now let's do a quick Federalist Paper.
So we are all the way up to Federalist 38, moving steadily through those Federalist Papers.
Every week we do one so that you have a little bit more knowledge about the foundations of the country and the background of the Constitution.
Federalist 38 is by James Madison, the so-called father of the Constitution, and he writes about the difficulty of coming together regarding a Constitution, and then he says that critics of the Constitution aren't being consistent in their critiques.
He explains that if you were looking for doctors to diagnose you with an illness and then act upon it, and they created a diagnosis, and then a bunch of new doctors came in and they said, no, no, no, that diagnosis is all wrong, but they offered no actual diagnosis, that you might say, well, okay, so what's your diagnosis?
This is his complaint, that all the people who are criticizing the proposed constitution have come up with no serious workable alternatives.
He says, It is a matter of both wonder and regret that those who raise so many objections against the new Constitution should never call to mind the defects of that which it is to be exchanged for.
It is not necessary that the former should be perfect, it is sufficient that the latter is more imperfect.
In other words, the Articles of Confederation are worse than the Constitution, so we should have the Constitution.
And then he says, You can't say that the functions of a government are necessary and then not give them the power to enact it.
Now, I actually find this Federalist paper a little bit unfair.
If you read the Anti-Federalist paper, there's some very... The Anti-Federalist papers were put together by people who are on the other side of the Constitution, and a lot of their critiques are really solid and really well taken.
A lot of them talk about the possible growth of the federal government, the idea that the government was being given too much centralized power, and a lot of those things have come true today.
Now, it is important to remember the historical context.
The historical context is that no one thought that the federal government would grow in this way.
No one in America thought that the federal government would be what the federal government currently is.
It was unthinkable at the time.
So in that way, Madison, Hamilton, John Jay, the founders, the creators of the Federalist Papers, they were right about the fact that the Constitution was better than the Articles because they never could have conceived that the Constitution would eventually grow to encompass nearly all of American life.
But the Anti-Federalists were right in that they saw where the slippery slope was going to go.
And I think it's important to read both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers.
Maybe when we're done going through the Federalist Papers after another 50 weeks, maybe we'll start going through the Anti-Federalist Papers so you can see the responses to the Constitution at the time.
Always better to know more than you did yesterday.
That's what we tried to do here.
So, 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.
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