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Aug. 23, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:41
The Day After | Ep. 609
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The fallout continues for Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.
New York opens another line of investigation into President Trump.
And President Trump leaps into the South Africa situation.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
See, normally they call it the summer doldrums because not a lot happens.
But then there was the Trump administration and stuff happens all the time.
We're going to jump into all of it in just one second.
But first, let's talk a little bit about our national debt.
It's $21 trillion and counting.
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All right, so we are still living in the aftermath of all the revelations about Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.
And we begin today with the sort of latest updates on the Michael Cohen situation.
Because Michael Cohen, it turns out, is the greater threat to the President of the United States than is Paul Manafort.
To recap, Michael Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance violations.
And he suggested that the president had informed him and told him to commit these campaign finance violations.
He'd instructed him to create all these shell corporations and avoid going through normal disclosure routes in order to pay off two separate women, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, with whom he had once had sex just before the election in order to impact the election.
Now, There are a couple of cases today as to why this is not actually legal violation.
One of those cases being made by Bradley Smith.
I discussed this over the last couple of days.
He's a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
He has a piece over at the Washington Post about this.
And what he basically argues is that it is not a campaign expenditure when you are paying off a former lover.
His rationale is that this is a personal expenditure.
You may be doing it for a variety of reasons.
Maybe you're doing it because you want to avoid ticking off your wife.
That was John Edwards' case.
He said that he silenced Riel Hunter, remember the 2008 presidential candidate for the Democrats?
He had knocked up a woman who is not his cancer-ridden wife because John Edwards is a piece of human trash.
And then he had Basically had his donors pay the woman a million dollars to shut up.
That ended up coming out.
He ended up being prosecuted for it.
His case was that he was paying off Riel Hunter because he didn't want to tick off his wife.
It had nothing to do with the election.
That was dubious.
He was tried on it.
There was a hung jury.
And he ended up basically getting off.
Well, that's sort of the case that Bradley Smith is making.
He is saying, under the theory that then-candidate Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen violated campaign finance laws by arranging hush money payments to women accusing Trump of affairs, the answer would seem to be yes to the question of whether a business owner running for political office deciding to pay bonuses to his employees would be a campaign expenditure.
He says that that's a problem, that we can't equate everything with a campaign expenditure.
Everything you do in your own interest or that influences a campaign can't be a campaign expenditure.
You decide to give your employees a bonus just before the election, that's not necessarily a campaign expenditure because maybe you would have given that bonus to your employees in the absence of the campaign anyway.
Bradley Smith says, regardless of what Cohen agreed to in a plea bargain, hush money payments to mistresses are not really campaign expenditures.
It is true that contribution and expenditure are defined in the Federal Election Campaign Act as anything for the purpose of influencing any election.
And it may have been intended and hoped that paying hush money would serve that end.
The problem is that almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to influence an election from buying a good watch to make sure he gets to places on time to getting a massage that he feels fit on the campaign trail to buying a new suit so that he looks good on a debate stage.
Yet having campaign donors pay for personal luxuries seems more like bribery than funding campaign speech.
So he's making the case that basically this is not a campaign expenditure.
This is a personal expenditure by the president of the United States.
The test under FEC rules is the so-called irrespective test.
The irrespective test says, would this expenditure have been made irrespective of whether the campaign was happening?
And as I've argued, I think that there's a plausible case Trump could say, I would have made this expenditure anyway, because he has a long history of pressuring women to stay silent and paying women off to stay silent.
Back in 2011, he basically threatened to sue In Touch magazine for printing an interview with Stormy Daniels.
And they backed off and did not print the interview with Stormy Daniels about her affair with then reality television producer and star Donald Trump.
So Trump has a case on these grounds.
There's a secondary case here, and that's the case being made over at Politico by a bunch of legal experts.
They say that Cohen's admission that he violated campaign finance law while acting at Trump's direction is far from rock-solid proof that the president is also guilty, even if Cohen is being entirely truthful, some lawyers say.
The fact that Cohen did something illegal doesn't mean Trump did anything illegal, said Jan Barron.
A longtime Republican campaign finance lawyer.
Cohen said in court on Tuesday that he acted at Trump's direction and violated federal election laws by arranging the payout to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, in the days before the 2016 election to keep her silent about what she said was an affair with Trump a decade earlier.
Andrew Gruhl, however, University of Iowa law professor, he says, under the law, it's quite easy for two people involved in the same act to have different criminal consequences.
That distinction is particularly critical in campaign finance cases, because the law limits criminal prosecution for campaign finance violations to instances where someone, quote, knowingly and willfully defied legal requirements.
So in other words, if Trump called up Michael Cohen and he said, dude, I'd like for you to make this go away.
And Michael Cohen says, don't worry, I'll take care of it.
That is not Trump being complicit in a campaign finance violation, because he assumes that Cohen knows all the legal requirements.
If, however, Trump says to Michael Cohen, listen, I need you to make this go away, and it doesn't matter if you violate campaign finance law, or I know that we should shield this from public scrutiny by using a bunch of shell corporations, and let's say Cohen has them on tape saying all of that stuff, then it looks more like a criminal campaign finance violation.
Cohen said under oath, the most damaging information that the president of the United States committed a crime and covered it up.
But that is not actually indicative that the president has criminal intent.
So this one lawyer, Jan Barron says, in order to prove criminal intent, you have to point to evidence that the actors knew or had reason to know that what they were doing was illegal.
Trump can simply claim ignorance.
And that may, in fact, be the case that he is making.
Right.
That may be his strongest case.
He sort of made that case a little bit yesterday.
We'll get to Trump's response to all of this.
So Trump has a couple of defenses that are relatively robust here.
Defense number one, I pay off women all the time.
This wasn't a campaign expenditure.
Defense number two, even if it was a campaign expenditure, I didn't know the rules because I have people whose job it is to know that stuff and I didn't order anyone knowingly to violate campaign finance laws because why the hell would I do that?
Also a relatively strong defense.
So ignorance and sluttiness are the president's two defenses and both are quite plausible because the president gets around and has for a long time and has paid women to shut up for apparently a long time and because the president is not exactly a legal expert despite his own belief that he is.
President Trump is actually a terrible legal client because he thinks he knows more than his lawyers, which is always the first mark of a bad legal client.
In fact, if God could have come up with a bad legal client in the laboratory before putting him on earth, he'd look a lot like Donald Trump, who just will not let his lawyers do their job.
Chuck Todd actually asked Lanny Davis.
Chuck Todd over at MSNBC asked Lanny Davis, who is Michael Cohen's lawyer.
And this is the great irony, of course, is Lanny Davis was Bill Clinton's lawyer back during the impeachment scandal.
So now he's flipped sides.
And Lanny Davis is now going after the president.
He is asked by Chuck Todd if there's any corroborative evidence that Michael Cohen is telling the truth.
That when Michael Cohen says that Trump told him to violate campaign finance law, is there any evidence that corroborates this?
Here was Lanny Davis's answer.
Does the SDNY have physical evidence in their hands that, or is this still on Michael Cohen's word versus the president's word?
I was trying to give you your answer, Chuck.
The answer is, number one, the Trump Team and Miss Giuliani have admitted that the money was paid.
Number two, there is physical and electronic evidence that the money was paid to Miss Daniels from the Trump conduit, who was Mr. Cohen, and it's all documented.
Okay, but that doesn't answer the question.
Okay, we know that the money was passed along.
The question is whether Trump had intent to avoid campaign finance law, and that is not actually documented, is what Lanny Davis seems to be saying.
So, just because the money passed hands, which we all assume happened, and just because Trump told Cohen to solve the problem, which we all assume happened, doesn't mean that Trump actually had intent to violate campaign finance law.
Now, the great irony of this situation is that Hillary Clinton was allowed to get away with Creating a private server and then destroying information on the private server, supposedly because she didn't have intent.
That's pretty clear.
She actually did have intent to destroy information and violate the law.
But Trump probably didn't have intent here.
And so by the same standard, he should probably not be criminally liable unless they have actual evidence that he knew that the law was being violated.
And he said, I don't care.
Go ahead and violate the law anyway.
It also doesn't help that Michael Cohen happens to be A particularly sleazy liar, and everybody sort of knows it.
The newfound respect for Michael Cohen's honesty is sort of astonishing from folks on the left.
And you can see that folks on the left even really don't believe Michael Cohen.
They think he's a liar and a screwball.
Lanny Davis was on national television yesterday on NBC News, and he actually said that they'd opened a legal defense fund for Michael Cohen.
He asked people to contribute, and the audience started laughing at him.
It's really funny.
But could I just take one opportunity to remind everyone that Michael Cohen has suffered a tragic and difficult experience with his family.
He's without resources and we've set up a website called MichaelCohenTruth.com that we're hoping that he will get some help from the American people so he can continue to tell the truth.
The audience, they don't know if you're ready to donate, Lanny, but we did check before we went to air.
And honestly, that's the appropriate response.
By the way, his legal defense fund has raised like $150,000.
It's raised a bunch of money.
$50,000 of those dollars apparently came from the CEO of NASCAR.
For some odd reason that nobody can really explain.
So all of that is good stuff.
Again, the president has actually three pretty good defenses.
Michael Cohen's a liar.
Okay, fair enough.
Michael Cohen is a liar.
Two, I sleep with every one of them, pay them off.
Also a fairly good defense.
And defense number three, I don't know what the hell I'm doing with regard to legal stuff.
He's my lawyer.
It's his job to know that stuff.
Also a pretty good defense.
So, All of the talk about Trump being necessarily legally on the ropes.
Maybe he is, maybe he's not.
I mean, he's certainly more jeopardy than he was two days ago, but that's not, it's not indicative that this is sort of an open and shut case.
Bret Stephens of the New York Times has a whole thing today about how Trump should immediately be impeached.
The evidence isn't quite there yet of criminal action.
We all knew that Trump is a man who lacks character in a lot of particular areas, but that's not the same thing quite as criminal activity.
We'll get to the White House's response to all of this in just a second, plus some Paul Manafort updates.
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So, with all of this said, the strongest offenses the President has are, I get around, I'm dumb about the law.
Michael Cohen's a liar, right?
Those are his strongest defenses.
His strongest defense is not, I am by nature a truth teller.
That is not the president's strongest defense because he's not, okay?
Let's just be honest about this.
The president is not known for his veracity on a wide variety of issues.
He may be at root a truth teller on some matters political.
I think that's true, but he also likes to fib a fair bit.
And so when Sarah Sanders got up, Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday at the White House, when she got up, When she was asked whether Trump is lying, she got very offended and it didn't play all that great.
I'm here today and say the president has never lied to the American people because so many people now look back at that tape of him on Air Force One saying he knew nothing about these payments, when in fact we now know he knew everything about these payments.
So has he lied?
Look, again, I think that's a ridiculous accusation.
The president in this matter has done nothing wrong and there are no charges against him.
Okay, so he's done nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him.
No charges against him is a bad defense.
He never lies, a bad defense.
It's offensive to ask whether he lied.
He literally was on Air... I mean, what that reporter says is true.
He was on Air Force One.
He was asked about paying off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.
And he said, I had no knowledge that any of that stuff was happening.
That was not true.
Okay, so that's not his best defense.
Again, I've laid forth three separate defenses for the president, all of which are fairly robust.
His best defense is not I can't be indicted and I never lie.
That's not his best defense, but Sanders said repeatedly that Trump can't be indicted.
Again, he can't be indicted probably because he's president of the United States, but that's not a case that he's not guilty of a crime.
There are a bunch of other cases he's not guilty of a crime, but the statement that he can't be indicted, that's like saying, well, I was acquitted on a murder charge and then it turns out I actually murdered the person.
I can't be tried again because of double jeopardy.
Well, that's true.
That is legally true.
It also doesn't mean that you didn't necessarily murder the person.
Here's, like, O.J.
Simpson clearly murdered Nicole Simpson.
He was acquitted, and he can't be retried under double jeopardy.
If somebody were to ask him, O.J., are you innocent of killing your wife?
And he said, can't be tried again.
You might assume, well, maybe he's a little bit guilty.
Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though, saying the president is innocent because he can't be indicted, which is, again, legally not tenable.
As the president said, we've stated many times, he did nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him.
As the president has stated on numerous occasions, he did nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him in this.
The president in this matter has done nothing wrong and there are no charges against him.
What the president has stated a number of times, he did nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him.
You just kept saying this over and over, right?
He did nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him.
He did nothing wrong.
There are no charges against him because he's the President of the United States and you cannot, under federal law, have a federal law enforcement agency indict a sitting President of the United States.
There are no charges against him is not part of the case.
There are no charges against him because he's the president of the United States.
And you cannot, under federal law, have a federal law enforcement agency indict a sitting president of the United States.
OK.
Meanwhile, we have updates on the Paul Manafort case.
So, President Trump has come out very strongly in favor of Paul Manafort.
He's defended Paul Manafort.
We're gonna get to President Trump's response to all of this in just one second, because he's been very prolific on Twitter, and then he did a very long interview this morning on Fox and Friends as well, and he talked to Ainsley Earhardt yesterday.
But, the update on Paul Manafort is that a lot of people on the right have been saying that Paul Manafort was railroaded, and the case that they're making is that because he was acquitted, or because the jury hanged, he wasn't acquitted, the jury The jury hung on ten separate charges.
That just means that he was innocent of those charges and the whole thing is some sort of witch hunt.
He was convicted on eight charges.
One of the jurors was on Fox News last night with Shannon Bream.
She's a Trump supporter.
She explained that basically there was one person in the room who made it a hung jury as opposed to everybody.
So basically, if it had not been for one juror, he would have been convicted on all accounts.
Here's the juror explaining.
Okay, how close, I want to know, did this jury come to convicting Paul Manafort on all 18 counts?
By one.
There was one holdout.
The person, a female juror, was... We all tried to convince her to look at the paper trail.
We laid it out in front of her again and again, and she still said that she had a reasonable doubt.
And that's the way the jury worked.
OK, so the idea that this was just all a witch hunt.
Again, there are a bunch of Trump supporters on that jury and Manafort was convicted on eight counts anyway.
So it's not the witch hunt.
If there is a witch hunt, the witch hunt would have to do a lot more with the Mueller investigation looking at Russian collusion.
But it would have nothing to do with Paul Manafort being guilty of stuff.
Paul Manafort was guilty of stuff.
End of story.
And when people say, you know, if the special counsel dug into you, he would find something, my answer would be, well, it depends on what he finds.
If he finds that I was actively taking money from a foreign government in order to manipulate the American political process, which is sort of what Manafort was doing prior to the election, had nothing to do with Trump, then that's a crime.
You know, there's not to say that the government should be able to go through everybody's books at will, but he was convicted of eight federal felonies and would have been convicted of another ten if there hadn't been one holdout on the jury.
So, let's reserve the witch hunt language for actual witch hunts.
Let's not reserve the witch hunt language for when there's actually a lady running around in an actual witch's hat riding a broom and casting curses by killing cats.
How about that?
How about we save the witch hunt language for, you know, actual witch hunts.
Ainsley Earhart came out and said that Trump is actually considering pardoning Manafort.
Trump has been very warm toward Manafort.
He says that Manafort is a great guy because he didn't squeal.
Which, again, doesn't make the president sound particularly innocent.
The president is his own worst advocate when it comes to matters legal.
Here, Ainsley Earhart came out and she said that Trump is considering pardoning Paul Manafort.
She then walked that back.
A little bit.
but Ari Fleischer tweeted out and he said, if Trump pardons Manafort, then it might be worth considering impeachment.
He says, I don't care for Trump's style.
He can be too offensive and divisive.
Fleischer, of course, was press secretary under George W. Bush.
I like many of his policies.
If he fires Mueller or pardons Manafort, I'd consider impeachment, but nothing so far merits impeachment.
The remedy for those who can't stand him is political.
Beat him in 2020 if you can.
I think so far Ari Fleischer is basically correct.
So all the talk about Paul Manafort, it amounts to nothing.
I'm just puzzled as to why the president continues to defend him.
Meanwhile, the state of New York is looking at going after President Trump as well.
This poses a significant serious difficulty for the president because the president can be indicted on state charges.
So if you commit a murder as president of the United States, there is nothing in the Constitution that forbids a state prosecutor from bringing you up on violation of state law.
The reason the president can be indicted under federal law is because the president controls the federal executive branch, but the president does not control state law, which is why the president can't, for example, pardon state crimes.
Right?
He can't pardon a state murderer, for example.
Well, New York state investigators have now subpoenaed Michael Cohen, the president's former personal lawyer, according to state officials, as part of a probe into the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
They have a lot of evidence that the Donald J. Trump Foundation was basically being used as a pass-through for Trump to pay personal expenses.
It's not a criminal matter yet.
The tax department in New York doesn't have the jurisdiction to pursue criminal charges, but if it discovered information valuable to the investigation of the Trump Foundation, it would then be referred to the New York State Attorney General.
I have very little doubt that the New York Attorney General would have very little trouble trying to pursue a criminal investigation into President Trump.
Barbara Underwood hates President Trump with a passion of a thousand burning suns.
So what you could see is a state prosecution against the President, and he is not, in fact, immune to state prosecution Under federal law.
So, this is a continuing serious problem for the president.
It's, you know, it would be great if we didn't have to deal with any of this stuff.
We'll have to deal with the charges as they come and evaluate them as they come.
Now, in a second, we're going to get to the president's response to all of this, some of which is good, some of which is bad, most of which is kind of bad.
But we'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay, so, President Trump has responded to all this in a variety of ways.
So yesterday, he was on with Ainsley Earhart over at Fox News, and he said, So remember, this is a guy who said that he didn't even know about the Stormy Daniels payoff.
Now he's saying that he paid for Stormy Daniels.
The case in favor of him saying this is that he doesn't think he violated federal finance law.
He didn't know it was a violation of federal finance law.
He still doesn't know it was a violation of federal finance law, so how can you say he had intent to violate federal finance law?
That's the charitable reading.
The uncharitable reading is that he just admitted to a federal crime, because if he personally paid for a campaign expenditure and admitted to it, then he just admitted to a federal crime on national television.
This is why you should let your lawyers do the talking, Mr. President.
Here is the President of the United States talking to Ainsley Earhart.
Did you know about the payments?
Later on I knew.
Later on.
But you have to understand, Ainsley, what he did, and they weren't taken out of campaign finance.
That's a big thing.
That's a much bigger thing.
Did they come out of the campaign?
They didn't come out of the campaign.
They came from me, and I tweeted about it.
You know, I put, I don't know if you know, but I tweeted about the payments.
But they didn't come out of campaign.
In fact, my first question when I heard about it was, did they come out of the campaign?
Okay, so this is not a smart line of attack, because if in fact he knew that the money was going to be used to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in violation of federal campaign finance law, then him saying, I signed it personally, is in fact the crime.
If it's a campaign expenditure, it's supposed to come from campaign funding.
And if he wants to spend on his own behalf, he's supposed to report it.
So that's not particularly great.
And the president also decided that it would be worthwhile to tweet out about Michael Cohen again today.
So he tweeted out, So fact check, three quarters true, half true.
So it is true that if he had not won, none of this would be an issue.
It is also true that the media are very pissed that he won.
It is not really super true that the only thing he did wrong was to win the election.
It turns out that shipping women, not your wife, and then paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars to shut up in advance of an election It doesn't go in the book of virtues.
It's probably not the best thing to do.
But he's right that the media are treating this in a way differently than they would treat a Democrat, certainly.
That wasn't the end of it, though.
The president also did an interview this morning.
on Fox News.
It was a fairly lengthy interview.
And he talked about a wide variety of topics.
One of the things that he talked about is Michael Cohen flipping on him.
And he makes a comment that, again, this is why you let your lawyers do the talking, Mr. President.
Let your lawyers do the talking, Mr. President.
My goodness.
He comes out and he says that when people flip, flipping ought to be illegal, right?
So getting somebody to testify in exchange for a due sentence, that should be illegal.
Well, for a law and order guy, that's a real weird statement because every drug ring that has ever been rolled up has been rolled up on the basis of people pleading to lesser crimes in order for them to get some sort of advantage and then testify against their buddies.
Right?
Every single, every single RICO case, every single drug case, Half of criminal cases are based on flipping people so that you can move up the chain, right?
Flipping people is a long honored tradition, and the reason for that is because if you couldn't flip people, if you couldn't offer them a reduced sentence, or protection, or some sort of concession, why wouldn't they just go by Omerta?
Why wouldn't they just keep silent in order to maintain loyalty with the folks who they are afraid will kill them in prison?
Or in order to maintain loyalty with the folks who are going to pay their family while they stay in jail for a longer period of time.
Here's President Trump, though, saying that flipping people ought to be illegal.
This is just not smart.
It makes him look guilty even if he's not.
It's just...
Okay, here he is.
Make up stories.
This whole thing about flipping, they call it.
I know all about flipping.
For 30, 40 years, I've been watching flippers.
Everything's wonderful.
And then they get 10 years in jail, and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.
It almost ought to be outlawed.
It's not fair.
What in the living hell?
I mean, he sounds like John Gotti here.
He should not be doing this, right?
The fact is, when the president says, I've been watching this for 30 years, okay, so you can actually search his tweet history.
He has not once tweeted about flipping.
Not once until now has he discussed flipping publicly.
Not once has he said, you know what?
This criminal procedure is really bad.
Only when someone flips on him, then all of a sudden flipping is really, really, really bad.
And presumably when it comes to cracking down on drug crimes or illegal immigration, he's a very tough law and order president.
He doesn't care about flipping.
It's only flipping applies when it comes to him.
So I guess that we can all expect Republican support for the Don't Rat On People Act of 2018.
It's just not good stuff.
Then the president makes a separate case.
He says, I shouldn't be impeached, not because I'm innocent.
I shouldn't be impeached because if I did, then the market would crash.
Again, ay-yi-yi-yi-yi.
I'll tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash.
I think everybody would be very poor.
Because without this thinking, you would see numbers that you wouldn't believe.
In reverse.
Okay, so maybe that's true, maybe that's not.
The fact is that after the impeachment of Clinton, the market continued to go up.
I think that the market really does not like uncertainty.
So it's probably true that the market would take a hit.
The market took a hit a couple of days ago when all these revelations from Michael Cohen broke.
So yes, the market doesn't like uncertainty.
Would it adjust with President Mike Pence?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, the answer is probably yes.
Although, a Trump impeachment would probably ding the market.
I don't think he's totally wrong here.
I think the reason that it would ding the market is because the markets fear a Democratic takeover of the House, Senate, and presidency, and a massive upswing in regulation that would dampen the ability to invest.
If people were afraid that Elizabeth Warren was going to be the next president with a Democratic Congress, then that might ding the market.
So Trump isn't entirely wrong here.
But again, his strongest case here is, I didn't do anything wrong.
He should just come out and say, I don't know the law, I didn't know the law, to pretend I'm some sort of campaign finance expert is silly.
There's such ample defenses available to him, but this is where the president's ego gets in the way of his own success.
Now, the president loves him some president.
I mean, Donald Trump is a big fan of Donald Trump.
And because he's a big fan of Donald Trump, he's never able to admit to things that we all know are true.
Like the fact that he goes around sleeping with porn stars and paying them off.
Like, we all know that's true.
I'm not going to pretend that he's a King David character when it comes to his character.
He's not.
And we all know that.
That was baked into the cake.
If he would just say that, I think everybody would be like, OK, fine, that's a plausible case.
That's what Bill Clinton basically did.
Bill Clinton basically says, yeah, that's what I do.
I go around sticking cigars in women.
That's what I do.
And everybody was like, OK, I guess so.
Yep, that's that's accurate.
If the president just said that stuff, he said, listen, I'm ignorant about the law and I pay off ladies.
Everybody would be like, yeah, kind of knew that already.
Kind of knew that already.
That was already known.
But instead, the president keeps saying that he's a legal expert on things, that he's been talking about flipping for 30 years.
He has never once talked about flipping that we can find.
And how do you know that the president is a little bit egotistic?
Because here's what he was asked to grade his presidency so far.
I will give you three guesses how he graded his presidency so far.
Three guesses.
I don't think it's going to take three guesses for you.
So I give myself an A+.
I don't think any president has ever done what I've done in this short... We haven't even been two years.
Biggest tax cuts in history.
So I would say I would honestly give myself an A+.
And so would many other people.
Yes, many other people who work for you and or in Congress and want to get things done with you.
Listen, I've been very positive about the president's policy.
I've given him an A- when it comes to his executive policy.
I have given him like a C plus when it comes to legislative policy, maybe a B minus.
And when it comes to rhetoric, he's a dear enough.
I mean, that's just the way that it is.
And people may disagree with that, although I can assure you there are a lot of folks in the administration who basically agree with that assessment.
But the fact that the president gives himself an A plus...
Ego is a killer, okay?
It's true for you, it's true for me.
Anybody who gets too over their skis on ego, who never reflects for a second and thinks, maybe there's something I'm bad at.
One of the worst things you can do in life is overestimate your own skill set or suggest that you have a skill set where you have none.
And there's certain things I'm just bad at, okay?
I'm not the world's most athletic human.
I'm good at math, but I'm not great at math, right?
There are certain things I just don't know a lot about.
If I don't admit that stuff, you get yourself in real trouble, and that's particularly true when you are talking about matters legal.
There are lawyers, for a reason, who go to law school and spend years practicing.
It is not a coincidence that President Trump has fired basically every lawyer he's ever worked with.
At a certain point, when you look at a client, and every one of their lawyers has failed, you have to think, maybe it's not the lawyers, maybe it's the client.
So the President of the United States making real trouble for himself.
He didn't stop there.
We'll get to some more of his comments in just a second.
First, let's talk about Bravo Company Manufacturing.
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And that is why I am a big Second Amendment supporter.
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Or if you are in the midst of a tyrannical government rise, which I know folks on the left like to discount this until Donald Trump is president, but one of the reasons we don't have a tyrannical government is particularly the threat of a population that is armed.
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Okay, so in just a second, we'll get to the media's response to everything Trump-related, plus the president sounds off on South Africa.
I have some thoughts.
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So the president continues to defend Paul Manafort.
Again, not a... I don't see why.
Paul Manafort was convicted of a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with Trump.
Now, the cynical reason he'd protect Paul Manafort is because he's afraid that if he doesn't talk about how Paul Manafort is great, Paul Manafort flips too.
But the non-cynical reason is that he just thinks anybody in his orbit who's targeted is targeted unfairly.
In any case, The president is not his own best advocate here.
I know that a lot of his fans think that he's always his own best advocate, but that is just not true, and it's not true on matters with regard to law.
So, you know, I would hope that the president would kind of leave off here and let his lawyers do the rest.
Meanwhile, the media are just champing at the bit over this.
Chuck Todd, over at NBC, you know, doing some real journalism-ing, being very objective here.
He says that Paul Ryan should drop impeachment papers, because I remember when all of the members of the media were calling on Democrats to go along with impeachment of President Clinton for committing actual perjury while he was President of the United States.
Oh, no, wait, that didn't happen at all.
I also don't remember calls for impeachment of President Obama over the IRS scandal or Benghazi or the Fast and Furious scandal or any of the other scandals that occurred during the Obama administration.
You want to read about all those scandals?
I wrote an entire book on them.
It's called The People vs. Barack Obama, so go check that out.
But Chuck Todd says Paul Ryan should start drawing up impeachment papers now.
Ryan's retiring.
I think he actually could do the party a favor.
And if you just start the procedure in the House Judiciary Committee, you give some home, you give some place for Republicans getting nervous to say, hey, you know what?
Let's start an investigation and we'll go from there.
Okay, how about everybody just saying we won't obstruct the investigation?
There's already an investigation going on.
The Mueller investigation continues, and Republicans have already said that if it's obstructed, it's going to be a problem.
The same thing holds true with regard to the SDNY investigation, I assume.
But the idea that Republicans are going to start impeachment proceedings based on the information that we have now, it's a little early, Chuck Todd.
Also, let's be real about what impeachment is.
Impeachment is a political remedy.
Impeachment is not a legal remedy.
That's not how it was originally conceived.
The founders thought that impeachment was going to be a legal remedy, that Congress would use impeachment in order to check the executive branch.
In reality, impeachment has been used extraordinarily sparingly.
People in politics tend to want elections to provide the referendum on the sitting president of the United States.
They don't tend to want to oust people, even for legal violations, because they'd rather have the people take it on their own backs to get rid of a particular president.
There have only been three impeachment proceedings in America's history with regard to presidents.
One was Andrew Johnson, impeached in the House, not convicted in the Senate.
Bill Clinton, impeached in the House, not convicted in the Senate.
And Richard Nixon, impeachment proceedings never really got started because Nixon knew he would be impeached and he resigned.
So...
The sudden shift toward we have to have a bipartisan view of impeachment is kind of ridiculous, coming from the same media that thought it was absolutely absurd for Republicans to try to impeach President Clinton back in 1998.
Elizabeth Warren, though, understands this is where the heart of the base is.
She is probably one of the frontrunners for the 2020 nomination among Democrats, and she said on CNN that she's not nervous to bring up the topic of impeachment.
Of course, why would she be?
She's from Massachusetts.
The chances that she meets any sort of resistance here aren't slim and none.
I'm not nervous.
I just want to be effective.
And the way that any of us are effective is to say, let's get all of the evidence.
Let's get all of the pieces out there.
Protect Robert Mueller.
Let him finish his investigation.
Let him make a full and fair report to all of the American people.
Okay, so what exactly are Democrats looking for in this whole proceeding?
What they're really looking for is an excuse just to obstruct Trump's agenda.
We all know this.
Kamala Harris, who's our ex-Gribble senator, I've been using that word a lot because there's a lot of ex-Gribble people lately, but Kamala Harris, who's our ex-Gribble senator here in the state of California, she came out and she says, you know, because Trump is now basically an unindicted co-conspirator, which he is not, right?
I mean, that's an actual legal term that is not used in the indictment of Michael Cohen.
Because he's an unincited co-conspirator, says Kamala Harris, we should not move forward on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
This does not follow.
Let's say Donald Trump will remove tomorrow.
Let's say Donald Trump resigned tomorrow.
Who would become president?
It wouldn't be Kamala Harris.
It wouldn't be Hillary Clinton.
It would be Mike Pence, who would then move full-scale forward on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
So this is just stupidity, but it demonstrates that the real force behind impeachment has much more to do with obstructing the president's agenda than with legal ire at the president's mis-action here.
Even before this happened, there was no question that the process was horribly flawed.
A court of the United States of America has accepted a guilty plea from someone who was the lawyer for the President of the United States.
And that person, in pleading guilty, basically made very clear that it was the then candidate, and now the President of the United States, who directed him to commit a crime.
This is a serious matter.
Yeah, I love the faux seriousness from Kamala Harris, who is one of the worst attorney generals in the history of the state of California, refusing to enforce the law.
Enforcing the law where it wasn't appropriate.
And now she's, of course, a senator who's going to use this sort of supposed legal ire to go after President Trump.
There's a fair bit of hypocrisy on this.
They're going to hold a Brett Kavanaugh over Trump.
Come on.
Come on.
We all know what this is really about.
We are all very well aware of what this is all really about.
OK.
Meanwhile, the president is getting himself in, I think, hot water from the left, but I don't think appropriately, because yesterday he tweeted out that he wanted to look into the situation in South Africa regarding land seizures.
So for folks who have not been following the situation in South Africa, because we don't tend to follow foreign policy that much in the United States, What's been happening is that the South African government, which is dominated by the left, has decided that they want to seize the land of white farmers in recompense for apartheid.
Apartheid ended in 1994, I believe, under Nelson Mandela.
It had started to collapse already in the late 80s, and then it was formally ended in 94 by Mandela.
In any case, I don't want to get the history of that wrong, so I'm actually going to look that up right now.
So, in any case, the South African government decides, yeah, that's right, in April 27th, 1994 is when it was formally ended.
In any case, the President of the United States is commenting on the fact that the South African government now wants to seize land that is owned by white folks in South Africa and redistribute it.
This is bad policy for South Africa.
It's particularly bad policy because it is undermining the rule of law.
And the real problems in South Africa have very little to do with white land ownership.
And they have a lot more to do with the fact that rule of law has collapsed in South Africa.
The crime rates are extraordinarily high.
They have an unemployment rate of 28%.
They have significantly high inflation.
They have water crisis that's been ongoing for years at this point.
This is a distraction from the government of South Africa to the people of South Africa on a racial basis.
And it is true that apartheid was evil and it has carried over into land ownership today.
But the idea that you can just seize property from white landowners and not undermine the rule of law, which undermines foreign investment and the capacity to trust in your ability to own private property in South Africa, is of course very silly.
So Trump tweeted out, I've asked Secretary of State Pompeo So he was watching Fox News last night and he decided this was going to drive policy.
He's not wrong about the land expropriations.
and the large-scale killing of farmers.
South African government is now seizing land from white farmers.
Tucker Carlson, Fox News.
So he was watching Fox News last night, and he decided this was going to drive policy.
He's not wrong about the land expropriations.
The left, which is going nuts over this, suggesting that this is racial, that it's racially motivated, The United States, if it were the reverse, if it were black landowners who were having their land seized by white people, the president would certainly have a right to intervene, and the same is true here.
There's already been talk about the United States government getting active on the international stage over all of this, the Cato Institute.
...has issued a statement regarding the dire consequences awaiting South Africa should due process fail land expropriation without compensation.
What's happening there is the government is not even saying that they're going to pay people for their land.
They're basically just grabbing land without even recompense, which is a crazy, crazy policy.
Here is some audio of the leader of South Africa, the Prime Minister of South Africa, his name is Ramaphosa, talking about this land expropriation.
On Tuesday, South Africans, through their publicly elected representatives in Parliament, Okay, that's a crazy policy.
This is Cyril Ramaphosa.
The reason he's doing this is because he's being outflanked by radicals.
of land without compensation.
Okay, that's a crazy policy.
This is Cyril Ramaphosa.
The reason he's doing this is because he's being outflanked by radicals.
The ruling African National Congress amended but supported the motion to actually expropriate land without any sort of compensation.
He's being outflanked by the radical left's economic freedom fighters.
fighters, these are folks who wear red berets, like they're legitimate communists, whose leader Julius Malema told the country's parliament, we must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.
So they're not going to pay people.
Now, you may think that the people who own the land committed a crime.
You'd actually have to look at which people owning the land committed the crimes.
Maybe that's true, maybe that's not.
But to remove land from people without actually paying them on the governmental level, especially when it wouldn't cost all that much money to pay them off and make them leave, To do that undermines rule of law in South Africa, and the president isn't wrong to point that out.
Now, there's been a lot of focus on so-called farm murders in South Africa.
A lot of these farms are owned by white folks, and the murder rate on these farms is high.
But the murder rate across South Africa is particularly high.
The statistics are very much in doubt as to whether there is a higher rate of targeted killing of whites in South Africa than blacks in South Africa, the most violent areas of South Africa.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
Anyway, black folks, crime rates are very high over there.
But to suggest the president has no place in saying anything about this and that he's only doing this because he's a racist.
And so many on the left are saying that is that that's that's pretty silly.
That's that's, I think, an overstatement by the media, which we are getting used to in large scale.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
My sister actually recommended the show to me.
It's on Netflix.
It's called I Am A Killer, and it's a look inside Death Row.
It's a documentary series, so they profile a bunch of murder cases, and they talk to folks who are on Death Row.
It's kind of fascinating because it is fairly objective.
It tries to take all sides of a particular issue.
It will talk to the victims of a killing.
It'll talk to the killer.
We'll talk to the family of the killer and the law enforcement officers and the prosecutors.
It's as good a piece of journalism on this stuff as I've seen.
I'm only a couple of episodes in, but so far, I'm a fan.
The show is I'm a Killer, and here's a little bit of the trailer.
I was convicted for capital murder.
I was convicted of capital murder.
And I was sentenced to death.
I did something so heinous.
I just fired a shot.
I strike him with the axe.
I started stabbing.
You're gonna let me tie you up or I'm gonna kill you.
I don't feel bad about it.
So, I mean, it's definitely well done.
It's not the fastest moving thing, but it's definitely a well done series, so you should go check that out.
It's well worth seeing.
Other things that I like, so the President of the United States has been making an issue out of the Mollie Tibbetts case.
The Mollie Tibbetts case, 20-year-old Iowan girl who was abducted and murdered by an illegal immigrant, and President Trump issued comments yesterday.
A lot of folks were saying that President Trump was doing this to distract from all the Cohen stuff.
The reality is that Trump would have done this in any case, right?
I mean, he did this during the campaign.
Mollie Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family.
A person came in from Mexico, illegally, and killed her.
it's one of the reasons why President Trump continues to retain popularity, is because the contrast between Trump and the left on issues like this is pretty astonishing. - Molly Tibbetts, an incredible young woman, is now permanently separated from her family.
A person came in from Mexico illegally and killed her.
We need the wall, we need our immigration laws changed, The Democrats will never give them.
And the wall is being built.
We've started it.
But we also need the funding for this year's building of the wall.
So...
To the family of Mollie Tibbetts, all I can say is God bless you.
This is why if President Trump would just leave to his lawyers the rest of this stuff and he campaigned on this stuff, he'd actually be doing much better in the polls.
And I think that he'd be doing well, especially when you contrast this with the sort of idiocy of a lot of folks on the left.
Simone Sanders is a commentator over at CNN.
Here's what she had to tweet on the Mollie Tibbetts matter.
She tweeted, Mollie Tibbetts was murdered because she told a man to leave her alone while she was jogging.
Her murderer happens to be undocumented.
This isn't about border security.
This is about toxic masculinity.
Molly Tibbetts lost her life because a man couldn't take her saying no.
Full stop.
Well, I think it's fair to say that when a man kills a woman, that does count as toxic masculinity.
I think it probably counts as just toxic evil, in any case.
And it turns out the vast majority of murders in the United States are committed by men.
So, I don't think that's totally wrong, but to say that it has nothing to do with being undocumented is silly.
He shouldn't be in the country.
The question is how you stop that.
If Simone Sanders has a good answer as to how to stop toxic masculinity, like men from killing women in general, that is better than don't let evil men into the country illegally.
I'd like to hear it.
But this is sort of the problem with a lot of folks on the left.
They will say things like, we have a problem.
The problem is toxic masculinity.
And it's out there in the air somewhere.
And I'm not going to actually provide a solution to that.
The solution is sort of, you know, like, to regender our children.
The solution is to pretend that masculinity is inherently bad, right?
And then those of us say, well, you know, the other thing we could do is just not let this piece of crap in the country.
She's like, no, we got to talk about toxic masculinity.
You wonder why folks are resounding to President Trump even still.
That is the reason why.
Meanwhile, some things that I hate.
Speaking of the attempt to undermine basic truths, there's this video that I've now been made aware of.
It's a video that is promoted at, of all places, the Huffington Post, because this is the repository for all stupidity in the United States.
It's a video of a trans man, which is to say, a woman who believes that she is a man.
Her name is Cass Bliss, and she detailed at Huffington Post what it's like to get your period when you're not a woman.
Which, as a man, I would say, is pretty weird, because you need a uterus, which makes you a woman.
Bliss is a non-binary trans educator, and she first went viral with her Bleeding Well Trans campaign in 2017 to prove the biologically impossible claim that men have periods, too.
She recently created a music video discussing the struggles of having your period while not identifying as a woman in a quest for menstrual equity.
So here is the song, cut by a woman who believes she is a man who says that men have periods.
And yes, it's weird.
And yes, if this is your solution to toxic masculinity, I'm not going to take you seriously.
When I find my cycle is a struggle and bloody Mary comes to me.
Oh no.
Streaming womb of wisdom, let me bleed.
Though I'm not a woman, she is spilling right outside of me.
You are though.
My boyish womb of wisdom, let me bleed.
Let me bleed, let me bleed, let me bleed, let me bleed.
Okay so, I'm not a big...
Our gendered wombs of wisdom let us bleed.
So, first of all, not a huge Beatles fan in general, but if you're going to destroy the Beatles this way, I feel bad for the Beatles now.
And this person is saying that we can't have tampons anymore because tampons are gendered.
When you go to the store, they're like pink and stuff.
Instead, what they should be is they should be like a manly blue, like manly blue tampons.
Very important.
And we should have tampons in the men's bathroom also.
Which would be weird, since men don't have uteruses.
But the conflation of sex with gender is one of the most ridiculous aspects of the sort of trans rights agenda.
This bizarre notion that sex and gender are different, but then we will conflate them again.
So, sex is your biology.
You are biologically male.
But your gender is that you are a gendered female.
But then when it comes to going to the bathroom, we are going to treat your gender as your sex.
You are a biological female, even though you are a biological male.
None of this makes any sense.
You wonder why folks are confused and find this stuff... There's an article yesterday.
It was really amazing.
There's an article about Blair White, who's a trans woman, meaning a man who believes that he is a woman, or who feels like a woman on the inside, or whatever.
And Blair is a nice person.
I've been on Blair's show on YouTube.
We just discussed exactly this issue.
And the Yahoo News article about Blair White described our conversation and said that I was anti the trans community.
I don't even know what that means.
If by anti the trans community you mean I am not going to suggest that you are a member of the sex to which you claim membership, then okay.
If you mean that I don't want you to have all the rights of a normal human being in the United States, then of course that's not true.
Of course I think that trans people should be able to do anything that non-trans people should be able to do in the United States, but no one in the United States gets to redefine objective biological terms and then expect me to go along with that because that's not a thing that is going to happen.
I guess, again, just this idea that you are anti a person because you're anti a perspective is a conflation that is intellectually dishonest.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So Jimmy Kimmel has now made clear for the 175th time that he doesn't want to appeal to Trump fans.
He says, I don't think that world exists anymore.
He says that he is not going to bother.
With trying to appease all of these folks.
He says, I don't think you can look at things in that way.
He says that the world doesn't exist anymore where he can appeal to a wide variety of people.
He was interviewed by the Daily Beast.
The Daily Beast said, In terms of the effect of politics on your own ratings, I know you've said if people who disagreed with you don't want to watch, you don't particularly care.
Has that ever been an issue at ABC?
And he replied, Maybe I shouldn't have said I don't care.
I don't care enough to change what I'm doing is probably a more explicit explanation.
I'm sure ABC would love it if my show appealed to everyone.
But I don't think that world exists anymore.
And I'm not comfortable in it.
I don't really see any other path.
I also think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a performer is trying to guess what your audience wants.
I think you need to do what you think is right and hope that works out.
While I agree with that, I also think that what the audience expects from a comedian is to be funny and not to be a crusader for their politics.
That is not the same thing as if you just want to be a political person who happens to be funny.
There is a difference.
There is a difference.
I think the media are going to continue to fragment so long as people don't understand which lane they are in.
Are you a comedian or are you a political guru?
Pick one.
Pick one.
You can be a political guru who's funny.
That's fine.
There are plenty of those.
But if you're going to be a comedian, theoretically, you should be making comedy about everybody, which is not what folks like Jimmy Kimmel are doing.
It's alienating a lot of the audience, and it's causing that audience to react politically to cultural flashpoints like Kimmel.
Alrighty, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest updates and the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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