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Dec. 13, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:35
Payoff Politics | Ep. 679
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The National Enquirer turns on President Trump, Vox wants Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president even though she's not eligible, and the Boy Scouts verge on bankruptcy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So many things to talk about today.
We'll get to all of them.
We'll analyze all of the things happening in this beautiful world before the advent of Christmas.
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All righty.
So we begin today with all of the hubbub that has now broken out amidst the Michael Cohen sentencing.
So as you recall from yesterday's show in the ongoing legal saga that is the Trump administration, Michael Cohen, the president's personal attorney, was sentenced to three years in jail, which was not good for President Trump.
It was particularly not good for President Trump because of the ancillary details of the actual plea agreement.
Judge William Pauly III said that Michael Cohen had committed a bevy of crimes with an eye toward deception.
Cohen, for his part, threw himself on the mercy of the court.
He said, quote, I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today, and it was my own weakness and blind loyalty to President Trump that led me to choose a path of darkness over light.
So dude has watched a few too many mafia movies.
He added, time and again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass.
And then there was this weird shot of him in an abandoned home in like Arizona suburbia looking wistfully into the camera back at the days when he was a good fella.
More damaging than Cohen's open court mea culpa was that the prosecution made an announcement.
They announced they'd reached a non-prosecution agreement with America Media Inc., which is the parent company of the National Enquirer.
Now, you'll recall that President Trump had an arrangement with the National Enquirer in which, essentially, He was going to provide the National Enquirer for cash, the National Enquirer was going to take that cash and then pay off women to stay silent.
What the National Enquirer would do is they would go to Trump paramours, they would buy their life rights, and then they would sell those life rights to President Trump for a certain amount of money.
That was basically the way that this chain of custody worked when it came to these sorts of stories.
Trump would use the National Enquirer basically to funnel hush money.
Well, now, AMI has decided that they are going to work with the Southern District of New York and turn on President Trump.
So, AMI, as I say, would purchase the stories of Trump's lovers and then bury them at Trump's behest.
Cohen would then attempt to reimburse AMI, so the allegations go.
So, according to prosecutors, AMI, American Media Inc., which, again, is the parent company of the National Enquirer, admitted it made a $150,000 payment in concert with a candidate's presidential campaign.
And in order to ensure that former Trump paramour Karen McDougal did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election.
AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.
Now, the reason that this is very damaging is because the way that campaign finance law works is that if you violate campaign finance law, it must be on the basis of you having made an unreported expenditure intended to influence the campaign.
On President Trump's defense, as I've been saying for a long time on this particular score, would be, yes, I paid off women, but I didn't do it to influence the campaign.
I've been paying off women for years, right?
Which is absolutely credible in the case of President Trump.
So it wouldn't be a campaign-related expense any more than you buying a suit to wear on a campaign is a campaign-related expense.
You would have bought the suit anyway.
It's just that now you're doing it in the middle of a campaign.
It's the reason that you can't just blame everything on campaign expenditures.
You actually have to Kind of.
You have to filter out all of the stuff that is campaign expenditure from non-campaign expenditure.
So there basically been two lines of defense that President Trump has been urged to use by his defenders on this particular score.
Number one, this wasn't a campaign expenditure by Michael Cohen or by America Media Inc.
if he was involved in that particular path.
And number two, that even if it was a payoff, he relied on the advice of his attorney, Michael Cohen, and Michael Cohen's the attorney.
So it's his job to determine whether or not the law was being complied with.
Well, the first prong of that attack is sort of falling apart.
The idea that this was not campaign related.
If AMI is going to now testify, if executives at AMI, including people like David Pecker, who is a good friend of President Trump's, are now going to testify that Trump explicitly said to them, hey guys, I've got an election coming up and I really need you to buy up all the stories of the women I screwed years ago.
Like, if he said that, then it's going to be hard for him to claim That it was not campaign related, that it wasn't intended to influence the campaign.
While Cohen didn't actually use AMI to silence Stormy Daniels, representatives of AMI were the first to notify Michael Cohen of Stormy Daniels' intent to go public, according to prosecutors.
Again, all of this undercuts the case that President Trump could make that he paid hush money on a regular basis outside of election circumstances.
So Trump is now going to have to claim, in defense, that both AMI and Cohen are lying about such expenditures, representing illegal campaign allocations, that he would have done it anyway, and that they have caved to the pressure of rogue prosecutors.
Alternatively, he's going to have to blame Cohen for the violations, as I say.
Now, none of this bodes particularly well for President Trump.
President Trump cannot be prosecuted as president according to Justice Department guidelines, but that doesn't mean that a looming indictment wouldn't change the math for 2020.
I think one of the great misnomers in presidential politics is that if you are impeached, it redounds sort of to your benefit.
That if you're impeached, that it doesn't hurt you politically.
And the case that people tend to make here is with regard to Bill Clinton.
Because when Bill Clinton was impeached by the House, but he wasn't convicted by the Senate, his approval rating rose, people saw it as a witch hunt, and Bill Clinton was sort of exonerated by his own party and by the American people.
The problem is, Bill Clinton was a lame duck.
And the same thing is true of Richard Nixon.
When Richard Nixon resigned in the middle of Watergate, he was, in fact, a lame duck.
If Richard Nixon had been in his first term during Watergate, does anyone think he would have won a second term after that?
How about Bill Clinton?
If Bill Clinton had been hit with a perjury and obstruction charge and been impeached in, say, 1994, as opposed to 1999, does anybody actually think that he would have won re-election in 1996?
The evidence that it hurts people That it hurts the party that is impeached more than it doesn't is that in 2000, if you recall, Al Gore should have won that election running away.
He had a very solid economy, he had a record of Clinton's deficit reduction, he had a solid campaign apparatus behind him, and because of Bill Clinton's Turmoil.
He forcibly disassociated himself from Clinton.
He would not campaign with Clinton.
And George W. Bush ran a campaign based on, I'm going to bring honor and decency back to the Oval Office.
That was actually the main thrust of his campaign in 2000.
And it cost Al Gore the White House.
So the idea that it doesn't have negative ramifications for you as a candidate or your party as a candidate If you are impeached, I am not sure that that is the case.
Certainly, it's riskier than not impeaching Trump, but I'm not sure that if the Democrats were to impeach Trump in the House on the basis of, for example, obstruction of justice or perjury, that it would necessarily redound to President Trump's benefit.
And again, those would be the actual crimes that we're talking about with regard to President Trump.
So, there are three crimes that are on the table with regard to President Trump, to do the quick legal analysis here.
Crime number one would be active promotion of a campaign finance violation.
That would be, he went to Michael Cohen, he said, listen dude, I know this violates campaign law, but take this money and go pay off the ladies.
And don't report it.
Do it.
And Cohen was like, well, sir, that could violate campaign finance.
And Trump, I don't care, do it anyway.
Like that would be campaign finance violation.
That's case number one.
Case number two is that Trump didn't necessarily say that, but when Michael Cohen went back to Trump and he said, listen, the FBI is looking into me and they want me to testify that you had nothing to do, that you had everything to do with the payment and that you knew all about the payments and that you were deeply involved in the payments and that they were campaign related.
And then Trump said, I want you to go and I want you to lie.
I want you to just tell the FBI nothing.
I want you to lie.
If Trump did that, that would be obstruction of justice.
That's what Bill Clinton did in 1998 with regard to the Paula Jones case.
The reason that Bill Clinton ended up being impeached was for obstruction of justice and perjury.
The perjury charges came when he was asked specifically about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
And he said that he did not have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
He used the present tense.
And that's where you got that famous quote.
It depends on the meaning of what is is meaning that present tense.
He didn't have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but he had in the past.
He was charged.
So remember, the perjury and obstruction of justice charges with regard to Bill Clinton had nothing to do with an underlying crime.
He wanted her to lie about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
That was considered obstruction of justice.
So remember, the perjury and obstruction of justice charges with regard to Bill Clinton had nothing to do with an underlying crime.
It wasn't an actual crime for Bill Clinton to sleep with Monica Lewinsky.
It was a crime for him to lie to the congressional investigators about it.
And it was a crime for him to tell other people to lie to congressional investigators or the FBI about it.
You can have a very similar circumstance here, where Michael Cohen didn't actually even commit a campaign finance violation, and Trump didn't commit a campaign finance violation, but Trump told Michael Cohen to lie to people.
In positions of legal authority about this, and then you get obstruction of justice and perhaps perjury depending on what Trump actually said in his deposition by the FBI.
Remember, he has turned in written answers to Robert Mueller.
Presumably, the perjury charge from there would arise in the context of Trump saying, for example, that he didn't know about the Trump Tower meeting.
And then you have a bunch of people who say, no, he absolutely knew about the Trump Tower meeting.
And so you have a case of perjury.
So again, Trump Tower meeting, not illegal.
The affairs with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal and the payoffs to them.
Not illegal.
But crimes can arise from non-illegal activity if you end up telling people to fib to legal authorities like the FBI or the DOJ.
And that is where the peril lies for President Trump.
Now, a competent lawyer will say at this point that President Trump should shut his face, right?
I mean, this is, as I've said many times on the program, the first thing to know about when the FBI comes calling is get a lawyer and shut up.
And this is true for anyone.
Okay, this is true for anyone.
Now, there are people who are saying that, you know, you want to urge people to talk to the FBI and the DOJ.
That's true.
As a general matter, I would like for people to talk with the FBI and the DOJ and the police and law enforcement authorities so that we can track down crime and solve those crimes.
I'm saying that if I were the defense counsel for somebody, if it were my job to defend you, any lawyer worth his salt will tell you, first rule of order, get a lawyer in the room and then don't answer questions unless your lawyer says that it's okay to answer the questions.
Certainly don't go on Twitter and start tweeting about your legal strategy.
And yet, as we shall see, being President Trump's lawyer is a barrel of laughs.
So here, we'll talk about what President Trump had to tweet about.
He started tweeting out his legal strategy this morning, which is always... Honestly, if you're his lawyer, you just want to stick your head in an oven.
I mean, it's just... It's...
There are three really bad jobs in Washington- There are many bad jobs in Washington, D.C.
Among these bad jobs, being the president's personal attorney, being the press secretary for the White House, and being the chief of staff, which is why they're now going to- I think maybe they should just conflate all of these into one.
The president's personal attorney should become the press secretary and the chief of staff.
We can kill three birds with one stone, or as PETA would have it, we can feed three birds with one scone.
We'll get to all of that in just a second, but first, let's talk about your ancestry.
Are you more Native American than Elizabeth Warren?
This is the real question of the day.
So Elizabeth Warren may have blown up her presidential campaign because she decided to release a genetic ancestry test showing that she may have been one 1,024th Native American.
I decided that I would take a genetic test from 23andMe because I wanted to find out more about my ancestry.
As it turns out, truth in advertising, I was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish.
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People worry about whether they are of mixed heritage.
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Check that out right there.
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Other folks in the office have taken the genetic ancestry test.
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Okay, so.
President Trump, the first rule of lawyering is shut your head.
President Trump does not abide by that rule.
So President Trump decided this morning to tweet out his entire legal strategy because when you have 50 million Twitter followers, why not lay out your entire legal strategy in the middle of an FBI investigation?
How could this go wrong?
So President Trump decides to tweet out and he tweets, I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law.
He was a lawyer.
He's supposed to know the law.
It is called advice of counsel, and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made.
That is why they get paid.
Despite that, many campaign finance lawyers have strongly stated, I did nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws.
If they even apply, because this was not campaign finance.
Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me.
But he pled to two criminal charges, campaign charges, which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty, even on a civil basis.
Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did, including the fact that his family was temporarily let off the hook.
As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me.
So, I will admit that the best tweet Trump has ever sent was specifically about Michael Cohen.
He sent a tweet several months ago in which he said, Well, you know, he should have thought of that before he did it, but what he is saying here is exactly the legal strategy that I've drawn up for him.
Now, the problem with him saying this sort of thing out loud is it shows sort of a motive for him to say it, meaning that he's now contradicted himself on Twitter itself.
Remember, he says he didn't pay off Stormy Daniels, that he never had an affair with Stormy Daniels on Twitter.
It turns out that all of that is false.
We all knew it was false at the time.
But he's basically making the case that Michael Cohen was supposed to protect him.
That's what a lawyer is supposed to do.
And that is the defense that he's going to have to rely on in the end, is that Michael Cohen should have known all this stuff, and Michael Cohen blew it anyway.
Whether that holds or not is...
Questionable, but it does set up a really difficult 2020 run for the president for a couple of reasons, which I'll explain in just a second.
So the president looking forward to 2021, a couple of things can happen.
Either the Democrats can impeach the president on the basis of obstruction of justice and perjury, Or the president is not impeached and we just jabber about this and investigate it for the next two years and we run into 2020 under the looming threat of indictment for President Trump.
And so it becomes President Trump trying to escape jail by running for president because when you're president you have immunity from being imprisoned by law enforcement authorities unless you're impeached and you're out of office.
If the if the president is able to survive impeachment, which I think he will up till 2020, but the indictment is still on the table, then basically he's going to be running under the threat of indictments that if you let him not be president anymore, he will immediately be sent to prison by the Southern District of New York.
That obviously is a different color for an election that we have ever seen in American politics before.
Now, it does set up a conundrum for the Democrats, which is, is it better to impeach him now, and move toward impeachment now, or is it better to run under those circumstances?
I think everyone sort of agrees it's better that if you can, you run under those circumstances in 2020.
You just keep jabbering and yelling about how Trump is an obstructor of justice, and a liar, and a perjurer, and then you run against him.
It's better to do that than to impeach him, and then the Senate acquits him, and then the story's basically over.
Alan Dershowitz, who's been a big defender of the President in a lot of this, and of course is a defense lawyer, was a defense lawyer for a living, He says that it's ridiculous to talk about impeaching Trump over this sort of stuff anyway.
I don't think he's going to come up with an impeachable offense.
Remember, the Constitution requires treason, bribery, other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The most they've come up with is a very, very questionable campaign contribution issue, which failed when they tried it against Edward some years ago.
So I don't think we're in impeachment land.
Okay, so I think that he is probably right, but only because of Bill Clinton.
So what's really amazing is watching all the people who thought that Bill Clinton should not be impeached turn around and now say that Donald Trump should be impeached on the same basis.
Now, here is my general take on whether Trump should be impeached if all of this stuff happens to be true.
If we were talking about we're now living in 1994, 1993, 1996, and we're trying to uphold a certain standard of what the presidency is, then any president who is credibly accused of obstruction of justice or perjury or be indicted on that basis should be impeached, which is why I was in favor of the Bill Clinton impeachment.
But Let's be real about this.
The math changed and it was changed by Bill Clinton.
It's not just that the Democrats held Bill Clinton to no standard.
It's that the realities on the ground changed themselves.
It's that the realities on the ground changed.
Donald Trump is not president if Bill Clinton Is not impeached, right?
If Bill Clinton is impeached, rather Bill Clinton had been impeached in 1999, Donald Trump is not president today.
Bill Clinton lowered the standard for what a president could be so much that by the time we got to Donald Trump in 2016, everybody just went, listen, we know that a president doesn't have to have high moral fiber.
We had Bill Clinton.
We know that a president can have corruption issues.
We had Bill Clinton.
You guys are running Hillary Clinton in this election and then lecturing us about higher character in the election?
You can't do this.
This is not a real thing.
And that's basically correct.
I'm not going to go back to the old standard.
I don't think it's it's even credible to go back to the old standard of what the presidency was before Bill Clinton, because let's be let's be frank about this.
There hasn't been no moral change of mind on the part of Democrats.
Now, what you're going to see over the next two years, here's the prediction now.
Over the next two years, what you're going to begin to see is a bunch of Democrats coming out and saying, you know what?
Thinking about it now, we should have gotten rid of Bill Clinton.
We should have impeached him.
They started to do this last year in the middle of the Me Too movement.
Well, you know, we really should have taken Juanita Broderick more seriously.
Right, but you didn't.
And I don't trust that you would if it happened again today.
If we were talking about a Democrat in office having committed the same sort of quasi-crimes or accused crimes as President Trump, Democrats would not be talking about impeaching, they would be talking about defending.
That is the world in which we live.
The standard that was used in 1999 for Bill Clinton retaining office.
By the way, he retained office under a Republican Senate.
A Republican Senate voted not to convict him in the impeachment case.
The standard that was used was, could Bill Clinton credibly continue to carry out his job, or had he lost the faith of the American people because of the charges upon him?
And the answer that the Senate gave was, no, he can still credibly perform his job, so we can't throw him out of office for high crimes and misdemeanors even though he was impeached in the House.
That standard still applies to President Trump.
Republicans would, I think, there's a case that people are making that Republicans would be smart to convict President Trump in the Senate.
I think that's ridiculous, politically speaking.
Too much of the base is invested in President Trump personally.
The idea of throwing him out of office on what look like ticky-tack fouls that are certainly no worse than what Bill Clinton did in 1999.
I think you want to split the base.
That's a good way to do it.
But does all this bode well for 2020?
I can't say that it does, and I would prefer that it had not been a thing.
But unfortunately, it is a thing, and so we'll have to move forward with it.
Now, in other news, I want to talk about, in just a second, presidents from facing down Democrats over border funding.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, the President of the United States has been caught up in this talk of a government shutdown with the Democrats.
And the Democrats are saying, we are not going to fund this border wall no matter what.
This is a winning campaign issue for the President.
If Democrats refuse to give the President his funding for a border wall, And the president says, listen, I'm not signing anything without that funding in it because they will not provide you the necessary security, the necessary prevention against dangerous people getting into the country.
That's a winning issue for the president.
And the Democrats are proving themselves intransigent.
It's amazing to me that the Democrats don't just give him the funding.
I understand that they want the political win of being able to say that they prevented Trump from getting the funding, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.
So what?
Wouldn't they look stronger on security if they just said, you know what?
The president is right.
We need to be stronger on border security.
So we're giving him the funding for border security and we're doing so in order to make the country safer.
Is that a huge win for Trump that's going to win him vast swaths of voters across the country?
I don't think so, especially if Democrats tried to show themselves as partners in all of this, as opposed to obstructors in all of this.
Instead, they've decided that this is a hill they are willing to die on.
President Trump should make them stand on that hill over and over and over again.
So Bernie Sanders is one of the folks who's pushing this.
Bernie Sanders is so wild, and the Democrats are so wild, that Bernie Sanders says he would not even trade citizenship for the Dreamers, meaning people who arrived here below the age of majority as children or young teenagers.
He wouldn't trade citizenship for them for a wall.
So he would leave, he'd rather leave legitimately hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal immigrants who could get citizenship in a deal Off the table, just so that President Trump can't build a border wall.
It's an insane position, but it is the mainstream democratic position.
Here's Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who's fading in the polls, but not fading in our hearts.
Bernie Sanders, go!
What's wrong with the move of saying what the Democrats say quietly, which is, we're in favor of border security, we're funding the stuff that they're doing on the border right now.
Give them the wall and get back what you want for the Dreamers.
My understanding is he does not have the votes in the House.
And I think there are a lot of folks here in the Senate, Republicans, who are also not supportive of building the wall.
All right, so wall for dreamers, not on the table for Bernie Sanders.
And then Chuck Schumer comes out and he says, President Trump is going to hold the government hostage for a campaign pledge?
Well, first of all, that is what every president has done.
Barack Obama did it also.
When the Republican Congress refused to pass a budget that included funding for Obamacare, Obama shut down the government, right?
Obama said, OK, well, I won't sign it.
I'm not going to sign it then.
Well, Chuck Schumer says, how dare President Trump do the same thing President Obama did on his priorities?
That's crazy talk.
President Trump made clear he'll hold parts of the government hostage for a petty campaign pledge to fire up his base.
That's all it is.
OK, that is absurd and it is not true.
You know, the president's pledge is a matter of border security and he is not wrong to push it.
But the Democrats are very radical on this issue and that's a winning issue for the president of the United States.
How radical are Democrats on this issue?
Here's an editorial from the Boston Globe about this.
They're very, very upset because the president over the last week has expanded his plan to dramatically expand the so-called public charge rule.
The public charge rule says that the administration is not going to allow people to come into the country who might become a public charge.
In other words, you don't get to come in the country if you're going to come here and be on public benefits.
So according to the Boston Globe, the rule is meant to prevent people who might become a public charge from entering or establishing legal residency in the United States.
Historically, the test was narrow, designed to identify those who would rely on the government as their main source of support.
The test considered only cash-based aid, which only 3% of non-citizens use.
Trump wants to expand factors considered to include food stamps and housing assistance programs like Section 8 and Medicaid, among others.
Additionally, establishes new factors that would count against non-citizens.
Earning an income of less than 125% of the federal poverty level, lacking English proficiency, having a poor credit score, or being older than 61 or younger than 18.
These new rules would apply to foreign-born individuals seeking a green card and to some abroad requesting visas.
Why is any of that unreasonable?
I think if you ask the American people, do you want people immigrating to the country who depress wages because they earn low wages abroad, who have low levels of education, who are more likely to depend on food stamps and Section 8 housing, most Americans would say, no, we don't want those people coming into the country Just as a general rule, because if they're going to take advantage of our public benefits programs, then how are they of net benefit to American society?
Now, I'm libertarian on immigration in a non-social welfare-based system.
When my great-grandparents came to the United States, great-great-grandparents came to the United States in 1907, 1908, there were none of these social welfare programs in place.
If there are no social welfare programs in place and you just want to come here and work, You just want to come here and be free?
Then more power to you.
Come on in.
But if you're coming here and you are likely to rely on public benefits, how exactly do you hope that we are going to be able to support those public benefits on the back of such immigration policies?
But Democrats on the left are so radical on this that they say that if you don't agree that we should bring in people to be on our welfare systems, then this means that you're some sort of racist or xenophobe.
So, it really is an amazing, amazing statement by folks on the left.
The Boston Globe concludes, in the past, the government has encouraged low-income people to enroll in public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid, so it'd be especially unfair to make those choices count against immigrants now.
Why?
Why?
I mean, just because the government had bad policy in the past, we have to maintain that bad policy now?
With so much harm, what could possibly be the intent of this policy change?
Homeland Security said in a statement that the policy would, quote, "...promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers." This is called rationality.
But the rule says the Boston Globe would do exactly the opposite.
It would cripple low-income immigrant families who are doing everything by the book and trigger aftershocks that would hurt all Americans.
No, no, it would remove people from the public roles is what it would do.
But this is how extreme the Democrats are.
They say not only should we not build a wall, we should encourage people to come here and then we should tell them to get on public benefits.
That's a radical position.
Most Americans don't agree with this.
And so when folks on the left say that Trump's border policy is all about xenophobia and racism, it just doesn't ring true in any real sense.
That's not going to stop them from saying it though.
CNN's Angela Rye says that Trump's wall is all about xenophobia and racism because for the left, everything Republicans do is about xenophobia and racism.
Donald Trump is fixated on the southern border as he was the day that he announced his campaign.
It is not about securing the borders.
It is about xenophobic, racist, bigoted beliefs that he holds.
Okay, it is not about that.
It is about the fact that most Americans agree that we ought to secure our borders.
Now, President Trump is doing something very silly this morning.
He made a promise during his campaign that he was going to build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it.
He was going to make the Mexican government pay for it, right?
That was his idea.
And it was always silly.
I said it during the campaign.
The Mexican government was not going to pay for the building of a border wall.
That was a ridiculous contention.
But Trump is now trying to claim that he has somehow successfully done this.
How?
Because he cut a new trade deal with Mexico.
So he tweeted out this morning about NAFTA.
He tweeted, "I often stated one way or the other, "Mexico is going to pay for the wall.
"This has never changed.
"Our new deal with Mexico and Canada, "the US MCA is so much better than the old, "very costly and anti-USA NAFTA deal "that just by the money we save, "Mexico is paying for the wall." No, that is not true.
That is not true.
OK, so first of all, it is incumbent upon us to say that the USMCA, the new trade deal, is 95 percent the same as NAFTA.
The idea that Mexico is going to be paying for the wall through a better trade deal is just silliness.
OK, that's that that is not accurate.
If the trade deal is better, that means both sides benefit.
So, I don't understand how that pays for the border wall.
If this is Trump's idea of fulfilling a promise, that's silly.
But again, it was a silly promise to begin with, and no one was going to hold him to it anyway.
The only question is whether he actually builds the wall and pleases all of his fans who wanted him to build the wall.
It seems like, unfortunately, President Trump is making noises in which he's going to claim that he's already built the wall, even though he has not.
The Department of Homeland Security put out a memo today saying that the wall has never been built higher than it is now.
In other words, we didn't build a new wall, but we extended upward the wall that we already had, the fencing that we already had.
If you want to buy that, you can buy it, but that is not a fulfillment of his campaign promise.
Okay, in just a second, I want to get to media bias, because we have a couple of amazing stories of media bias over the last couple of days.
And then we also have to talk about the increased radicalism inside the Democratic Party and the Boy Scouts on the verge of bankruptcy.
But first, let's talk a little bit about another podcast that you ought to give a listen to.
This podcast is called Kingpins.
If you like podcasts about greed and corruption, there's a new podcast from Podcast Network.
It's called Kingpins.
Kingpins takes a deep dive into the minds and stories of the men and women who call the shots of the criminal underworld.
I love stuff like this.
And there's a great show on Netflix called Narcos about Pablo Escobar and the drug cartels.
Well, there are episodes coming up on Kingpins all about Pablo Escobar and Thelma Wright and Al Capone, about people who control the landscape around them and use force and cruelty to control, use extortion and violence and even murder to protect their empires.
The misuses of human power are one of my chief sources of fascination in life, and Kingpins really takes it on on a narrative level.
It's really fascinating stuff.
Listen today by searching and subscribing to Kingpins wherever you listen to podcasts.
That is K-I-N-G, P-I-N-S, Kingpins, or visit parcast.com slash kingpins to start listening now.
That's P-A-R-C-A-S-T dot com slash kingpins to start listening now.
If you're into crime podcasts, if you are into exciting narrative podcasts, You don't want to miss Parkast's Kingpins.
Go find it at any place you listen to podcasts.
Again, the podcast is called Kingpins.
Go check it out right now.
OK, for more on media bias and all the rest, we have pretty good things I like and things I hate coming up today.
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So the media obviously are wildly biased against Republicans.
And you can see it in terms not only of the immigration debate, where you have everybody ripping on President Trump's eminently practical policies with regard to illegal immigration, but in virtually every aspect of the media.
It is amazing how much the left will go out of its way in the media to cover for its own.
To cover for members of the media who are on the left and to cover for politicians on the left.
And this is how you end up with stories like this one from the LA Times.
So it turns out that the CEO of the LA Times was talking openly about a Jewish cabal that ran Los Angeles.
Here's the article from NPR.
Several months after taking control of the troubled Tribune Publishing Company in 2016, Chicago investor Michael Farrow convened a session of corporate leaders from within his own news empire, including chief news executives from such storied papers as the L.A.
Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun.
The group of about 20 people trooped from Chicago's iconic Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue to an upscale restaurant nearby.
In a private room, participants dined on seafood and steak while Farrow, then the company's chairman, held forth on his plans.
His own net worth was newly in the nine figures.
Associates and peers say Farrell held ambitions that were wide-ranging, even audacious, given the newspaper industry's stiff headwinds.
At the dinner, as at other moments, Farrell railed against those he felt were impeding him, including perceived rivals and competitors.
Among them, Eli Broad, who's a Southern California billionaire and civic leader.
Farrell called him part of a Jewish cabal that ran Los Angeles.
A spokesman for Faro denied the incident occurred and called the claim reckless allegations.
Nothing really spells out how much you should trust the media than that a bunch of members of the media were in a room with a high-powered guy who owns a bunch of newspapers and failed to report for several years that the man was talking about a Jewish cabal running Los Angeles.
It's amazing how the left is willing to accept antisemitism when it comes from its own ranks.
Tribune Publishing made the first in a series of secret payments to total more than $2.5 million to avert a threatened lawsuit by a fired newspaper executive, according to three people with knowledge of the deal.
That had the effect of keeping Farrow's antisemitic slur out of the public spotlight.
So in other words, intrepid journalists sitting at the Stinner hearing the CEO of the LA Times rail against the Jewish cabal in Los Angeles.
They had several choices.
Choice number one, Tell him to pipe down, maybe get fired, and then go public.
Choice number two.
Assign an investigative reporter.
Go and cover this stuff.
Be a fireman the way you say you're a fireman.
Choice number three.
Try to sue the guy for 2.5 million dollars and then keep the thing silent.
And our intrepid fireman chose number three.
Solid stuff, intrepid fireman.
Also, not a shock from the folks at the LA Times who have legitimately, for years on end, hidden a tape Now it's been hidden for a full decade.
A tape of then-Senator Barack Obama attending a party at which Rashid Khalidi, an actual terrorist spokesperson, spoke up in his favor and then Obama spoke about him.
That tape should have come out during 2008.
The LA Times hid it and they refused the offer of payment of I think it was $100,000 from Andrew Breitbart to release the tape.
How long do you think it would have taken for that tape to release, to leak, if it had been a Republican making such comments?
Media bias is pretty extraordinary, and media bias is so extraordinary that you can get away with pretty much anything so long as you are still in the leftist wheelhouse.
Case in point, Mika Brzezinski.
So yesterday on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski was talking about Mike Pompeo, who is the Secretary of State, and she's very angry that Secretary Pompeo, what she believes is being weak, With dictators around the world.
And she proceeded to use a phrase that if any Republican used it, that Republican would immediately lose his job.
She still maintains her job because that's how this works.
Joy Reid can say whatever homophobic thing she wants and maintain on MSNBC.
And Mika Brzezinski can say whatever homophobic thing she wants and maintain her job on MSNBC.
Here's what she said yesterday.
So, Joe, I just, I have to ask, because I don't think there, I can't think of anyone here who could put it more clearly than you.
I understand that Donald Trump doesn't care.
Heilman makes a good point, he doesn't care.
But why doesn't Mike Pompeo care right now?
Are the pathetic deflections that we just heard, when he appeared on Fox & Friends, is that a patriot speaking?
Or a wannabe dictator's butt boy.
I'm dead serious.
I'm asking, are these the words of a patriot?
He's debased himself.
He once again is undercut.
I love how that just like flies right over the radar, under the radar for these folks like that.
Everybody who's sitting there listening to this, nobody thought, oh it's bad to say butt boy, which is a homophobic.
A homophobic term.
Mika Brzezinski came out later and apologized.
I totally agree with you.
Super bad choice of words.
I should have said water boy, like for football teams or something like that.
Apologize to Dick Durbin, too.
So sorry.
Well, I guess that it just goes away now.
It's a good thing that she didn't want... I guess she can't host the Oscars anymore, though.
So that's exciting news.
Because I'm not sure anybody would watch the Oscars hosted by Mika Brzezinski.
So, again, she gets away with it.
Anybody does that on Fox News, they're immediately suspended, maybe fired, because that's the way that the media protect their own.
Well, because the media are so far to the left, that is increasing the radicalism inside the Democratic Party, and this does have consequences.
So, how radical is the Democratic Party becoming?
What has happened inside the Democratic Party is that Bernie Sanders has become the mainstream.
It's one of the reasons why Bernie Sanders is not going to run successfully in 2020.
He made the mistake of being too successful in 2016.
The Democratic Party decided to basically cannibalize Bernie Sanders' campaign and then ingest it and then poop out a bunch of candidates who mirror Bernie Sanders' priorities.
So here is Bernie Sanders yesterday talking about greedy billionaires controlling the USA.
The only real question about this is, is there any Democrat who's going to run in 2020 who disagrees with this?
I really doubt it.
Okay, this is the exact sort of language that everyone in the Democratic Party now uses, particularly folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I bring up because, again, I know every time we talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we're accused of being obsessed with her.
Except that there are articles in mainstream media today calling for her to run for president.
She's not even eligible for the presidency.
You have to be 35 to be president of the United States.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who does not know things, is 29 years old and she's being touted as the new hot thing in Congress because she's good at social media, which she eminently is.
Matthew Iglesias, who is a dummy.
Matthew Iglesias, the Ralph Wiggum of political commentary over at Vox.com.
He has an article today called, It's Ridiculous That It's Unconstitutional For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez To Run For President.
He says, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the biggest star in the Democratic Party and she has been ever since she unseated Representative Joe Crowley in a surprise primary upset in May.
That her win didn't, in the final analysis, launch a wave of leftist primary victories only goes to show what a phenomenon she personally is.
I mean, I don't wish to review the history here for all that long, but Representative Joe Crowley was a representative from a majority-minority district, and she won 17,000 votes in the primary.
So, like, five people showed up, and of those five people, three voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This makes her the rising star.
In any case, Matthew Iglesias says it is very bad that we prevent people who are not 35 from running for president.
He makes the case that she should run for president and then she should dare the Supreme Court to make her ineligible.
He says one good sign that AOC should run for president is that she has a nickname, AOC.
So does Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
So does Cher.
Like, what?
You have a nickname and now you should run for president?
El Chapo has a nickname.
Should he run for president?
I mean, maybe we should change the Constitution so you don't need American citizens to run for president and they can be in jail.
Maybe...
Matthew Iglesias, man, that guy was dropped on his head as a baby many times.
He fell off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.
A House Democratic staffer told me the other day that ACO was a good example of something.
I knew exactly who she meant, despite the error, because there aren't any other members of Congress who have widely recognized nicknames you would just drop into casual conversation.
Is having a nickname a sign you would exercise good judgment in the Oval Office?
Absolutely not.
But it's proof positive.
She's an honest-to-goodness political superstar.
And it's clear that's what many Democrats are looking for in 2020.
Let's make something very clear.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, kind of vaguely Trumpish figure in California politics.
Had he run for president in 2012, he probably would have lost badly in the primaries on the grounds of not being right-wing enough.
But it's at least conceivable he would have won, and he'd have been a tough opponent for Barack Obama to beat for the best possible reasons.
His politics are considerably saner and more humane than the average Republican, but he didn't run.
We never got a glimpse of what a run would look like, because immigrants, like 20-somethings, are constitutionally barred from serving.
Let's make something very clear.
The 35-year-old age limit on people running for president of the United States is considerably too low.
I I say this as somebody who's about to turn 35 in January.
It's considerably too low.
People were running for president at 35 and were allowed to do so because you were working when you were like 13 and you were dying when you were 50.
were 50. 35 in 1789. 35 in 1789 is basically the equivalent of like 55 now.
So I don't know by what logic you have.
So you live in your mother's basement.
You should run for president.
Like, by what logic are people more mature at 35 now than they were 200 years ago?
Is there any logic by which this is true?
There is no logic by which this is true.
This is just a bunch of crap, but this is how biased folks in the media are, and this is how insane they are.
It's...
Really, really crazy.
But that's not the only article about AOC.
There's another one from the Washington Post talking about how she's so great at trolling her conservative critics.
It's so weird.
When Trump trolls leftists, then it's because he's evil and bad and mean.
When AOC, the beloved AOC, trolls conservatives, then this means she's brilliant and wonderful.
And then you wonder how you got Trump?
You trolled us into trolling you, and so we'll troll you into trolling us.
And so it'll be trolls all around.
It'll be great.
Congratulations on ruining American politics, everyone.
You've done an excellent job.
OK, in just a second, I want to talk about the Boy Scouts and other things.
Let's talk about some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
I was in the car the other day and I recalled that when I was growing up, my dad was a big Dave Grusin fan.
Dave Grusin is a jazz musician.
He's written a bunch of really good movie scores.
His best movie score is the score for On Golden Pond.
That year he was nominated for Best Score Oscar.
He lost to the score for Chariots of Fire, which is a joke.
Chariots of Fire is a wildly overrated score.
It's a good movie with a mediocre score.
On Golden Pond is a good movie with a great score.
The movie itself is good as well.
Henry Fonda and Jane Fonda and Catherine Hepburn.
And it's all about aging and family.
It's a really good movie.
It's kind of a forgotten movie.
But it is certainly worth watching.
So here's a little bit of the preview of On Golden Pond.
Universal Pictures proudly presents a very special motion picture.
Catherine Hepburn.
Henry Fonda.
Jane Fonda on Golden Pond.
Listen, is Norman Fair Jr.
over in Golden Pond?
Oh, Norman!
It's so beautiful!
Everything's just waking up.
Ethel Fair.
Sounds like I'm listening, doesn't it?
My, oh my, you have on a tie!
Yes, I know.
I put it there.
You look sexy.
I hear you turned 80 today.
Is that what you heard?
Man, that's really old.
You should meet my father.
The movie is really good.
It should have won Best Picture this year.
Chariots of Fire is what won Best Picture that year.
It was a pretty weak year for movies, is the truth.
This is in 1981.
The movies that were nominated for Best Picture that year were Chariots of Fire, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is the most memorable of all these movies, and Reds, which is the most overrated of all of these movies.
But On Golden Pond is really worth watching.
It's a very sweet, Movie, it's got a lot of great acting, so much great acting that it won Best Actor for Henry Fonda and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Katherine Hepburn and was nominated for Best Actress for Jane Fonda, who's really good in the movie.
She's not a good person but a very good actress.
So go check out On Golden Pond if you have the time.
Okay, other things that I like.
So Nikki Haley gave a great interview yesterday.
And in this interview, she talked with NBC News.
She talked as sort of her exit interview.
She left being UN ambassador.
She talked about President Trump's predictable unpredictability when it came to foreign policy and how she was able to utilize that for good purpose.
I needed to pick up the phone and say, this is what I'm going to do.
You know, are you good with this or this?
We we kind of partnered in that.
And so he would like ratchet up the rhetoric.
And then I'd go back to the ambassadors and say, you know, he's pretty upset.
I can't promise you what he's going to do or not.
But I can tell you if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far.
So you were playing good cop, bad cop.
I was trying to get the job done, and I got the job done by being truthful, but also by letting him be unpredictable.
And not showing our cards.
OK, the fact is that when it comes to foreign policy, President Trump's unpredictability can in fact be an asset.
And as Haley says, it has been an asset in many cases.
She has a bright political future ahead of her.
And as I say, it is sad to me that she's leaving her post as U.N.
ambassador, but there's a future for Nikki Haley in politics for sure.
OK, final thing that I like.
So there's a great organization that is run by Gary Sinise, who is a wonderful human being.
And this organization is entirely dedicated to The families of soldiers and remembering the past, Gary Sinise basically took a hundred kids who are children of people who are KIA or killed in action and took them to the war memorials in Washington, D.C.
And this is really great.
A bunch of people on the ground at the airport where they were received stood there and cheered these kids as they got off the plane and then sang them the national anthem.
anthem.
It was really quite moving.
It was really good.
I mean, this stuff is really moving, and he actually sent more than 650 families, who are Gold Star families, to Disney World via the Gary Sinise Foundation.
Certainly a charity worthy of your support, a charity worthy of my support as well.
Worth checking out.
This was at the Nashville International Airport, where there was a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, where the families were waiting to board the plane as service members stood at attention.
It's just beautiful stuff, and Sinise is known for being extraordinarily pro-military.
And his service in that respect is really extraordinary.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So the Boy Scouts are now on the verge of bankruptcy.
Shocker.
It turns out that when you abandon the chief values for which you once stood, people do not want to sign up for your organization.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Boy Scouts of America is considering filing for bankruptcy protection as it faces dwindling membership and escalating legal costs related to lawsuits over how it handled allegations of sexual abuse.
It's not really that that's bankrupting the Boy Scouts of America, it's that their membership is wildly down ever since they decided that they would admit girls, and that they would allow gay scoutmasters, and that they would no longer focus on the Judeo-Christian heritage of the organization.
Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts say that more than 110 million people have participated in its educational programs, which promote outdoor skills, character building, and leadership.
The Boy Scouts have been at the center of sexual abuse scandals in the past.
The organization is facing a number of lawsuits alleging inappropriate conduct, By employees or volunteers, an incident stating back as far as the 1960s.
But that's not really what is going on here.
What's really going on here is that the Boy Scouts are being bled dry by people who do not want to be part of the Boy Scouts now that they have forcibly caved to the radical left.
There's a famous video of me online talking to a girl about the Boy Scout, about pronouns, gendered pronouns, like boy and girl, meaning things, meaning biological boy and girl.
And why the Boy Scouts should not allow biological girls into the Boy Scouts.
And a woman at one of my speeches saying, well, how do you know that?
I said, because it's in the name Boy Scouts.
Well, then the Boy Scouts flipped and agreed with her and decided boy can also mean girl.
With that kind of intestinal fortitude, a lot of people are not going to join the Boy Scouts.
The Boy Scouts currently have more than 2.3 million youth members.
And why exactly are they losing members?
Well, the Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, formerly one of the group's largest sponsors, said that it's going to withdraw from the Boy Scout programs.
Instead, they're going to develop its own program for young men.
The Boy Scouts group drew scrutiny over its slow pace to become more inclusive, but it wasn't that that created problems in the Boy Scouts.
It was that they caved to social justice warriors who insisted that they change their mainline mission.
Under pressure from legislators in California who said they would withdraw 501c3 status from the group and sponsorship from the group if the group did not cave to the social justice warrior demands.
This is what happens when groups that are based on historic values decide to destroy those historic values in the name of convenience.
Nobody wants to stick around.
This is true for churches, it's true for synagogues, and it's true for the Boy Scouts as well.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, in all of the hubbub over Jamal Khashoggi, who is the Saudi Arabian citizen who was murdered by the Saudi government at the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Creating worldwide chaos.
People have forgotten a couple of quick things.
Not about Khashoggi, right?
Khashoggi himself, controversial figure.
He had lots of sympathy toward the Muslim Brotherhood over the course of his career.
He was very much in favor of radical Islamists taking part in politics and all of that.
But there's a reason that this information saw the light of day in the first place.
I mean, I'm glad that information sees the light of day, but let's not pretend there wasn't an agenda behind it.
The agenda was Turkish president and dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan Erdogan has made himself dictator of Turkey.
He's arrested all of his political opponents.
He shut down the press.
He has prevented political rivals from being able to gain power.
He has jailed political rivals.
He's tried to assassinate political rivals himself.
He wanted a dissident named Gulen shipped from the United States back to Turkey so he could basically do the same thing to him that the Saudis did to Khashoggi.
And now, Erdogan is saying that he is going to wipe out the Kurds in eastern Syria.
He says that Turkey will launch a military operation against the Kurds in northern Syria within days, a decision that could signal a shift in Turkish-U.S.
relations and have far-reaching consequences for Syria's future, is according to The Guardian.
Long frustrated by U.S.
He says,
They're still not removing terrorists from this particular area, meaning Kurds from this particular area.
Therefore, we will do it.
It is always important to recall that whenever there's a Middle Eastern conflict, the answer usually is there are no good guys.
And when it comes to Erdogan, he is an absolute bad human being.
He's a bad, radical, terror-supporting human being.
And the fact that so many people have fallen for the idea that because Erdogan says something, we have to take it seriously or that it has no geopolitical ramifications.
To take positions that help Erdogan is absurd.
Turkey is an extraordinarily powerful military player in the region.
They have a much more powerful military than any other military in the region with the possible exception of Israel.
And the fact that the Turkish government has been able to go about its business without any serious blowback from the West is an incredible, incredible thing.
And that we're focused more on the Saudis who are much more helpful to us in geopolitical terms than the Turks right now.
We're more focused on the Saudis killing a Saudi citizen on Turkish, on Saudi territory in Turkey.
We're more focused on that than the Turks going in and wiping out the Kurds in Eastern and Northern Syria.
It demonstrates that we have very little geopolitical vision and that we are apt to fall for whatever is the convenient narrative that the media wish to tell us about ongoing geopolitical conversations.
Another example of that, Ben Rhodes came out recently.
Ben Rhodes, a national security advisor for President Obama, he came out recently and he said that the United States should not be involved in the war on Yemen.
Where do you think that started?
It started under the Obama administration.
He was there the entire time.
It just turns out that the Obama administration had an agenda to push forward the ambitions of the Iranian government, and Trump doesn't have those ambitions.
And because the press loves Obama and hates Trump, they've decided to side with the ambitions of the Obama administration, even if that means emboldening enemies of the United States and radical Islamists across the world.
OK, well, we'll be back here tomorrow to discuss more on all of this.
Plus, tomorrow's a Friday, isn't it?
So that means mailbag time.
So we'll be doing that, too.
We'll see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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