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Jan. 14, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:01
The FBI’s Big Mistake | Ep. 694
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The FBI opens an investigation into President Trump as a Russian agent, the government shutdown continues, and Democrats move even further to the left.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Welcome to a brand new week.
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Okay, we'll get to all the actual news of the day in just one second.
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Okay, so the big story over the weekend.
Is that the FBI was apparently investigating President Trump as in like investigating him during the campaign in 2016 and 2017.
In 2017, they opened an investigation into President Trump, concerned that he might be a Russian agent.
And now, this is ridiculous.
Okay, just on the face of it, it is ridiculous.
The idea that the President of the United States was a Manchurian candidate, that somehow he was being blackmailed with kompromat by Vladimir Putin, that all of the activities during the campaign weren't just Trump not knowing what he's doing or being incompetent, that we had to chalk it all up to President Trump was in a back room with Vladimir Putin, and they were putting together their master plan for taking over the universe.
And then he was going to be triggered by some sort of watchword from Vladimir Putin or something.
All this is asinine.
Here's what the New York Times reported, however.
In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
This is a wild overreach by the FBI and it gives a lot of credence to the Trump administration and Trump ally claim that the FBI and the so-called Deep State were out to get President Trump.
Why?
Because what triggered this was not all of the knowledge during the campaign.
What triggered this was not all of the contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian officials or the Trump Tower meeting of June 2016.
No, what triggered this was Trump firing James Comey.
So what this sounds more like is the President fires the head of the FBI, who was an incompetent boob, And then all of the people left over at the FBI say, well, you know what?
I'll bet the president fired him because he's a Russian agent.
Now, James Comey himself testified openly before Congress that Trump did not attempt to shut down the Mueller investigation or hamper the Mueller investigation in the wake of James Comey's firing or before James Comey's firing.
In fact, he was just irritated that Comey wouldn't issue a statement saying that Trump was not under investigation.
That's all that happened.
Trump said that, openly.
He said, the reason that I fired James Comey is because I asked Comey for a declaration that I was not personally under investigation, and Comey said he wouldn't do it, and so I fired him.
And he said that it would take pressure off him with regard to Russia.
People interpreted that as though Comey was on the verge of nailing Trump on his Russian relationships.
When in reality, what Trump was saying was, I want Comey out because Comey won't just leave me alone about the Russia stuff, and I didn't do anything, so why wouldn't he just leave me alone?
And the FBI, in the aftermath of Comey's firing, which Trump had every legal ability to do.
Every president can fire every head of the FBI.
The executive branch is a unitary branch.
It's so funny.
Folks on the left like to rip on the theory of the unitary executive, but the Constitution is very clear about this.
The head of the FBI works for the President of the United States.
Executive branch agencies are answerable to the President of the United States.
If Trump wanted to fire Comey, he had every right, capacity, and constitutional ability to do so.
And yet, after Comey was fired, the FBI tried to open an investigation into whether Trump was a Russian agent.
I'll get in a second into all of the defensive claims by the FBI and its advocates on why they opened this investigation.
According to the New York Times, the inquiry carried explosive implications.
Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.
Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.
Again, this is inappropriate stuff.
If you don't actually have evidence that the president is being blackmailed, if you don't have evidence that the president is in fact a Russian agent, then evaluating his policies with an eye toward whether he is a Russian agent is just an executive branch agency second-guessing the policies of the president.
Can you imagine if the FBI had opened up an investigation against Barack Obama in 2013 on his Syria policy?
Remember, in 2012, Barack Obama openly, on a mic that everyone heard, said to Medvedev, who was then the Prime Minister or the President of Russia, he said to him, at that time, if you get your boss to leave me alone, then I'll have more flexibility in dealing with Russia once I am re-elected.
And then guess what happened?
The Russians went into Crimea and Obama did nothing.
The Russians went into Syria and Obama handed over control of the Syrian situation to the Russians.
Did the FBI open an investigation and say, hey, wait a second, you know, Obama, he had this promise that he made to the Russians about the election.
And then he was real soft on the Russians after the election.
Maybe he's a Russian agent.
Can you imagine if they'd opened that investigation?
Everybody would have said, rightly so, that the FBI has no right and no capacity to go after a president based on public policy simply because they don't like the public policy that the president is pursuing.
This is a massive FBI overreach.
And this is coming from somebody who has said we should wait for the results of the Mueller investigation.
I've said all along, let's wait for the results of the Mueller investigation.
Let's wait for all the facts to come out.
I don't believe in the Russian collusion theory.
I think that it's hogwash as far as the evidence that I can see so far.
But I can see why people would have been suspicious of Carter Page.
I can see why people would have been suspicious of various other members of the Trump campaign.
I can see why their actions, Papadopoulos, I can see why those actions would have looked suspicious to people.
I can see why the Trump Tower meeting looked suspicious to people.
But that does not mean that the FBI opening an investigation into the President of the United States and suggesting that the President of the United States is in fact a Russian plant, that that's justified constitutionally or otherwise.
And opening it under the counterintelligence rubric, by the way, is really kind of gross.
Andy McCarthy points this out today in a piece over at Fox News.
He's been saying for a long time that the FBI was using the rubric of counterintelligence in order to target President Trump.
The case he's basically been making is there are two types of investigations that the FBI does.
One is counterintelligence, which is them trying to fight off Russian influence.
And then there's criminal investigation, them trying to investigate criminal activity on American soil.
These are not the same thing.
The standard of proof for counterintelligence is not the same as the standard of proof for a criminal investigation.
If they actually wanted to bring some sort of criminal prosecution against someone, you have to reach a certain level of proof.
Counterintelligence is not designed to do that.
Counterintelligence is just designed for you to go and see the facts and then fight those facts on the ground as they exist, usually abroad.
What McCarthy's been saying for a long time is the FBI was going after Trump with counterintelligence so that they didn't have to reach the level of proof necessitated by a criminal investigation.
McCarthy writes this today, former federal prosecutor.
He says, Because the FBI did not have solid evidence of a crime, they did it under counterintelligence authority rather than criminal authority, calculating that the cover of probing Russia's interference in the 2016 election would enable them to keep investigating while they tried to tighten up the obstruction case or find some other criminal defense.
In other words, the counterintelligence aspect here was just a cover for them to go after Trump personally.
McCarthy says the investigation was always hoping to find something on Trump.
That is why, for example, when Director Comey briefed then-President-elect Trump about the Steele dossier, he told Trump only about the salacious allegation involving prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
He did not tell the President-elect either that the main thrust of the dossier was Trump's purported espionage conspiracy with the Kremlin, nor that the FBI had gone to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants based on the dossier.
The FBI was telling the president-elect that the allegations were salacious and unverified, yet at that very moment, they were presenting them to a federal court as information the judges could rely on to authorize spying.
So, this is pretty dirty stuff.
And the New York Times report continues, it says, Now again, it did not.
It did not constitute obstruction of justice.
I've gone through the statutes on the program before.
It is not obstruction of justice for the President of the United States to fire his own FBI director.
Okay, that's not how this works.
There are actual statutes with regard to obstruction of justice.
There's several statutes with regard to obstruction of justice.
There's 18 U.S.C.
1503.
This is the so-called Omnibus Clause under American law.
It covers corruptly or by any threatening letter or communication influencing or impeding or endeavoring to influence, obstruct or impede the due administration of justice.
But that requires a pending judicial proceeding.
In other words, there's a trial going on and you try to obstruct justice by intimidating a witness.
There is no pending judicial proceeding.
This statute does not apply.
18 U.S.C.
1512 C. This provision of law covers anyone who obstructs, influences, or impedes an official proceeding or attempts to do so.
It is not clear that an FBI investigation is, in fact, an official proceeding.
And in order for you to violate this clause, in order for Trump to violate this clause, he would have had to knowingly do so.
So it's not enough just to fire somebody and that firing ends up impeding something.
You actually have to have intended to do so.
They have no proof of that.
18 U.S.C.
1519.
This provision covers destroying evidence related to a federal investigation.
There's no allegation even that Trump destroyed evidence.
So when people talk about the FBI opening an obstruction of justice investigation into Trump over firing someone he has plenary power to dispense with, that's nonsense.
That's nonsense.
According to the New York Times, agents and senior FBI officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign, but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude.
Well, if you knew about all the stuff in 2016, the stuff in 2017 was not worse than the stuff in 2016.
Just objectively speaking.
All of the bad stuff that happened basically happened in 2016.
By 2017, Trump had already fired Michael Flynn.
By 2017, he fired James Comey.
But that was not obstruction of justice, as I've explained.
So there's really no case for opening an investigation into Trump as Kremlin agent in 2017.
If you want to make that case, you make it about 2016.
But they didn't.
The president's activities before and after Mr. Comey's firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, according to people at the FBI.
Again, if your boss gets fired and you open an investigation into his firing, I'm going to say that that looks very retaliatory.
It doesn't look like this is power the FBI should have.
I'll get more into this in just one second.
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Okay, so the New York Times reports But the special counsel, Robert Mueller, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed days after FBI officials opened it.
That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller's broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them.
It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.
The answer, of course, is, yeah, I mean, it kind of looks like it.
What they're basically claiming is that if Trump fired Comey to stop the Russia investigation, that would have been obstruction.
But you may notice something.
What's the calendar say today?
That's right.
It's January 14th, 2019.
The Russia investigation opened in 2016.
It has now been three years of investigating.
Two and a half years of investigating.
Has it stopped in any time?
No, it's never stopped.
So where exactly is the case for obstruction of justice?
Where exactly is the case that Trump is in fact a Russian agent?
Rudy Giuliani is the president's lawyer.
He says the fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it, that showed a breach of national security means that they found nothing.
Trump is rightly very upset about all of this and he has a right to be.
If it turns out that at the end of this long chain of events, the Mueller investigation comes up with basically nothing, Then that is going to speak to whether this investigation should have taken so long, whether this investigation was appropriately launched in the first place, whether this investigation was in fact a political project to get Trump out.
Two things can be true at once.
It can be true that the investigation comes up with nothing and that it was launched in good faith.
But it makes it hard to make that claim when you got members of the FBI apparently vindictively launching investigations into whether Trump was a Russian asset in 2017.
When you do have people inside the FBI, like Peter Strzok, a motivated anti-Trump guy, leading the investigation.
If we're not asking these questions, we are not doing our job.
Now, the media are beginning to realize, at least some members of the media, that the Mueller investigation may not end the way they want it to.
ABC News' Jonathan Karl made a stunning admission yesterday on This Week on ABC News.
Here's what he had to say.
This is all building up to the Mueller report and raising expectations of a bombshell report.
And there have been expectations that have been building, of course, for over a year on this.
But people who are closest to what Mueller has been doing, who have interacted with the special counsel, caution me that this report is almost certain to be anti-climatic.
That if you look at what the FBI was investigating in that New York Times report, look at what they were investigating, Mueller did not go anywhere with that investigation.
Okay, so what is this all gonna be?
The answer may come up with nothing.
That's been my prediction for a long time, is that we come up with some nasty indicators that members of Trump's team were talking with the Russians, like Donald Trump Jr., for example, or that members of Trump's team were unwittingly working with Russians who were connected to the Russian government, something like that.
The idea that Trump was sitting behind the curtain Waving his wand and making the magic happen.
I just don't think that there's any evidence of that whatsoever.
If that changes, then I'll change my opinion.
But based on the evidence so far, you gotta be asking what exactly prompted the FBI to open an investigation for Trump as a Russian agent?
The guy's one of the most prominent people in American public life for the last four decades.
When exactly did they target him?
Back when he was on the cover of Playboy in like 1990?
Back when he was doing The Apprentice in the mid-2000s?
When did the Russians decide, you know what?
Let's get behind the reality TV show star and make him into a full-blown Russian agent.
That's conspiracy theory nonsense, if that's what the FBI was investigating.
Lindsey Graham, senator from South Carolina, says as much.
He's exactly right.
I'm going to ask the FBI director, was there a counterintelligence investigation opened up regarding the president as being a potential agent of the Russians?
I find it astonishing.
And to me, it tells me a lot about the people running the FBI, McCabe and that crowd.
I don't trust them as far as I throw them.
So if this really did happen, Congress needs to know about it.
And I and what I want to do is make sure how could the FBI do that?
What kind of checks and balances Now listen, I want to believe in the veracity of the FBI.
I know a lot of FBI agents.
I think the vast majority of FBI agents are wonderful folks who are doing a really great job keeping Americans safe.
I want to believe in our law enforcement institutions.
When the leadership of those law enforcement institutions are people like Peter Struck and Lisa Page, it makes it kind of hard.
And when they're making claims that Trump was a Russian agent, not just that they were going to investigate Russian ties and then see where those led, but instead that Trump was himself deeply involved.
Come on.
I mean, I'm going to need some evidence for that other than Trump has a big mouth.
First of all, if Trump were really a Russian agent, do you think he can keep his mouth shut about it?
Dude can't keep his mouth shut about anything.
Trump would be out there actually speaking Russian if he were a Russian agent.
Right?
Trump would be out there singing the Soviet National Anthem, like the characters in The Hunt for Red October.
I mean, the president doesn't, he's not known for his capacity for secrecy.
The president isn't exactly known for his subtlety.
Like, if you were going to pick a person to be a Russian plant or a Russian spy, really, Donald Trump?
Really?
That's who you were gonna go with?
Like, Trump would go out there in the middle of a campaign and be like, you know who I love?
Not only do I love him, Vladimir Putin, he's the real president.
He's great.
He's gonna, like, when I'm president, I'm gonna talk to him every day.
We're gonna write each other mash notes.
It's gonna be unbelievable, people.
That's what it would have been.
Come on, come on.
So the Democrats are desperately trying to defend the FBI's activity here.
Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, he says, well, the FBI went after Trump because they had good reason to do so.
Here's the excuse making from people who say the FBI had a reason to consider Trump a Russian plant.
I think it's less did the FBI overreact.
I think the question is this.
They had to have a very deep level of concern about this president to take this step.
And that's again why we need to protect the Mueller investigation.
And I think that's going to be a critical issue in the Judiciary Committee hearings about the Attorney General nominee.
Will you guarantee to protect this investigation?
And will you make sure that the American public and Congress get the results of it?
So here, this really is the key question, though.
The real key question is the one that Cain is mentioning here.
How deep does the FBI's level of suspicion have to run for them to launch an investigation?
If they're talking about Trump as Russian agent, my suspicion is not all that deep.
That they could just take flyers on investigations, which does raise systemic questions about the FBI.
Not just about the Trump investigation, but what kind of information is necessary for them to actually open an investigation targeting American citizens?
It makes you really disquieted about the nature of American power, about law enforcement power.
It makes you into sort of a reason.com libertarian.
Looking at this sort of stuff and going, hold up, the FBI can just launch an investigation based on a couple of people who don't like Trump, not liking that he fired James Comey, and then they can open a full-on counterintelligence investigation into the president?
That's a thing?
Again, Democrats, who five minutes ago hated the FBI, now love the FBI.
They love this stuff.
So Mark Warner from West Virginia, he says the FBI went after President Trump for good reason also.
I think we're seeing these independent actions, even independent of Mueller, which is the lead up in some of the rationale about why this investigation started and why so many Americans, like myself, have been concerned for so long.
There was enough concern that the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan fashion, the House Intelligence Committee in a slightly less bipartisan fashion, Yeah.
Launched investigations.
Our investigation is almost, it's not quite two years in, but we have literally spoken to hundreds of witnesses.
We may have spoken to even more witnesses than Mueller, and we have a very important story to tell to the American public.
Okay, then you could just tell that story to the American public instead of just telling us how important the story is you're gonna tell.
You know, we've seen about 1,000 trailers for this movie.
At what point do we actually get to see the movie?
When the Mueller investigation comes out, it better be public.
We need full transparency because all we've seen is narrative from both sides.
John Solomon has a piece over at The Hill specifically talking about all of these allegations that there was too much smoke for the FBI not to investigate.
He points out there was a presidential candidate in 2016 whose husband traveled to Moscow and collected a $500,000 speaking fee from Vladimir Putin cronies while she was still serving as Secretary of State negotiating with the Russians.
There was a candidate in 2016 who ran a cabinet agency that authorized the sale of a large swath of strategic American uranium assets to Putin, who served in an administration that helped arrange and approve billions of dollars in nuclear fuel contracts for Moscow and American nuclear plants just a short while before Putin invaded Ukraine.
Whose campaign chairman served on the board of a clean energy company that received 35 million bucks from Russia while she was Secretary of State.
Whose prominent fundraiser subsequently came under investigation for possible illegal lobbying activities involving Paul Manafort and Russian-backed Ukraine politicians.
And whose family charitable empire accepted support from a lobbying and public relations firm working for a Russian nuclear giant.
That would be Hillary Clinton.
So whenever people say there's a lot of smoke, yeah, welcome to politics where smoke is the way that this stuff works.
In a second, we'll get to President Trump's response to all of these allegations.
Then we'll get to the government shutdown as well.
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Okay, so the President of the United States is asked about all of this, the FBI investigation, all the rest.
He's asked about this.
He calls into Judge Jeanine, because this is our new world, where the President has time on a Saturday night, calls into Fox News shows.
So, President Trump calls in to Judge Jeanine, and she asks him straight up about the Russian collusion stuff, and here was his response.
Now, or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?
I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked.
I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written.
And if you read the article, you'd see that they found absolutely nothing.
But the headline of that article, it's called The Failing New York Times for a reason.
They've gotten me wrong for three years.
They've actually gotten me wrong for many years before that.
Okay, so what was funny about this is you can hear Trump just denies it openly, right?
Trump says, listen, this is a ridiculous story.
The media, people like Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, a reporter who does some good work, okay, but she tweeted out, Trump does not deny.
And that was the headline that the media ran with.
So Judge Jeanine asks him, are you a Russian agent?
And he goes, it's the most ridiculous question I've ever heard.
It's insulting.
And the media run with, well, he didn't deny it, did he?
Come on.
Come on.
You think that if any Democrat answered that same question the same way, the headline would have been, he didn't deny it?
Of course he denied it, because it's stupid.
It's a stupid theory.
Again, even if you think that Trump was in cahoots with Russia, the best available theory would have been that the guy's a dupe.
It wouldn't have been that the guy's a paid agent of the Russians, or involved in kompromat or something.
And again, there's no evidence for any of this stuff at this point.
The media's attempt to go after Trump from every angle is pretty astonishing.
The Washington Post has a piece today about how Trump concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in the administration.
Now, members of his own administration are denying this.
Folks in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's office, they say, no, we know everything he said to Putin.
We know what he said, but according to the Washington Post, President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S.
officials said.
Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
U.S.
officials learned of Trump's actions when a White House advisor and senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States' main adversaries as a result.
U.S.
officials said, according to the Washington Post, there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump's face-to-face interactions with Vladimir Putin.
Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone the one that Russia sought to install through what U.S.
intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
Now, I have a possible alternative explanation as to why President Trump was seizing the notes of his interpreters.
Okay, here's my theory.
My theory is that everything inside this administration gets leaked, and so President Trump does not want those notes leaked.
I mean, really, that's my theory.
And that theory is backed to a certain extent by the fact that not only does everything leak, but if I recall correctly, there was an actual article written by an interpreter in the Trump administration who talked about how she had left the administration.
There was an article in July 19, 2018, about the interpreter.
It was from the New York Times, and who heard what Trump said to Putin?
Only one other American.
Marina Gross, the only other American in the room during President Trump's meeting on Monday with Vladimir Putin of Russia, was the interpreter for Laura Bush at the Russian resort of Sochi in 2008 and interpreted for former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Moscow in 2017.
She appears to live in an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, is an employee of the State Department, and is unsurprisingly fluent in Russia, but little else is known about Ms.
Gross.
Her white pad of notes, visible in photographs from the summit meeting, are probably useless.
Experienced government interpreters said, dictated in her personal shorthand, that it would be illegible to anyone else.
And if she were to say what exactly transpired, she would violate an ethics code of confidentiality similar to lawyer-client privilege or the silence of a priest during confession.
So they were already reporting on who the lady was, right?
The media were already targeting who the translator was.
They had full articles about Marina Gross, the translator, during the Trump meeting.
And then they wonder why Trump was trying to seize the notes?
Like the media were trying to take pictures of her notes.
This is wild stuff.
I mean, it really is amazing.
So Trump is apparently to blame.
Trump is the worst, right?
Trump is to blame for the fact that he didn't want his stuff leaking.
It's I just I find this I find this to be a kind of absurd contention by folks that Trump is And Trump is doing something deeply wrong.
Again, this is all privileged material in the first place.
And people inside his own administration say that they've heard the conversations.
What do you think Trump is telling Putin behind closed doors?
Do you think that he's actually selling out the democracy?
Do you have any evidence of that?
Now they say they're going to subpoena the translator.
Fine!
Subpoena the translator and then you know what Trump will do?
He can claim executive privilege.
Because that is executive privilege.
The president talking in front of a translator.
She does not get to be subpoenaed by Congress.
It's amazing.
Can you imagine anybody doing this with Obama?
Like, really, I don't like using the, can you imagine the Obama routine, but it is literally impossible to imagine the media going along with anything like this about Barack Obama.
Barack Obama had back channel negotiations with the Iranian government, with the Iranian government, actual enemies of the United States.
Far more so than the Russians.
I mean, the Russians are enemies of the United States.
They're geopolitical foes, would be a better way of putting it.
The Iranians are active enemies of the United States, and Obama was having open conversations with them.
We didn't know any of those details, and everybody assumed that's what the president gets to do, because he's the president.
Just because you don't like the president of the United States doesn't mean you get to shrink either the executive power, or that you get to pretend that normal exercise of executive power is somehow now barred.
It's wild.
So now Democrats are claiming that they're going to probe Trump's meetings with Putin as though he was having these... I don't know what kind of spy novels they're reading, honestly.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Okay, meanwhile...
Meanwhile, the continuing government shutdown has not ended.
It moves forward.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
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All righty, so the government shutdown continues apace.
According to a new CNN poll, President Trump is bearing the brunt of this.
Now, I would like to remind folks that polls a year and a half out, two years out from an election, don't matter at all to the president.
Barack Obama's approval rating in the middle of his first term were not good, and then he won re-election, it turns out, fairly easily over Mitt Romney.
So right now, people all look at Trump's approval ratings.
They're down to 37%.
What a disaster.
You know why?
Because there's no opponent.
In a presidential race, Trump's approval ratings, even when he was running against Hillary Clinton, never came close to cracking 50% and then he won anyway.
It turns out that most people see presidential elections as binary in every election.
So all the people who are agonizing over Trump's approval ratings are so low.
This is where Trump should say, OK, well, if I have to take the hit, I take the hit.
I will give you the evidence that this is sort of what he should do.
So here is the poll.
The poll is from CNN.
What it finds is that Trump is being blamed by a majority of Americans now for the government shutdown.
Trump's approval rating in the poll is down to 37%, as opposed to 57% disapprove.
That disapproval has risen five points since December, which is not a shock since he's been the subject of unending bad media coverage, and also because the president can't keep his fingers away from the Twitter buttons.
The increase in disapproval for the president comes primarily among whites without college degrees, 45% of whom approve, and 47% disapprove.
That's a really interesting stat because what that suggests is, again, this has more to do with media coverage than policy.
If you think that whites without college degrees are really pro-illegal immigration, I'm gonna need the evidence for that.
In December, his approval rating with whites who have not received four-year college degrees stood at 54%, so he's dropped pretty precipitously among people who don't have a college degree.
Among whites who do hold college degrees, Trump's ratings are largely unchanged, and they remain sharply negative.
64% disapprove, 32% approve.
Now, what the statistics show is that whites who do not have college degrees remain in favor of a wall along the border with Mexico.
51% in favor, 46% oppose.
But they tilt toward blaming President Trump for the government shutdown.
Again, a lot of that is the media coverage.
The public say that 55% say that Trump is more responsible for the shutdown than are Democrats in Congress.
32% say the blame rests mostly with the Democrats.
Another 9% say both are responsible.
Democrats are more unified in their blame for Trump.
Republicans are Kind of not unified at all.
Rank-and-file Republicans blame Democrats by 65%, but 23% do blame President Trump for the shutdown.
Now, if Trump can't sell the shutdown to his own base, that's a Trump problem.
That's not really a shutdown problem, that's a Trump problem.
That's because Trump went on national TV and said, I'll own the shutdown.
Brilliant strategizing and communications from the president.
Independents are more apt to blame Trump, 48 to 34, and are most likely to say both sides are responsible because independents are the only people who apparently have not lost their minds.
Again, if they say both sides are responsible, it means 48% of independents say that Democrats at least hold some responsibility for all of this.
Now, here's the part of the poll that is actually more telling and suggests that Trump should take a little bit of short-term pain in order to reach some long-term gain.
While more than half of Americans are now blaming Trump for the government shutdown, the wall itself has become more popular.
This new poll said support had increased for the wall from 34% to 42%.
The CNN poll had it going up from 35% to 39%.
In other words, Trump's pitch for the wall is going well.
His pitch for himself is not.
And that should be okay, right?
I mean, he's the president.
He's not up for re-election for another two years.
So people who are hitting the panic button and saying, well, Trump should therefore sign some sort of deal right now.
Which do you think is going to be more important come November of 2020?
Trump's approval rating in January of 2019 or Americans' long-lasting feelings about a wall that he has been pushing for for years?
My bet is that the issue itself is going to be more important than the approval rating over the government shutdown.
Government shutdowns have no long-lasting poll effects.
Like, none.
In January of 2013, there was a government shutdown.
Republicans then won a sweeping victory in November of 2014.
No one cares about government shutdowns five minutes after they're over.
The only thing that people care about is the long-lasting impression of Republicans.
In 2014, most Americans thought Republicans wanted to end Obamacare, Obamacare was deeply unpopular, and Republicans took back the House of Representatives.
And the Senate.
They took both of them.
They had the House already.
They took back the Senate.
So why exactly, why exactly would we think that there's going to be any long-lasting impact from a government shutdown now?
All the folks on the right who are panicking and saying, we need to end the shutdown right now, it's really hurting Trump.
Really hurting Trump.
Dude's approval rating's never been high.
When he runs, he's going to be running against someone.
He's not going to be running against the government shutdown.
The more important statistic here is not Trump's personal approval rating or who Americans blame for the shutdown.
The shutdown will end.
Everything will go back to normal.
People will get paid.
The real issue is how people feel about the wall.
If you're a political strategist, that's what you care more about.
And that's why Lindsey Graham came to Trump and he said, open the government temporarily.
And Trump was like, nope, not going to do that.
Not interested.
And he is correct about all of this because Democrats are being increasingly forced to deal with the consequences of their own intransigence.
And they look bad doing this.
I mean, there's a piece in the Washington Examiner today all about the Democrats during the government shutdown.
According to the Washington Examiner, some 30 Democratic lawmakers left the government shutdown behind on Friday on a chartered flight to Puerto Rico for a winter retreat with 109 lobbyists and corporate executives, during which they plan to see the hit Broadway show Hamilton and attend three parties, including one with the show's cast.
Is it just me, or I thought that Puerto Rico was just hit by a hurricane, right?
Right, so if they were hit by a hurricane, how much money are the Democrats spending on this retreat?
Maybe they should donate a little bit of that to the people who are suffering in Puerto Rico, if this is their thing.
Those attending the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Bold Pack Winter Retreat in San Juan plan to meet with key officials to discuss cleanup after Hurricane Maria at a roundtable on Saturday, but the weekend is packed with free time for the members and their families on a trip.
Apparently some 109 lobbyists and corporate executives are named in the memo at a rate of 3.6 lobbyists for every member.
And these include some of the biggest lobbyists in the country.
Senator Bob Menendez was spotted shirtless on the beach in Puerto Rico talking to some blonde lady on the beach.
She looks, thank God, overage.
So that's good for Bob Menendez.
All of this is to suggest that Democrats Those sort of optics are not going to play well for Democrats.
I think the panic button being hit by Republicans is a little bit premature at this point.
Okay.
Meanwhile, Republicans have been struggling for an answer with regard to Steve King.
We talked about this last week.
Representative Steve King from Iowa, who was quoted by the New York Times in an interview that he did not deny, saying that there was nothing wrong with the terms white nationalism and white supremacy, which is insane.
And I called for him to be immediately primaried and maxed out for his opponents, actually, in that primary.
Kevin McCarthy, the Senate, the House Minority Leader, he came forward.
He said there will be consequences for Steve King from the Republican caucus.
Watch on the other side that they do not take action when their members say something like that.
Action will be taken.
I'm having a serious conversation with Congressman Steve King on his future and role in this Republican Party.
What does that mean?
As a leader, there is a number of things you'll see that has taken place.
But I will not stand back as a leader of this party, believing in this nation that all are created equal, that that stands or continues to stand and have any role with us.
Okay, so this is the exact right perspective that McCarthy is articulating right here.
Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, the only black senator in the Republican caucus, he says that, he says, Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism.
It's because of our silence when things like this are said.
Immigration is a perfect example in which somehow our affection for the rule of law has become conflated with the perceived racism against black and brown people.
He says, King's comments are not conservative views, but separate views that should be ridiculed at every turn possible.
Conservative principles mean equal opportunity for all to succeed, regardless of what you look like or where you are from.
It is maddening to see so many folks who believe this and have only good intentions in their hearts tarnished by these radical perspectives, which is why silence is no longer acceptable.
And Tim Scott is right about this.
The difference is that members of the Republican caucus, many of them are not being silent about Steve King.
Whereas when it comes to bigotry by Democrats, the entire caucus is completely silent about bigotry by Democrats.
Let me give you an example.
Rashida Tlaib.
is one of the new fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
I always say that because you sort of need a trademark for how often that is used.
The media are constantly saying things about the fresh faces in the Democratic Party, and it's always the same three fresh faces, right?
It's always Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And they are fresh, not because they're the only new Congress people, but because two of them are Muslim and one of them was a former bartender and is kind of pretty, right?
That's really why the media are paying attention to these folks.
Well, they're going to pay attention, but not enough to actually question the bigotry among these actual members, particularly the anti-Semitism of these actual members.
So Rashida Tlaib was sworn in.
To office.
A few years ago.
I guess she was sworn in in Detroit.
And she invited a guy named Abbas Hamideh.
And he gave her a painting of herself in front of the U.S.
Capitol wearing the keffiyeh around her neck.
She's Palestinian.
Wearing the Palestinian ceremonial kind of scarf that you see very often.
And he tweeted, I was honored to be a Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib swearing in ceremony in Detroit and private dinner afterward with the entire family, friends and activists across the country.
Hashtag Palestine.
Hashtag tweet your thobe.
I don't know what that means.
Hashtag Rashida Tlaib.
Okay, it turns out that Abbas Hamidah is like an actual terrorist sympathizer.
Here's what he tweeted out, November 19th, 2016.
Abbas Hamidah has also called for an intifada.
He's called for solidarity with Hamas.
He was at her swearing-in and attended a private dinner with her.
Remember that time that Steve King said something super racist and then most members of the Republican caucus said something about it?
Most Republican commentators, most conservative commentators came out and condemned him in as strong language as humanly possible.
Some of us gave money to his primary opponent.
Remember that?
Because that was like three days ago.
You remember?
How many Democrats have been asked about Rashida Tlaib?
How many?
They're all asked about her calling the president a mother effer.
How many were asked about the fact that she's an anti-Semite?
How many were asked about Ilhan Omar, who has a similar record of anti-Semitic statements?
How many have been asked not about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's bizarre take on domestic policy, but about her association with people like Linda Sarsour?
Any?
How many have been asked to defend their comments?
Zero.
Okay, which just goes to show you that when it comes to who is being held accountable for the nasty, evil comments within their own caucus, the only people ever held responsible are Republicans.
And Republicans, I think, hold themselves responsible, as Senator Tim Scott is pointing out.
And we try to do better.
The Democrats don't try to do better.
Not only do they not do better, they then claim that if you question them about these things, that it's an evidence of some sort of bias.
People were complaining that Rashida, it was funny, AOC, Ocasio-Cortez, was complaining that the media were reporting much more on Rashida Tlaib's calling President Trump a mother effer than they were on Steve King's white supremacist comments.
I agree.
That's an imbalance that ought to be noted.
But I'll tell you an imbalance that also ought to be noted.
The complete absence of anyone making note of the fact that open anti-Semites now sit in the Democratic caucus.
So we'll get endless coverage about Steve King.
That coverage is justified, I think.
But no coverage of Democrats who have been making nice with anti-Semites and racists from the other side of the aisle for years.
Like, no coverage at all.
And the media are cowed into silence by people like AOC claiming that they are insufficiently leftist.
It's truly incredible.
Like AOC tweeted against Josh Crashour, who's a reporter for Hotline.
She went after him because I guess Crashour had pointed out that she was saying something dumb, and she complained about the reporters.
And then he said, well, the reporters are just reporting on you.
And she said, well, they're insufficiently racially diverse.
And then he said, well, Are you calling for a quota among reporters?
And she said, I'm not calling for a quota.
This is a direct quote from AOC.
I've never called for strict quotas.
Just having representation of one of the most fundamental voting blocs in the American electorate, which is called a quota.
And the media cheer her.
They cheer her.
Being left means never having to say you're sorry.
It means never having to be asked about the extremists in your own coalition.
It means never having to answer for the disastrously bigoted views of your own membership.
It's truly amazing how the left is allowed to get away with this by the media and themselves.
I mean, they're supposed to be the reminders of the morality of America.
These are the people who are supposed to be the reminders of tolerance and diversity.
Yeah, sure, I'm gonna take advice from Rashida Tlaib about racism and anti-Semitism.
Yeah, I'm really gonna listen to reporters who won't ask Rashida Tlaib a question.
A question.
But are going to be mulling over Steve King while Republicans come out of the woodwork to denounce him.
Truly amazing stuff.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like this week.
So, this weekend I had the opportunity to see Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse.
It's great.
Okay, it's not just good, it's fantastic.
The script is really clever.
The voice work is great.
More importantly, the art of it is just astonishingly beautiful.
I mean, the art of it is fantastic.
It's art in a very different way than, like, Aquaman.
Aquaman, the CGI is great.
Here, Spider-Man is done differently than anything else I've ever seen.
So what's fascinating is that Sony owns the animated rights to Spider-Man, but Marvel, meaning Disney, owns the live-action Spider-Man.
I will tell you what, I am much more interested in seeing more animated movies like Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse than the Tom Holland Spider-Man that we've seen in The Avengers.
Even though I kind of like Tom Holland in The Avengers.
This movie, Into the Spider-Verse, is one of the most beautifully animated films I have ever seen in my entire life.
It's an amazing artistic accomplishment.
Basically, it looks like a moving comic book.
If you can't actually see the trailer, we'll show you a little bit of the trailer right now.
They combine all these different styles.
It's great.
There's only one Spider-Man.
But there's another universe.
It looks and sounds like yours, but it's not.
My name's Miles Morales.
Hey, kid.
You're like me.
How?
I know it's complicated.
You wanna know what happened to you?
I can teach you to be Spider-Man.
I love this burger, so delicious.
One of the best burgers I've ever had.
You have money, right?
I'm not very liquid right now.
I think you're gonna be a bad teacher.
The movie's really good, and it's all about, basically, the basic premise is that there's a portal that opens and all the Spider-Mans from the multiverse are sucked into this one Portal.
Now, people who are comic book fans all have their favorite Spider-Man.
I'm still a Peter Parker fan.
I know the younger generation likes Miles Morales.
I'm fine with Miles Morales.
Like, I think he's fine.
This movie makes him a lot more likable than he is in the comics and more interesting than he is in the comics.
He's the center of the film.
The movie's really good.
Jake Johnson does great voice work as Peter Parker from a different multiverse where Spider-Man's kind of a loser.
Like, he's divorced from Mary Jane and he's kind of falling apart as a human.
It's, the movie is, is really, I can't speak highly enough of this movie.
It's really good.
You should take your kids to see it.
It's not appropriate for kids, probably under the age of maybe seven or eight.
But if your kid's 10, your kid could easily see this movie.
And it's not scary in any sense beyond that.
And again, the animation is just incredible.
And it's got a bunch of, like John Mulaney comes in for a bit, that's great.
Nick Cage comes in as Spider-Man Noir, which is my favorite bit of the film, is that one of the multiverse Spider-Men is Spider-Man Noir, so he's like from the 1930s, and it's Nick Cage being Nick Cage.
So it's great.
It's like him coming in and being like, I'm Spider-Man and I punch Nazis.
It's terrific.
Go see the film if you haven't yet.
If it doesn't win the Oscar for best animation or best art direction or something, then the Oscars are irrevocably broken, which they are already.
We already know that, but worth seeing.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so thing that I hate, number one, there's a director named Duncan Jones.
He made a movie called Moon, which I've recommended on the show, before Talented Guy.
He tweeted this out yesterday, and I just find this obnoxious.
He tweeted out, I have two kids, two and a half years and nine months old, respectively.
I'll tell you something I never see anyone admit.
They're exhausting, frustrating, and life's destabilizing.
They are rarely fun.
Sure, smiles are great, hugs are lovely, but it's hard, and not obviously a good choice in life.
This is where people feel compelled to say, I wouldn't change it for the world.
But you know, of course I'd reconsider.
It's exhausting, it's banal.
It's like looking after your dog you can't house train.
What it is, is that it is, and they are mine.
Hopefully they turn out okay.
First of all, just to go back to the first part of that tweet where he says, I never hear people talk about how exhausting and horrifying children are, how frustrating and life destabilizing they are.
Is he like, does he have actual mental problems?
Does he have eyes or ears?
This is the number one topic among all parents forever, is how your kids drive you up a wall.
Like literally, you can ask folks at the office, how often do I talk about how my kids are driving me crazy?
You don't have to do that.
Listen to the show!
Like every other day, I'm talking about how my kids drive me crazy.
It is also true that they are the best thing that has ever happened to me.
And when Duncan Jones says, well, you don't have to add that, you know, they're not a great, they're not a great choice.
They're not obviously a good choice in life.
When he says, you know, I might reconsider, I can't imagine how his kids are going to feel 10 years from now reading those tweets.
When he says, I wouldn't change it for the world, of course I'd reconsider.
Really, would you reconsider?
Then maybe you should not be a parent.
Seriously.
And also, it's just, it's so self-centered.
If kids screw up your priorities, it's because your priorities are screwed up.
Your priority is your kids.
You know how many times I've had to ditch things that I want to go to because I gotta take care of my kids?
Or shift my schedule around because I have to do something with my kids?
And then do you know how awesome it is that I was with my kids?
As I've said, I've said this a thousand times in person and on the show.
This is one of my things.
Life is all about the highs and the lows.
And basically here's how it works.
When you're single, your high is like a seven and your low is like a two.
Unless you're clinically depressed or something.
Then, you get married.
And your high is a 10, because you have a partner in life.
And that partner in life, when you're with them, it makes life just that much better.
And your low is like a 0, because when something bad happens to the person you're with, then it's worse than something bad happening to you.
When my wife is sick, it is much worse for me than when I'm sick.
And then you have kids.
And all boundaries on the upper and lower thresholds disappear completely.
The best things that ever happen to you in life will happen with your kids, and the worst things that ever happen to you in life will happen with your kids.
There's nothing better, nothing in the world better, than hanging out with my daughter, and teaching her things, and having her say funny things, or me being in the car and partying with the kids in the back.
I have a great video.
My kids like to sit in the back of the car.
We have two car seats in the back.
I have one who's five and one who's almost five in a few weeks here, and one who's two and a half.
And I turn on Elvis, and they're partying it out in the back, and it's a blast.
Nothing is better than that.
And then when something terrible happens to your kid, when your kid is throwing up in the middle of the night, and you're cleaning up and trying to make them feel better, or when, God forbid, your kid has a surgery or something, which I've been through with my daughter, when all that happens, that's the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life.
Is that something that you would trade away?
I don't know.
Would you trade away seeing the world in color?
Would you trade away?
It's like the Wizard of Oz.
It really is.
Before and after having kids, I don't even remember not having kids.
This is how it works.
At every stage of life, there's a point where you don't remember what happened before.
After you get married, you don't remember what it was like to be single.
It's very difficult to remember what it was like to be single.
Because now you have someone you are attached to.
And then you have kids, and you really don't remember what it was like not to have kids.
Which is why you see so many couples struggling with empty nest syndrome after the kids leave.
Because your life totally shifts around that.
It's like in The Wizard of Oz, the original Wizard of Oz, where everything is in black and white and then the house lands in Oz and suddenly the door opens and everything is in color.
That's what it's like having kids.
So maybe you'd prefer to go back to black and white.
Maybe it was safer and nicer for you there.
Guess what?
That's because there's something wrong with your eyes.
It's because if you look at your kids and you only see the same blacks and whites you saw before you had kids, then I would suggest that you have some sort of vision adjustment because you got a problem.
You got a problem.
Okay.
Other things that I hate.
As I've said before, the entire goal of Western civilization is to protect innocents.
That is what Western civilization is about.
It is about curbing the worst instincts of humanity, whether they are masculine or feminine, whether they come from one group of people or another group of people.
Western civilization is about the idea that everyone can be civilized to be a good person, and all of that is designed to protect innocent people.
We as a society are failing the history of Western civilization.
We are failing it.
We are failing it because we no longer care about protecting innocent people.
Protecting innocence has become secondary to our own subjective pleasure.
And that means that parents, speaking of parents abusing their kids, this case is just sickening.
It should sicken you to your stomach.
We've talked a little bit before about this 10-year-old drag kid, okay?
There's another drag kid now.
So there are a couple of different drag kids.
These drag kids are 10-year-old, 11-year-olds who have been featured in the media, and they're supposed to be the heroes of our new society, right?
It is heroic to bring your children, your male children, to dress up as female children in a sexualized fashion.
Does anyone care about this kid?
A 10-year-old Canadian boy named Nemus Quinn Maloncon-Golden was featured in a troubling Huck magazine piece highlighting the life of a so-called child drag queen, young Nemus, whose drag name is Queen Lactatia.
No.
Does anyone care about this kid?
No.
I mean, like, I care about the kid more than this kid's parents do.
Really, I think that is fair to say.
And how do I know that?
Because of what I'm about to tell you.
Was shot by photographer Jonathan Frederick Turton for the spread.
In one of the shots that did not make the magazine, Nemus, in full drag makeup and a black dress, is posing for a photo with the Season 7 winner of RuPaul's Drag Race, Violet Chachki.
In a shocking photo, Violet is wearing nothing but a pair of heels and a small piece of fabric covering his genitals, as seen in this screenshot.
Interviewed and photographed, Queen Lactatia for Huck Magazine about life as a child drag queen, posted Turton.
Turton has shot for mainstream outlets like the BBC.
Adidas dazed and confused the Discovery Channel.
The Huck Magazine piece, by the way, called me out personally for over-sexualizing drag kids.
I'm the bad guy for pointing out that it is a bad thing to take ten-year-old boys, dress them as girls, and then put them in the presence of naked men pretending to be women.
I'm the bad guy.
Nemus's mother, Jessica Malankan, conceded that drag has a sexual component and is unapologetic about her young son wearing sexually suggesting clothing if it makes him feel beautiful.
This is according to Amanda Prestijakama over at Daily Wire.
She said, drag is an adult arena and that's where people question our judgment.
So we have to censor things.
He knows there are adult aspects of drag that he's not allowed to apply to his show.
We would never try to overtly sexualize our child.
But if he wears something that makes him feel beautiful, what right do I have to stop him wearing that dress?
Because it might cause people to think things they shouldn't be thinking.
It's a circular problem.
No, it is not a circular problem.
You're damaging your child because you're a bleepy, you're a bad mother.
You're a terrible mother.
Okay, Child Protective Services should be at your house today.
Today.
It is disgusting to violate the innocence of a child like this, and then to pretend you're doing it for the child's own sake.
You wouldn't let your kid not eat his vegetables, you wouldn't let your kid ditch school, you wouldn't let your kid prostitute himself, and yet you are acting as his pimp.
To put him in a photo like that, you are acting as his pimp.
It is endangerment of children.
In 2007, Nemus appeared on stage with popular drag queen Bianca Del Rio at a drag show his mother brought him to.
The clip of the two on stage together, wherein the drag queen repeatedly used the B-word and dropped an F-bomb, quickly went viral.
According to Jessica, drag is how Nemus chooses to express himself.
He's just a kid playing.
Yeah, but you know better, don't you?
You know what this is.
You know this isn't just a kid playing.
You know that there are people who are going to victimize your child.
You know that you are victimizing your child.
This idea that you're supposed to substitute the judgment of your children for your own judgment as an adult.
It's one of the aspects of our civilization that has gone completely awry.
The idea of being a civilized human being is that you don't know crap when you're a kid and then you get older and you know crap and you try to stop your kids from having to experience the same garbage that you experience.
And we now have a society where we're supposed to supplant our own judgment with that of our children.
Let the children roam free.
In a world of adults, some of whom are predators, Genius stuff.
Genius stuff.
This has nothing to do with the welfare of the kid.
This has everything to do with the subjective self-satisfaction of a terrible mother.
I rarely rip parents like this, but this parent deserves every bit of ripping, and I am dead serious when I say that Child Protective Services should show up at this person's house.
I mean, that is horrifying garbage.
OK, well, with that said, we'll be back here tomorrow.
We'll break down all the latest news for you then, and we'll be back here later today.
So if you're a subscriber, we have two more hours of great content coming up later today.
Be there or be square.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
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