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June 24, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:01
Calculation or Chaos? | Ep. 807
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Is President Trump's Iran strategy strategy or just chaos?
Plus, President Trump changes his mind on ICE rates and Democrats get even more radical.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty.
Well, we have a lot of news to get to.
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OK, so we begin today with the latest on the tension with Iran.
So before we get to the actual latest on the tension with Iran, there's a really great piece by Michael Doran, who's a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.
And he goes through what exactly Iran is trying to do here.
And it's it's necessary to understand what Iran is trying to do and what the United States is trying to accomplish to determine what the strategy should be with regard to Iran.
Now, listen, the backdrop here is that nobody really knows in foreign policy.
It's not it's not a machine.
Nobody knows in foreign policy what can happen given any circumstance.
Foreign policy is simply too unpredictable.
There are, however, tried and true strategies When it comes to things like deterrence, if you're trying to deter somebody's action, they have to know that you are committed to taking a very harsh step should they violate a line, right?
This is why President Obama violating his own red line in Syria was so devastating.
It's why when President Obama said to Syria, use chemical weapons and that'll violate our red line and then him backing off the red line, it undermined his credibility and it led to tremendous suffering across the Middle East and across the world.
It's one of the reasons why a lot of America's enemies got more ambitious and more aggressive in the face of President Obama.
In other words, the talk softly and carry a big stick methodology of Teddy Roosevelt isn't just a nice phrase, it's also a very good strategy.
That when you carry the stick, people should know that you're carrying the stick.
Blustering is not good.
Bluffing is not good.
If you're going to draw a red line, it actually has to be a red line.
And if you're not going to draw a red line, then don't draw a red line.
Be very clear about where your lines are so that people know that if they cross them, you're going to smack them.
That is sort of the predicate to this discussion.
We have to know what exactly the policy is.
And the policy has to be backed by an actual grand strategy.
It can't just be haphazard.
It can't be you're frustrated, so you throw a missile somewhere.
The Clintonian policy of An embassy gets bombed in Kenya or Tanzania, and so we toss a missile at a drug factory in Sudan.
You can't actually do that, right?
That doesn't evince any sort of fear on the part of your enemies or the belief in consistency.
Foreign policy is a lot more like parenting when the United States is involved than it is like a bargain between mutual friends.
There is no community of nations.
When it comes to the international community, there's no community.
The international community is a dog-eat-dog space, and that means that the most powerful hand, the whip hand in international politics, has to be very predictable and very solid.
People have to know what they are going to do before they do it, especially if they're going to take a strong policy.
Okay, so what exactly does Iran want?
Because right now, Iran has been engaged in aggressive antics for the past several months.
Well, Michael Doran, as I said, has a really good piece over at Mosaic.
It's called, What Iran Is Really Up To.
He says, in April 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, that is the Iran nuclear deal signed by President Obama, a garbage deal, was still to be formalized, but Republicans preparing to run for president in the following year were already denouncing it.
At a public forum in New York City, The Washington Post columnist David Ignatius asked Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, whether he worried that one of these Republicans, if elected, might overturn the deal.
Zarif answered confidently.
"Any successor to Barack Obama would be constrained by international law, by America's commitments, formal and informal, to allies and partners, and by all the norms that govern relations among nations today." He said, "I believe the United States will risk isolating itself in the world if there's an agreement and it decides to break it.
The result of any such action," he predicted, "would be chaos." Zarif's comments, says Doran, prefigured the strategy that Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is following today in his brinksmanship with President Trump.
Playing on the fear, especially prevalent among European elites and American Democrats, that Trump is, precisely, an agent of chaos, Khamenei has taken a leaf from the book of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who in 2017 appeared at the World Economic Forum as the representative of enlightened globalism.
We should adhere to multilateralism to uphold the authority and efficacy of multilateral institutions, Xi declared.
We should honor promises and abide by rules.
The chords struck by Xi were still resonating in the halls of the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last December, when the assembled leaders adopted a joint communique, affirming their commitment to a rules-based international order.
This is shorthand for slapping Trump, presumably.
Khomeini intends to leverage the fears that haunt Europeans by raising the specter of war and simultaneously offering a cooperative, multilateral way to exercise it, namely by returning America to the Iran nuclear deal.
His goal is to place President Trump's renunciation of the Iran nuclear deal on the unofficial agenda of this week's G20 summit, which begins Saturday, June 29th and 30th.
In the hope that it will win a place on the shortlist of Trump's major sins against a rules-based international order right up there with the American president's economic protectionism and his disavowal of the Paris climate accord.
So basically what Khamenei wants is to get the Europeans to pressure President Trump into re-signing the Iran nuclear deal.
Why?
Because the Iran nuclear deal allows Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, as I'll explain in just a second.
Rather, as Michael Doran explains over at Mosaic.
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OK, back to the strategy that Iran is using here.
So according to Michael Doran, he says it was the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who revealed the public face of the new strategy.
The date, May 8th, was highly symbolic.
Exactly one year earlier to the day, Trump had renounced the nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran.
His country's patience, Rouhani declared in a televised speech, was exhausted.
For 12 months, Iran had displayed admirable forbearance in the face of Trump's maximum pressure campaign against it.
It had done so, he said, in an obvious nod to the Europeans, in large part because nameless signatories to the Iran nuclear deal had asked Tehran to avoid acts of retaliation while they worked to help shelter it from the worst ravages of American sanctions.
Rouhani said, Now, notice that Rouhani is actually using the same language here that Barack Obama used about Iran.
Barack Obama suggested that the strategy was strategic patience, and now Rouhani is saying that he is using strategic patience against Trump.
In other words, the rogue actor here is not Iran.
The rogue actor is Trump, according to the Iranian regime.
But now they are going to give way to strategic pressure.
According to Rouhani, Iran would cease to observe the restrictions the nuclear deal placed on its stockpiles of heavy water and enriched uranium.
On June 17th, the spokesman of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization followed up, disclosing that Iran's stockpiles were set to exceed the JCPOA limits in 10 days, just in time for the G20 summit.
Iran, in other words, would have to break the deal in order to save it.
They were basically trying to push the Europeans, saying, listen, we're going to break the deal.
We're going to go full nuclear unless you reinstate the Iran nuclear deal and pass off.
And they were going to increase the pressure in order to generate a feeling of chaos such that the Europeans would pressure President Trump to sign up to an agreement again.
That is the goal here.
The goal here is to get the Europeans to basically undercut President Trump and to undercut Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and to undercut the Trump administration's getting out of the Iran nuclear deal.
According to the prevailing view, what pushed Iran over the edge and precipitated Rouhani's May 8th speech was the Trump administration's decision in April to tighten economic sanctions that were seriously affecting the Islamic Republic's ability to sell its oil.
But this view overlooks something else.
On May 3rd, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revoked two waivers that had been allowing Iran to ship heavy water to Oman.
and low-enriched uranium to Russia.
When Rouhani announced five days later that Iran would cease complying with the JCPOA restrictions on enriched uranium and heavy water, he was reacting directly to Mike Pompeo's May 3rd revocation of the two waivers.
Iran's policy of strategic pressure then, says Mike Duran, this is a really good piece, is made up of three separate but interlocking lines of effort.
One, a struggle to gain relief from the oil and banking sanctions.
Two, a campaign to tarnish President Trump as an agent of chaos.
And three, an initiative aimed at keeping its nuclear waivers in place.
Among these, the third is by far the most important.
So what are these waivers?
Well, apparently there are a bunch of waivers that permit the Europeans to cooperate with the Iranians on projects permitted under the terms of the Iran nuclear deal.
There are seven sets of such waivers in total.
Pompeo has revoked only the two that pertain to the export of enriched uranium and heavy water, but the other five remain in force.
Now, there are people inside the Trump administration who say we should end all the waivers, and that would dramatically put pressure on the Iranian economy.
But there are also people in the State Department who didn't want that kind of pressure on the Europeans.
The Europeans were lobbying Washington to continue renewing all of the waivers, and those efforts were partially successful.
The five waivers escaped the acts because they applied to activities in which Iran's partners are European.
Presumably, the Europeans kept Tehran well informed regarding the debate in Washington.
Khamenei understands that the Europeans are fighting hard to save the nuclear deal and that their support is an asset to Iran and that the debate over the waivers has also been creating in the transatlantic alliance a fissure that benefits Iran.
He also understands that the fight is by no means over.
The administration usually grants waivers 180 days.
On May 3rd, it shortened the term to 90 days.
Khomeini is intent on pressuring the Europeans and interested powers like Japan to convince the American president to reinstate the two revoked waivers and commit his administration to leaving the other five in place for the remainder of his term in office.
Also, the Trump administration has been considering whether to activate the multilateral snapback mechanism at the U.N., meaning that there was a mechanism that Was supposed to be in place during the Iran nuclear deal that if the Iranians violated the agreement, the sanctions would snap back.
And there's enough information to show that the Iranians have violated the nuclear deal because there are archives showing that Iran never abandoned its nuclear weapons program, but simply restructured it, emphasizing dual use activities to allow Tehran to falsely claim that they are pursuing peaceful nuclear activities.
If Trump were to invoke the snapback, then a bunch of sanctions would be put back into place.
So Khamenei must instead push the idea that he has been abiding by the deal, that the waiver should stay in place, and that as President Trump puts new pressure, the possibilities of chaos are increasing.
So this is the game.
This is the game.
And he's being helped out in this game by Democrats.
So Democrats have been jumping on the bandwagon.
Europeans have been jumping on the bandwagon as well.
The press have been jumping on the bandwagon proposing that it's President Trump who seriously wants war.
Now, there's no evidence that President Trump wants war.
In fact, Trump keeps saying over and over and over again that he does not, in fact, want war.
Here's President Trump over the weekend explaining that everyone was saying I'm a warmonger.
Now they're all saying I'm a dove.
So what's the deal?
Everybody was saying I'm a warmonger.
And now they say I'm a dove.
And I think I'm neither.
You want to know the truth?
I'm a man with common sense.
And that's what we need in this country is common sense.
But I didn't like the idea of them knowingly shooting down an unmanned drone.
And then we kill 150 people.
I didn't like that.
Okay, Maxine Waters, right, comes out and she is actually doing the work of the Iranian administration.
She tweets out, Why was the unmanned drone in Iran's airspace?
It wasn't.
the strike against Iran.
Why was the unmanned drone in Iran's airspace?
It wasn't.
Why the surveillance?
Because you have to surveil international airspace.
Don't provoke and then pretend innocence.
So everybody is jumping on the Iranian bandwagon here.
I mean, this is pretty astonishing.
So basically, you have a bunch of people in the Democratic Party who made a deal with the Iranian regime and then blamed the Republicans, saying the Republicans were trying to undercut the deal and this helped Iran's hardliners.
That was an absolute lie.
The Iranian hardliners are the government.
Hey, now you have the Iranian government, which is stumping for chaos, specifically in order to undercut Trump, and Democrats are signing up for the party.
You got folks like Adam Schiff, who are suggesting that it's Trump's chaos in the Middle East, even though he knows that it's Iran.
You have people like Maxine Waters overtly parroting Iranian propaganda.
That's what's going on here.
Now, in a second, we're going to get to President Trump's actual strategy here, because here is the problem.
This is a point where you do need a certain level of stability.
You need the president's strategy to be out there.
You need him to explain his strategy.
People have to know where the lines are, where he is willing to bend, where he is not willing to bend, because otherwise the Iranians have an interest in upping the ante.
If, as I suggest, the Iranians are interested in chaos, then forwarding chaos would seem to be what they are looking for.
Okay, so here is President Trump's policy.
So, according to the Wall Street Journal, President Trump ended up bucking his national security aides on his own proposed Iran attack.
They say President Trump bucked most of his top national security advisors by abandoning retaliatory strikes in Iran on Thursday.
In private conversations on Friday, Trump reveled in his judgment, certain about his decision to call off the attacks while speaking of his administration as if removed from the center of it.
Trump told one confidant about his own inner circle of advisors, quote, Now, again, I disagree with that on a fundamental level.
I don't think that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is itching for war with Iran.
I don't think that John Bolton is itching for war with Iran.
Despite all of the talk about this, I really don't.
And the notion that these folks are just desperate to go to a war that would end with tens of thousands of American dead, presumably, and billions, if not trillions, of dollars spent.
Nobody is interested in that.
But one of the ways that you prevent war is you prevent international misunderstanding that escalates into war.
Because here's two ways of falling into war.
Way number one, the United States reacts to an Iranian provocation, and then the Iranians try to pancake a bunch of American bases, and then we're in a war.
Okay?
Because we were too harsh in our response.
Way number two is that we aren't harsh in our response.
Iran keeps pushing the envelope to the point where we have no choice.
Iran shoots down a manned American aircraft.
Iran takes, captures a bunch of American soldiers.
Iran kills an American.
Now, President Trump has said, if they do that, then we're going to have to do something.
Well, you got to set the lines.
Because the Iranians are going to push right up to the line.
Whatever the line is, the Iranians are going to push all the way up to it.
And if you don't make clear what the line is, if you have a secret line in your head, and the Iranians violate it, you can find yourself in a war much more easily than if you say, here is the line, you cross it, and the hammer comes down.
Right now, it's not clear where President Trump's line is, because he keeps moving around on the line.
And listen, maybe there's a strategy in place, but it would be good to hear it.
It would be good to hear what the strategy is, because the Iranians clearly have a strategy, and that is to play on the sense of chaos inside the Trump administration to convince the Europeans to pressure Trump to make a deal, and for them to appeal to Trump's isolationist side.
Because here's what the Iranians are going to do now.
What the Iranians are going to do is they're going to go to the Europeans and they're going to say to the Europeans, look, Trump's an agent of chaos.
You need to get him back in this Iran nuclear deal.
We can go back to status quo ante under the Iran nuclear deal and everything will be all better.
And that chaotic Trump will be taken off the table.
And then what you're going to get are Europeans and isolationists in the United States who go to President Trump and say, you don't need a war, man.
And the best thing you can do here is do exactly what you did with NAFTA, which is you can sign a deal that looks a lot like the Iran nuclear deal, but call it Trump's deal and then get all the credit.
And that's sort of an appealing pitch to President Trump.
Now, this rests on what do you think America's interests are?
Really, in the end, this rests on what do you think America's interests are in the region?
Part of the problem for President Trump is, I'm not sure that he really believes America has significant interests in the region.
He keeps signaling back and forth.
So on the one hand, he says that we have an interest in Iran not gaining a nuclear weapon.
Okay, well if that's true, Iran's been violating the nuclear deal, so the sanctions should stay in place.
On the other hand, When they are shooting ships and blowing them up in the Straits of Hormuz, the president seems unconcerned about that.
So here's what the president tweeted today.
Quote, China gets 91% of its oil from the Straits, Japan 62%, and many other countries likewise.
So why are we protecting the shipping lanes for other countries, many years for zero compensation?
All of these countries should be protecting their own ships on what has always been a dangerous journey.
We don't need to be there in that the US has just become by far the largest producer of energy anywhere in the world.
The US request for Iran is very simple.
No nuclear weapons and no further sponsoring of terrorism.
But here's the reality.
When it comes to no further sponsoring of terrorism, who knows whether President Trump is really committed to Iran not sponsoring terrorism in the region.
Why should we care?
For the same reason that he doesn't seem to care about the straits of Hormuz, why should we care if Iran is sponsoring a war in Yemen?
That's a very far away place.
And this is sort of Tucker Carlson's point over the weekend.
The truth is, however, in international politics, there is no such thing as a vacuum.
So, let's say that the United States were to pull out of the Gulf of Oman and the Straits of Hormuz.
We're just going to pull out right now.
And China were to take control, because it's a lot of Chinese oil that is going through.
And China were to work with Iran.
Do you think that that's beneficial for the United States?
For China to control a significant amount of the world's oil supply?
The fact is that we have a global oil market.
So while the United States may be self-sufficient in terms of oil, the amount of oil that we put on the market has a heavy impact on what the price of oil is at the pump.
In 1973, when OPEC decided on an oil embargo against the United States, the United States was still a solid producer of oil.
But it does impact the global oil prices and the price of the pump if, in fact, the other players in the global market decide that they are going to shut down key shipping lanes like the Straits of Hormuz.
So when the United States retreats from the world scene, that is not left open.
And that also encourages the threat of violence in the end, because you strengthen China.
President Trump is very concerned, I think rightly so, at the global ambitions of the Chinese.
He's rightly concerned at the strength of China's government and China's territorial ambitions.
So would the goal be to hand over the Straits of Hormuz?
To me, that's no better than Vladimir Putin taking control of Syria.
We have geopolitical rivals.
Those geopolitical rivals are interested in taking more territory under their own control and then providing threats to America's national security as well as to America's partners and allies, as well as to global trade and economics.
If you believe that global economics is entirely global, indeed it's a global thing, The United States has an interest in preserving the freedom of economics and the freedom of flow of things like oil.
If you believe that there are rival countries out there that have territorial ambitions and want to form alliances with evil countries like Iran in order to forward those ambitions, and that as those countries gain power, they become more threatening to the United States, you got a problem.
Now, listen, you can err on the other side, too, right?
You can err on the other side of looking to go to preemptive war every five minutes because you think that you see a threat around every corner.
You can do that, too.
And we ought to be cautious.
We ought to be cautious.
I think one thing that we learned from the debacle in terms of intelligence in Iraq is that we ought to be cautious about these things, obviously.
There's also a point to be made, which is if you can take an action that forestalls the growth of an alliance against you at a cheap cost, meaning you knock out Iran's navy, for example, and Iran isn't going to go to full war.
If that's the analysis, then maybe that's something you got to say to them.
Right now we don't seem to have a strategy in President Trump.
Well, he may have been right not to strike the Iranians over the downing of the drone.
I said last week, I think that he was wrong.
Maybe he's right.
Maybe he's right.
Whatever it is, it has to be part of a broader strategy because if it really is just gut level, we're doing it or we're not doing it.
That's going to allow Iran exactly what they want, which is to grant this feeling of chaos.
Now, maybe you're a full isolationist.
You think we should pull out of the region entirely.
You don't care if Iran takes control of the Strait of Hormuz.
You don't care if China gets involved.
You don't care if the Russians gain power.
You think that the United States should basically retreat within its own borders and then leave the world as is.
I think that's bad foreign policy.
I think that that's a mistaken foreign policy, because the fact is, either the United States occupies this space, or our enemies occupy this space.
And if we can do so at low cost, we ought to occupy the space, because if we don't, we will have to defend that space at much higher cost in the future.
But we have to decide on what the vision is for foreign policy, because President Obama campaigned on retrenchment, and then he retrenched.
That was not good for America.
President Trump campaigned on retrenchment, too, on foreign policy.
And so far, he has not retrenched, and that's been good for American foreign policy.
Is he retrenching now?
I don't know.
No one knows.
And that actually helps the Iranians in the sense that they want to portray Trump as an agent of chaos.
OK, in just a second, we'll get to the Trump administration again sending some mixed signals on this thing.
President Trump looking sort of isolationist on the one hand and meanwhile acting out on the other.
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Okay, so in terms of mixed signals, the president has been issuing muscular calls.
He suggested that if they cross a red line, if the Iranians cross a red line, there will be obliteration like you have never seen before.
He suggested this over the weekend. - Not looking for war, and if there is, it'll be obliteration like you've never seen before.
But I'm not looking to do that.
But you can't have a nuclear weapon.
You want to talk, good.
Otherwise, you can have a bad economy for the next three years.
No preconditions?
Not as far as I'm concerned.
No preconditions.
And you'll talk anyway?
Here it is, look.
You can't have nuclear weapons.
And if you want to talk about it, good.
Otherwise, you can live in a shattered economy for a long time to come.
Okay, notice, there are a couple things that he's saying here that are really interesting.
One is, he says, if you cross a line, an unspecified line, then we will destroy you.
And then he suggests that the line is the development of nuclear weapons, but he doesn't mention anything about terrorism, or about Iranian aggression in the Gulf of Oman, or any of that sort of stuff.
Which puts him back on the path to re-entering the Iran nuclear deal.
Because if the idea is all we have to do is stop Iran from getting a nuke, he can just re-sign into an agreement where supposedly they stop creating nuclear weapons.
Which is what Obama was falsely claiming.
Senator Tom Cotton, who's an ally of the administration, a very strong ally of the administration from Arkansas, obviously a man also with military experience, who's on Fox News Sunday, he said, the big problem here is we don't have a firm set of boundaries.
He's saying the same thing I'm saying here, and I think Cotton is correct, obviously.
I think retaliatory strikes were warranted when we were talking about foreign vessels on the high seas.
I think they were warranted against an American unmanned aircraft.
What I see is Iran steadily marching up the escalation chain.
It started out with threats.
It went to an attack on vessels and ports.
It went to an attack on vessels at sea.
Now it's an unmanned American aircraft.
I fear that if Iran doesn't have a firm set of boundaries drawn around its behavior, we're going to see an attack on a U.S.
ship or U.S.
manned aircraft.
Okay, and he's exactly right.
You at least have to make clear to them that if they kill an American, then we are going to blow their navy off the map, right?
You have to set some sort of line.
Just like with a child.
My children.
If my children do X, they get punishment Y. That is the way that foreign policy has to work.
As well.
And here's the thing.
The Obama administration was looking to box President Trump in by creating the nuclear deal.
They were boxing in everybody who opposed Iran's nuclear weapons program over the long haul.
It was originally designed to box in Israel so Israel wouldn't strike at Iran's nuclear facilities.
It was also designed to box in Trump because the idea was, OK, well, we've taken the nuclear weapons thing off the table.
So what are you complaining about?
And Trump said, well, what we're complaining about is Iran using billions of dollars in our money for terrorism, or money we were holding back from Iran for terrorism.
We're concerned about Iran's regional ambitions.
And so we're placing sanctions back on them.
Also, we think they're lying about the nuclear weapons.
Now, Iran is attempting to force Trump back into the Obama-created box.
They're trying to suggest that President Trump is the agent of chaos.
They're trying to suggest that the only way out of this morass right here, the only way to avoid war, is for President Trump to basically bribe them and give them a pathway free to a nuclear weapon.
In just a second, I'll show you how Democrats are jumping on this bandwagon trying to help Iran out.
President Trump should not fall for the trap.
Again, if he's a full-on isolationist, believes the United States should not be in the region, he's willing to abandon that area of the world to the vicissitudes of the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians, that's one thing.
But I don't think that's what President Trump wants.
And I think that's not what his supporters want either.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Democrats are jumping onto the Iranian bandwagon.
Kamala Harris, who's running for president on the Democratic side and is also a NARC, she says on Face the Nation that President Trump created the situation.
So it's not the Iranians who obviously are creating this chaotic situation specifically in order to reach out to people like Kamala Harris so she will pressure Trump.
It's Trump who's the bad guy.
She is falling right for this.
She's doing the work.
Not intentionally.
She's not a traitor or anything.
But she is doing the work of the Iranian government because the Iranian government is, I think, in quite smart fashion, attempting to create a feeling of pressure all around President Trump based on the fact that people don't like Trump personally.
And Kamala Harris is jumping right in, doing the work the Iranians are looking for the left to do.
Here's Kamala Harris.
We have to conduct ourselves in a way that we are smart about what we do to have one and one goal only, which is ensuring that our nation is secure.
And it cannot be the goal to express one's ego and to engage in gamesmanship without much serious regard to the consequence.
And I think that's what we've seen in this president.
Oh, well, you know, it's Trump who's the agent here.
He's the problem.
You got the Washington Post with headlines like this.
Trump's erratic policy moves put national security at risk.
Experts warn.
Oh, it's the experts now.
It's not the Washington Post's opinion.
They found some experts.
One of the beautiful things about the media is you can always find an expert who's going to back whatever position you wish to push.
I don't see an article in the Washington Post today.
Iran seeks chaos in order to preserve nuclear option.
Experts warn.
Well, they could have quoted some experts.
I know some experts, but no, those aren't the experts they want to talk to.
The New York Times has a piece today from Susan Rice, a former national security advisor to Barack Obama, suggesting that it's President Trump's fault.
That is President Trump's fault.
She says, President Trump's process of ordering and then canceling military strikes was a mess, but he now has an opening to restart talks on Iran's nuclear program.
Ah, there's the punchline.
The punchline, members of the Obama administration doing exactly what Iran would like them to do, trying to push President Trump back into a bad Iran nuclear deal that allows Iran a pathway to a bomb and also allows Iran to pursue its regional ambitions with American and European cash.
They're doing exactly what Iran wants them to do.
The only way to fight that is for the president to take a forthright, strong and solid stance on what exactly he's willing to do, what our policy is, And that's our policy.
Take it or leave it.
That's the way it is.
And you have Cory Booker.
This is always amusing to me.
It's Cory Booker and Democrats claiming that President Trump can't act on Iran without coming to Congress.
Let me just point out that the Iran nuclear deal was never approved by the majority of the Senate necessary to approve treaties.
It is not, in fact, a treaty.
Let me point out that Barack Obama routinely violated his oath of office by exceeding his constitutional boundaries.
Now we've got Cory Booker saying, well, you know, President Trump can't act on Iran without coming to Congress.
Realistically speaking, the last time we declared an official war in the United States, Was back in World War II.
We haven't had an official war since then.
So Cory Booker is a little late to this bandwagon.
I'm sympathetic, by the way, to the idea the president should go to Congress for foreign policy.
I mean, that is the way the Constitution is supposed to work.
All I'm pointing out is that Democrats seem to have had a slight change of heart about the powers of the executive branch as soon as the man in the Oval Office was named Trump, not Obama.
I think there's bipartisan group of senators that spoke pretty clearly last week that this president cannot take military action against Iran without coming to Congress.
The 2001 authorization for the use of military force does not cover a military strike against Iran.
The Constitution speaks very clearly on this, that he needs to come to Congress before he engages in military action that, again, could have us tumbling towards chaos and war in that region.
Okay, now to Libya.
Now to Libya, where we went to full-scale war to achieve basically not much, except getting rid of a bad guy Qaddafi and replacing him with a bunch of terrorists, which is basically what happened in the aftermath of all of that.
The legislature ended up trying to legislate from a boat off the coast of Libya.
I don't remember all of the congressional debate about Libya.
Good times.
Anyway, in a second we'll get to immigration, where also we're seeing some mixed signals.
And then we'll get to Democrats, who are incredibly radical.
Here's the truth.
Regardless of what President Trump does at this point as president, if the Democrats move too far to the left, which they are in the process of doing, they're not winning the election.
And they are busily moving in that direction.
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Okay, in just a second, we'll get to immigration.
President Trump put ICE raids on hold over the weekend.
And then we'll get to the insane radicalism of the Democratic Party, which continues to basically pledge to hand out everything for free, everything in the universe.
It's incredible.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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In other news over the weekend, the president of the United States said that he would temporarily put deportation efforts on hold.
You remember late last week, he sort of randomly announced on Twitter that there were going to be ICE raids, which is already kind of weird.
I mean, I pointed out last week, this is the president who says that you need strategic unpredictability.
Announcing raids in advance is probably not a great strategy if you're then going to do immigration raids.
Well, President Trump pulled back from that over the weekend.
He tweeted out that, at the request of Democrats, I have delayed the illegal immigration removal process, deportation, for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the asylum and loophole problems at the southern border.
If not, deportations start.
Now, let me pause that for just a second.
That's a very odd formulation.
Either the deportations are useful or they are not useful.
Either they are good or they are not good.
The case that he has been making is that these deportations are necessary because they're going to be directed against people who already have deportation orders.
In other words, people who have overstayed visas, people who have been adjudicated by a court to be absconding, people who have committed crimes.
So saying that you are going to wait to do anything to see if Democrats will make a deal with you on the border is like, what would the deal include?
Keeping these people here?
It's very weird.
Like, he doesn't have to do this.
Either do the deportations or don't do the deportations.
But to make a contingent on the Democrats funding the border is very, is a strange policy.
He then continued along these lines and suggested that he was going to reinstate this in a couple of weeks.
According to the Washington Post, President Trump abruptly suspended his wide-ranging threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants starting on Sunday, demanding that Democrats and Republicans forge a plan to stanch the record flows of asylum-seeking families across the southern border into the United States.
Okay, then why are we negotiating over them?
Why aren't we just deporting them?
"have already been ordered to be deported." This is his old tweet.
"This means they have run from the law "and run from the courts.
"These are people that are supposed to go back home "to their home country.
"They broke the law by coming into the country "and now by staying." Okay, then why are we negotiating over them?
Why aren't we just deporting them?
Now, President Trump suggests that the deportations are gonna start in a couple of weeks.
Nancy Pelosi wrote that the delay is welcome.
She said families belong together.
So Democrats aren't going to make a deal.
Instead, they're just going to suggest that this is another act of cruelty.
Because this is one of the things that Democrats do on immigration, and it really is awful.
And that is that they facilitate cruelty, and then they suggest that the cruelty is the fault of the Republicans.
They make the cruelty happen, and then they suggest that it's the fault of Republicans.
The best evidence of this was over the weekend.
When there was a tape of a government lawyer that was going around in which the government lawyer was telling a panel of Ninth Circuit judges that it is safe and sanitary to confine immigrant children in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights.
The idea here is that the Trump administration is uniquely cruel to illegal immigrant children.
Sarah Fabian, the senior attorney at the Department of Justice online office, rather, of immigration litigation, was instantly excoriated online.
As fate would have it, the clip of her argument went viral at the same time as a new wave of reports of brutal and inhumane conditions at immigration confinement centers.
Nobody is in favor of any of this stuff, obviously.
We want better conditions on the border.
However, it is worth noting that what exactly this lawyer was arguing over was an Obama-era policy.
In other words, it was the Obama-era policy not to give these kids toothbrushes.
It was initiated then, and the Trump administration, the Office of Legal Counsel, the Department of Justice, they were arguing simply that it was time to reconsider the so-called Flores Settlement.
Ken White has a piece over at The Atlantic in which he talks about this.
He says the government's safe and sanitary argument did not arise from a new case generated by Trump administration policies.
It arose in 1985, during the Reagan administration, when a 15-year-old Salvadoran child named Jenny Lisette Flores was detained after entering the United States illegally, hoping to escape her country's vicious civil war.
Flores spent two months at a facility in California, confined with adult strangers in poor conditions and strip-searched regularly.
In July 1985, she and three other minors brought a class action against what was then called INS, challenging its policies for the care and confinement of minors.
The party settled the lawsuit in the Flores Agreement, which required that the government hold minors in facilities that are safe and sanitary, and that they be released from confinement without delay whenever possible.
Over the years, lawyers acting on behalf of minors protected by Flores have filed numerous motions asking judges to enforce it.
They argue that confining minors in these facilities are not safe and sanitary.
Ultimately, a U.S.
District Court judge ruled that the Border Patrol was violating the Flores Agreement during Obama.
In 2017, she found that the CBP failed to provide adequate food and water to minors.
She found that CBP's obligation to provide safe and sanitary conditions, including provided soap, dry towels, showers, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and ordered the Border Patrol to appoint a monitor to bring its facilities into compliance with Flores.
G's order put the government in a technical legal bind.
When a federal judge appoints an official to monitor compliance with an already existing injunction or agreement like the Flores Agreement, the government can't immediately appeal.
The government can only appeal if the judge modifies the prior injunction or order.
So the U.S.
argued that this judge altered the deal, that before it was considered safe and sanitary, now it's no longer considered safe and sanitary so they can appeal.
So it's a bad argument, right?
It's an immoral argument, but the litigation began under the Obama administration.
The litigation began there.
The Trump administration should be condemned for the argument, says Ken White, but it's wrong to think the problem can be cured with a presidential election.
Administrations for 20 years have been doing this sort of stuff.
Nonetheless, Trump gets the blame because that's the way that this works.
Meanwhile, Democrats refuse to provide the funding that would actually rectify this situation.
Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats get increasingly radical.
So they are all competing for attention at this point.
Bernie Sanders has now unleashed a new proposal.
You'll recall that Elizabeth Warren created a proposal that would fund free college education for all going forward.
Going forward in time, we would tax wealth and then we would use that money, or Wall Street transactions, we'd use that money to fund college education for everybody.
This was always stupid.
The reason it was stupid is because disproportionately the people going to college They're not lower class people.
Lower income people, rather.
They're folks who are generally middle to high income who are going to college.
And so you basically have a regressive tax that is going to people who are going to be earning money after they leave college.
Also, if you want to ensure that the price of college goes down, you don't subsidize it with taxpayer dollars.
There are two areas of American life where prices have consistently gone up since the 1970s.
One is student loans.
The other is health care.
Both are increased in cost because of government involvement.
When the government subsidizes things, the costs go up.
You have artificially increased demand.
By artificially increasing demand, you have limited the supply still further in comparison with the demand.
And that means that you're going to get increased prices.
This is basic econ 101.
It's really stupid.
It encourages people to go to college and major in stupid things that they don't need to major in.
College is not for everyone.
In fact, the path to success for a lot of smart people is not just that there are a bunch of people who go to college and they don't need to because they're going to work with their hands or they're going to be mechanics or something.
No, there are a lot of smart people who don't need to go to college because they're smart and they can just get started in business.
My business partner here at Daily Wire did not graduate college.
He went to JUCO for two years and then he dropped out.
He went to a community college and then he majored in music.
He could have stayed a musician or he could become the partner in this business and have a lot of money.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish up at Harvard.
Steve Jobs did not finish college.
There are just a lot of people who don't need to finish college because college doesn't do what it was supposed to do in the first place for a lot of folks.
There are people like my wife for whom college was useful because it finishes with her becoming a doctor.
And then there are people who don't really need to be there because they're majoring in poli sci and they're going to get a job teaching history, which they could have done without having to major in poli sci at a university and incur $120,000 of debt minimum.
Well, Bernie Sanders is now going even further than Elizabeth Warren.
He wants to propose cancelling the entire $1.6 trillion in U.S.
student loan debt, which really means $3 trillion, because he also wants to pay for everybody's college going forward.
And then there's refi of the student loan debt.
So presumably you're talking about probably $3 trillion in actual student loan debt.
So now he wants it.
And while we're at this, why not just relieve everybody's mortgage?
We'll just pay for everybody's mortgage.
All it would take is taxing everybody at a higher rate, and then we can relieve everybody's mortgage.
Great plan, guys.
This is going to go really, really well.
Free everything for everyone.
You want to win over those blue-collar voters in Ohio?
Talk about relieving student debt for a bunch of left-coasters who insist on going to college to major in lesbian dance theory.
That's definitely going to win over the middle of the country.
Speaking of such pandering, Elizabeth Warren has fought back against Bernie Sanders' radicalism, now calling for gay reparations.
I am not kidding you.
Under the Refund Equality Act, according to Amanda Prestigiacomo over at Daily Wire, same-sex couples would be able to amend their past taxes, readjusting with jointly filed tax returns, and accepting refunds from the IRS.
So in other words, a privilege.
Okay, I understand the Supreme Court declared that marriage for same-sex couples was a right.
It is not.
It's a stupid ruling.
I don't care whether same-sex couples get married on a legal level.
I'm libertarian on it.
Although my libertarianism extends to the government should not be involved in marriage, period.
This is a contractual arrangement between two people.
I'm not sure, frankly, that there should be tax benefits to getting married.
Just on a libertarian level, I think the idea that the government benefits married people at the expense of single people is pretty stupid.
Also, it happens not to be true.
The fact is that if you tax my wife's and my combined income, we end up in a higher tax bracket.
So that's not... It's never been particularly accurate, this idea that getting married provides you massive tax benefits.
In any case, her proposal is that because the Supreme Court has now ruled that same-sex marriage is a right provided by the Constitution of the United States, which is an absurd contention, That because of that, now we should go back and basically pay reparations by allowing gay married couples to file in the past, retroactively.
Well, they weren't married before, so how exactly would you get to that?
She said, the federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade.
We need to call out that discrimination and make it right.
And so, I don't even know how you would do this, because there are a lot of couples who didn't get legally married because they couldn't get legally married, and so Obergefell.
Also, how exactly do you prevent people from getting legally married simply for the tax benefits at this point?
You and your best friend.
I mean, there's literally an Adam Sandler, Kevin James comedy about this, right?
Where two guys decide to get gay married for the tax benefits.
This is so absurd.
Also, if we're going to point out income differentials, Gay couples, gay male couples particularly, have a higher joint income than any other couples in America by statistics.
So now you're paying reparations to couples that make more money than any of the other couples by sexual orientation.
All of this is ridiculous.
At this point, frankly, Elizabeth Warren should just come out for reparations based on you voting for her.
Basically, you vote for Elizabeth Warren and she will provide you reparations from somebody else's pocket.
That's the direction that we are now moving.
Cory Booker, meanwhile, moving radically, too.
He says he's not going to rule out meeting with Louis Farrakhan because this is where we are in American life.
That Louis Farrakhan, an open, unrepentant, vicious, anti-Semitic piece of crap, that guy is still receiving plaudits from people like Cory Booker because the woke intersectional crowd insists upon it.
Here's Senator Cory Booker saying this. - Excuse me, but you're not supposed to be fair. - I am, I am. - My question was, would you be willing to have an audience with him concerning that Senate matter?
You know, I have met, I live in Newark, so we have famous Mosque 25, we have Nation of Islam there.
As mayor, I met with lots of folks.
I've heard Minister Farrakhan's speeches for a lot of my life, so I don't feel like I need to do that, but I'm not one of these people that says I wouldn't sit down with anybody here what they have to say.
But I live on a neighborhood where I'm getting guys on the streets offering and selling his works.
I'm very familiar with Minister Louis Farrakhan. - So not only is he very familiar, he will still meet with him.
Like the guy who calls Jews termites.
They take anti-Semitism so seriously inside this Democratic Party.
You know, calling detention centers at the border concentration camps and internment centers and making light of meeting with Farrakhan.
What delights these folks are.
This is not the way to win a national election, so good luck with that.
Time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, Yoram Hazoni, who is one of my favorite philosophers, really an interesting dude.
He's written a book I've recommended before called The Virtue of Nationalism.
He has an older book called The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture that really is interesting.
His basic premise is that there is indeed philosophy in Hebrew Scripture in the Old Testament, as Christians put it.
That it is not just a book of revelation, that we should approach it as a book with something to say.
Now, I totally agree with this.
I have an entire chapter in my book, The Right Side of History, that is about, effectively, the philosophy of Hebrew scripture.
Yoram Hazoni does this in a very methodical fashion.
He says that there's been this tendency in philosophy to separate off So-called revelatory books like the Bible from philosophy.
And he points out that if you read Plato, there are times in Plato where Plato talks about hearing voices.
Why is that not considered revelatory scripture?
Why is it that Parmenides is talking about receiving inspiration from on high?
It's not revelatory.
He says that's an artificial distinction that in the ancient world, people very often in accessing their reason would suggest that they were speaking with God.
That that was sort of godly reason that had descended upon them.
So why exactly aren't we looking at the Hebrew Bible for moral lessons that can be sussed out by reason?
It's a really interesting book.
I think Yoram is a really interesting thinker.
Go check out The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.
A little expensive on Amazon, but worth it.
Yoram Hazoni's book from 2012.
Really good stuff.
Okay, time for a bevy of things that I hate.
All righty, so Trump was accused last week of rape.
He was accused last week of rape by a gossip columnist.
She's been for years a gossip columnist named E. Jane Carroll.
She accused President Trump of attempting to rape her in a changing room at Bergdorf Goodman's department store in the mid-1990s.
So, her story was in the middle of a book where she also accused Les Moonves of sexually assaulting her and a bevy of other men of sexually assaulting her.
Now, listen, I think that all allegations of rape should be taken seriously.
I do not, however, think that all allegations of rape are equally credible.
Her original story, which was in an interview with New York Magazine, she says that President Trump attacked her after the pair met in a chance encounter while shopping at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City.
Carol says that Trump met her She was 52 at the time.
Trump met her, and then urged her to try on lingerie shopping with him.
She acceded to his request.
He urged her to try on some lingerie, and then she laughingly implied he should try on the lingerie.
And then they went into a changing room together, or into the changing area.
He pushed her into a changing room, pinned her arms to her side, and then sexually assaulted her.
She says that she then fought off Trump and escaped.
Now, there are several questions about this that should be asked, because if this were a rape prosecution, then you would have to ask the questions.
Questions would include, was there anybody else around?
Was there any tape of this?
Apparently there's no tape of it.
Is there any verifying detail?
Was she physically damaged by this?
People have been comparing it to Juanita Broderick.
Juanita Broderick had a friend who, at the time, she showed her torn panties, her bruises, like the whole deal.
Also, the timing of the revelation of this story is a little bit suspicious in the sense that this lady did not say anything in 2016.
Donald Trump was one of the most famous men in America, even in the 1990s.
She was already a gossip columnist for a major New York publication.
So this is not You know, she couldn't speak truth to power in the 90s.
She certainly could.
She could have said something in 2016 when all of these allegations were coming out about Trump.
Then she didn't.
She's coming out with this the week before her book comes out.
The week before her book comes out.
Now, very often, one of the claims that's made about this sort of stuff is, why would a woman say this stuff if she has nothing to gain?
In many cases, that's true.
When you're coming out with a book about it, and you waited to say anything about it until the book comes out, That has to raise some red flags.
Her behavior during interviews also raises red flags.
Not all allegations are equally credible.
Julie Swetnick's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh were on their face significantly less credible than the allegations that were made by Christine Blasey Ford And even those allegations had no supporting detail.
And so you couldn't end somebody's career or life based on those allegations.
So here is E. Jean Carroll.
She's now doing interviews on all the media.
And she's making very, very weird statements.
I mean, weird statements.
So she was asked specifically about why she was not in favor of prosecuting President Trump.
There's no statute of limitations on rape in New York, I believe.
So why isn't she in favor of pushing for prosecution?
Her response leaves something to be desired.
So I just, Lawrence, I wish I had said, I wish I said, I'll tell you my age if you show me your tax returns.
Yeah, it would have been helpful.
So that is a response to, he asked her age, supposedly, and she said that she was in her 50s or something.
And she says, well, I wish I had asked for his tax returns.
Like, that's what's on your mind right now?
Allegedly, he raped you.
Allegedly he raped you and you're talking about asking for tax returns?
What?
And then it gets weirder.
Would you consider bringing a rape charge against Donald Trump for this?
No.
Why not?
I would find it disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection.
They're young women, you know, and mine was three minutes.
I'm a mature woman.
I can handle it.
I can keep going.
You know, my life has gone on.
I'm a happy woman.
Okay.
You know what?
Decide for yourselves.
Decide for yourselves on the credibility of this person.
Decide for yourself.
I'm sorry.
You were, according to her, she was forcibly raped in a dressing room.
And now she doesn't want to bring charges.
She just wants to talk about it on national TV because she's afraid that it would distract from people being raped around the clock on the border.
Okay.
I mean, I do find it interesting that this story disappeared basically from mainstream media over the weekend, that on Friday it was one of the bigger stories in the country by the time we finished our radio show.
And by Monday, not a lot of coverage of this.
Might it have something to do with the fact that this woman being interviewed does not, she does not reek of credibility?
Her story does not reek of credibility.
Again, rape allegations should be taken seriously, absent any other evidence other than this woman's account.
And the president, of course, has denied it, says he doesn't know her.
But in the absence of any other evidence, she hasn't brought forward even the people she spoke to contemporaneously.
I don't know how seriously you can take something like this, given her behavior during... I mean, all we have to judge is her behavior.
That's all.
So if we have to judge, as the public, the credibility of a story, obviously you have to judge the credibility of the speaker.
Not all speakers are equally credible.
All this seems fairly logical.
So maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.
I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows.
Except for Trump and this woman.
All you can do is judge based on the evidence in front of you, just decide for yourself.
Okay.
Other things that I hate.
So, everything is stupid.
Lillian Gish, one of the more famous actresses in American history.
And the model, the very model of a feminist woman.
Well, she has now been removed, her name, from a campus theater.
Why?
Well, because she was in D.W.
Griffith's Birth of a Nation.
So she starred in the 1915 silent film, which is a vicious, racist, awful film, aired, by the way, by Woodrow Wilson at the White House, because Woodrow Wilson was the worst president in American history.
He was a garbage, terrible human being.
His students at Bowling Green requested the change.
And after a study, it was agreed to change the name.
Now, a bunch of Hollywood stars, including James Earl Jones, Helen Mirren, and Martin Scorsese, have released an open letter calling for Bowling Green to retain Agish's name.
She was from Ohio.
They point out that D.W.
Griffith's film takes an indefensible racist approach to the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, but as even the University admits, Lillian was no racist.
Her work in many films, such as Griffith's own Intolerance, a dazzling four-part overview of world history in which she plays the symbolic mother figure rocking the cradle of humanity and tolerance, The Broken Blossoms, an interracial drama.
The 1955 masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, in which she plays a protector of endangered children.
The 67 film of Graham Greene's The Comedians, in which she challenges Haiti's dreaded secret police.
So the idea is if she played a part in a movie and the movie is racist, therefore they're going to remove her name from things.
That's where we are.
Is this making America any better?
Speaking of things that you wonder if it makes America any better, there are a bunch of schools that are named after Robert E. Lee.
Now, Robert E. Lee's legacy has come up for a lot of debate recently, I think fairly.
There's some new accounts, new histories written about Robert E. Lee, talking about how he treated his slaves specifically, how brutal he was in all of this, what he really was, whether he had been kind of, whether he'd been painted with the sepia Afterglow, because of the attempt to repaint a level of heroism in the Civil War that didn't exist in the cause.
Well, schools named after Robert E. Lee are now trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that changing the signage cost them a lot of money.
So they are now looking to pick new Lees to be named after.
Unintended consequences, everybody.
Now, here's the thing.
You could just name all these schools after Richard Henry Lee, who was one of the founding fathers and the sponsor of the resolution in Congress that led to the Declaration of Independence.
It was a resolution suggesting that the colonies hereby ought to be independent.
So Richard Henry Lee, an actual founding father, member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.
He presided over the first confederation, meaning before continental Congress was formed.
You could name him after Richard Henry Lee, but I guess that wouldn't be woke enough.
I'm not sure.
I believe he held slaves, so that's not woke enough.
So I think Bruce Lee is probably the best thing to do.
So we'll just have a bunch of Bruce Lee schools all over America, which, frankly, is kind of hilarious.
This is where we have moved.
OK, so we will be back here a little bit later today with a couple additional hours of content.
We will see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show, Representative Ilhan Omar is accused now of marrying her brother in order to skirt our immigration laws.
A very bizarre, weird situation, but if it's true, she committed a serious crime.
Is it true though?
Well, we'll take a look at the evidence and you decide.
Also, speaking of looking at evidence, President Trump is accused again of sexual assault,
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