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Sept. 26, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:41:30

Daily Wire Backstage: Ukraine In The Membrane

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	Great news, folks.
	In case you missed it, the latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, Ukraine in the Membrane Edition, is here.
	Find out if Trump and Biden can survive their Ukraine scandals, how the 2020 election is shaping up, and much, much more.
	It's a real good time.
	Enjoy.
	Ah!
	Ah!
	Oh, Ukrainian laugh.
	Ukrainian laugh.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage Ukraine in the Membrane Edition.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as the boss of everyone except Ben.
	We're glad you tuned in.
	Can Donald Trump and Joe Biden survive their Ukraine scandals?
	Will the Dems impeach?
	Does Liz Warren's poll surge mean that she has become a 1 in 1,024th chance of winning the presidency?
	Is the rap reference in the show title tonight, Lost on Ben?
	Join me tonight as we explore these important issues.
	And here to help me do so, the one and only Ben Shapiro, the one and only Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles.
	Wait a minute, someone is actually missing.
	I mean, there's usually a four-man, but one dog show.
	Oh!
	Hey, buddy.
	There he is.
	There's the chief executive dog.
	That is the first doggy smoking jacket.
	There's the dog king himself.
	The dog king.
	Lowercase d, lowercase k.
	The show's getting more toxically masculine.
	Wow.
	Also with us, as ever, the lovely Elisha Krause via satellite.
	Elisha, how can fans get their questions in tonight?
	You know, to combat that toxic masculinity that is prevalent on this show, per Ben's mention, I am here to ask amazing questions from our subscribers to you guys.
	So, if you're a subscriber watching at home or, I don't know, on a plane train or in an automobile, hopefully not behind the wheel, be sure to go to thedailywire.com, click on Backstage, and type your question into the chat box below the video.
	We will be checking, some amazing producers and I are in here checking those questions, and we'll be tossing them to the guys throughout the night.
	We are back to only subscribers getting to ask the questions.
	So if you are not a subscriber, you should become one tonight to get those questions in.
	Yeah, you can head over to dailywire.com to become a subscriber, and you'll notice that maybe things look a little different when you get over to the website.
	We got some new curtains, we cleaned the carpet, we rearranged the furniture, and we launched the brand new dailywire.com, completely new and improved website.
	Today's the first day, so some of the features are still rolling out and will keep rolling out over the next 48 or 72 hours.
	But one of the things that we're really excited about is a new membership tier, which will be going live over the next few days called All Access, where we're gonna have a discussion feature where we can all log in and do almost like a Reddit-style AMA-type engagement with our Daily Wire subscribers where we can, in real time, interact with them.
	And each of the four of us will be doing that And over time, we're going to integrate some of our writers into the process, too.
	So it'll be a lot more opportunity for us to actually Engage directly with the people who make it possible for us to do this show, which are our premium subscribers.
	Sounds awesome.
	More work, less pay.
	I quit.
	You guys hate the fans so much.
	Oh, I love the fans.
	I hate you guys.
	So, lots going on in the news.
	And we weren't originally scheduled to do the show tonight.
	We're actually going to do it next week.
	And then it became, oh my god, the biggest news day of 2019.
	Impeachment Gates 2019.
	And it's solid stuff, guys.
	So, this week's been shit so far.
	I mean, let's just be real about this.
	I've been having a great time.
	So, why don't we begin with a little bit of background.
	Who wants to sum up what happened here?
	Knowles, you talk.
	Well, there was, and this is the only source I have to go on as the president, the most perfect phone call that ever occurred Since Alexander Graham Bell was born, and that was between the president of Ukraine and the president of the United States, Donald Trump.
	This we'd heard for a week now through media leaks and reports.
	This was it.
	This was the end of the game for Donald Trump.
	It was all over.
	They were going to start an impeachment inquiry for it.
	President Trump, in a rare move, releases the transcript of the phone call, which raises a whole slew of other questions.
	So now we can read the transcript.
	We've got it today.
	Doesn't matter.
	The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has officially, formally declared an impeachment inquiry.
	And nobody really knows what that means.
	You know, when she's formal.
	It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. - I'm gonna say.
	I declare impeachment inquiry.
	No impeachment is going on yet.
	Before this transcript was released.
	Yes.
	So she had no idea what she was talking about.
	So when I woke up this morning, admittedly later than the rest of you, because I barely have a job, I I went to my favorite little breakfast restaurant and I was enjoying a nice...
	Well, I'll be honest, I eat chili for breakfast.
	I'm from Texas.
	I'm weird.
	I just like to eat chili for breakfast.
	And CNN was on and the chyron for the entire hour that I was in my favorite breakfast restaurant said...
	Transcript reveals President pushed Ukraine to investigate Biden.
	And I thought, imagine back to the days of yesteryear when you had men like Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings flying the big desks, right?
	And I'm almost positive that at that time the Chiron would have said, transcript reveals President asked Ukraine to investigate Biden.
	But the word asked, which is neutral and accurate, has been replaced in today's journalism with pushed.
	Which is editorializing, right?
	Right, because then it begs the question, pushed with what?
	That's correct.
	And the answer is pushed with military aid.
	Oh, look, it's quid pro quo.
	Oh, impeachable.
	That's right.
	So the whole thing's a mess.
	The backstory to the backstory there is, of course, that President Trump is very concerned with the Joe Biden-Hunter Biden allegations circa 2016, in which Hunter Biden was working for a company called Burisma on the basis of his long history of being completely useless over the course of his life and being Joe Biden's son.
	And knowing nothing about gas.
	I mean, really, he doesn't know anything about anything.
	He had been ousted from the Navy for drug use.
	He had serious problems, right?
	This is a guy who has a very checkered history.
	And he's being paid $50,000 per month to sit on the board of this company, Burisma.
	$50,000 per month?
	Yeah.
	Per month.
	How many months?
	That, I think all of them.
	All of the months?
	I think all the months.
	That analyzes roughly $600,000.
	No one has been paid this richly for doing so little until Michael Moles.
	You think we pay Michael Knowles?
	My day just got way better.
	In any case, so Joe Biden was the vice president at the time.
	He's flying around with Hunter Biden.
	There are allegations about some of their relationships in China.
	But Hunter Biden is on the board of this company, Burisma.
	There is a prosecutor in Ukraine.
	His name is Viktor Shokin.
	And Viktor Shokin is widely believed to be corrupt by the EU, by the IMF, by the Obama administration.
	And he's investigating Burisma and then maybe not investigating Burisma.
	And at a certain point, Joe Biden openly threatens and talks about this, openly threatens to withdraw $1 billion in American loan guarantees unless Shokin is ousted.
	Now, people on the right make the connection, okay, maybe the reason why he's doing that is because Shokin was investigating Burisma.
	And the media basically said, no, no, no, no, no, it's not about that.
	He just, everybody wanted him out and Biden was in charge.
	Regardless of whether there was an actual corrupt...
	It's obviously a conflict of interest.
	I mean, there's no way that Biden has been leading that up.
	Anyway, so Trump wants an investigation into that.
	The allegation again, Joe Biden was leveraging American taxpayer dollars for his own personal benefit.
	And he does this, allegedly, by leveraging American taxpayer dollars for his own personal budget.
	That's the allegation.
	So the allegation is by the Democrats and by the media that President Trump withheld $400 million in Ukrainian aid in order to force them to investigate his chief political rival at this point, Joe Biden.
	Because there was no money going to the Cherokee tribe to investigate Elizabeth Warren.
	Because we've broken every treaty we have historically.
	What I want to know is when would Ukraine ordinarily have expected to receive this military aid and how long...
	Did they not receive it after?
	They were receiving it regularly.
	I don't know if that was monthly or quarterly, but they were receiving it regularly for the first couple years of the Trump administration.
	So that in and of itself was a change, right?
	So the Obama administration had not provided this sort of aid to Ukraine.
	They had just been giving them MREs, basically.
	And Ukraine was like, well, we need some weapons to fight off the Russian insurgents who are trying to murder us.
	And Obama was like, nope.
	And so Trump comes in, that changes, now we're providing them with Javelin missiles, for example.
	And in July, mid-July, so here...
	I'm going to give you the Democrats' point of view, and then we can start working on debunking it or talking about what's wrong with it or where it's lacking.
	So I want to build up the strongest case for the Democrats, and then we can talk about the transcript and all that, because we still like being honest.
	See, we're here on the show.
	We enjoy honesty.
	It's a thing.
	I know.
	Media matters.
	It's a thing.
	So in any case, the basic timeline is this.
	In mid-July, President Trump tells the head of the Office of Management and Budget personally, apparently, Mick Mulvaney, he wants to stop the aid to Ukraine.
	A week later, he has this phone call with Zelensky, and that's what this transcript is that we're going to go through.
	A few weeks after that, he still has not opened up aid to Ukraine, and people are starting to ask questions like, why the hell are we not providing the aid to Ukraine?
	In the beginning of September, you have the Washington Post runs a story September 5th about Ukraine aid being held up.
	September 9th, there is this whistleblower complaint.
	So somebody in the intelligence community files a whistleblower complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, saying that something untoward has gone on.
	They've heard a promise on a call.
	It's all secondhand, as we learn.
	But the notice goes to the inspector general.
	The inspector general says, yes, this is urgent, which means it has to now be reported to Congress.
	The director of national intelligence steps in and says, well, Whatever the content is, it doesn't fulfill the statutory requirements of urgent, so it can't be turned over.
	So September 9th is when Congress finds out that this thing even exists.
	Two days later, Trump releases the aid.
	So the Democratic case is he was holding up the aid because he wanted to leverage the Ukrainians.
	And then as soon as it became public, he let the aid go because he didn't want the blowback, right?
	That's their case.
	And the second part of their case is...
	Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney, has been spending the last two years basically going in and out of Ukraine investigating this Biden stuff.
	And then Rudy being literally the worst spokesperson for anyone in the history of mankind.
	I mean, this guy makes Sean Spicer look like Jay Carney.
	It's unbelievable.
	And he was the greatest mayor of New York, only maybe tied with LaGuardia.
	But who thought that he would be a good lawyer on somebody else's behalf?
	Rudy Giuliani is Donald Trump.
	Could Donald Trump represent somebody else?
	It's not possible.
	Rudy Giuliani could never represent anybody else.
	That's not a thing.
	So Rudy Giuliani, who appears on television only to make problems for the president, apparently, he goes on TV and he just blurts out.
	So, you know, the reason that I was over in Ukraine is because the State Department sent me.
	He sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders.
	I don't want to do the lisp because it's kind of insulting.
	They're both New Yorkers.
	But in any case, Rudy overtly spills that the State Department sends him.
	So I'm not sure what he thought he was clearing up there, but why is the State Department sending the president's personal lawyer to Ukraine to investigate Ukraine?
	Like, we have people who work in Ukraine called ambassadors.
	And also their entire staff.
	So that's weird.
	Okay, so that's the Democratic case.
	And they say the capper is this transcript.
	Trump reveals the transcript.
	Trump says it shows there's no quid pro quo.
	The entire Democratic Party says it does show a quid pro quo.
	So that brings us up to date.
	So now, do we want to go through the transcript or do we want to start breaking down the timeline?
	No, I do want to go through the transcript, but I have a couple questions about the timeline.
	One, So Trump says, I want you to withhold the aid.
	Two weeks later, he has the call with the president of Ukraine.
	But ostensibly, the call with the president of Ukraine is in response to these elections in Ukraine, correct?
	Right.
	For the Ukrainian parliament?
	Right.
	So Zelensky was elected a little bit earlier this year, but has he been in office like six months?
	Not very long.
	So this is Trump's first official phone call with Zelensky.
	And so again, the real question is why the aid was being withheld from Ukraine.
	Trump has given a couple of reasons.
	But there were parliament elections more recently.
	No, it was parliamentary elections.
	Oh, yes, you're right.
	He was elected president and then he won parliamentary majority.
	And I think this was actually when the phone call opens up, they kind of joke about this.
	And he says, you only call me when I win things.
	And it's all this kind of flattery back and forth.
	So all of this is, the real question is, why, and where this is going to end up is, why did Trump not just say okay to the aide from Ukraine?
	So the question that I'm asking, I just want to get to is, were the parliamentary elections between Trump saying withhold the aide and this telephone call?
	No.
	The parliamentary elections were before it.
	They were before it?
	I believe.
	I'd have to check it.
	I don't know the answer to that.
	So there is no world where Trump was saying, hold back the aid until we know if good guys are running the country.
	Yeah, Trump hasn't even made that argument.
	So Trump's two arguments have been the Europeans aren't paying their fair share, which he does say in the transcript.
	And also that he is worried about generalized corruption, which is his other case.
	So that's where things stand.
	So then we get to...
	And I do think that this is why the transcript, I think, will be the beginning of this and not the end.
	I don't think the transcript...
	I think even if you are very much inclined to believe President Trump's account of this, I think that in order for Trump to be, quote-unquote, exonerated, the way he's saying exonerated, we need to have some explanation of why the aid to Ukraine went away.
	And I think we have to have some sort of explanation as to why Rudy Giuliani was being sent by the State Department to Ukraine.
	I mean, those seem like reasonable questions to me.
	Now, does that mean that the Democrats have proved impeachment just with all of this?
	No, this is all speculative.
	It's all a timeline that they've put together.
	And most importantly, The transcript, in my opinion, doesn't do what either side says it does.
	So you're seeing the Trump team saying, totally exonerates him.
	It's a great phone call, the best phone call, fantastic, unbelievable.
	And then you have the Democrats saying, this transcript isn't in and of itself the quid pro quo.
	It is impeachable.
	It is obvious that he's pressuring Ukraine using military aid.
	So let's stick into the transcript.
	But before we do, let's talk about something that does do exactly what it says it's going to do.
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	Absolutely.
	Okay, so...
	The transcript.
	How do you guys want to go through the transcript?
	So, I'll give you my overall take on the transcript, because if you want to actually hear the entire transcript, you can listen to my podcast this morning where I literally read it word for word.
	Really?
	Yeah, because I feel like with important documents...
	I did this with the Mueller report, too.
	I mean, I really read a lot of it.
	I think it's important that people hear the primary source.
	I read through the Star Report every Christmas.
	It's good times.
	It's weird.
	It's weird.
	It's like to sit around as a family, you know?
	Yeah, I know.
	Do our civic duty.
	Do our civic duty.
	Okay, I'm not even going to go here.
	This is not going well.
	Anyway, so my overall take on this conversation...
	Is that this conversation seemed to me not like the president engaging in a quid pro quo, I'm going to withhold your military aid unless you investigate Joe Biden.
	It sounds like Zelensky, President Vladimir Zelensky, definitely understands the conversation to be that.
	Meaning that Zelensky is going through this entire conversation thinking to himself, my military aid has been withdrawn.
	What do I need to do to massage this dude's buttocks so I can get what I need?
	And everything he says is geared toward that.
	He starts off, and the first thing that he says...
	He says, we worked a lot, but I would like to confess to you, I had an opportunity to learn from you.
	We used quite a few of your skills and knowledge, and we're able to use it as example for our elections.
	And yes, it is true that these were unique elections.
	And he keeps telling you about how, he keeps telling Trump about how wonderful he is.
	The next thing he says, he says, To tell you the truth, we're trying to work hard.
	We want to drain the swamp here in our country.
	Everything he's doing is directed at the Kim Jong-un model of diplomacy, which is like, if I just massage this guy, maybe he'll give me what I want.
	Now, Trump seems to completely miss this.
	Because he's used to people fawning over him all the time.
	So Zelensky is spending the entire call going, what do I have to do to get what I want from you?
	And Trump's like, you know who's called you, Rudy?
	I like Rudy.
	The whole call is like that.
	Because he goes on.
	Importantly, though, speaking of Rudy, one of the great defenses of your read on this is that it's not Trump who brings up Rudy.
	Exactly.
	It's not Trump who says, I want to send Rudy over here.
	It's Zelensky who says, and you know who we really like over here.
	Rudy Giuliani!
	Rudy's a nice guy, I guess.
	And then Trump's immediate response to that is not, anybody to help him, there goes your military.
	It's like, you're right, I do like Rudy.
	And sometimes we like to go fishing together.
	I mean, that's the whole conversation.
	It's like talking to my three-year-old.
	I'm trying to convince my three-year-old to eat his dinner.
	And then I'll say, you know, you should eat your dinner because it makes you healthy, so you'll be strong.
	You know, like an elephant.
	And he'll be like, I like elephants.
	Elephants are really great.
	Like, that's this conversation.
	Zelensky's like, you know what?
	Here are all the things I want to give you.
	You give me what I want.
	And Trump's like...
	Let's talk about Rudy.
	I like Rudy.
	The best part is when Zelensky even says, I stayed at Trump Tower once.
	He does.
	He says that at the end, right?
	At the end, he's still trying to go, like, I've tried everything here.
	This guy does not get it.
	I stayed at Trump Tower.
	And he's like, it's great, isn't it?
	Very shiny.
	And, like, that's the whole conversation.
	In the transcript, do they ever directly talk about the military aid?
	So, yes.
	But it is not Trump.
	So, Trump...
	Okay, so here's how it goes.
	Zelensky says that they're trying to drain the swamp and you teach us and all of this.
	And then Trump says, it's very nice of you to say that.
	I will say we do a lot for Ukraine.
	Then he talks about the military aid, but he never mentions what he wants Zelensky to do.
	He says, you guys should get more military aid from the surrounding countries, right?
	Europe is not paying its fair share.
	So when Trump has said that that is his excuse for holding back the aid, that part's true, right?
	He said that in this exact...
	The very first thing he said, and that's consistent with Trump With what he said, right?
	With what he said for the last four years.
	With NATO, with everything, right?
	This is very consistent.
	No one's paying their fair share.
	He's like the Bernie Sanders of international politics.
	Everybody's got to pay their fair share.
	But he's kind of right.
	So Zelensky then goes on and he starts talking about how...
	Then Zelensky brings up the military aid, right?
	Zelensky says, we're ready to continue to cooperate for the next step.
	Specifically, we're almost ready to buy more javelins from the United States for defensive purposes.
	And here is the part that the media are seizing on and the Democrats, right?
	So Zelensky mentions the javelins, the javelin missiles.
	And Trump's next line is, I would like for you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.
	Here's where the media are being supremely dishonest.
	Because if you've been watching the media today, they have the hardest working ellipses in media.
	So what they do is they go from, I would like for you to do us a favor, dot, dot, dot.
	Hey guys, go to the next page.
	All the way to the top paragraph, about six lines down.
	There's a lot of talk about Biden's son.
	So they skip from right here.
	All the way down.
	Basically one full page.
	One full page of the transcript.
	So Trump's initial thing is, you know, if you're going to talk about military aid, I want you basically to investigate corruption.
	And that would mean investigating Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
	Now, what he brings up there doesn't make any sense.
	He's talking about crowd strike and supposedly that crowd strike somehow buried Hillary's servers and all that.
	That's what the reference is to because Trump only remembers the stuff he wants to remember.
	He's talking about the election.
	But he's talking about the election.
	He's not talking about Joe Biden.
	He's not threatening anything about Joe Biden.
	So the only connection made between the military aid and anything so far is, we'd like for you to investigate your country's role in meddling In the 2016 election.
	And then...
	Which is actually interesting because...
	That is a legitimate thing for Trump to ask about.
	That's fully legitimate, right?
	And Democrats have done the same thing, right?
	They've said that if Ukraine was not going to investigate Paul Manafort, for example, in 2016, that maybe their age would be withdrawn.
	So that's not illegitimate to say it's in the interest of the United States to know what Ukraine did during the 2016 election.
	We want you guys to get to the bottom of that, right?
	That's legitimate.
	Then Zelensky brings up Giuliani.
	Then Zelensky is the one who's like, okay, this is going nowhere.
	I want to, again, show the president what a friendly dude I am.
	And so he starts talking about all of this very important.
	He talks about recalling the ambassador because the ambassador allegedly had been working with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a person from the DNC to get dirt on Manafort and the Trump campaign during 2016.
	He says, we recalled the ambassador.
	Also, love Giuliani.
	He's great.
	And he starts talking about how much he loves Rudy Giuliani.
	No offense to Pavel for my awful, awful issue.
	He says, I will tell you personally, one of my assistants spoke with Mr.
	Giuliani just recently.
	We are very hoping that Mr.
	Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine.
	And then he goes on and on about how much he likes Giuliani.
	And he keeps bringing up the aid, right?
	He says, I love this.
	This is one of my favorite sentences in the whole thing, right?
	It's poetic.
	He says, I also wanted to tell you we are friends.
	We are great friends.
	He's like telling Trump how good friends they are, how they're going to like...
	Go to, I don't know, brothels together or something.
	And Trump's response to all of this is, okay, now that you bring up Giuliani, I'm just going to talk about, like, it's free association with Trump.
	All conversations are free association with Trump.
	So he mentions Giuliani, and Trump goes, Giuliani's a highly respected man.
	I heard you had a prosecutor who was really good.
	I sent Julianne over there to investigate the Biden thing.
	And now we're on to Biden.
	But that's a page removed from the actual military aid stuff.
	And the Biden stuff is like a page and a half removed from the actual military aid stuff.
	And then he talks about Joe Biden and investigating the Bidens.
	And Zelensky says that he is going to appoint a good new prosecutor who's not as bad as the old prosecutor.
	And he says that he's removed the ambassador.
	Trump keeps going back to, I'm going to have Giuliani give you a call, and you like Giuliani, and I like Giuliani, and all this stuff.
	At no point for the rest of the conversation does Trump actually go back to foreign aid.
	No, you actually get to my favorite line in the entire thing here at the end, which is President Zelensky talking about meeting up with President Trump in Poland, and he says...
	After that, it may be a very good idea for you to travel to Ukraine.
	We can either take my plane and go to Ukraine, or we can take your plane, which is probably a nicer plane than that.
	That's a genuinely funny line.
	Again, the whole thing here is Zelensky.
	Reading this the way that, if you were in Ukraine, you would read politics.
	Which is, you gotta bribe people in Ukraine.
	Like, Ukraine has a serious corruption problem.
	Like, a really, really serious corruption problem.
	Almost all countries, except ours, have serious corruption.
	This is right.
	I mean, that's why when people say American politics is corrupt, it's like, you should be in other places.
	For like, a second.
	But Zelensky is reading this conversation with Trump like, okay, he removed the military aid.
	"What do I have to bribe this guy?" And Trump is kind of like, do do do do do do do do do do.
	Like he's just kind of wandering around.
	I have this instinct to, like, just sit here quietly for this entire show because my opinion about this story is different than almost everybody else's.
	I know you're going to beat the crap out of me when I tell you what I'm doing.
	Let's do this thing.
	Bring it, Drew.
	Hold on.
	I'm going to force you.
	I'm going to...
	This is me just speculating as to what Drew's opinion...
	The treaty of Westphalia.
	Yeah.
	I mentioned the Treaty.
	Just for you, I mentioned it on my show today.
	I appreciate it.
	I totally didn't listen to your show.
	No, of course not.
	I thought, maybe if I mention the Treaty of Westphalia, he'll finally listen to it.
	No.
	My wife tries that to you.
	I suspect that Drew's take is something along the lines of...
	Donald Trump is the President of the United States, and the President of the United States has a responsibility, before giving aid to another country, he has a responsibility to try to root out corruption.
	Nope, nope, sorry.
	Elizabeth Warren's the worst, I don't care.
	It's much worse.
	Right, it's Elizabeth Warren, it's going to be President, I don't care.
	We've got to hear it.
	I think this story is crap.
	I think it is utter crap.
	I think it's a non-story.
	I don't think it's going anywhere.
	If it does go anywhere, I think it's going to blow up in the Democrats' face.
	I think the most obvious thing that's going to happen is it's going to end Joe Biden's bid for the presidency.
	And I can't even believe, I can't even believe that people are allowing the news media to get away with this.
	For two and a half years, for two and a half years, they told us absolute lies about what the president did with Russia.
	Just lies.
	Just lies.
	And that was the news.
	And remember, it was the walls are closing in.
	This is the tipping point.
	It's over.
	And then he comes out and Mueller's coming.
	I don't know.
	I don't know what happened, but it wasn't anything.
	Trump is off the hook.
	And suddenly they come up with this garbage.
	And I'll get back to why it's garbage in a minute.
	And people go like, oh, well, this time, this time they must be really telling the truth.
	You know, Mickey, I think I think this time.
	And I just think you've got to be kidding me.
	And you've got to forget about Stormy Daniels.
	You've got to stop Michael Avenatti.
	I think that's how the American public will see it.
	So I think that you are right, that in the view of the American public, they will say that Democrats have been going after Trump, hammer and tongs on Ukraine, on Russia for two years.
	And then they just shifted the scope slightly to the West, and then they were like, Ukraine.
	And if Ukraine fails, they're going to be like, Latvia.
	We're going to end up in France.
	On Morning Joe today, that guy, the former governor of Massachusetts Weld, is that his name?
	He said, this is treason, he should get the death penalty.
	We're not over the top now.
	Hey, he's a real conservative.
	He's a conserving conservative.
	I was talking to my mom about this last night, and she's like, can you sum up this scandal for me?
	I started to do it in four sentences, and she's like, it's crap.
	And I was like, well, you know, can I explain it?
	And she's like, I don't really care.
	And I feel like that's most important.
	What I want to hear is...
	Explain.
	Why do you think that it's nothing?
	Not why do you think they're corrupt.
	Right.
	That's a completely different argument.
	Absolutely.
	I get you.
	I get you.
	The reason I think it's nothing is this.
	The president has a right to say just about anything he wants to a foreign leader when he's in conversation.
	When I read this, what I read, I don't even, I mean, you may be right.
	I think the guy from the Ukraine, I keep calling it the Ukraine, they tell me not to.
	The guy from Ukraine, you know, is looking around, he's buttering him up.
	But that's probably what all his conversations with foreign leaders are.
	I mean, I totally agree with that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And so the guy constitutionally has a right to run foreign policy.
	He has a right to talk to presidents privately without everything he says being exposed.
	And he's Donald Trump.
	We all know he runs off of the mouth and he thinks out loud and he doesn't half the time know what he's saying.
	He's certainly the idea that he is organized enough to ram these guys to get investigation of Joe Biden.
	I think he'd prefer to run against Joe Biden than Elizabeth Warren.
	She's a much more disciplined candidate.
	She's not a dithering old man like Biden is.
	I just think it's a ridiculous story.
	I think that you can blow up anything, especially with a guy like Trump, who steps on his own tongue a lot.
	But with any president, you can blow up anything into a big deal.
	And finally, the final thing about this is...
	Impeachment is bad, okay?
	We elect the president.
	The House of Representatives of the Senate, they don't elect the president.
	It's our choice.
	They don't get to throw him out unless he really does something awful.
	That this even comes close to awful.
	Anything that for them to negate an election, which they've been now trying to do for almost three years, It's absurd.
	And the people will make them pay.
	And you know, the thing about it is, we all know there's the Trump people, and we all know there's the left-wing people.
	We all know they're going to take their sides.
	But the people in the middle have got to be looking at this, I think.
	You know, Americans are pretty sensible.
	And the people in the middle have got to be looking at this and saying, Are you kidding me?
	Give me a break.
	And we also know Kimberly Strassel did a great little tweet thread on this today.
	She was great.
	And she is just terrific generally.
	But we do know, speaking of Trump saying things that aren't going to happen and kind of speaking loosely, he says that he's going to have Barr call Zelensky, the Attorney General call the head of Ukraine, Doesn't happen.
	It just simply doesn't happen.
	Because in Trump's head, I have a lawyer.
	His name is Giuliani.
	I have another lawyer.
	His name is Barr.
	Literally, it does not cross his mind that one is his personal attorney.
	Right.
	The other thing is, it's not like this call happened yesterday.
	This call happened July 24th, July 25th.
	So after this, they get the complaint from the whistleblower, so-called, and this goes to the inspector general, and then this goes over to the DOJ.
	The DOJ looks into whether this is a campaign finance violation and clears them of the violation.
	Now, whether there are some other issues that are opened up here, that's what we're discussing, I suppose.
	But what they also found, what the inspector general found, is that there was demonstrable, I'm sorry, signs of political bias on the part of the whistleblower for a political rival of Donald Trump.
	This seems like pertinent information.
	We've got a guy here who is leaking this information, who hates Trump, who is in the intelligence community, who is trying to get rid of him, presumably from the start.
	It's deja vu all over again.
	This certainly sounds like the last three years.
	Here's where I agree with you guys and where I disagree with you.
	To the extent that we agree, we absolutely agree that The fact that there are people in the bureaucracy, people in the intelligence community, who believe that they can unmake the election simply because they don't like the president, who believe that they can leak...
	Apparently, the whistleblower didn't even hear the call.
	That's right.
	It was secondhand, at best, that they can leak that kind of private information.
	And the press will play it.
	And that the press will play it.
	This is an existential crisis.
	That we have a press who is working with the bureaucracy to unseat an American president is an absolute constitutional crisis.
	No question.
	However, if all of that is true, And it is also true that Donald Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
	And even though I think Donald Trump is probably in the long run less of a threat to the country than the press and the bureaucracy simply because he will eventually turn himself out even if he'll either not win the next election or he will in either two to six years or 500 more cheeseburgers.
	One way or the other, Donald Trump won't be the president, but the media and the bureaucracy Being corrupt transcends electoral politics.
	Totally agree with that.
	Nevertheless, the two wrongs don't make a right.
	Jeremy, I agree with you, but I also want to add that truly, I've been alive through Richard Nixon.
	The only time I ever saw a president commit an offense that I thought was vaguely impeachable was when Barack Obama used the IRS to silence And the reason I say that is because the IRS is so powerful and our elections are so important that that was the only time I ever thought, hey, that actually damages my freedom.
	You know, Richard Nixon going to the DNC, that doesn't damage my freedom.
	You know, that actually hurts our countries.
	So I'm not a big impeachment guy.
	My standard for impeachment is much different than yours.
	I certainly agree that Obama using the IRS was an impeachable offense.
	Also probably think that having people burgle the offices of your political opponents is probably also right.
	The only impeachable offense there was that they didn't tape the door right.
	They should have done it up and down, not side to side.
	No, I mean, bad and sleazy, but, you know, come on.
	But what I will say is, you do have a presumption of innocence in this country.
	One of the things that bothered me today that I read was actually written by our friend David French.
	We all have good relationships with David French.
	I know that especially...
	David's great.
	I talked to him today.
	Great guy.
	And I know that particularly you guys have a disagreement with him about Trump.
	I think I have a disagreement with him about Trump too, but probably not as extreme as yours.
	But he wrote today...
	I agree that he's a great guy.
	He is.
	He's a great guy.
	He wrote both in Time and at National Review that as a prosecutor...
	He would have absolutely no problem taking this document, walking a grand jury through it and demonstrating to them quid pro quo.
	And he does this interesting breakdown just of sort of the order of the paragraphs.
	All I could think was, the fact that a good prosecutor could do that doesn't mean that it's real.
	And you have a presumption of innocence in the country.
	When I read this transcript, when I read it this morning after Ben sent it to me, I thought, there is a case that's plausible that the president's engaging in quid pro quo.
	It's plausible that the president, because he is naturally a negotiator, that's actually his identity, the way he sees himself, that he's sort of always angling a little bit to get what he wants, and that if you're in the position of the presidency and you're always angling to get what you want and you can't delineate between the personal and the public, which I think Donald Trump has a unique difficulty.
	He thinks out loud.
	It's amazing.
	But not just that.
	He thinks he is the country.
	He thinks that he's the country.
	If somebody insults him, they're insulting the United States.
	That's right.
	And in the way that he thinks the Attorney General is his personal lawyer, it's why he says things like, you know, I thought that...
	That's why he tried to demand loyalty of people who work for the government.
	That's right.
	So this fact that he is sort of always negotiating can lead him into very corrupt territory.
	And there is a plausible read of this that says that some version of either that being the most generous, that he was just being a negotiator who can't separate the public from the private, or that he was flat out turning the screws on this guy to get quid pro quo, you can make a plausible case.
	But a plausible case is not enough to remove a president of the United States.
	But again, let me go back, though, to this thing.
	You know, Bill Clinton committed perjury.
	No question.
	And everybody said, well, that is an impeachable offense.
	But remember, impeachment is a political process.
	The people have to agree.
	And the people said, as I think they were absolutely right to say, eh, he was lying about sex.
	We all lie about sex.
	I think that they were absolutely right to say that because it is a violation of the central premise of the country that we choose the president to throw the president out.
	I remember when Obama said that thing to, I can't remember, Yevon Tushchenko, whatever his name is, where he said...
	Yeah, Medved.
	He said, you know, after the next election, I'll have more flexibility.
	I remember walking in to, at the time, PJTV, and Bill Whittle was on the ceiling.
	I mean, he was like, you know, just furious.
	And he was saying, this is treason.
	And I thought, you know, it's actually not treason.
	He actually has the right to do that.
	It's simply revelatory of the fact that he's not a good American.
	By the way, you can make an argument that you can read what Barack Obama said to Medvedev as quid pro quo too.
	But it isn't definitively quid pro quo because we don't know.
	But again, it was much, much worse than this.
	It was endangering the country.
	It was a terrible thing.
	But he has the right to do it.
	And it just shows what a bad person he was.
	But it's not impeachable.
	I would not negate the election of Barack Obama over that or anything else he did except maybe the IRA. Here's the truth of that.
	I have a much broader definition of impeachable than most people because I think that the original intent of the founders is that people would get impeached fairly regularly.
	I don't think that they thought of it as a unique remedy.
	I don't think that they thought of it as something that you never do.
	I think they thought of it as the ultimate check on the power of the executive because otherwise the executive was going to grow out of control.
	And so the power was to limit their funding and to impeach them, which is why they didn't actually specify what high crimes and misdemeanors meant and left it as a political process.
	With that said, I do think that you actually do have to show something criminal and not just suspicion of something criminal in order to justify to the American public what is happening here.
	I think that Bill Clinton ought to have been impeached.
	He committed perjury.
	I don't really think that you take a public opinion poll on whether that's popular or not.
	I think that if you commit a high crime or misdemeanor, you ought to be impeached.
	Now, the question is whether Trump did that in this case.
	He has plenary power over foreign policy.
	That gives an enormous amount of power.
	And that is fine.
	I mean, that is constitutional.
	That's how this works.
	By the way, just as part and parcel of my impeachment thing, I think it was, you know, in my ideal world, I think it's impeachable that Barack Obama went to war in Libya without any congressional approval and proceeded to depose somebody using American taxpayer dollars.
	Like, I think that we should have a Congress that's actually in charge of foreign policy, again, in terms of approving war before the president just runs off willy-nilly and commits us to wars.
	But, with that said...
	The question here is, does your foreign policy power extend to The allegation is using American taxpayer dollars in order to forward your political ambitions by targeting a domestic political opponent.
	I do not think that the President of the United States has that power.
	I also think that has to be proved.
	So what that means is that I don't think that this transcript proves anything.
	I think that it is a Rorschach test.
	If you believe that Trump is a corrupt quid pro quo guy, you think it's a corrupt quid pro quo document.
	If you think that Trump is kind of a buffoon who just says things, then he's a buffoon saying things.
	If you think that he is...
	Studiously ignoring, you know, what Zelensky is saying and is pushing only in the areas where he thinks he ought to, then you can read it that way.
	It is subject to a variety of interpretations.
	But whichever of those interpretations you happen to subscribe to, it is not enough.
	It is not enough.
	It is not enough.
	Which is why what this is going to come down to in the end, really, is the Democrats are going to do a big House investigation, and can they come up with one human being who Trump said to the human being, out loud, If they do not investigate Biden, I am withholding American taxpayer dollars.
	If they can come up with one person who said that, he's in serious trouble.
	If they can't come up with anybody who he said that to, it doesn't matter.
	I'm not even sure I agree with that, but I'll give that credit.
	But just to go back to what you said about impeachment.
	In an ideal world, you know, in an ideal world, we change the Constitution all the time, and we go throughout the country and be able to have a lot of amendments.
	But in the real world, in the real world, it's a bad thing to remove the president.
	It's traumatic for the country.
	It's traumatic for the country, and it strips the people of their choice.
	He is the choice of the people.
	He's the choice of a constitutionally elected president.
	I used to say this about Obama all the time when I was talking to my right-wing friends, and they were screaming, he's evil, he's Muslim, he's this and that.
	I'd say, you know, he's...
	He's the elected president of the United States.
	In order to get rid of him, try voting him out of office.
	See, that would be an amazing strategy for the Democrats.
	By beating him at the bloody polls.
	Presumably, there are crimes and misdemeanors for which you would impeach a president, regardless of public opinion.
	This was the other thing I just wanted to say.
	What I would need to impeach him was to see that he was actually manipulating his office, like Obama did.
	Like Obama did when they went after, tried to stop Trump.
	That he was manipulating his office for other political purposes.
	So he's not just this one conversation where he's being trumped.
	What you would need is, and so far, the reason this is an open...
	So I think in politics, typically, there are three answers.
	Yes, no, and I don't know.
	And I think the one that nobody likes giving but is almost always correct is I don't know.
	And right now, this is an I don't know situation with shades of no.
	I'm leaning toward no, but I don't know why he denied aid to Ukraine, neither does Mitch McConnell.
	They asked McConnell, and McConnell was like, I have no idea why he denied aid to Ukraine.
	He was getting pressure from the Republicans to restore the aid to Ukraine.
	He was getting pressure from Democrats to restore the aid to Ukraine.
	He wasn't doing it.
	So I don't know the answer to that.
	I also don't know in what world...
	Why is the State Department sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine?
	Nobody knows what that's about.
	So all I'm asking for is, I do not think it is unreasonable.
	Even though the people who are asking for it are unreasonable, I do not think it is an unreasonable request to say we would like answers to these questions.
	But the people who are doing it, two things can be true at once.
	The people who are doing it obviously are politically motivated.
	Obviously, they don't give a crap about the Constitution.
	Obviously, they're not worried about overreaching the presidency.
	Obviously, they are only trying to get Trump.
	All of those things can be true simultaneously.
	But as somebody who cares about, you know, people not violating their constitutional duties, I would like to know the answers to these questions.
	It would make me more comfortable.
	But at this point, the answer is you haven't proved anything.
	And the political aspect of this too is that not one single person in America cares about aid to Ukraine, other than maybe like three Ukrainian Americans.
	But no one cares about that.
	What people care about is being able to elect their president.
	And especially at this moment, where the legislature has given away so much of its power to the administrative state, where it's given away so much of its power, with the executive, for that matter, to the Supreme Court, there is a palpable feeling in the country of helplessness, that we cannot choose for ourselves.
	And regardless of whether the founders hoped that impeachment would be used regularly, it wasn't.
	It wasn't used regularly at all.
	And arguably, and this would probably be my argument, every time it was used, it was a bad idea.
	It was a bad idea to use it against Johnson in the 19th century.
	It was a bad idea to use it against Nixon.
	It was a political hit because the Democrats couldn't stand him getting reelected by a landslide.
	It was the impeachment of Bill Clinton, while there's a legitimate argument for it, I think was just payback for Nixon and for Judge Bork and for Clarence Thomas and for Democrats constantly overturning these processes.
	And I think it would be wrong to, I think it would be perceived as wrong.
	Here's what I disagree with you about.
	I don't care if the American, I'm more with Ben on this.
	I don't think it's fair to say they don't care about the Ukraine.
	They do care about getting to elect their president.
	I mean, first of all, I know we talk about this all the time.
	More people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Donald Trump.
	So when you say things like the people, what the people want, we have a system.
	I prefer the system to mob rule.
	But when you just talk about the people, it's disingenuous to say the people elected Donald Trump.
	No.
	The constitutional system, which I prefer to mob rule, elected Donald Trump.
	The people probably didn't actually want Donald Trump to be the president.
	I prefer the system.
	Similarly, the people may not care about Ukraine.
	I don't believe in mob rule.
	If we're doing something that is illegal, then we have to enforce that, even if the people wish that we wouldn't.
	So it's not like in the UK, where the people say Brexit, the politicians say no Brexit.
	The people did say Brexit, and the politicians are standing athwart the will of the people in contravention of the system.
	That's not quite the case with what we're talking about.
	What I would say, though, insofar as I agree with you guys, what I would say is that's an entirely different story.
	That is a page 16 story about this long in which they say, well, you know, we're looking, a couple of people on one of the committees are looking into this.
	I absolutely agree with that.
	But see, that's the thing.
	That's why I say it's a crap story.
	It's a crap story to have a 24-7 idea that we just got off this Russian collusion thing.
	And personally, like I said, I think this is Wile E. Coyote.
	I think they're going to blow themselves up.
	I think we're going to watch the Democrats do that slow thing with a little puff of smoke at the bottom.
	This is why if you ask me...
	This is why if you ask me, did the president do it?
	I have no real opinion.
	No.
	And I say, there's a presumption of innocence.
	He did not do anything to violate the presumption of innocence.
	I agree with you.
	And right at this moment, I would say, I believe he didn't.
	But I could be convinced.
	Politically speaking, so I've always been more than a little skeptical of the case that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was horrible for the Republicans.
	I've been very skeptical of that case.
	The reason I've been skeptical of that case is because the impeachment of Bill Clinton meant that Al Gore could not use him in 2000 and George W. Bush became the president, campaigning on restoring honor to the Oval Office.
	So I am not fully sold on the impeaching Bill Clinton was the end of the Republican Party.
	It was the end of Newt Gingrich.
	It wasn't the end of the Republican Party.
	As far as would impeachment seriously damage Democrats here, I think that the country is so polarized, I have serious doubts that it would I mean, like, it's pretty obvious what the Democrats want to do.
	So now they just want to do it louder, right?
	Like, they've been saying impeach basically all along.
	They tried to—they're talking about impeaching Kavanaugh until five minutes ago.
	Well, you're going to get to find out because they're going to impeach him.
	Oh, no, they will impeach him.
	I'm not 100% convinced of that.
	I thought you made a good argument because I do listen to what you're saying occasionally.
	But I thought you made a good argument that once they set their foot in it...
	But there's also the argument that Pelosi was doing...
	I mean, she did nothing today, right?
	She did nothing.
	No, but the problem is now, if she doesn't impeach him, she'll be seen to exonerate him, and that she can't do.
	She has to.
	They will impeach him in the House, regardless of whether they have anything, and then they'll just argue that the Senate Republicans are corrupt.
	It's possible, but it's also possible.
	I mean, she's a wily person herself, and it's also possible that she's doing this to give him a little bit, and then she'll say, you know what?
	She has said before, impeachment should be a bipartisan procedure, and Mitt Romney is not going to suffice.
	But you're talking about the Senate.
	Yes, but she has said impeachment should be a bipartisan venture, and I don't think they're going to get there with this.
	I'm willing to put $100 on the table that they impeach him.
	I think that the 2020 election changed fundamentally this week, and it will no longer be a referendum on Donald Trump.
	There will be a referendum on the impeachment of Donald Trump.
	No, that's possible.
	If Nancy Pelosi does not impeach Donald Trump, She's going to lose the squad.
	She's going to lose the left.
	I mean, there's a head count today.
	There are 211 Democrats in favor of impeachment.
	They just need to get up to 218.
	So I think the chances that he's not impeached is zero.
	I think that he will be impeached.
	I think that he will be acquitted in the Senate.
	And I think you'll have the 2000 election if Bill Clinton had had one term.
	And I will say that there are a couple of other things that matter here.
	One is...
	What this really signifies, Pelosi going forward with this, is that the Democratic Party has signed off on Joe Biden.
	They're done with Joe Biden.
	Biden is toast.
	What they are basically saying is, Elizabeth Warren is her nominee.
	She's going to run on an anti-corruption platform.
	And she's going to say...
	I'm sorry.
	Which, by the way, reminds me of a story that was not covered at all this week.
	I mean, at all, but it's deeply suspicious.
	Were you covering this Working Families Party story?
	You know, when it comes to The Elizabeth Warren things.
	I lost track of all the things going on.
	Because of my story.
	I was so instanced in the story.
	I could not tear myself away from the story.
	You're thinking his wife is not a deep sleeper.
	She drugs her.
	So, Elizabeth Warren, so they're going to try to run her on the anti-corruption platform.
	You can laugh.
	But the story was, from this week, that everyone ignored.
	The Working Families Party endorsed Elizabeth Warren over Bernie Sanders.
	In 2016, they endorsed Bernie Sanders.
	And the people of the Working Families Party, there's a vote of the population, who are the members, and then there is the vote of the board.
	They released the breakdown in 2016.
	87% of the members of the Working Families Party voted for Bernie Sanders.
	This time, they endorsed Elizabeth Warren.
	So, what changed, you may ask yourself?
	One of the things that changed is that in 2017-2018, there's a group called Demos.
	It is run by Amelia Warren Teaghi, who is the daughter of Elizabeth Warren.
	And they gave $45,000 to the Working Families Party.
	The Working Families Party then proceeded to endorse Elizabeth Warren over burning standards and not release the breakdown of the vote.
	Because half of the vote is by the board and half of the vote is by the people.
	And so basically the assumption-- - The very fact that they didn't-- - Release it is highly suspicious.
	Look, I think that the rip on Elizabeth Warren is gonna be in the end that she is deeply insincere.
	Because she is.
	She shifts her views.
	She's very manipulative.
	But she is a lot better at this than Hillary Clinton.
	And the Democratic Party basically this week gave up on Joe Biden.
	He's now trailing in one national poll.
	He's trailing in Iowa.
	He's trailing in New Hampshire.
	She's within margin of error in Nevada.
	And they're tied in the YouGov poll nationally.
	Right.
	And she is now pulling into the lead in California as well.
	So he's done, I think.
	I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of Joe Biden barring some sort of cataclysmic collapse by Elizabeth Warren.
	And so it was, okay, we see where the momentum is going.
	Yeah.
	If Biden goes down over this whole Ukraine thing, if we have to push Biden over in order to get Trump to also be knocked over, then I guess that's what we'll have to do.
	Like, if Biden is seen as corrupt and also Trump is seen as corrupt, we can survive that.
	And so Elizabeth Warren will be our nominee.
	She'll run on the I'm the crusader who started the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which is a scam.
	But still, she has that image.
	And they'll run that against Trump.
	And...
	I mean, frankly, I think that people on the right are a little too sanguine about how that election goes.
	I agree.
	I agree.
	No, she's a disciplined, good candidate.
	I've been watching her.
	Obviously, the press is backing her 100%.
	But still, she has a good...
	She doesn't have the same vulnerabilities as Hillary Clinton.
	She doesn't have 30 years of record of being awfully corrupt.
	She never killed that guy?
	She didn't kill that guy?
	I think the Pocahontas thing is a good hit.
	You can only use it so long, eventually they'll come up with a strategy about it.
	But I think it really annoys black people because in the same way military people see guys who walk around in uniform but never served as stolen valor, I think they see it as stolen victimhood and that she basically pretended to be a minority when she wasn't.
	I mean, I think the fact that she lies about raising taxes will hurt her.
	She's kind of like a pretend believer.
	I also think at some point here that Bernie Sanders will open up his guns on her.
	And so far he has been pretty silent about her.
	He'll be forced.
	There is, to Drew's point, there is a demographic issue here, which is that Joe Biden is the only serious candidate who has black support.
	And that's collapsed.
	Obviously he's trailing now, it looks like, in Iowa.
	He's not looking good in New Hampshire and he dropped 18 points since May in South Carolina, which is where actual black Democratic primary voters are.
	So what happens?
	I mean, does Elizabeth Warren pick up that support?
	She's starting to.
	So what she has shown that none of the other candidates have, that she is rising among all demographic groups right now.
	And so that was always my supposition, is that it's going to be hard for her to remove the black support from him.
	But there's also a momentum question.
	So the order of the primaries is Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.
	If she wins the first three, then he's toast.
	Then he gets Super Tuesday, and that's California.
	That's Massachusetts.
	And those are going to go further left and left.
	But remember, there's also the issue of whether blacks turn out to vote.
	I have been saying for a long time that I think a lot of more black people are going to vote for Donald Trump than the polls will ever show because I think they'll lie about it.
	I think they'll lie about when they come out of the voting booth, and I think that nobody's going to see it until the election.
	The reverse Bradley effect.
	Yeah.
	I don't think that that's impossible, but I think it's a hard thing to speculate about.
	We ought to see what some of our DailyWire.com subscribers think, especially because today we launched our new DailyWire.com, the brand new website, and I'm pleased to announce that we will have a future rollout within less than a week of the DailyWire mobile app.
	When is the Shapiro store going to open?
	Is the Shapiro store opening soon?
	And then, just in time for Black Friday, the Shapiro store.
	So, because today's the day that we launched the new site, we're really proud of it.
	It's a huge upgrade for people who come to our website.
	Much faster, much more elegant, much better looking, better UI. The whole user experience is going to be much more intuitive.
	But today is the day we launched it, so it's buggy as all hell, right?
	Because, you know, you're rolling out these modules in real time, and our site is highly trafficked, so there's a bunch of people hitting it.
	I coded the website, so there's some errors in there, you know?
	Yeah, we said learn to code.
	But part of learn to code is...
	But if you're willing to go to our website right now, dailywire.com, become a subscriber, put in your question.
	You have endured so much to get your question on tonight's show.
	We absolutely must answer it.
	Alicia, are you with us from Mission Control?
	I'm ready to roll.
	And man, that lead up to how wonderful the website was.
	Sounded as if Trump wrote that copy.
	It's wonderful.
	It's going to be good.
	It's amazing.
	All right.
	It's going to be good.
	It's perfect.
	Jacob says, do you guys think that Democrats know that this impeachment effort will fail and they're just building up to an impeachment in 2022 midterms if the Democrats can take both houses?
	Can I take this one?
	Sure.
	Yeah.
	I don't think it fails.
	I think you have to define success to be able to measure it as to whether or not it's a success or a failure.
	You assume, in saying that it will fail, that the intention of the Democrats is to remove Donald Trump from office through the impeachment process.
	I don't think that that would be insane.
	Yeah.
	They're not crazy enough to think that.
	They don't control the Senate.
	They would have to have not only control of the Senate, but a supermajority in the Senate in order to convict.
	Impeachment happens in the House, and then it goes to the Senate for conviction, right?
	So they're not doing this to remove Donald Trump.
	They're doing it actually because of a lesson, I think, because of a lesson that they learned during the Obama years.
	You'll remember right after the 2012 election that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell got together and they had a confab and John Boehner came out and said, we decided that no matter what Barack Obama does, under no circumstances will we impeach him.
	They said this out loud, which would be about like saying, no matter what my five-year-old does, I will never ever lock up the drugs.
	Drug cabinet is open for business.
	You've removed even the specter of any kind of constraints on the office.
	And we saw what happened.
	Barack Obama, his first term, he was further left than any of us would like, of course.
	But he was, with the exception of Obamacare, he was a normal, run-of-the-mill Democrat presidential candidate.
	His second term is when he does all the big social moves to reorient the country sort of on a trajectory toward the left.
	And the Tea Party was so incensed.
	No matter how many times they sent messages to our politicians, we gave Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts to a Republican to stop Barack Obama's agenda.
	We gave the House to the Republicans to stop Barack Obama's agenda.
	We gave the Senate to Republicans to stop Barack Obama's agenda.
	A thousand seats around the country.
	And then they said, yeah, we've got it all, but unless we have the White House, we're not going to do anything.
	And in many ways, I think that decision precipitates the election of Donald Trump as much as any other thing that happened.
	It incensed the movement.
	And I think that what Nancy Pelosi learned from that, and it may be, she may have been slow getting there, but I think she's absorbed the lesson now, watching the rise of the Bernie Sanders fans, watching the rise of the squad, watching the popularity of AOC, is she has come to realize if we don't take, if we are not seen to take major action against this president, our own base is not going to show up for us.
	The Rust Belt workers may show up for us, but the actual hardcore...
	You have to absorb rather than marginal.
	That's right.
	You co-opt rather than marginal.
	And so it's a huge victory for her to impeach the president.
	Not because she's trying to oust him.
	And you might say, right, but what if the right rises to his defense and they lose the election?
	I think Nancy Pelosi would rather lose the presidential election than lose the support of the base for the party more generally.
	And for herself.
	And for herself.
	I mean, she made this clear earlier this year when she refused to go up against Ilhan Omar.
	And so in many ways, she must impeach the president.
	And it is a victory simply to have done it.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	It was a slow road to get here, but there was a trigger.
	I'm not as convinced.
	I'm not convinced it won't happen, so don't think I'm saying, no, you guys are absolutely wrong.
	I think the odds are a lot higher against them.
	I don't think she wants to do it.
	And I think...
	You know, I think the thing is they want to do this kabuki show.
	There's an amazing, amazing...
	They get a lot of...
	What's the word I'm looking for?
	Encouragement from the media to do this stuff.
	So that's the one reason I think that they might impeach because the media will go nuts and it'll be...
	You know, I mean, they've already got them suffering the death penalty.
	My big problem is not that I can't see why she wouldn't want to do it.
	I totally see why she wouldn't want to do it.
	I do not see how she walks back.
	There's just no way.
	I mean, she's come out.
	Once you say...
	She can keep this charade going for the rest of her.
	But that gets worse and worse for her the closer it gets to the election.
	If she's going to impeach him, she needs to impeach him by Christmas.
	I don't know, because at some point you can say, let's let the people decide.
	At some point she says, let the people decide.
	No, she can't do that.
	She can't.
	She's going to have to bring this thing up for a vote.
	If it goes down, it goes down, but she's going to have to bring it up for a vote.
	There's even a world where she works behind the scenes to defeat it.
	To kill it, exactly.
	But there's no world where she doesn't bring it to a vote.
	The reason, I mean, listen, a bunch of the quote-unquote moderate Democrats have, like they signed, what was her name, Spanberger, the one who ran for Dave Brat's seat in Virginia.
	Right.
	She just sent that letter along with seven other moderate Democrats to the Washington Post calling for the opening of the impeachment inquiry.
	That's a pretty good indicator that even the moderates in the party have swung behind this thing.
	Yeah.
	Alicia, question number two.
	Ken says, is Trump jumping into the California homeless crisis a good campaign strategy or is it just a waste of time in a state we all know he can't win?
	I actually want to take two questions in a row because it's the same question.
	It's the exact same question because your premise is that he wants to fix the homeless problem in California.
	Of course that would be insane if Donald Trump thinks that him getting behind an issue will change the hearts and minds of California to stop the homeless.
	No, it's a huge win for Donald Trump because the premise is that the average Republican voter in the country despises California.
	And so he wades into this and he wins automatically to think that it's about changing something.
	It's a troll.
	It's a big troll.
	And it also, the homeless problem in L.A. in particular, for those of the people who don't know, it's increased 16% in one year, the homeless population, in just L.A. City.
	What happened one year ago?
	Yeah, I don't.
	It's so, gosh, I don't know.
	I couldn't possibly remember.
	San Francisco, same thing.
	Crazy homelessness problem.
	This is something I like about Trump, though.
	He knows not only how to troll, but how to pick issues.
	Whereas kind of the old egghead Republicans think that people are going to jump out of bed because they're so excited about the upper quintile and the marginal tax rate.
	Nobody gets excited about that except for us, the people in this room.
	But the thing you get excited for is, hey, those filthy, dirty, rotten bums on the street who are leaving needles all over the place and affecting my kids' walk to school.
	In crazy California.
	In crazy California in La La Land.
	I want the president to talk about that.
	That looks really great.
	Now do the sympathetic version of that, please.
	Yeah.
	Was that not the sympathetic version?
	No, the sympathetic version is there are a lot of people who are suffering living on the streets with a pair of them and that it is a problem for everybody who's a taxpaying citizen of the city of Los Angeles.
	That's the sympathetic version.
	And I know that that's what Knowles actually means, but I'm just going to clarify that.
	And if you want to fix it, you have to get rid of Gavin Newsom.
	If you elect the guy who turned San Francisco into one big homeless refugee camp to be governor of the entire state, you can't be surprised if a year later, homelessness in the rest of the state has also jumped in.
	And this is actually a real point.
	This is a real advantage.
	By the way, I think it is true, by the way.
	I feel like you are not helping any of the homeless people by what they do in California.
	No, it's not.
	Especially if they put in rent control.
	I mean, a huge percentage of these folks are drug addicts.
	A huge percent of them are suffering from serious mental disorders.
	They're dangerous to themselves or they're dangerous to others.
	It is nothing but cruelty.
	To leave people living in their own filth and feces on the streets and they call yourself a liberated thing.
	I would start by making it illegal to be homeless and then Just not to hurt the homeless people, to force the government to start building emergency shelters.
	It's like getting them off the street.
	It should be illegal.
	You may not know that the City Council of LA actually did pass a measure to build emergency housing.
	Yeah, they did.
	$1.7 billion.
	Average cost per unit.
	Yeah.
	$517,000, and it's going to take a decade to build up.
	That's ridiculous.
	And the real aspect of it, I mean, jokes aside, like the actual aspect of this for Trump, is that you do have this major opioid epidemic.
	You do have a lot of veterans who are living on the street.
	You do have a lot of actually very sympathetic and empathetic people who have been left behind.
	And you have a major problem.
	And you have taxpayers.
	I mean, like, I've lived here my entire life, my entire life, in nice suburban areas.
	You now have to worry about open needles on the streets and people who are talking to themselves and haven't bathed in several weeks walking by your kids on the street.
	And what people who don't live in California don't know is that we pay 13% in state income tax.
	13% in the richest state in the country, the fifth largest economy in the world, in addition to our federal income tax.
	We pay about half of the national taxes, again, just to the state of California.
	We have potholes and needles on the street.
	And it's important to say, too, though, you know, unlike Knowles, I do care very deeply about that.
	No, I have a real heart for the homeless.
	I do believe that they're sick.
	Many people are sick, and addiction is a kind of sickness.
	It emulates an evil or Tory has written it.
	Having said that, it's not wrong also to worry about the normal people.
	When you have a city, it has to be a livable place.
	There have to be places for the rich to live, there have to be places for the middle class to live, good places for the lower class to live.
	That's the way a city works, and if it doesn't work that way, it ain't working.
	I promise not to be the first person to answer the third question.
	I'm just going to call an audible and take the third question.
	Just kidding.
	This question comes from Thomas.
	He says since 2016 he's been saying that the left and the right are watching the same screen but seemingly a different movie.
	How did we get here and how do we get past it?
	Guys, I have to.
	We got here because we wanted it.
	This is what we wanted.
	This was the purpose of the conservative movement.
	This was, I mean, maybe now we don't like the results of it, but the purpose of the conservative movement that Phyllis Schlafly and Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley talked about was to create a choice, not an echo, and to break up that liberal consensus.
	One of the complaints about political scientists in the 30s and 40s was that the two parties were indistinguishable.
	They didn't have any real ideological character to them.
	And so Buckley comes in and takes a liberal Republican party and turns it into a conservative party.
	And the parties have become polarized over the years, more and more so in many ways.
	You also had the new left come in in the 1960s.
	Actually, right around the same time that the conservative movement was blowing up, you had the Democratic Party moving further to the left.
	This is not great for national unity and you had a breakdown of common culture that coincided at this exact time.
	But it does give you a choice.
	It just gives you less in common with your citizens.
	I'll give you a different answer and a better answer.
	The better answer is that the media did this.
	And the reason that I say the media did this is because what the media did is they did the very horrible and dishonest thing of conflating fact and opinion.
	And so people started saying, okay, well, hold up.
	If you are conflating fact and opinion and you are saying that your opinion is fact, then I can look at the same fact pattern and derive a completely different opinion from that.
	And my opinion is also fact.
	So you're looking at the same fact pattern and you have people who are taking their opinions and mistaking those facts.
	To the point where we can't even agree on the central facts anymore.
	Whereas if you can start a conversation by saying, okay, here's the basis for the conversation.
	This fact, this fact, this fact.
	Now, let's do opinion.
	Then you can have a conversation with people.
	But when somebody takes the facts and so ingests it and digests it into their own opinion, that it becomes an integral part of their opinion and the opinion is, you cannot separate it out from the fact.
	And then somebody else says, well, I can do the same thing with that set of facts.
	What you end up with is these two agglomerations of opinion and fact, in which you can't tell the opinion from the fact and they have no relationship.
	But I suppose seriously, it's a seriously harmful thing to have so much of the communications machinery of the country in the hands of one party.
	It really is a seriously divisive thing.
	And it means that guys like us...
	Everything, right?
	This has been my complaint about Trump's use of fake news.
	Trump will say fake news, and half the time he's, of course, exactly right.
	And half the time he's saying it about something that is obviously not fake news.
	And the problem is that because the media are, in fact, the fake news, as characterized, because they're not news people, because they're opinion people, then when he says fake news, we all go, okay, so everything they're saying is a lie.
	He's always right even when he's wrong.
	He's always right.
	I want to hit the media as much as anybody.
	He's always right even when he's wrong.
	It always is fake news even when they get the story right because it's always on one side.
	My only point...
	I can't believe I'm defending the media.
	This is awful.
	I do always go back to that Mencken line about democracy.
	That democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard.
	And we do, in the media...
	We get the media that we want in many ways.
	I mean, there are huge corrupt institutions and it's all run by one party, but we do get a certain amount of sensationalism.
	We do get the blurring of fact and opinion that people do desire.
	There is not as much of a market for more bland journalism that is just straight facts.
	That's totally fair, but it's also true that corporations have glommed on to the fact that big government is good for corporations.
	I was talking about this on the show this week.
	They don't even have to be corrupt.
	All they have to do is hire people who all have the same opinion, and they will begin to think that that's reality.
	It's just a psychological fact.
	So we're going to come back and have a few more questions, but before we do, I want to talk about our friends over at Black Rifle Coffee.
	Black Rifle Coffee.
	Love those guys.
	I will take you back in time two years to the first time that Ben and I ever heard of Black Rifle Coffee, and this is how you know what a great brand it is, what a great product they produce.
	They bought one ad to test into the Ben Shapiro show.
	And we tried the coffee and it was delicious.
	We went to the website and watched their videos and they were hilarious.
	And I said, man, I think that we should see if these guys will do more advertising with us.
	And Ben said, I think we should try to buy them.
	Why don't you call the guy who started Black Rifle Coffee and see if we can buy them?
	I didn't.
	Fast forward two years, we actually meet the guys behind Black Rifle Coffee, and we can't afford them.
	We did not buy them.
	We walked in and they were made of physical gold.
	They actually changed everything.
	These guys, not only are they immeasurably more successful than we are, they are great gods.
	I'm a big coffee guy.
	It's great coffee.
	It is excellent quality coffee.
	It is fantastic coffee.
	And, good news, if you visit blackriflecoffee.com slash ben, my name.
	And get 20% off your first purchase.
	That's blackriflecoffee.com slash Ben for 20% off your first purchase.
	Once more, blackriflecoffee.com slash Ben.
	Also, they're just awesome dudes and you should support their business.
	Seriously, you should go out and support every business that you like because the fact is people want to take good businesses away from you.
	So every business that you like, you should go support.
	By the way, before we get back to questions on this, I just want to mention a story that was like this this week.
	Did you guys see this Carson King story?
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Okay, so for folks who missed it, there's this kid.
	I mean, he's 24 years old named Carson King.
	And Carson King is, I think, a security guard.
	And he went to an Iowa football game.
	And he was outside at ESPN College Game Day.
	And he was holding up a sign that said something like, I want more funds for beer.
	Venmo.
	And they put his Venmo.
	And this became a viral thing.
	And he raised $1.14 million.
	Going after beer money.
	Going after beer money.
	And he proceeded to then give $1 million to cancer research at the University of Iowa, which is a phenomenal story.
	This guy is not living high on the hog.
	He's a security guard.
	He could have used that million dollars.
	It still would have been a funny story to make a guy rich overnight for holding up a sign that says, I want beer.
	And he didn't do that.
	He took the money and he gave it for cancer research, which is a studly thing to do.
	Wasn't it children?
	It was children.
	It was unbelievable.
	The Des Moines Register reports on this.
	Then the Des Moines Register starts checking through his Twitter history.
	They dig up a couple of tweets that he made that were apparently references to Tosh.0.
	Back in, like, eight years ago.
	So back in 2011.
	And then they canceled him.
	Anheuser-Busch, which was forming a relationship with him to match his donations, and then they might have done ads with him or something.
	They canceled it because they said his values don't match our values.
	And suddenly, a guy who no one had heard of until five seconds ago, and only had heard of because he did an unbelievably cool thing, suddenly is canceled.
	And the good news is that people really rallied around him.
	The Du Bois Register got...
	Rushed.
	They lost an enormous amount.
	They lost a bunch of subscribers.
	People, like, en masse unsubscribed from the Des Moines Register.
	The state of Iowa passed a...
	They're going to declare one of these days a Carson King Day.
	As well they should.
	Because F these people.
	Honestly, if your life is about digging through people's past tweets and the crap that they've said 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, which they may disagree with right now, and your life is about that because they got famous and you didn't and you're a jealous little piece of Well, this is the thing.
	The people who do this have never accomplished anything.
	These guys win Heisman trophies.
	They get to host the Oscars.
	And the people who take them down have done nothing.
	Right.
	And the only reason they do it is because the person became successful.
	No one cared about Kevin Hart doing anything.
	Of course.
	And the minute you reach that apex, then all the guns train in.
	And it's like, well, if I take down that guy, then I'm famous and better.
	And you know what?
	You're not famous.
	You're not better.
	You're just a piece of shit.
	And you know, it does apply to Donald Trump.
	The one thing is, I know we all pick on Trump.
	Even I pick on Trump.
	Even I do.
	Yeah, for the stuff he says.
	I do, not a lot, but I do.
	Picking the barnacles off his back isn't picking.
	But it takes a certain amount of craziness to stand up to these people.
	I heard this story today, by the way.
	I turned to Jeremy.
	You can ask him.
	The first thing that I said was, this is where Donald Trump is an important, amazing figure.
	I mean, I even turned to somebody today.
	I think it might have been you, actually.
	And I was like, listen, I'm not asking that Trump not be kind of garbage-y.
	Just like...
	Take it down like 20.
	We all feel that way.
	Because if he could just be a culture warrior on issues like this, he'd be president forever.
	Really, because this kind of stuff, I think that no one in the country has a taste for this, except for the woke left on Twitter and the people they can intimidate.
	Can I ask a question, bring you back to a topic that you had before?
	No, you brought this up before, and I so agree with this, about the fact that the intelligence community is now working with the press to basically get the government they want and cancel out...
	It is a deep state thing.
	I didn't even believe in that stuff until now.
	It's pretty impressive.
	And Kim Strassel ran a piece, I think it was last week.
	She's been doing great work about Obamagate and how this all started.
	And she said, you know what, if you watch the timing, just before a story breaks that's about to expose the intelligence community, an anonymous intelligence leak brings a story to the fore that threatens to wipe it off, the front page.
	We know that the IG, the Inspector General of the DOJ, Has turned in the first draft of his looking into how this collusion story got started.
	And then this leak comes from a partisan whistleblower, a guy we think is a partisan whistleblower, on a story that he wasn't involved in, basically.
	Does that change your calculation of how you treat Donald Trump?
	I totally admit it.
	I say this on the show all the time.
	I'm not calling balls and strikes.
	I'm not calling balls and strikes because the two teams are not playing for the same thing.
	One of the teams is actually playing.
	Listen, I've always said I call balls and strikes, but I'm calling balls and strikes as a conservative, meaning that I can agree with everything you just said and also think that the president shouldn't engage in quid pro quo with the president.
	Oh, I do agree.
	It doesn't change my estimation of Trump.
	It changes my estimation of the threats that face the country.
	But just in terms of reality, though, there's times when I say, gee, you know, Trump, I'd like to go and slap him for what he did.
	But the other side, they hate the First Amendment.
	They hate the Second Amendment.
	They're socialists.
	They're open socialists.
	They say America was never great.
	They're not patriots.
	If what you mean is he stands in sharper relief, of course that's true.
	But I don't feel like my opinion of him has changed.
	I feel like my opinion of the left has changed.
	It's like making the blacks blacker on a TV screen.
	You haven't actually made the whites whiter.
	You just made the blacks blacker.
	And so, yes, the contrast is wider.
	The contrast is wider.
	I feel about Donald Trump basically the same way I felt Every day since he became a public figure again in 2015.
	I don't really think, as a character, I've changed my opinion about Trump.
	There are certain things I've changed my opinion about.
	His politics, the effectiveness of his approach.
	Those things I feel like I've changed my opinion about and been pretty obvious about that.
	But when it comes to, does it change my opinion of him?
	No, because I think that regardless of what the intelligence community...
	I mean, he was saying deep state when I didn't think that the deep state was a thing.
	He's still saying deep state.
	So now I just think he's right.
	So I think that...
	You know, if it's changed in any way, I will say that I always thought he had good gut instincts.
	Maybe they're even better than I thought they were.
	Meaning that he can sense enemies very quickly.
	He's very, very good at sensing enemies.
	He's got almost an innate, uncanny sense of being able to spot when somebody's a threat to him.
	And he will call that out.
	Now, I think he's over-applied that.
	But in an arena of danger, which is what politics is, I think that's an effective skill.
	And I would say this.
	I think that what you're really trying to get out of the question...
	I'm actually just curious.
	I want to know.
	Yeah, but I think you're trying to get me to answer a question on a set of terms that I don't accept.
	Because I think where we really disagree fundamentally is actually a little bit higher than the question of Donald Trump.
	It's in two ways of looking at the world.
	You look at the world as though there are no...
	There only is what is.
	I like looking at the world as though there only is what is from a making decisions about how you're going to behave in a moment point of view.
	But I don't like it in these more philosophical conversations because it just supposes too much in my view.
	So in some ways, what you're saying when you ask about your entire approach to the election, for example, your approach to the election is, it's going to be Donald Trump or it's going to be Hillary Clinton.
	Yes, that was my approach to the election.
	This is your approach to the election.
	And I think what you're asking me right now is, since the left is revealed to be worse and worse and worse, and the bureaucracy a bigger and bigger threat, and the intelligence community a bigger and bigger and bigger threat, doesn't that make you have to support Trump more?
	Because he is the thing that's standing in the gap right now.
	And that is true, that right now he's the thing standing in the gap.
	I would not support him being bad even to defeat things that are worse.
	That's the line that I can't cross because I don't accept that it's that binary.
	I don't accept that the only options are that we sully ourselves completely in an attempt to stand against them or we surrender.
	I just don't think that those are the only two options.
	And I don't think that...
	Listen, am I willing to get my hands dirty?
	Sure.
	Am I willing to get messy?
	Yeah.
	Will I vote for the guy in this re-election?
	Likely.
	I think we've got a lot of miles between here and the election and in this new cycle, we could learn anything.
	If the election were today, would I vote for Donald Trump to be president?
	I would.
	So it's not some sort of pristine, pure, like the super never-Trumper position, the remaining never-Trumper position.
	All five of them?
	All five of them.
	That's not my position.
	But it's sort of like, in a war, to use an analogy, if we are in a war and the question is, if we have to fly our bombers at altitude because there's so much flack, that if we fly low and slow, we're going to lose all of our planes and not hit any targets. that if we fly low and slow, we're going to And therefore, we have to fly high and fast.
	And the result of flying high and fast, as it was in Western Europe in World War II, is that our bombs aren't going to be as precise.
	And we're going to kill more civilians.
	But it's the only way to defeat the machinery of Nazi Germany.
	Then you make the decision that Churchill made, and you go, we're going to fly high and fast, and we're going to get rid of the Nazis, even if it requires us to get our hands dirty.
	I'm all for that.
	But if what Churchill had said is, we need to go to every town and village that we liberate, and anyone who speaks German we need to put in camps, and we need to work them until they die, or put them in gas chambers, I would go, oh, well, yeah, no, I... I'm not willing to be that to beat them because I reject the premise that us being that defeats them.
	Us being that is just they change...
	But I agree with that.
	I guess maybe what Jeremy's asking is for you to be a little more precise in the question.
	What exactly do you want me to change in my opinion about Trump?
	Well, I guess what I mean is, when I openly say this, I'll openly say Trump did a really stupid thing that I hate, but, you know...
	It doesn't cross that threshold.
	An election is a binary choice.
	The world is not a binary place.
	That's why politics can make you stupid, right?
	Because sometimes you have to do the dirty thing to get the right result.
	But there is something that he could do.
	Of course there is.
	Of course there is.
	I guess what I'm asking is, there is something.
	No question about it.
	We all agree on this.
	And we might not agree on the exact place, but I think we're probably...
	The three of us are pretty close to this.
	Yeah, I would say, no, I mean, if he...
	Launch nuclear weapons at every end of the...
	Do you mean has my threshold loosened?
	So I think that the answer there is in some ways yes, but that's not as a result of me thinking this stuff is okay.
	It's as a result of the status quo itself being changed.
	The Overton windows.
	Right, exactly.
	Meaning that the reality that was presented in 2016, and with which I refused to engage, was a reality in which there was a Trump timeline and a Hillary timeline, and either way it was going to degrade the country.
	But my hope was that by not engaging and saying, no, a pox on all of this, that that would still...
	that people maintained a certain level of honesty. - There could be a third future timeline. - Right, there's a third future timeline where some people stood athwart and said, "Listen, you're gonna make your choice, but I disapprove of all of this crap, and I don't like any of it." Okay, then that passed, because the world was what it was.
	And the stand that people made in 2016 was no longer relevant because the moment had passed.
	And now the stand didn't have anything to do with the election.
	The stand changed because Trump was now the president.
	And it was, are you willing to say that what he is doing is bad and wrong when he's doing something bad and wrong?
	So if the question is, will I vote for him in 2020 because my threshold has changed, No, if I vote for him in 2020, which I'm likely to do, it's because the reality has changed, not because my threshold changed.
	I have exactly the same objections.
	If I could erase some of the things that I think have gone wrong in the country because he's president, I would do it.
	That doesn't mean I would want Hillary Clinton to be president, God forbid.
	I think she would have been way worse as a president.
	And I think a lot of the same bad things would have happened with Hillary Clinton as president.
	I think a lot of different bad things would have happened with Hillary Clinton as president.
	But again, I've said before, we now are living in the sunk cost All the costs have been sunk.
	I don't think the world is getting incrementally worse because Trump is president every day.
	This is the argument of the real Never Trumpers.
	What their argument is, is anything that is good for Trump is bad for the country.
	Because the longer he's in office, it makes the country worse.
	And I don't think that's true.
	I think that basically, the day after the election, we were living in Trumpland.
	And Trumpland was Trumpland.
	And Trumpland has been Trumpland since the day after the election.
	And that really has not altered.
	Like, nothing here, even with Ukraine's story, I don't think anything is fundamentally altered.
	Now, if he did commit a quid pro quo, I think that fundamentally alters the nature of reality in a certain way, and then things change.
	I could probably clarify what Ben said, because I largely agree with it.
	What I really think is that my Never Trump position in 2016 Was premised on the idea that the greater threat to the...
	Hillary was a massive threat to the country.
	But I believed that a...
	I couldn't have voted for her, even with what I'm about to say.
	But I believe that an even greater still threat to the country...
	Was if the Republican Party, the only party with conservatives in it, that if it surrendered its values, if it changed fundamentally what it stood for, that in the long run that's a greater threat to the country because the president's going to come and go.
	The only hope for the country is that somebody still stands for these founding principles.
	And I thought that we were, in backing Donald Trump, I thought we were risking forsaking those principles.
	To Ben's point, Donald Trump gets elected.
	I'm disabused of some of that because he is more conservative than I thought that he would be.
	There is also the sunk cost thing, which is whatever damage is done is done.
	But the reason that my position on Trump remains different than your position on Trump or Michael's position on Trump over time isn't because I'm still maintaining the position that I had in 2016 about Trump.
	I'm not.
	Trump is.
	Now he is what he is.
	He is our president.
	I mean, the never-Trumpers right now are waving at a taxi that's already departed.
	That's right.
	The reason that I'm critical of the president now is because I still believe that the only hope long-term for the country isn't just short-term political expedience.
	It's someone still standing.
	All I want in politics today, as far as my involvement, not what I'd like to see happen, for my involvement, all I want is that the things that I stood for before Trump and the things that I stand for after Trump to be the same things.
	I don't want it to be the case that I claim to have all these deep beliefs, these philosophical beliefs, these moral beliefs.
	But I'll give all that up as long as we're winning.
	But you mean...
	That's the only thing I don't...
	It's not to say that you want every political position you held 10 years ago to be the same as your political position.
	No, of course not.
	You're talking about foundational principles.
	Foundational principles.
	Right.
	Of course.
	And that's why I think that when Jeremy and I are sort of on the same side on this quid pro quo thing, which is like, if it gets proved that...
	So let's put it straight out.
	If it gets proved straight out that he said to Rudy Giuliani or anybody else, I am withholding the Ukrainian aid until they investigate and go after Joe Biden.
	Do you think that's impeachable?
	Wow.
	I still wouldn't impeach him.
	But I have to say, I probably wouldn't impeach any president.
	Well, this is the issue, right?
	I wouldn't impeach Richard Nixon.
	This is the thing.
	If he only did that all the time, if he did it a number of times, if he was leveraging the value of the country, which belongs to us, for his political purposes, the way Obama seems to have done, in a constant way, Yeah, then you'd move into impeachment territory.
	But if he made some kind of remark to somebody- But impeachment by necessity is rarely about a pattern.
	Usually it's about an incident.
	So meaning if Barack Obama had been caught on tape saying to somebody, I am withholding aid to Israel unless Israel investigates Donald Trump and finds dirt on him.
	I would for sure say impeach the guy.
	100% I'd say impeach the guy.
	And I think we all would have at the time.
	And I think that if you allow Putin to come in and kill a bunch of Ukrainians, So that one of the potential people who might run against you in a forthcoming presidential election might possibly be hurt if your presumptions about what actually took place are right.
	You gotta go.
	But again, this is all hypothetical.
	We're trying to hone in on sort of a distinction.
	And to me, my rule has always been if it's something where I would condemn Obama, I'll condemn Trump for it.
	And if it's something where I think Obama should have been impeached, I'll say the same thing about Trump.
	Because the minute that we start shifting the standard based on that, then nobody has any standards.
	And then it may as well.
	Then politics isn't war by other means.
	It's just war.
	And this is why the Flight 93 election analogy that went around in 2016.
	Jonah Goldberg had this great line this week on Twitter where he says, people seem to forget what happened to Flight 93.
	It crashed.
	No, I never liked that analogy.
	And I never thought that was true.
	If I was on Flight 93...
	Crash it.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	You'd rather crash the plane than go where the plane is going.
	But my view of politics is that while we always treat it like it's that urgent, the truth is that...
	If the country is to survive, it cannot be that urgent.
	If the country is to survive...
	We can't truly believe...
	I had this argument with Dennis Prager, where Dennis was saying, if Hillary Clinton is elected, it's the end of the country.
	And I said to him, well, I don't see you quitting your job.
	So what are you going to do?
	Not go into work the next day?
	But that attitude is what leads, I think, to the, okay, well, no matter what he does, then at least he's better than them.
	And it's like, well...
	Yes and no.
	Yes and no.
	Whatever he does, he may be better than them, but whatever you say is okay may make the country worse than it was five minutes.
	Specifically on the quid pro quo idea, we all read the transcript.
	I don't think any of us thinks that this is evidence that Trump was engaging in a quid pro quo, even if Zelensky was trying to do that.
	At the very least, I will say I don't think it's clear that he was.
	Or it's not clear that he was.
	It doesn't seem to me that he was doing that.
	We're also losing the context of the call itself, or even the ask itself, which is Joe Biden as the sitting vice president, apparently putting a lot of pressure, threatening to withhold a billion dollars in aid at a very crucial time for Ukraine, so that for his own son and for his own presidential ambitions, to get his derelict son out of trouble for a prosecutor who may not have been looking for.
	Let me ask you a question.
	If they found that to be true, should he have been impeached as vice president?
	No, well...
	I'll answer that in one second, but I want the first part of the question first.
	Because it converges him to Trump and then answers him.
	Because in that case, what I want to point out is the Obama administration faced no consequences for that.
	Obama faced no consequences for any of his other egregious oversteps.
	And so my look at impeachment is one of great prudential character.
	I don't like impeachment.
	I don't think any of the attempted impeachments should have taken place.
	And so I'm just pushing the brakes on that, even when it applies to Trump, even if I'm uncomfortable with the behavior.
	And I have to say, you have to give me credit, that when I voted for Trump, which I'm really proud, and I really think I did the right thing, I knew I was taking a risk.
	I actually wrote a thing where I said, I'm taking this risk for my country.
	Because I think if I'm right, I thought there was a 5% chance I was wrong.
	Now I look back, I think there's a 1% chance I was wrong.
	But at the time, I thought, 5% chance this guy's as bad as...
	You know, I hate him.
	And there's a 5% chance he's as bad politically as I think he is.
	I thought it was worth risking my reputation and my morals to do what I thought was right for the country.
	I'm glad I did it.
	I'm glad it worked out.
	I could be sitting here...
	I could be outside asking for money because no one would hire me because, you know, I voted for a Nazi.
	But it didn't turn out that way.
	I thought that was the right thing to do.
	The only thing I would say, too, is the one way in which...
	I agree with the Kurt Schlichters of the world.
	Kurt Schlichter is a friend of mine, so I'm not like that.
	That's right.
	And he's a great guy.
	Hire him if you need a lawyer.
	He's absolutely a hilarious guy.
	We can't be so clean.
	We can't be so clean that they hit us with a lead pipe while we're dancing around with the Marcus of Queensborough.
	No, but this is the...
	I get offended by that.
	Yes, so do I. Because...
	Not me.
	I've taken an enormous amount of...
	All we do all day is fight the left.
	All we do all day is fight.
	I literally have 24-7 security because I fight the left.
	No, but it's not the question of whether we fight.
	It's a question of how we fight.
	So there's the old...
	No, there's the old...
	But here's the problem.
	There's the old joke.
	I piss off the left way more than all the people who think they're dancing around with the lead pipe.
	That is just a fact.
	There are very few conservatives in America.
	But there's the old joke about the guy who goes up to the gal and he says, you know, would you have sex with me for $5 million?
	Right?
	And she's like, oh yeah, I mean, if I... Make it quick.
	Write the check.
	He goes, cool, cool, cool.
	I don't have $5 million, but would you take a buck?
	What kind of girl do you think I am?
	Well, we've established what kind of girl you are.
	We're acting now over the price.
	Of course, that's all of us on some...
	No, that's right.
	That's all of us on some...
	The joke's funny because we can all relate to it.
	I am willing to compromise, of course.
	I'm not...
	But there is a degree of compromise at which you have actually...
	Fundamentally change the nature of the thing.
	Right.
	I agree with this.
	We agree on this.
	And the funny thing about Trump, you thought there was a 5% chance that it would be catastrophically bad.
	I thought that there was a 5% chance that he would be catastrophically bad, too.
	But only a 5% chance.
	That's not what kept me from voting for him.
	What kept me from voting for him is that I thought that there was a 75% chance that he would be a creature of the left, not of the right, and that he would fundamentally gut the actual philosophical and moral core of our movement in such a way that when he was gone, I wasn't sure what we were fighting for anymore.
	I wasn't that wrong.
	Like you, the 5% worst-case scenario thing didn't happen.
	The 75% thing, half of it I was wrong about, which is I thought he'd give us his sister to be a Supreme Court justice.
	I thought the guy just has been a Democrat his whole life, and he's going to govern.
	I worried about that, too.
	He's going to govern.
	He has not governed as a Democrat.
	They haven't let him.
	Thank God for the Democrats.
	They haven't let him.
	But if you're asking, do I think that our party has done more than just sully itself, but has compromised itself to the point that it isn't sure what it is anymore?
	I do think that.
	I think that we only in this moment, where it will go in the future, I don't know.
	In this moment, I think the only identity that our party has is anti-left.
	I think when Rush Limbaugh changed the slogan of his show from the Advanced Institute of Conservative Studies to the Advanced Institute of Anti-Leftist Studies.
	He switched it back, I think.
	He did.
	He did.
	But it was actually, it was an honest moment because we used to, not everyone who votes Republican, but we used to in the core of the movement be about conservatism.
	And then in the moment of Trump, at the core of the movement, we're just about fighting the left.
	I see.
	I see.
	The way I disagree with you about this is I think Trump is a symptom of that phenomenon.
	I think, you know, I asked Ted Cruz about this and I love Cruz, but he is a politician.
	It's sometimes hard to get an honest answer.
	And I said, look, you know, Tucker Carlson had this wonderful line where he said, a happy country doesn't elect Donald Trump president.
	That's not something that happens in a happy country.
	I said, the Republican, the conservative movement, in my opinion, had failed.
	I think it had failed in three specific ways.
	I think it had failed by supporting the wars of the freedom agenda, which turned out to be an overstep.
	That was a big thing.
	I think it failed to restrain the administrative state because nobody actually wanted to do the work.
	And I know you and I have disagreed on this, but I think it failed the people in the heartland of the country by talking about free markets while they starved.
	Just a sec.
	I think it failed.
	I think it collapsed.
	I said this almost immediately after the election.
	I think we're living in a room without gravity and the furniture is floating around.
	Nobody knows where it's going to come down.
	And I think that that's the phenomenon we're seeing.
	And I think Trump is part of that.
	What I'm hoping for and strategizing for and praying for is that after Trump, There is a new conservative movement because, look, the Cold War is over, guys.
	You know, Reagan conservatism is out of date.
	We need a new conservative.
	I don't believe it's out of date.
	I don't believe that the founding principles are out of date.
	The founding principles aren't out of date, but how do we apply them?
	And I don't agree that conservatism failed.
	The Republican Party failed.
	That there was this huge populist movement toward conservatism.
	That happened during the Obama years.
	And no matter how much power they gave the Republican Party, the Republican Party absolutely refused to engage in a conservative election.
	I think that's fair, but I think that if conservatism had been more realistic, more responsive, maybe they wouldn't have done that.
	But look, I think that's a fair comment too.
	So a couple things.
	One, I think that on economics, you are doing a fair bit of revisionist history.
	I am not aware of the Republican Party that was small government And universally pro-free trade and anti-steel subsidies and anti-specific tariffs.
	They were in their rhetoric, weren't they?
	George W. Bush spent more money than Croesus.
	George W. Bush was a big spender.
	He campaigned on compassionate conservatism.
	- He was not a conservative. - The exact, he campaigned on exactly, when it came to spending, the agenda that Donald Trump, he gave us new entitlements.
	- I agree.
	- He gave us all the things that-- - Gave us Homeland Security, the TSA.
	- Right, exactly.
	- Medicare.
	- He was a big government, not super conservative guy who happened to share a couple of socially conservative values and like tax cuts.
	I mean, that was really kind of what he was.
	And so I'm not aware of this Republican Party of which you speak and whose agenda failed.
	I don't think that that was actually ever the agenda in terms of practice or even in terms of campaigning when they were campaigning as compassionate conservatives in 2000.
	I think the last conservative who campaigned as a small government conservative was Ronald Reagan.
	No one has done it since.
	George H. Bush did it and then betrayed it and then lost.
	Right.
	When I say the conservative moved and failed, I mean by not having enough...
	And by the way, we did not fail on pro-life.
	They've succeeded wildly on pro-life.
	I'm not saying about everything.
	I'm saying the conservative movement did not collapse because of Donald Trump.
	Donald Trump was elected because the conservative movement collapsed.
	I believe the conservative movement collapsed into rage.
	It didn't collapse because...
	It didn't collapse because of principle.
	It collapsed because of frustration.
	And then it collapsed into who will punch these people in the grill.
	And Donald Trump wasn't running on a agenda.
	John Boehner gave us Donald Trump.
	Yeah, I mean, I agree with this.
	John Bain was the most depressing person I ever met.
	But more than that, so you said that you know right now you don't regret your vote, and Jeremy, you sort of said that you also don't regret your vote.
	Here's my answer.
	I don't know yet.
	And I know that's sort of a cop-out, but I really don't know yet.
	So I think that I've been very clear about what about my vote I got wrong, and that was how he would govern.
	And then there's the long-term ramifications of the Trump presidency, and I have no idea.
	No, but who does, right?
	No, no, but I think you think you do.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, no, no.
	That's not it.
	That's not it.
	I think because I don't, I have no basis to judge.
	And you have to vote in the moment.
	You have to vote in the time.
	Nobody knows the future.
	You have to vote on that day.
	You've already said that.
	You can't say I'm going to phone in my vote 20 years from now.
	No, of course.
	And I'm not blaming you for how you voted, nor did I any time during the election, right?
	I said, like, I can't vote this way.
	You screamed at me for three hours when I told you I was going to vote for Trump.
	I told you it was like the godfather when Sonny gets in.
	The way you talk, it was like being a machine gun.
	Pfft!
	But when it came to people who explained why...
	But then, by the time you voted for Trump, it was like you voted for Trump.
	I never at any point said people should actively not vote.
	I said, I can't do it.
	But I never made the statement that people should...
	I don't blame you for not doing it.
	But the point that I'm making is that when it comes to the questions of things in life we regret, because that is inherently retrospective, And I'm not talking about in the moment.
	In the moment, you always feel good about what you're doing because you're doing it in the moment, right?
	So now we're talking about retrospective because that was the topic of conversation.
	So you're saying, in retrospect, that you feel fulfilled, that you feel good about how you voted.
	And I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I feel bad about the fact that I got him wrong on politics.
	Yeah.
	I don't feel bad about how I felt about him on character, because I think that he has proved to be all the things that I thought he was.
	I think that in terms of what the country has been, you know, and what has been done to the country, not just by Trump, but also by mostly the reaction to Trump.
	And that's not Trump's fault.
	That's Trump being and the left just losing its mind and just going way off the rails.
	And so Trump's presence is not responsible for that in the same way that when I go on campus and people lose their minds, I'm not responsible for that, but it is true that the campus is a worse place because I'm there.
	They all feel that way.
	But because of that, I don't know yet.
	And the one thing that I'm afraid of, there are two things I'm afraid of, and these fears still obtain, but I'm not sure they're avoidable anymore, was Jeremy's concern that the Republican Party would be soul-sucked, embrace a bunch of stuff.
	It never would have before, not even in terms of policy because the Republican Party goes up and down in terms of spending and in terms of taxes.
	And it has disparate elements to it as well.
	Right, and it's got a lot of different stuff in it.
	But in terms of the...
	Like, today, when people were militantly, I mean, like, militantly, he's absolutely innocent.
	He's 100%.
	And this transcript exonerates him.
	And I just thought to myself, no, it doesn't.
	Okay, it doesn't.
	Like, the transcript may not prove the case against him.
	And I'll say I don't think it proves the case.
	I agree with you.
	It doesn't prove the case against him.
	But if you read that transcript and you read, this was, in fact, the greatest conversation ever been placed, then I don't know how that's...
	In the realm of reality.
	Because of the presumption of innocence, it doesn't have to exonerate him.
	Right, exactly.
	It just has to not condemn him.
	It does not condemn him.
	So the two things that I was afraid of are that he would soul-suck the Republican Party, and I don't know if that's just as long as whoever's president is the president, that's how it goes.
	Meaning that you follow Bush when he's the president, you follow Obama when he's the president, you follow Trump when he's the president, and that's just how it goes because that's how we operate.
	That's right.
	And then you hope for a better president who's not going to follow them down dark paths.
	So maybe it's that or maybe there's been a fundamental shift in what will be allowed from now on.
	That's why I say I don't know yet.
	I'm hoping that it's the former.
	I'm hoping that it's like, okay, for the moment everybody's like, okay, we'll throw bricks at each other and then there will come a time where we don't have to throw bricks at each other and we won't throw bricks at each other anymore and in that time it will be moral again not to throw bricks.
	And then I'm worried, obviously, about something that Republicans have decided to not worry about ever again, which is the serious demographic problems facing the Republican Party.
	I think that's a problem, too.
	I mean, President Trump is, like, for all of the talk and for all the sanguinity about how he is going to drive out the masses and he's won the white working class over, and yes, he has won more white working class votes, and that's great.
	But, like, I don't know...
	Let's put it this way.
	Out of 100 young people, and by young people, I mean people under the age of 35.
	Out of 100 young people, and I'm talking about like across the country, My guess is you couldn't find 35 of them who will say that they will vote for Donald Trump in the next election.
	I'm really worried about this, by the way.
	That scares the living crap out of me.
	No, I'm really worried about this.
	So I don't know yet.
	I don't know yet.
	And there's no way I'm ever really going to know the truth because who knows what it would have been if Hillary had been president.
	I didn't want her to be president, and I think she would have been a crap president, but that alternative timeline doesn't exist.
	It doesn't exist, right.
	No, that's why when you talk about regret, I mean, I look back, when you look back on your life, the things I regret are things that I did that I knew were wrong at the time.
	But there are things that you regret where you made excuses to yourself at the time to make yourself do them, because we all do that.
	Right.
	And then later you're like, but I kind of knew.
	That's what I mean.
	And I feel like there is going to be some of that with regard to behavior during this era.
	Where people look back and they're like, yeah, it's true.
	I was trying to stop these people from being the worst people.
	And I was trying to stop them from taking control of the country.
	But I kind of knew at the time that there was something niggling at me inside that was eating away at me and saying, this is not...
	I'm sure that's going to happen.
	I mean, that's why...
	What I've been careful to do is just tell people my thought processes.
	When I talk, I just say...
	I totally agree.
	I totally agree.
	That's why I'm not angry at you.
	That's why the people who I am angry at are the people who go out there and don't even try to reveal the thought process or the struggle.
	Like, I just want some honesty.
	Like, I'll tell people, and I do it on my show all the time, and I hope people appreciate it, that if I'm struggling with an issue, I'm actually struggling with an issue.
	Sometimes I just don't know the answer.
	You don't know, yeah.
	I just don't know.
	So...
	Anyway.
	Ben Shapiro just don't know.
	And on that note, thank you guys for tuning in to this episode of Backstage.
	We're going to do it again, I don't know, in a few weeks.
	We do this, what, once, twice a month every time now?
	Yeah, I'm leaving for a while.
	That's right, you're going away.
	Yeah, Ben's going to be gone, so we'll do a...
	Don't worry, my show will still be on air, but I will not be present here.
	That's right, so we won't be able to actually do this show, but you will be able to do your show.
	Right, the highly successful and entertaining...
	Thanks, everybody.

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