Trump meets with Kim Jong-un to try and get a deal on North Korea, but it doesn t work. Why did the president fail? And why is this even a thing? Ben Shapiro explains why the president should have known that this was not part of a grand plan, and why it s a massive failure. He also explains why this whole thing is a complete disaster, and how the President should have been able to broker a deal in the first place, not just a deal, but a deal that actually gets a deal done, and doesn t look like a deal at all. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the Daily Wire. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Wire and the Weekly Standard, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, and the Wall Street Journal. He is also a frequent guest on CNN and CBS News, and hosts the Hot Water podcast, The View from the Cheap Segment on CBS Radio's Hard Knocks. Check out his new show on HBO's The Five on HBO and CBS Radio, where he hosts a new podcast called The View From The Ground Zero. Click here to listen to the latest on the latest breaking news in the world of politics and culture, including Michael Cohen and Rashida Tlaib's testimony on the Cohen/Cohen case, here on The Hill, and much more. Check out Ben Shapiro's new book, on his new podcast, The People s Guide to the Trump-Kim Jong-North Korea Summit, out now on Amazon Prime on HBO. on The Tonight Show on the Tonight Show with Rachel Maddow. Subscribe to The Five, wherever you get your eardrums are listening to the show on the airwaves, and check out his podcast on The Five Most Powerful People on the Four Corners, The Six Billion Dollar Man, The Five most powerful people in the most important podcast on the road. The Six Million Dollar Man and more! Subscribe and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get the best listening experience on the internet, including The Five things you can get the most authentic and the most influential podcast in the best of all things political and most influential on the web, including the best podcast on culture and social media, The Realest place in the podcast The Most Powerful man in the greatest podcast on your favorite podcast, the Realest thing on the planet.
00:00:00.000Michael Cohen's testimony gives everyone what they want, Rashida Tlaib goes off the rails, and President Trump's North Korea gambit comes apart.
00:00:13.000We have a lot of breaking news on the North Korea front.
00:00:15.000We're going to get to that in just one second.
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00:01:26.000I have been very critical of the president's strategy on North Korea, but I was willing to withhold judgment.
00:01:30.000My feeling was, if the president wants to try his sycophancy for denuclearization negotiation tactic, if he wants to pretend that he can flatter Kim Jong-un into giving up his nuclear weapons, which again, makes no sense.
00:01:42.000The only reason Kim Jong-un is even a player on the world stage is because of his nuclear weapons.
00:01:47.000But if Trump thinks that he can flatter him into something, if he thinks that he can grant him world credibility by meeting with him and conferring America's imprimatur of quasi-approval upon him, if he thinks he can get him to denuclearize, well, that's a high-risk, high-reward strategy, because if it works, Then the President wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
00:02:06.000But if it doesn't work, then the United States has just sunk down to the level of the North Korean dictatorship diplomatically by sitting in a room with one of the worst people on planet Earth, a man who is keeping millions of people in a giant gulag, a person who has executed legitimately tens of thousands of people, a person who kills his relatives with anti-aircraft guns and anthrax at airports.
00:02:24.000The President of the United States sat down with that guy not once, but twice.
00:02:29.000And again, if this was all part of some grand plan, fine.
00:02:32.000It turns out, today, it was not part of a grand plan.
00:02:34.000And I'm going to show you how this whole thing fell apart, how it was never properly planned, and how the President of the United States made the United States look foolish in this entire endeavor, and continues to do so today in his talk about Kim Jong-un.
00:03:03.000That would require that Kim Jong-un had already signed off on some stuff before President Trump ever got in a room with him.
00:03:11.000What you don't do is send the President of the United States around like a used car salesman trying to pawn off a bad lemon on some unsuspecting schmuck.
00:03:20.000That's not what the President of the United States is there to do.
00:03:22.000We have an entire diplomatic corps that is there to ensure that at the end of a summit like this, that something gets signed that looks like a concession by the North Koreans, or that looks like a deal, or that looks like anything.
00:03:34.000The president didn't even get an empty pledge from the North Koreans this time.
00:03:51.000Because otherwise, you just took the most powerful, most moral country in the history of the world and put it on an equal photo op playing field with one of the worst people on planet Earth.
00:04:03.000According to the New York Times today, President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed, with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula.
00:04:17.000Sometimes you just have to walk, Mr. Trump said at an afternoon news conference in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam.
00:04:24.000The question is why you had walked into Vietnam in the first place without any sort of pre-negotiations.
00:04:29.000Again, I bashed President Obama back when he was Senator Obama in 2008 for saying he wanted to meet with the Iranians and the Cubans without precondition.
00:04:36.000You think I'm not going to do the same thing with regard to North Korea and President Trump?
00:04:39.000Especially when the president confers all sorts of beautiful words upon a piece of human debris like Kim Jong-un.
00:04:47.000The president of the United States went to Vietnam and suggested that Kim Jong-un, unlike, you know, many spoiled billionaire's kids, he was really a normal guy.
00:04:56.000And then they issued a statement yesterday.
00:04:57.000The United States issued a statement talking about President Trump's special relationship with Kim.
00:05:02.000Hey, you don't have to hug the dictator to negotiate with the dictator.
00:05:08.000The president has a personal negotiation strategy.
00:05:10.000He's been using it in business for years.
00:05:12.000And that strategy is essentially blustering threats, followed by the possibility of a warm, cordial embrace.
00:05:20.000The president thinks he can flatter people into doing what he wants, and if he doesn't get that, then he tries to threaten them into doing what he wants.
00:05:27.000That is just a wild vacillation from one point to the other.
00:05:30.000Remember, two years ago, the president of the United States was threatening little Kim Jong-un with the biggest nuclear button in the world, and now he's calling him his best friend.
00:05:39.000Does that seem like a strategy to you, or does that just seem like wild flailing about?
00:05:42.000I'll tell you, after what I saw today from the president, it seems like wild flailing about.
00:05:47.000According to Trump, he said Kim had offered to dismantle the North's most important nuclear facility if the United States lifted the sanctions on his nation, but he would not commit to do the same for other elements of its weapons program.
00:05:58.000Mr. Trump said that was a deal-breaker.
00:06:01.000Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn't do that.
00:06:05.000Well, that's something that you should have known walking in, is it not?
00:06:09.000I mean, this is why, again, we have an entire State Department that is designed to do these things.
00:06:14.000But I want you to see how people moved from Trump is a genius for engaging in the negotiation to Trump is a genius for walking away in the space of 48 hours.
00:06:24.000Not only is it wildly inconsistent, again, I point you to the fact that if Barack Obama did this, people on the right would lose their bleep.
00:06:32.000And they should, because the President of the United States represents not only the people living in the United States today, he represents the Constitution of the United States, he represents the American mission, he represents liberty.
00:06:43.000It was one of the most shameful things about the Obama presidency, the fact that President Obama was constantly trying to make common cause with the Iranian mullahs, for example.
00:07:40.000You know, it's not just talking when the president of the United States creates an image of the United States as a place willing to overlook the most brutal human rights violations on the planet in exchange for nothing, in exchange for literally nothing.
00:07:54.000Apparently, there was a meeting that was scheduled today.
00:07:57.000The premature end to the negotiations leaves the unusual rapprochement between the United States and North Korea that has unfolded for most of a year at a deadlock, with the North retaining both its nuclear arsenal and facilities believed to be producing additional fissile material for warheads.
00:08:10.000It also represents a major setback at a difficult political moment for Trump, who has long presented himself as a tough negotiator capable of bringing adversaries into a deal and had made North Korea the signature diplomatic initiative of his presidency.
00:08:22.000And here I will point out that the President's history of negotiation as President of the United States has been rather poor.
00:08:33.000In negotiations with North Korea, he comes away with nothing after spending an enormous amount of his own political capital and the political capital of the United States on these foolhardy negotiations.
00:08:45.000Now I'm going to show you how this unfolded.
00:08:46.000So, as of yesterday, President Trump was still talking up all this stuff.
00:08:50.000He said, listen, we're having great meetings.
00:08:58.000So we're going to have a very busy day tomorrow, and we'll probably have a pretty quick dinner.
00:09:03.000And a lot of things are going to be solved, I hope, and I think it'll lead to wonderful, it'll lead to really a wonderful situation along the way.
00:09:12.000And our relationship is a very special relationship.
00:09:18.000That's a phrase usually reserved for the United States' relations with Great Britain.
00:09:22.000The special relationship between the U.S.
00:09:23.000and Great Britain was the hallmark of World War II.
00:09:25.000Now he's saying that he has a very special relationship with a guy who literally strapped his uncle to an anti-aircraft gun and blew him in half.
00:09:32.000Who literally took his brother-in-law and had him anthraxed at a public airport.
00:09:39.000Now, maybe you're so cynical about politics or America's moral standing in the world that you think it doesn't matter what the president says.
00:10:04.000Because his real hope is that he was going to be able to sucker Trump into removing the sanctions.
00:10:08.000That's why, again, the president is absolutely correct to walk away from the negotiations.
00:10:12.000The question is why he was at the table in the first place without any of these things being discussed.
00:10:17.000It's not like this was a minor ancillary issue that killed the deal.
00:10:20.000This was the central issue of the deal.
00:10:23.000The central issue was, what is North Korea going to do in exchange for removing sanctions, and it better be total denuclearization.
00:10:29.000That was the entire premise of these negotiations.
00:10:33.000And when we say that, what I love is the ridiculous line that it's some sort of massive win for the United States to sit down with a tin-pot dictator like Kim Jong-un.
00:10:43.000The president of the United States can sit down with anyone on earth that he wants.
00:10:46.000When the most prominent recent guest to North Korea from America was Dennis Rodman, I'm going to go with Kim Jong-un's social book is not exactly full up.
00:10:56.000It's not a big win for the United States to sit down with a piece of garbage like Kim Jong-un.
00:11:00.000Anyway, here was Kim Jong-un saying that he had a feeling that good results were going to come out of this.
00:11:35.000But again, if he had been fully rolled, I'm sure there would be people praising him today for that, too.
00:11:39.000OK, we're going to talk in a second about how this thing ended, how it went down and how the defense went from Trump is a brilliant negotiator to Trump has has all the the cojones in the world for walking away from this.
00:11:50.000He has cojones for walking in and he has cojones for walking out.
00:11:52.000Well, then you have now created an untestable and unverifiable thesis.
00:11:57.000Okay, if the hypothesis is that it's good for him to walk in because something good will result, and then nothing good results, so it's good for him to walk out, which was it?
00:12:05.000We'll get to that in just one second, and I'll explain really why I'm so ticked this morning, because I am.
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00:13:26.000And Republicans are saying, well, it's going so great over there and that's why Democrats scheduled the Michael Cohen hearing because it's just terrible.
00:13:32.000They wanted to distract from President Trump over in Vietnam because things are just going so awesome over there.
00:13:37.000And then you got Kim saying, listen, I'm ready to denuclearize.
00:13:41.000Now what he means by denuclearize, obviously, is that the United States pulls all of its troops out of South Korea and the entire continent becomes free of American influence.
00:13:51.000That's what Kim meant by denuclearize.
00:13:53.000So when he says this, understand that he is lying.
00:13:55.000At least if you think denuclearize means he stops his nuclear program.
00:13:58.000But here was Kim making the overture that is not real.
00:14:02.000If I'm not willing to do that, I won't be here right now.
00:14:08.000If I'm not willing to do that, I won't be here right now.
00:14:12.000I'm not sure you're the best answer you've ever heard.
00:14:20.000Are you ready to take concrete steps to the world's life or not quite yet?
00:14:26.000That is what we are discussing right now. - Okay, so that would be Kim Jong-un and his sister basically saying, yeah, this is what we're discussing.
00:14:46.000And they have no intention of handing over their nuclear weapons.
00:14:48.000The minute the Kim family hands over the nuclear weapons, they get deposed in North Korea.
00:14:53.000This is obvious to anyone who's watching this.
00:14:54.000But that doesn't stop President Trump's fans from praising his brilliance in negotiation early on in this thing.
00:15:00.000And as I say, I was willing to withhold judgment.
00:15:03.000Not moral judgment, because again, the United States should not be granting this sort of legitimacy to an evil dictator.
00:15:08.000I wasn't willing to suspend judgment when it came to the president flattering Kim Jong-un to the skies and talking about his beautiful pen pal relationship with him.
00:15:16.000People saying today that it's just like Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev.
00:15:36.000President Trump has taken the opposite tack, which is to sort of pretend that it's not all that evil over there for purposes of trying to flatter the Kim regime into doing what he wants.
00:15:44.000Okay, so President Trump is doing these negotiations and supposedly everything is going swimmingly.
00:16:00.000Everybody watching tonight, if you see Kim Jong-un answering questions off the cuff to the news media, you're seeing a historic change that every person in North Korea is going to pick up on.
00:16:15.000I mean, it is an enormous moment because he's coming out of a shell of total control into a world where he's now trying to interact with Trump in a way that makes him more normal.
00:16:29.000And I think there's a real piece of this of trying to become normal.
00:17:01.000What incredible... Now, As I said, if the result had been something of any substance, or if there had been a plan, then I would concede this was out of the box.
00:17:32.000He visited North Korea, and he took a poster off the wall, supposedly.
00:17:36.000The North Korean regime took hold of him and literally beat him to death.
00:17:40.000They beat him into a coma, they made him a vegetable, and then they shipped him back to the United States.
00:17:44.000You'll remember it was a major issue because one Donald J. Trump spoke about Otto Warmbier and had his parents to the State of the Union address just a couple of years ago.
00:17:52.000Now here's the President of the United States, the most moral power on the face of the earth and in human history, talking about how he trusts Kim Jong-un that Otto Warmbier was not actually murdered.
00:18:02.000Otto Warmbier, something bad happened to him.
00:18:04.000But I mean, I trust this Kim guy over here, the one who murders his relatives with anti-aircraft guns.
00:18:09.000It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen.
00:19:29.000I am not suggesting that war with the North Koreans is the solution.
00:19:32.000I am suggesting that the solution is not the president of the United States going out there and saying that he trusts a man who had an American murdered.
00:19:52.000There's no moral component to politics.
00:19:53.000You know, so if Trump is praising Putin because it's advantageous, or if he's praising Kim Jong-un because it's advantageous, Well, what's the big deal?
00:20:00.000I mean, don't we all know that politics is dirty pool and people... It's the scene from The Godfather where Michael Corleone is walking around with Kay and he's explaining how he's just like a senator because senators have people killed too.
00:20:14.000This kind of faux sophistication about politics.
00:21:15.000It wasn't that the Cold War ended because President Trump, because President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev became friends.
00:21:23.000The Cold War ended because every incentive aligned against Mikhail Gorbachev, because Gorbachev made the mistake of believing that if he allowed a few of the fringe nations around the edges of the Soviet Union to leave, then the others would not leave, and that he would be saving money in the process.
00:21:37.000This is well documented inside the Soviet archives.
00:21:40.000He didn't do it because he was personal friends with Reagan.
00:21:55.000It is certainly true in international politics, where you are representing an entire nation and or a dictatorship that has to be preserved at all costs, including the cost of murdering many of its own citizens.
00:22:05.000There's no excuse for the president's behavior here.
00:22:08.000The only excuse would have been if he had somehow done all this crap and for some odd reason it had worked and Kim Jong-un had committed to denuclearization with verifiability.
00:22:17.000He committed to none of those things and he still got out of the president that they are besties and also Otto Warmbier, maybe, you know, maybe it was just sort of an accident in one of those crazy prison camps.
00:22:27.000So, apparently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said that officials had worked through the previous night and into the morning to come up with terms acceptable to both leaders.
00:22:35.000He said, when you are dealing with a country that is of the nature of North Korea, it is often the case that only the most senior leaders have the capacity to make those important decisions.
00:22:41.000He said, we'll each need to regroup a little bit.
00:22:43.000There was no statement from the Kim regime.
00:22:51.000Now, maybe this all results in something good down the line, but at this very moment, if I have to judge at this very moment, and I will judge the president on moral grounds here, no excuse.
00:23:03.000I do not have the capacity to speak in defense of a president who is saying that Otto Warmbier was, that the family of Otto Warmbier should apparently be trusted less than Kim Jong-un.
00:23:12.000I just don't know how to even remotely justify that or explain it.
00:23:17.000In a second, We're gonna get to the Cohen hearings, which, as it turns out, didn't do a lot of damage to the president.
00:23:24.000We'll talk about that in just a second.
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00:25:42.000If you put aside the answers he gave to Mueller, if Trump talked to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks in the way that Michael Cohen says he did, there is no collusion and no violation of law.
00:25:51.000Based on your experience with the President and knowledge of his relationship with Mr. Stone, do you have reason to believe that the President explicitly or implicitly authorized Mr. Stone to make contact with Wikileaks and to indicate the campaign's interest in the strategic release of these illegally hacked materials?
00:26:09.000Was Mr. Stone a free agent reporting back to the President what he had done, or was he an agent of the campaign acting on behalf of the President and with his apparent authority?
00:26:21.000He frequently reached out to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump was very happy to take his calls.
00:26:28.000Okay, so he was a free agent, not working for Trump, and Trump took his calls, and then when Stone told him that WikiLeaks was going to release stuff on Hillary, Trump was like, oh, great.
00:26:47.000Other evidence that there's no legal liability when it comes to the collusion stuff.
00:26:50.000Michael Cohen, who is as close to the president as anybody, according to his own testimony, he was asked, do you have any evidence that the president colluded with Russia?
00:26:57.000And Cohen says, no, not at all, actually.
00:27:00.000The questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.
00:27:28.000Then he was asked, have you been to Prague?
00:27:30.000So this is only important because the Steele dossier, which has been the linchpin of the argument that President Trump was colluding with the Russians, had a claim that Michael Cohen had traveled to Prague to negotiate with the Russians on behalf of Campaign Trump.
00:27:45.000I've never been to the Czech Republic.
00:27:51.000Okay, so in order, Cohen has now debunked the idea that Trump was colluding with WikiLeaks, that collusion generally was happening, and that he personally was involved in anything the Steele dossier talked about, demonstrating once again that the Steele dossier was basically just a mash-up of garbage that Christopher Steele was trying to dump onto the Hillary Clinton campaign via Perkins Coie, and that that was eventually moved to Fusion GPS.
00:28:17.000That's Cohen debunking half of the Democratic talking points for the last three years.
00:28:22.000And then it gets worse because Michael Cohen talks about the payoff deal that Trump had with Stormy Daniels.
00:28:27.000Now his suggestion is that he paid off Stormy Daniels at Trump's direction.
00:28:30.000As I mentioned yesterday, there are two elements required in order for Trump to violate a campaign finance law.
00:28:35.000One, the payment to Stormy Daniels must have been seen as a campaign contribution, meaning that if Trump had a long history of paying off women to shut up, that's not actually evidence in favor of the campaign finance violation.
00:28:47.000That's evidence against the idea that there was a campaign finance violation.
00:28:50.000A campaign expenditure is an expenditure that takes place only in the context of a campaign.
00:28:55.000That's why if I eat lunch on the campaign, I can't charge that to the campaign.
00:28:59.000Because I'm going to eat lunch normally.
00:29:01.000If, however, I'm flying to Iowa for the campaign, then I wouldn't be flying to Iowa if it weren't for the campaign.
00:29:18.000Did Trump know that he was violating campaign election law and trying to end around disclosure requirements by using Cohen as a cutout?
00:29:25.000And the answer, if Cohen does this on a regular basis, is no.
00:29:28.000Because if he's been using Cohen as a cutout for 10 years, what's the claim that he did it specifically this time to avoid law?
00:29:34.000Here's Cohen basically admitting that there's no legal liability even in the campaign finance case.
00:29:39.000Catch and kill is a method that exists when you're working with a news outlet, in this specific case it was AMI, National Enquirer, David Pecker, Dylan Howard and others, where they would contact me or Mr. Trump or someone and state that there's a story that's ...percolating out there that you may be interested in.
00:30:03.000And then what you do is you contact that individual and you purchase the rights to that story from them.
00:30:10.000These catch-and-kill scenarios existed between David Pecker and Mr. Trump long before I started working for him in 2007.
00:30:21.000Okay, so this has been going on for years and years and years and years.
00:30:24.000Therefore, this is probably not a campaign expenditure.
00:30:26.000And then he says, yeah, I was personally involved in killing a couple of these stories.
00:30:29.000Like, for example, there was a story about a love child.
00:31:12.000Immoral, embarrassing stuff is not grounds for impeachment.
00:31:14.000Impeachment is about high crimes and misdemeanors.
00:31:17.000Now, in a second, We're going to get to the only real attempt to try and catch Trump in serious legal violation, and then we'll get to the stuff that was bad for President Trump, just in terms of the headlines, in one second.
00:31:26.000First, go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
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00:32:19.000So the only real attempt to get Cohen to implicate Trump in illegal activity in any serious way was actually made by AOC.
00:32:32.000So Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who for some reason has been giving a plumb spot on the House Oversight Committee, she actually did a pretty good job of trying to tie down Michael Cohen to a story that could result in at least the capacity for the Democrats to try and grab Trump's tax records.
00:32:46.000She asked if Trump tried to commit fraud, and then Cohen says yes, and that provides the impetus for Democrats to now try to subpoena Trump's tax Tax records.
00:32:54.000So here's Michael Cohen giving these answers.
00:32:57.000In October 2018, the New York Times revealed that quote, President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.
00:33:12.000He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents' real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing his tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
00:33:26.000Mr. Cohen, do you know whether that specific report is accurate?
00:33:31.000And would it help for the committee to obtain federal and state tax returns from the president and his company to address that discrepancy?
00:33:38.000Okay, so that is her basically just saying that's what we're going to do.
00:33:42.000Now, Cohen didn't give any basis for them to actually subpoena the records because he says he doesn't know, but she's going to do that anyway.
00:33:49.000So this is just the beginning of the investigations, not the end.
00:33:52.000Meanwhile, so on the legal side, Republicans can easily say Michael Cohen provided no additional evidence of any illegal activity that harms President Trump.
00:33:59.000On the bad headlines side, there's going to be a round about headlines, because whenever one of your members of your inner circle turns on you, and then talks crap about you, and the media don't like you, that's going to be a headline.
00:34:09.000So, Michael Cohen, you know, basically just bad-mouthed the president yesterday.
00:34:15.000He called him a racist, he called him a bigot, he called him a sexist, and all the rest.
00:35:23.000And the Democrats' attempt to paint Michael Cohen as some sort of redeemed hero was similarly cringeworthy.
00:35:28.000Elijah Cummings, who's the chairman of the House Oversight Committee under the new Democratic Congress, he says, listen, we're better than this.
00:35:34.000We can be redeemed because Michael Cohen can be redeemed.
00:35:36.000Michael Cohen, he's changed his life here.
00:35:39.000Yeah, if anybody believes that, I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
00:35:42.000You come saying I have made my mistakes, but now I want to change my life.
00:35:52.000If we, as a nation, did not give people an opportunity after they made mistakes to change their lives, a whole lot of people would not do very well.
00:36:37.000American politics has been like this for a very long time.
00:36:40.000It's just that now the mask is off because President Trump is very obvious, and also because the Democrats are very obvious and the media are very obvious.
00:36:47.000Now, the worst moment of the entire day actually had nothing to do with Michael Cohen.
00:36:57.000And you can tell she's a nasty person.
00:36:59.000Not just because she's an open anti-Semite, but also because the Congresswoman from Michigan does stuff like this.
00:37:03.000So, yesterday, Mark Meadows brought in Lynn Patton from the White House, with whom he is friends, and he said, and she's also close with Trump, to sort of rebut the allegation that President Trump was a racist.
00:38:18.000But according to Rashida Tlaib, it does make him a racist.
00:38:20.000So in a second, I'm going to play you, Rashida Tlaib, going after Mark Meadows and suggesting he's a racist.
00:38:25.000This is so out of bounds that even Elijah Cummings had to step in.
00:38:28.000So this does explain a difference right now between the modern, new-fangled Democratic Party and maybe some of the older members of the Democratic Party.
00:38:35.000Mark Meadows and Elijah Cummings are really good friends.
00:38:37.000They've been good friends for many, many years.
00:38:39.000The new members of the Democratic Party, however, have been deeply ensconced in the idea that every Republican down deep is a vicious, evil racist.
00:38:48.000So here's Rashida Tlaib calling Mark Meadows a racist for the crime of having said, here's a black friend of the President of the United States who's not a racist.
00:38:55.000Just to make a note, Mr. Chairman, just because someone has a person of color, a black person working for them, does not mean they aren't racist.
00:39:50.000And I think, and I'm not going to put words in her mouth, but I think she said that she was not calling you a racist.
00:39:59.000So there's Cummings trying to quell that controversy.
00:40:02.000Now, the truth is that Tlaib was, of course, calling Meadows a racist, because Tlaib and half the Democratic Party are constantly calling Republicans racist at the drop of a hat.
00:40:11.000This is why Republicans don't take seriously accusations of racism, in some cases to their own detriment, because Democrats are willing to call everything racist.
00:40:19.000Cummings at least has the wherewithal to say, hey, that's not right.
00:40:37.000Good for Elijah Cummings for at least stepping in and shutting that down.
00:40:40.000In other news, it is important to note here that I mentioned yesterday that Matt Gaetz, who is the Republican congressperson from Florida who basically threatened Michael Cohen before his testimony, He has now tweeted out, I've personally apologized to Michael Cohen, referencing his private family in the public square.
00:40:54.000Regardless of disagreements, family members should be off limits from attacks from representatives, senators, and presidents, including myself.
00:41:01.000He said that after Bar Association initiated actual investigation into him in the state of Florida.
00:41:08.000There are reports today that Goetz was on the phone with President Trump and Trump had basically suggested that he do this thing with Michael Cohen in the first place, which Again, is a is a thug tactic and has no place in American politics.
00:41:48.000And you may agree with the president on policy, you may like the president, you may back the president, but immoral is immoral.
00:41:54.000We should be able to hold all of these thoughts simultaneously.
00:41:57.000Unfortunately, because nothing matters and everything is stupid, people want to get rid of their cognitive dissonance by suggesting that there are good guys and bad guys in American politics.
00:42:05.000There are very few good guys, and there are a lot of people who are mediocre, and there are a significant number of bad guys.
00:42:10.000That's the actual breakdown of good guys, bad guys, and people in between in American politics.
00:42:15.000Okay, meanwhile, speaking of corruption, it's not restricted to the United States, and it would be Silly to suggest that America is more corrupt and more dirty than any of the other nations of the West.
00:42:26.000Like, people have not paid attention to this, but Justin Trudeau in Canada is in serious trouble.
00:42:34.000According to Bloomberg, Justin Trudeau is facing the most explosive crisis of his administration After his former Attorney General detailed a months-long campaign by the Canadian Prime Minister's office to quietly end a legal problem for an iconic Quebec construction firm.
00:42:47.000In dramatic testimony that lasted nearly four hours, Jody Wilson-Raybould broke her silence with a detailed account of efforts by Trudeau and top aides to persuade her to step in and end prosecution of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.
00:42:59.000She argues it amounted to interference in the judicial system.
00:43:04.000Trudeau says he was trying to prevent job losses in his home province of Quebec by interfering in the judicial system.
00:43:10.000The former attorney general says, Wilson-Raybould, who quit the cabinet this month, also said she faced veiled threats about what might happen if she refused to order an out-of-court settlement.
00:43:25.000Her testimony shook the core of Justin Trudeau's team, naming him, his finance chief, and his most senior aides.
00:43:30.000Conservative leaders have been trying to unseat Trudeau, and they're calling for his resignation.
00:43:34.000In the polls, suddenly the Conservative Party is surging in Canada, thanks to all of this.
00:43:38.000That's not the only corruption that is being charged.
00:43:41.000There's corruption charges now issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:43:45.000The Attorney General of the State of Israel announced on Thursday his office had indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges after a two-year investigation.
00:43:52.000There are apparently one count of bribery and two counts of fraud and breach of trust.
00:43:56.000The most serious allegation against Bibi involves his relationship with Shaul Elevich, the controlling shareholder of an Israeli telecom company called Bizek.
00:44:06.000Police recommended an indictment in the case based on evidence collected that confidants of Netanyahu promoted regulatory changes worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Bezek.
00:44:14.000In exchange, they believe Netanyahu used his connections with Elevich to receive positive press coverage on Bezek's popular subsidiary news site, Walla.
00:44:21.000So the idea is that he traded favors for positive news coverage.
00:44:25.000Police have said that their investigation concluded that Netanyahu and Elevich engaged in a bribe-based relationship.
00:44:31.000The other charges against him are a lot less serious.
00:44:34.000The conclusions are published 39 days prior to a general election, so people have no idea how this is going to impact the vote.
00:44:41.000Bibi is actually, his Likud party is running second to a unity party created by the sort of center-right and center-left in Israel, with the indictment coming down.
00:44:51.000There's great uncertainty as to what happens in Israel next.
00:44:53.000So when we talk about corruption in the United States, recognize that corruption in government is sort of endemic to government.
00:44:59.000The good news is that in Western democracies, people try to do something about it, as opposed to in North Korea, where you just kill everyone who asks a question.
00:45:19.000Because the base of his party is extraordinarily extreme, and the mainstream of his party knows that if the base takes control, they have a real problem on their hands.
00:45:28.000So he's got the base of his party clamoring for a vote on this Green New Deal.
00:45:32.000The Green New Deal resolution is a bag of crap.
00:45:56.000Are they really willing to embrace this sort of nonsense?
00:45:59.000Here is Chuck Schumer gamely trying to say that it is Republicans' fault that a bill that Democrats proposed could make it to the floor for a vote.
00:46:08.000I heard Leader McConnell knocking the Green New Deal.
00:46:14.000I would ask the leader, and we're going to keep asking him, and every Republican in this chamber, what they would do About climate change.
00:48:43.000So this one, if you're eating breakfast, now is not the time to do so, if you are a subscriber and you can see this.
00:48:49.000There is a woman who has now smeared herself with menstrual blood, saying that she wanted to show that periods are both beautiful and powerful.
00:50:57.000Ads about menstrual products talk about smelling fresh or making us cleaner, implying that our body's natural functions are gross.
00:51:02.000If she doesn't think our body's natural functions are gross, she should smear poop on herself and walk around.
00:51:05.000Like really, when my son doesn't want his diaper changed, you know what I say to him?
00:51:11.000It's time to change your diaper, because you have gross poopoo.
00:51:15.000I know, deep thoughts here on a Thursday.
00:51:18.000But we have reduced adults to dumber than our smallest children.
00:51:26.000There are very few parents who have never had the experience of walking into a room and seeing your child with their diaper around their ankles looking at their own poop.
00:51:35.000And you thought, well, that's a dumb thing because kids are dumb.
00:51:38.000When you're in your mid-twenties and you're still doing this with the stuff coming out of your body, let me suggest that you may have a problem larger than the societal feelings about periods.