Trump is putting the screws to House and Senate Republicans in order to get them to buy into his Trumpcare bill. Plus, all the fallout from the Trump-Russia scandal, and the latest on the latest in the Russia investigation. All that and more on today's show with Ben Shapiro! Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with the latest news and discuss all things going on in the world of politics and pop culture. Use the promo code "UPLEVEL" for 20% off "Hunt a Killer" at checkout when you enter the discount code: GIVEAWAY at checkout. That's right, you get 10% off your first purchase when you place your order at ZipRecruiter. You can post jobs on Ziprecruiter for FREE! You don't have to wait for the results to roll in and sift through them all to find the best candidate. ZipRecruiter is a great resource for finding quality, affordable, high-quality candidates to work in your field. You can get a competitive salary, benefits, and benefits all in one place! Zip Recruiter is a company you get when you sign up for a free, affordable college course, and get 20% discount when you book an ad-free training and prepayment is accepted. There are no fees, no credit card required. All you have to be 21 years old or older than 18 years old to attend college, and they get a discount when they can post their first year of college or buy a course, they can get $100 or more. If you re a student-grade credit, you ll get a free for the course, plus a discount on the course and get an additional $5,000 in training, plus they ll get an ad discount when the course is reviewed, plus an extra $5/month, they ll also get a FREE VIP membership when you become a member of the program that includes a VIP discount, they get 25% off the site gets $50/month and get a VIP membership, plus VIP access to the VIP membership gets $25/ VIP access gets $19/ VIP gets $4/ VIP discount and they also get VIP access when they get the VIP discount gets the VIP gets a VIP deal. They also get early access to VIP access, and there s a discount, too! They can also get my ad-only offer when they sign up to the program.
00:00:00.000Speaking in Louisville on Monday night, President Trump slammed former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who made an enormous production out of kneeling for the national anthem last season.
00:00:25.000That's not because Kaepernick doesn't deserve criticism.
00:00:27.000This is a fellow who wore socks depicting police officers as pigs, who thinks the same America that has made him rich and famous for being a one-shot talent is deeply racist and horrible.
00:00:35.000NFL teams are reticent to pick Kaepernick up not just because he's a headache, but because he's flamed out as a football player.
00:00:41.000But the President of the United States should not be in the business of bullying businesses into firing particular employees, or even being perceived to do so.
00:00:49.000Imagine if President Obama had celebrated Mozilla Firefox firing former CEO Brendan Eich over his support for traditional marriage.
00:00:56.000Conservatives would have been outraged, and rightly so.
00:00:59.000This isn't even Trump celebrating the predictable results of making deeply stupid political stands.
00:01:04.000It's him celebrating his own impact on creating consequences for people who aren't even in a political business.
00:01:10.000Yes, NFL owners are right to shun Kaepernick, but Trump certainly isn't right to involve himself in pressuring owners to do so through his own Twitter feed.
00:01:24.000We're going to get to President Trump putting the screws to House Republicans and Senate Republicans in order to get them to buy into his Trumpcare.
00:01:41.000But first, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at ZipRecruiter.com.
00:01:45.000So, if you're somebody who's looking to fill an employment position, and you don't want to post on 200-odd job sites and then wait for all of the returns to roll in and sift through them, ZipRecruiter.com helps you out.
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00:02:58.000Here we are and Donald Trump has gotten himself in trouble for yet another day.
00:03:02.000But I want to begin with a bigger story than everything that's happening with the wiretapping and the Russia connections and the leaks and all that.
00:03:07.000We'll get to all that in just a second.
00:03:09.000I want to talk about the latest developments on the Hill, the thing that I think is going to have more impact than any of those things on President Trump's presidency, and that is how this health care bill goes down.
00:03:19.000So right now, President Trump is on the Hill threatening people.
00:03:23.000According to MJ Lee over at CNN, the White House gave a message to senators yesterday.
00:03:51.000One is just repeal Obamacare without a replacement, and then replace it piecemeal.
00:03:55.000You can do that with a straight Republican vote.
00:03:57.000But Tom Price, who's the Secretary of Health and Human Services, he's already come out and he says that's not a possibility, they're not the votes for it.
00:04:03.000Which just shows you that Republicans were lying to you for years.
00:04:08.000They weren't promising you that they were going to replace Obamacare with something that was Obamacare-lite.
00:04:13.000They weren't promising you there weren't going to be any effects, there were going to be no effects from repealing Obamacare.
00:04:17.000They promised you they were going to repeal Obamacare, and now Tom Price is telling you they don't have the votes.
00:04:23.000Paul Ryan says the same thing, to just repeal the damn thing.
00:04:26.000So instead of just repealing it, we have to go through this whole rigmarole where we put together an omnibus package bill, a 120-page bill, with tons of regulations that are going to be attached to it.
00:04:35.000That is really a crappy bill, and it's a crappy bill for a number of reasons.
00:04:38.000The only good thing about the bill is the shifting away from need-based Medicaid aid from the feds to the states toward a block grant from the feds to the states, $10 billion a year for 10 years.
00:04:47.000If you think, however, that Congress is going to hold to those strictures, you're out of your mind.
00:04:51.000Congress is going to have that block grant, it's going to apply for about five years, and then there's going to be a lot of complaints at the state level, and Congress is going to up the amount of the block grant.
00:05:34.000And the reason Trump is pushing hard is because this is a no-lose proposition for Trump at this point.
00:05:39.000is pushing hard because he doesn't have the patience to actually go through a negotiation.
00:05:43.000So if you didn't just want to repeal, if you wanted to repeal and replace, there's something else you could do.
00:05:47.000You could push as the original, as the original sort of bill, you could push a very conservative bill, and then you could negotiate with the Senate inside the House.
00:05:56.000You put up your ideal bill, and then you negotiate.
00:05:58.000Your opening position is the position for which you are negotiating, right?
00:06:02.000You wouldn't start with what Paul Ryan did, which is he negotiated against himself.
00:06:05.000The House Republicans negotiated against themselves.
00:06:07.000They created what they thought was a bill
00:06:11.000But it's not going to pass through Congress specifically because whatever the bill is that you first put up is subject to negotiation and everybody wants input.
00:06:18.000So what you really want to do if you're going to do this right is you put up a bill that your base agrees with and then you have your solidified your base and then you move towards something that more people can agree with.
00:06:47.000The reason you can tell he doesn't get it is when he speaks publicly about the bill, he's still making promises that do not apply to this bill.
00:06:52.000He's still saying things like nobody's going to get thrown off their health insurance.
00:06:56.000Okay, there are people on Medicaid who are not going to be on Medicaid anymore if this plan goes forward.
00:07:01.000So, I never thought that that should be a promise that any Republican makes.
00:07:04.000The fact is that it's not government's job to keep you on health insurance, it's your job to go out and buy your own health insurance.
00:07:10.000And it's the government's job to get out of the way so that competition ensures that the price is lower for health insurance and the quality is higher for health insurance.
00:07:18.000Doesn't matter, Trump right now is trying to ram this thing through.
00:07:20.000In typical Trump fashion, he apparently said to a bunch of House members,
00:07:24.000We won't have these crowds if we don't get this done.
00:07:27.000He's talking about all of the crowds that he's speaking to, as though those crowds are in any way indicative of the level of public support for this plan.
00:07:36.000And the polls show this plan is highly, highly unpopular.
00:09:11.000The sycophancy is going to maybe drive Trump to support the Ryan plan, but if the Ryan plan goes down in flames, if he thinks that Trump is going to be there for the incoming fire, he is totally wrong.
00:09:21.000It's Ryan's butt on the line, not Trump's here.
00:09:24.000Mark Meadows, who's one of the representatives who opposes the bill, he's been saying he doesn't back the bill, and Trump is targeting him directly, which is really ridiculous.
00:09:32.000I mean, we're now targeting Republicans for not voting for a bill that's not conservative enough.
00:09:37.000If this busts, if this whole thing falls apart, the results are going to be disastrous for conservatives particularly.
00:09:52.000But I'd rather have the economic program of Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus than the economic program of Steve Bannon and Trump.
00:09:57.000Trump tends to be more on Bannon's side anyway on this sort of stuff.
00:10:01.000You could see very easily Donald Trump moving away from working with House and Senate Republicans at all, and just crossing the aisle and working with Democrats on his populist economic program, if this thing flames out.
00:10:12.000Because he's going to blame Ryan for anything that falls apart here.
00:10:15.000He's going to blame Ryan Suprebus for anything that falls apart here.
00:10:17.000You can see him doing the, okay, now I'm going to swivel to the middle.
00:10:22.000I tried it your way, and now I'm not going to do it anymore.
00:10:25.000You saw tendencies like this from Trump during the campaign.
00:10:27.000He said he didn't care if the Republicans held the Senate because maybe he'd be able to get things done with Democrats more easily.
00:10:32.000He has a tendency not to really like the the quote-unquote establishment of the party and right now if he goes down in flames over this bill he's gonna blame them and he's gonna turn away from them.
00:10:42.000And that's going to be really, it's going to have really negative ramifications for people who want to see some conservative governance, because you're not going to get conservative governance between Trump, Bannon, and the Democrats in the House and the Senate.
00:10:52.000It was interesting, I was listening to another podcast, there's some top Democrats who do a podcast, Pod Save America, which is an interesting podcast I like to listen to to get, you know, kind of what Democrats are thinking.
00:11:01.000And they were saying that they're upset with Trump, not because Trump is backing Trumpcare so much, but because Trumpcare isn't Trumpy enough.
00:11:09.000They want Trump to swivel toward the economic nationalist populism of Steve Bannon, and they say openly there might be a political realignment in store if Trump does exactly that.
00:11:18.000Trump sees that same opportunity, so this could be the precursor to a solid move to the left.
00:11:37.000With that said, Donald Trump did have a very bad day yesterday.
00:11:40.000It's not even going to be his worst day of the week if this bill goes down on Thursday.
00:11:43.000It's supposed to be voted on in the House on Thursday.
00:11:45.000Wouldn't be the first time that House leadership has presented a bill that went down in flames.
00:11:49.000Happened regularly under John Boehner.
00:11:52.000Yesterday was a bad day for Trump because there were basically two stories, neither of them good for Trump.
00:11:56.000One was Jim Comey, the FBI director who is not particularly competent, speaks out of line a fair bit.
00:12:04.000He was in front of the House Intelligence Committee yesterday and he said that Donald Trump's tweets about wiretapping, they just weren't true.
00:12:12.000Jim Comey talking to Adam Schiff of California.
00:12:15.000Director Comey was the president's statement that Obama had his wires tapped in Trump Tower a true statement.
00:12:22.000With respect to the President's tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets.
00:12:31.000And we have looked carefully inside the FBI.
00:12:34.000The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components.
00:12:40.000The Department has no information that supports those tweets.
00:12:45.000As you understand the term McCarthyism, do you think President Obama or the FBI was engaged in such conduct?
00:12:53.000I'm not going to try and characterize the tweets themselves.
00:12:56.000All I can tell you is we have no information that supports them.
00:13:01.000Can you make out a great case that President Obama wiretapped Mr. Trump's phone as just part of the election, in light of the fact you have said there's no evidence of that?
00:13:10.000All I can say is what I said before, that we don't have any information that supports those tweets.
00:13:14.000Okay, so, you know, and he keeps saying it over and over and over.
00:13:17.000The Democrats keep hammering it home over and over and over.
00:13:19.000There is no evidence that Trump was wiretapped by Obama.
00:13:22.000Now, here's what actually happened, in all likelihood, by all the available reports.
00:13:25.000Basically, there are FISA warrants out on a bunch of Russians.
00:13:29.000And those FISA warrants allowed the government to listen in on all of these Russians who were apparently doing business with Americans or talking to Americans, and a bunch of Trump associates were swept up in those wiretaps.
00:13:40.000So in other words, let's say that Austin were a Russian agent, which is not implausible, and the government decided to put a wiretap on Austin, and I called Austin up.
00:13:51.000That's what was actually wiretapped, and that's how Mike Flynn got caught up in this conversation.
00:13:56.000We're going to get to the leaking portion of this in a second, because that is also a real scandal.
00:13:59.000But it is not a real thing that Obama ordered a direct wiretap on Trump.
00:14:04.000The reports that were promulgated by Heat Street that the FISA warrant had been issued for Trump Tower, that was debunked yesterday by, I think it was Mike Rogers, who's the head of the National Security Agency.
00:14:21.000What I really meant was that there is obvious government
00:14:24.000Surveillance of people in my campaign because people in my campaign were talking to the Russians and it's just ridiculous That information about that stuff is being leaked to the press.
00:14:32.000That's good But because Trump two things Trump only reads the headlines He never reads below the headline and to Trump always doubles down and that means that he created this entire big problem for himself in which he looks foolish in which he looks like he made this case that is Unsubstantiated and that is a disaster for him
00:14:48.000Because, again, it goes to credibility.
00:14:51.000He's going to need that credibility when it comes time to ram through legislation.
00:14:54.000If you're going to make the case to Republicans that they need to get on board with Trumpcare and that you've got the American people behind you, you actually have to be able to show data showing that the American people are behind you and trust you.
00:15:04.000And right now, he's undermining that trust.
00:15:06.000And we'll talk in a second about, you know, more of the fallout from this because it's not good for President Trump.
00:15:11.000If you want him to be successful, you need him to stop with the Twitter.
00:15:14.000Honestly, his administration would be much better off if he would just stop with the Twitter altogether.
00:15:18.000I know people who are fans of his don't like that idea.
00:15:21.000The fact is that he's doing himself more harm than good with the Twitter account at this point.
00:15:24.000If he wants to be sporadic in his use of it, targeted in his use of it, that's one thing.
00:17:28.000Here's Mike Rogers of the National Security Administration saying that Trump, you know, trotting out this theory that the British were behind some sort of tapping of him.
00:17:58.000Have you seen any evidence that anyone else in the Obama administration made such a request?
00:18:03.000No, sir, and again, my view is the same as Director Comey.
00:18:07.000I've seen nothing on the NSA side that we engage in any... Address that should be noted was appointed by Donald Trump.
00:18:12.000So his own guy is saying right here that this is nonsense.
00:18:15.000Devin Nunes, who's a Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, he debunked that story that said there was a FISA warrant for Trump Tower.
00:18:21.000He said there is no FISA warrant for Trump Tower.
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