The Ben Shapiro Show - The Democratic Strategy Emerges

00:00:00.000 President Trump moves to stop his former White House counsel from testifying.

00:00:03.000 A court rules against Trump on his financial records.

00:00:06.000 And Tim Cook laments how baby boomers betrayed millennials.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:10.000 Well, we have a lot to get to today.

00:00:17.000 I promised no Thrones talk, no Game of Thrones talk.

00:00:19.000 We did all of it yesterday.

00:00:20.000 So if you want to hear that stuff, listen to yesterday's show, not today's show.

00:00:23.000 We'll get to all the actual news today.

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00:01:28.000 Alrighty, so the big news of the day is that President Trump is now being subjected to new scrutiny.

00:01:33.000 So according to a court, President Trump must now allow his accountants to turn over his financial records, according to a lower court judge.

00:01:40.000 This is from the New York Times.

00:01:42.000 President Trump's accounting firm must turn over his financial records to Congress, a federal district court ruled on Monday, rejecting his legal team's argument that lawmakers had no legitimate power to subpoena the files.

00:01:52.000 Trump vowed that his legal team would appeal rather than permit the firm Mazar's USA to comply with the subpoena and the ruling.

00:01:58.000 So the legal fight is far from over.

00:02:00.000 The ruling by the judge, whose name is Amit Mehta, of the U.S.

00:02:03.000 District Court for the District of Columbia, was an early judicial test of the president's vow to systematically stonewall all subpoenas by House Democrats, stymieing their ability to perform oversight of Mr. Trump and the executive branch after winning control of the chamber in last year's midterm elections.

00:02:19.000 Mr. Trump's legal team, led by William S. Consovoy, had argued that the House Committee on Oversight and Reform had no legitimate legislative purpose in seeking Trump's financial records and was just trying to dig up dirt, like finding out whether the president broke any laws for political reasons so the subpoena exceeded its constitutional authority.

00:02:35.000 Democrats claim they need the records because they're examining whether foreigners are in a position to use business dealings with the president to exert hidden influence over American policymaking and whether ethics and disclosure laws need to be strengthened.

00:02:47.000 Judge Mehta is an Obama appointee, of course.

00:02:50.000 He said that the justification was sufficient to make the subpoena valid.

00:02:54.000 He said, "These are facially valid legislative purposes.

00:02:57.000 It is not for the court to question whether the committee's actions are truly motivated by political considerations.

00:03:01.000 Accordingly, the court will enter judgment in favor of the oversight committee." Now, this ruling is fairly absurd.

00:03:08.000 It's fairly absurd.

00:03:09.000 It relies extremely heavily on a 1957 court ruling that talked about how private citizens could not be targeted by the federal government, by Congress, but made distinction for government figures and quote-unquote legitimate government purposes.

00:03:24.000 The question is, is there a line that is supposed to be drawn when it comes to how far Congress can go in seeking information on somebody who holds elected office?

00:03:33.000 This case seems to suggest no.

00:03:36.000 This case seems to suggest that Congress can, for any reason, as long as they can just say investigation, Congress can, for any reason at all, grab information on basically any elected official.

00:03:50.000 That's a pretty wide and broad ruling by Mehta.

00:03:55.000 There was a 1957 Supreme Court decision, as I mentioned, hot air points this out, that limited congressional authority for investigations when it comes to private individuals.

00:04:02.000 This judge took care to rule that his decision fits well within that precedent, noting that presidents are not private individuals and that their private behavior before and during their tenure in office can be grounds for impeachment.

00:04:13.000 Mehta notes that Congress went unchallenged in its authority to open such investigations into prior administrations.

00:04:18.000 He wrote, quote, Twice in the last 50 years, Congress has investigated a sitting president for alleged law violations before initiating impeachment proceedings.

00:04:26.000 It did so in 1973 by establishing the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, better known as the Watergate Committee, and then did so again in 1995 by establishing the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and related matters.

00:04:39.000 Now, Whitewater obviously happened before Clinton was president, although Watergate happened while Nixon was president.

00:04:45.000 The former investigation included, within its scope, potential corruption by Nixon while in office, the latter concerned alleged illegal misconduct by President Clinton before his time in office.

00:04:54.000 Congress plainly views itself as having sweeping authority to investigate illegal conduct of a president before and after taking office.

00:05:00.000 This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.

00:05:04.000 Well, as Hot Air points out, the Supreme Court wasn't asked in any of these cases whether the Whitewater investigation exceeded Congress's authority.

00:05:12.000 Also, we already knew about Whitewater.

00:05:14.000 I mean, there were already public reports about corruption in Whitewater.

00:05:18.000 And at this point, there's no information that suggests that President Trump is actually subject to some sort of nefarious criminal foreign activity.

00:05:27.000 With regard to being leveraged because of his finances, Trump has called the ruling crazy.

00:05:31.000 He said, we think it's totally the wrong decision by obviously an Obama appointed judge.

00:05:36.000 Trump's attorneys have already appealed this thing.

00:05:39.000 And again, I think that there is a solid case that Trump can make that Congress has to have some limitations here.

00:05:49.000 I mean, it is truly astonishing that a court is ruling that basically anytime Congress wants to dig up any information about somebody who holds elected office for any purpose, without presumably any actual hook for the investigation, that they are allowed to do so.

00:06:06.000 That's a pretty amazing statement.

00:06:08.000 And it's obvious that this ruling is politically driven.

00:06:11.000 I mean, the ruling opens with a quote from James Buchanan.

00:06:14.000 You can tell what the judge thinks of President Trump when he opens the ruling with a quotation from James Buchanan, widely derided as the worst president in the history of the United States.

00:06:23.000 The ruling itself says, the quote from Buchanan is, I solemnly protest against these proceedings of the House of Representatives because they're in violation of the rights of the coordinate executive branch of the government and subversive of its constitutional independence.

00:06:35.000 And then the judge says, these words written by President James Buchanan in March, 1860, protested a resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives to form a committee known as the Kavod Committee to investigate whether the president or any other officer of the executive branch had sought to influence the action of Congress by improper means.

00:06:53.000 Buchanan cheerfully admitted that the House of Representatives had the authority to make inquiries incident to their legislative duties as necessary to enable them to discover and provide appropriate legislative remedies, but he objected to the committee's investigation of his conduct.

00:07:06.000 He maintained that the House of Representatives possessed no general powers to investigate him except when sitting as an impeaching body.

00:07:12.000 Buchanan feared that if the House were to exercise such authority, it would establish a precedent dangerous and embarrassing to all my successors, to whatever political party they might be attached.

00:07:20.000 Some 160 years later, President Trump has taken up the fight of his predecessor.

00:07:24.000 Again, this is a judge who is politically motivated if he's quoting Buchanan.

00:07:27.000 There are plenty of presidents who have argued that Congress does not have this sort of investigative authority, including President Clinton.

00:07:33.000 But he's not citing President Clinton or, say, Barack Obama, who used executive privilege in order to shield documents from Congress's prying eyes in the Fast and Furious scandal.

00:07:42.000 This judge is deliberately trying to humiliate Trump by quoting James Buchanan.

00:07:47.000 And by the way, just because Buchanan made the argument doesn't mean that the argument is actually constitutionally wrong.

00:07:53.000 Buchanan's argument, he may be a crappy president, but his argument, which is that Congress only gets to use its investigative powers in the context of an impeachment proceeding, that they can't, in other words, just say, you know what?

00:08:04.000 I'm now subpoenaing every tax record from every accountant of every politician on the other side, because we theoretically have the power to impeach anybody.

00:08:12.000 Like, where does this stop?

00:08:13.000 Let's say that you are the Democrats in the House, and let's say you just don't like Ted Cruz, or you just don't like Mitch McConnell.

00:08:18.000 Can they now subpoena All financial records from Mitch McConnell.

00:08:22.000 He holds elected office the same way that Donald Trump holds elected office.

00:08:25.000 Presumably, without any reference points, they could just issue subpoenas to the accountants for Mitch McConnell, suggesting that maybe he's been compromised by foreign authorities.

00:08:35.000 And according to this judge, McConnell's accountants would then have to turn over all of that material.

00:08:41.000 I mean, if the idea is that if you are a public official, you are now exposed to scrutiny without any sort of any sort of hook, any sort of actual crime that you think has been committed.

00:08:52.000 You're just speculating as to whether a crime could have been committed.

00:08:55.000 This is going to get very dangerous very quickly.

00:08:57.000 And Democrats better pay attention to this, because if Republicans retake the Congress, and let's say there's a Democrat who's president and Republicans decide, you know what?

00:09:04.000 We're going to do exactly what Democrats did.

00:09:06.000 We're going to subpoena everything, all the things.

00:09:08.000 Like, where exactly does this stop?

00:09:10.000 You think Democrats would have been okay if, let's say that the Congress, under Republicans, had said, you know, we are afraid that Barack Obama committed some sort of fraud in his application to Occidental College.

00:09:23.000 Maybe he committed a fraud.

00:09:25.000 Maybe he claimed that he was foreign-born or something.

00:09:28.000 All of this is speculative and nonsense.

00:09:29.000 But let's say that they had said that.

00:09:31.000 And so they had subpoenaed Occidental College for his admission records.

00:09:34.000 And Obama said, wait a second.

00:09:35.000 This has nothing to do with my presidency.

00:09:38.000 You don't have any evidence I committed a crime.

00:09:40.000 And Republicans were like, doesn't matter.

00:09:41.000 We've got investigative power.

00:09:42.000 We can investigate anything.

00:09:43.000 You're an elected official.

00:09:45.000 What this is going to do is create a situation where no one of any level of decency runs for public office ever again.

00:09:52.000 Because no one is pure as the driven snow, and no one wants their life turned over this way unless they are absolutely shameless.

00:09:59.000 I mean, there have to be some limitations to this sort of power.

00:10:02.000 But according to this judge, there are no limitations of this sort of power.

00:10:07.000 The court says echoing the protests of President Buchanan, President Trump and his associated entities are before this court claiming that the Oversight Committee's subpoena to Mazars, the accounting firm, exceeds the committee's constitutional power to conduct investigation.

00:10:19.000 The president argues there is no legislative purpose for the subpoena.

00:10:23.000 The Oversight Committee's true motive, the president insists, is to collect personal information about him solely for political advantage.

00:10:29.000 He asks the court to declare the Mazars subpoena invalid and unenforceable.

00:10:33.000 Courts have grappled for more than a century, says the judge, with the question of the scope of Congress's investigative power.

00:10:38.000 The binding principle that emerges from these judicial decisions is that courts must presume that Congress is acting in furtherance of its constitutional responsibility to legislate, and must defer to congressional judgments about what Congress needs to carry out that purpose.

00:10:51.000 To be sure, there are limits on Congress's investigative authority, but those limits do not substantially constrain Congress.

00:10:58.000 What do those two sentences even mean?

00:11:02.000 Context of one another?

00:11:03.000 What do those sentences mean?

00:11:05.000 There are limits on Congress's investigative authorities, but those limits do not substantially constrain Congress.

00:11:12.000 So, in other words, I mean, that's like me saying to my son, who is screaming and trying to stick a fork into an electric socket, you know, there are limits on what I'm going to allow you to do, but those limits don't substantially constrain you.

00:11:24.000 According to this judge, So long as Congress investigates on a subject matter on which legislation could be had, Congress act as contemplated by Article 1 of the Constitution.

00:11:34.000 Well, this is denying the fact that the executive branch also has separate powers, that the executive branch does not have to subjugate itself to the legislative power.

00:11:43.000 And more than that, this does put private citizens in danger because For example, let's say you're now a candidate for public office, or let's say that you donated to a candidate for public office, and Congress is now investigating you.

00:11:56.000 Congress, unfortunately, has got its thumb in a bunch of areas in American life that are purely private in scope.

00:12:02.000 Remember, Congress used to have hearings on steroids in baseball.

00:12:07.000 I mean, if Congress has the power to do this sort of investigative work, like anytime they don't like somebody, they can dig up anything they want on them, so long as they can make the argument that they're a public figure.

00:12:19.000 I don't know how far this goes.

00:12:20.000 Now, maybe you say this only applies to elected officials.

00:12:23.000 Even there.

00:12:24.000 How far are we going to take this, exactly?

00:12:26.000 Can they subpoena President Trump's phone records from the times in the 90s when he was calling up the New York Post as his own press secretary?

00:12:34.000 How far can they go?

00:12:35.000 We'll get to more of this in just a second.

00:12:36.000 But first, when the Founders crafted the Constitution, you know, a little thing that we like to protect our rights, the first thing they did was to make sacred the rights of the individual to share ideas without limitation by their government.

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00:13:49.000 So this judge rules that applying these principles compels the conclusion that President Trump cannot block the subpoena to his accountants.

00:13:56.000 According to the Oversight Committee, it believes that the requested records will aid its consideration of strengthening ethics and disclosure laws, as well as amending the penalties for violating such laws.

00:14:05.000 Okay, so this is an amazing claim by the Oversight Committee.

00:14:07.000 They're not even arguing at this point that President Trump has committed a crime.

00:14:11.000 They're arguing that in order for them to do research on the possibility of strengthening ethics and disclosure laws generally, not with application to Trump, and amending the penalties for violating such acts, they now need access to the President's personal finances.

00:14:28.000 I mean, that's an amazing statement.

00:14:30.000 So in other words, if I want to pass a piece of legislation on any topic, all I have to do is say, listen, you know, I'm doing research, to go back to the Barack Obama college records example, I'm doing research on college loans and college admissions.

00:14:43.000 And we're thinking of passing some legislations on loans and admissions.

00:14:46.000 In order for me to get some background info on that, I'm going to need Barack Obama's personal college records.

00:14:51.000 Wouldn't everybody go, wait a second, that is not within Congress's scope.

00:14:54.000 But here, that's exactly what they're saying.

00:14:55.000 And the judge is like, no problem.

00:14:57.000 Okay, so we'll get to more of this in just one second.

00:15:00.000 The judge goes even further than that.

00:15:01.000 The judge says that according to this oversight committee, the records will assist in monitoring the president's compliance with the Foreign Emoluments Clause.

00:15:09.000 These are facially valid legislative purposes.

00:15:11.000 It is not for this court to question whether the committee's actions are truly motivated by political considerations.

00:15:16.000 Accordingly, the court will enter judgment in favor of the oversight committee.

00:15:20.000 Actually, it is for the court to question whether the committee's actions are motivated by political considerations if they cannot name a relevant hook on which to build this particular subpoena.

00:15:35.000 This ruling is so insanely broad.

00:15:38.000 And again, Democrats should understand that because this could come back to bite them in a very serious way.

00:15:41.000 A Republican will not be president forever and Congress will not be Democratic forever.

00:15:46.000 President Trump is correct to point out that this ruling is kind of crazy.

00:15:51.000 Nonetheless, it just exposes once again that the judiciary is out of control, unfortunately.

00:15:57.000 And I mean, this is a judiciary that is ruling consistently that President Barack Obama had authority to issue effectively immunity for DREAMers, but Donald Trump has no executive authority to rule back the immunity for DREAMers.

00:16:12.000 The courts are out of control.

00:16:14.000 It's funny.

00:16:15.000 When the founders created the Constitution, what they hoped for was a system of checks and balances.

00:16:20.000 Now, that did not mean that all of the branches were going to be equally powerful.

00:16:23.000 They thought that the Article 1 branch, the legislature, was going to be the most powerful, followed by the presidency, followed by the judiciary.

00:16:30.000 In many ways, what has happened is that the legislature has become almost a vestigial organ of government, where all legislation and regulation is actually done from the executive branch, except when there's a political break between Congress and the president, in which case the legislative branch acts as effectively an investigative unit, aided by the judiciary.

00:16:49.000 This is a different system of checks and balances than was sought by the founders in the first place.

00:16:54.000 The founders were hoping that the lead check on the executive branch would in fact lie in the legislative branch, but not really through impeachment so much as controlling the means and mechanisms of policy.

00:17:04.000 Instead, Congress kicked all the means and mechanisms of policymaking over to the executive branch.

00:17:09.000 The regulatory agencies do virtually all the policymaking in American government now.

00:17:14.000 And then, when people in Congress don't like the president, instead of them scaling back his authority to do things, they launch personal investigations into his accounting practices from 1992.

00:17:26.000 That is not the sort of checks and balances we were talking about.

00:17:29.000 And then you've got the judiciary, which steps in every so often and quashes the ability of the executive branch to enforce laws that are duly on the books.

00:17:37.000 So it's very weird.

00:17:38.000 There is a system of checks and balances in place, but the system of checks and balances is completely different than the system of checks and balances originally envisioned by the founders.

00:17:46.000 The founders thought that That the legislative branch would zealously guard its powers of rulemaking and legislation.

00:17:52.000 They did not.

00:17:53.000 They handed those to the executive.

00:17:54.000 They thought the executive branch would zealously guard its own powers against the legislative authority's encroachment.

00:18:01.000 And that has happened to a certain extent, but then the judiciary has overruled that and created this weird new system where the executive is basically, is effectively Instituted with all of these, imbued, imbued, with all of these powers, and the only check on the powers of the executive is investigations and impeachment, which is why our policymaking is so fractured right now.

00:18:27.000 Imagine if we went through the normal channels for making legislation.

00:18:31.000 Legislation started in the House, and then passed the Senate, and then the President signed it.

00:18:34.000 Rulemaking was not made by the executive authority.

00:18:37.000 Well, that would require all of these branches to work together more than they do.

00:18:42.000 The system that we have now is basically Congress delegates all of its authority to the executive and then whines about it when the executive does what they don't want them to do.

00:18:48.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:18:50.000 Meanwhile, this sort of stupid system of checks and balances continues to play out with regard to Don McGahn.

00:18:58.000 President Trump has now directed his former White House counsel, Don McGahn, to skip a House Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for Tuesday, citing a Justice Department opinion that he cannot be compelled to testify about his official duties.

00:19:08.000 McGahn confirmed on Monday evening that he won't appear.

00:19:10.000 Now, this is not an argument that McGahn That McGahn couldn't testify if he wanted to.

00:19:16.000 If McGahn wants to testify, he can.

00:19:18.000 The argument that President Trump is making is that if McGahn does not testify, there is no punishment in store for him, which is actually true.

00:19:25.000 The development prompted an obstinate response late on Monday from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York.

00:19:31.000 He said, we're having the hearing tomorrow.

00:19:32.000 We are expecting Mr. McGahn to show up pursuant to the subpoena.

00:19:35.000 They had the hearing today.

00:19:36.000 There was no, there was no McGahn showing up.

00:19:39.000 House Democrats are now claiming that maybe they will push forward with impeachment.

00:19:42.000 They have power to do so.

00:19:43.000 Are they actually going to do it?

00:19:45.000 I have my serious doubts.

00:19:46.000 Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, desperately attempting to garner attention in this presidential race while riding at a high of 0% in the polls, says, well, you know, maybe this is going to prompt impeachment of President Trump, that he doesn't allow his White House counsel, former White House counsel, to show up, even after allowing his former White House counsel to testify to the FBI.

00:20:02.000 Which, by the way, if he had lied to the FBI, That's a crime.

00:20:05.000 He would go to jail.

00:20:06.000 But according to Gillibrand, if he doesn't show up and answer questions from Democrats, then obviously Trump is going to be impeached.

00:20:11.000 Yeah, sure.

00:20:12.000 I think what the Trump administration is doing is fundamentally blocking our constitutional right for oversight and accountability over his administration.

00:20:23.000 And they're doing it aggressively.

00:20:25.000 Certainly ignoring the contempt proceedings against Barr is a step.

00:20:30.000 Telling witnesses like McGahn that they are not supposed to testify.

00:20:34.000 Uh, you know, I think it's something that Speaker Pelosi, she has six committees of jurisdiction now that are trying to do oversight investigations.

00:20:43.000 And I think she will continue to push very hard to get testimony and documents.

00:20:48.000 But if the president keeps stonewalling, it may actually force the House's hands and they might decide to start impeachment proceedings.

00:20:56.000 Because they need to get access to the truth.

00:20:58.000 OK, they have access to the truth.

00:21:00.000 It was all in the Mueller report.

00:21:01.000 The House is basically just frustrated they didn't get what they wanted from the Mueller report.

00:21:05.000 And so now they are making excuses.

00:21:07.000 They're digging through President Trump's personal finances and subpoenaing his accountants.

00:21:11.000 And they're going after Don McGahn, who again testified in front of Robert Mueller.

00:21:14.000 And they're going after William Barr, the attorney general, for abiding by the law.

00:21:18.000 We'll get to Attorney General Barr's response to all of this in just one second.

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00:22:38.000 So as I say, the Attorney General William Barr is coming under fire from Democrats as well.

00:22:46.000 They suggest that they might impeach William Barr because William Barr has not handed them all of the unredacted material that he is not allowed to actually hand them.

00:22:54.000 So William Barr is responding.

00:22:56.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Barr has come under criticism from Democrats and some Republicans who say he is acting more like the president's personal lawyer than the nation's top law enforcement officer.

00:23:05.000 The only Republican I've heard who said that is Justin Amash.

00:23:08.000 The Republican congressperson from Michigan, Barr, was a private citizen bristled at the barrage of legal and other challenges Trump faced during his first two years in office, said his long held belief in executive power is more about protecting the presidency than the current office holder.

00:23:22.000 He said, I felt the rules were being changed to hurt Trump.

00:23:24.000 I thought it was damaging for the presidency over the long haul.

00:23:26.000 When you look at that court ruling that basically says that Congress can subpoena anything from any public official at any time for any reason, it's hard to disagree with that sentiment.

00:23:36.000 Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, that sentiment, plus coaxing from friends, led the 68-year-old grandfather of five to sign on for another turn at the helm of the Justice Department, where his quest to protect presidential power has taken on new significance in light of special counsel Robert Mueller's report and the Trump administration's efforts to thwart congressional oversight.

00:23:54.000 He said in an interview, at every grave juncture, the presidency has done what it is supposed to do, which is provide leadership and direction.

00:24:00.000 If you destroy the presidency and make it an errand boy for Congress, we're going to be much weaker and a more divided nation.

00:24:06.000 Barr has jumped to the front lines of this Republican president's battle against Congress and the courts.

00:24:10.000 A House committee has already voted to hold Barr in contempt for providing them the entire Mueller report as well as access to the unredacted portions for Democrats who refuse to go look at it.

00:24:20.000 Many current and former law enforcement officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, have come to view Mr. Barr skeptically, citing his newly launched review of the investigation's origins and what he termed spying on Trump campaign associates over ties to Russia.

00:24:31.000 He hasn't explained specifically what prompted his concerns, giving fodder for Mr. Trump and his allies to attack the department that he leads.

00:24:38.000 Republicans have embraced Barr's willingness to bring attention to their grievances with federal law enforcement.

00:24:44.000 Of course, Trump is very happy with Barr because Barr is defending him and executive power at this point.

00:24:50.000 He said he apparently spoke with the Wall Street Journal last week, and he suggested that he is really not interested in protecting Trump personally.

00:24:59.000 He just believes that the rules are being arbitrarily changed in order to harm President Trump.

00:25:03.000 And again, it is hard to argue with that perspective, given the fact that Democrats were very much in favor of Barack Obama using executive privilege to shield Eric Holder.

00:25:12.000 They had no problem when Eric Holder called himself the wingman for Barack Obama.

00:25:16.000 They were very upset with the Kenneth Starr investigation, which was predicated on solid legal grounds.

00:25:23.000 I mean, Bill Clinton did commit perjury.

00:25:25.000 He committed a series of crimes, including actual obstruction of justice.

00:25:29.000 The Kenneth Starr probe was actually into illegality.

00:25:32.000 No illegality has been found about President Trump thus far.

00:25:36.000 None.

00:25:37.000 You may say that he has done stuff you don't like.

00:25:39.000 That's fine.

00:25:39.000 He's done stuff I don't like either.

00:25:41.000 You may say that the President of the United States has done untoward things.

00:25:44.000 That is true.

00:25:46.000 Has he committed a criminal act?

00:25:48.000 Even Robert Mueller, who had full authority to say so, could not bring himself to say that the President had done something criminal here.

00:25:55.000 And yet, we are seeing the Democrats expand the power of subpoenas to include virtually everything in the world?

00:26:01.000 This seems like dangerous stuff to me.

00:26:03.000 Meanwhile, Michael Cohen is out there still making trouble for the president.

00:26:06.000 Michael Cohen, President Trump's former longtime personal attorney.

00:26:10.000 President Trump did not hire the best people, as he himself has admitted with regard to Michael Cohen.

00:26:14.000 Apparently, Michael Cohen told a House panel during closed-door hearings earlier this year he had been encouraged by Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, to falsely claim in a 2017 statement to Congress that negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016.

00:26:26.000 In fact, Cohen later admitted, That discussions on the Moscow Tower continued into June of the presidential election year.

00:26:32.000 House Democrats are now scrutinizing whether Sekulow or other Trump attorneys played a role in shaping Cohen's 2017 testimony to Congress.

00:26:39.000 Cohen said he made the false statement to help hide the fact that Trump had potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in a possible Russian project while he was running for president.

00:26:48.000 Adam Schiff, who has made mountains out of molehills for several years here, he says, we're trying to find out whether anyone participated in the false testimony that Cohen gave to this committee.

00:26:58.000 Well, here's the problem with this story.

00:27:01.000 The headline says that Cohen told lawmakers that Sekulow encouraged him to falsely basically commit perjury before Congress.

00:27:10.000 And yet Schiff is now saying, we're trying to find out whether this happened.

00:27:14.000 Well, if Cohen said that it happened, wouldn't they now have the grounds to open some sort of criminal investigation into Sekulow and the White House?

00:27:22.000 But they don't.

00:27:24.000 They haven't been able to come up with anything thus far.

00:27:25.000 So it's just more Michael Cohen talk.

00:27:27.000 Doesn't matter.

00:27:28.000 Press is going to run with it.

00:27:29.000 This is on the front page of the Washington Post today.

00:27:30.000 So again, I think that these investigations into President Trump are really designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to exacerbate the feeling of chaos that Trump naturally creates around him.

00:27:42.000 President Trump has a strong re-elect pitch.

00:27:44.000 His strong re-elect pitch is the economy is really good.

00:27:46.000 People are very positive about the economy right now.

00:27:48.000 We're not in the midst of any serious foreign crisis.

00:27:51.000 He's got a really placid lake of politics in front of him.

00:27:56.000 And the economy is booming right now.

00:27:59.000 And this should be a great time for him.

00:28:02.000 It's no wonder he's upset because, again, he is a chaotic personality in and of his own right, and now Democrats are exacerbating that by creating a feeling of chaos that is not really justified by the fact pattern in front of them at this point.

00:28:14.000 So President Trump is out there campaigning, and he is doing what he does.

00:28:18.000 I mean, President Trump is a stand-up comedian, and out there on the campaign trail, he basically does a stand-up routine.

00:28:22.000 Here's President Trump last night speaking in front of a big crowd.

00:28:25.000 And asking whether his slogan in 2020 is in Pennsylvania, whether his slogan in 2020 should be make America great again or keep America great.

00:28:34.000 So now we go.

00:28:35.000 Ready?

00:28:36.000 Keep America great.

00:28:38.000 Ready? - Okay.

00:28:57.000 Make America great again.

00:28:58.000 Wow!

00:29:01.000 Wow.

00:29:03.000 Well, I like it because we'll sell many, many more hats that way.

00:29:08.000 He's a funny dude.

00:29:09.000 And again, the fact that he is that he actually has a strong economic record to run on means that if there is any feeling of solidity with Trump, if people feel that Trump is a solid character or at the very least that he's not going to bother them too much, that he's not in the eye every moment making them nuts, then he is likely to do fine in his reelect effort.

00:29:29.000 So Democrats now have to create a feeling of chaos around Trump.

00:29:32.000 Now, Trump doesn't help himself here, as we'll see in a second.

00:29:34.000 He doesn't help himself by constantly getting himself into trouble and saying dumb things.

00:29:39.000 Democrats with the investigations are trying to generate controversy around Trump that is beyond what the facts support at this point.

00:29:47.000 OK, we're going to get to more of that in just one second.

00:29:49.000 This is where the Biden campaign comes in.

00:29:50.000 We're going to get to the Biden campaign.

00:29:52.000 We're also going to get to Tim Cook of Apple.

00:29:54.000 Apologizing on behalf of Baby Boomers, but for all the wrong reasons.

00:29:57.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

00:29:58.000 First, head on over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

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00:31:17.000 All righty.

00:31:26.000 So President Trump on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania.

00:31:29.000 The polls in Pennsylvania are not fantastic for President Trump.

00:31:33.000 If you take a look at the polls right now, he is basically losing to Joe Biden.

00:31:37.000 That's the person he has to worry about most.

00:31:39.000 And because of that, because of that, he is targeting Joe Biden.

00:31:43.000 And again, I think he has a fairly solid case against Biden.

00:31:46.000 He is, by the way, in the polls, he's just getting clobbered.

00:31:48.000 Right now against Biden.

00:31:49.000 There are not that many polls out right now, but the last poll from Quinnipiac, which came out on May 15th, so just a little about a week ago, Biden was leading him 53 to 42, which is a blowout in favor of Joe Biden.

00:32:02.000 And that is trouble for President Trump.

00:32:05.000 Obviously, President Trump needs to win one of the following three states and maintain all of the other states as well.

00:32:11.000 He needs to win Wisconsin or Michigan Or Pennsylvania, right?

00:32:14.000 He needs to win one of those three states or he loses the presidency.

00:32:18.000 Right now, if you look at Michigan 2020, Biden versus Trump, you see that President Trump is not polling great against Biden in that state either.

00:32:26.000 Right now, the Emerson poll, which is from March, but I assume it would actually be more in Biden's favor now because Biden has actually jumped in since then, had Biden up 54 to 46 on Trump in Michigan.

00:32:36.000 And if you look at the Wisconsin 2020 polls, the story is somewhat similar.

00:32:40.000 Biden versus Trump in Wisconsin.

00:32:43.000 is the polls show that Biden is beating him by something like eight from that same Emerson poll.

00:32:48.000 So none of this is really positive for Trump.

00:32:51.000 He's gonna have to tear Biden down.

00:32:52.000 We'll talk in one second about how he can do that.

00:32:54.000 The chief way that he's going to do that is pointing out that his record is better than Barack Obama's and Joe Biden's.

00:32:59.000 Here is Trump saying, Obama and Biden, they did a bad job.

00:33:02.000 I'm doing a better job.

00:33:03.000 The previous administration, what they did to our country, they should be ashamed of themselves.

00:33:12.000 Sleepy Joe said that he's running to, quote, save the world.

00:33:23.000 He was going to save every country but ours.

00:33:23.000 Well, he was.

00:33:26.000 What they've done to us is indescribable, economically.

00:33:30.000 We have rebuilt China.

00:33:32.000 They've done a great job.

00:33:33.000 And I don't blame China.

00:33:35.000 I don't blame President Xi.

00:33:36.000 I don't blame them.

00:33:38.000 Look, we allowed it to happen.

00:33:40.000 Our leaders allowed it to happen.

00:33:43.000 So Trump is going to be running against Obama-Biden.

00:33:46.000 And what he has to do is come up with some material that damages Joe Biden.

00:33:50.000 The problem for him is that Joe Biden has 100% name recognition.

00:33:52.000 He was vice president for eight years.

00:33:54.000 And a lot of the dirt about him is already out there in public view.

00:33:56.000 And some of the dirt doesn't actually hurt him.

00:33:58.000 So Biden right now is winning a disproportionate share of the black vote.

00:34:01.000 It's the reason why he's clobbering Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

00:34:04.000 It's also the reason why, if you're Joe Biden, the person you're looking at for a VP candidate right now is not Kamala Harris or Cory Booker.

00:34:10.000 It's probably Pete Buttigieg.

00:34:11.000 You need young millennials showing up to vote for you.

00:34:14.000 And Biden figures, if I'm clobbering Kamala Harris with black voters, what do I need Kamala Harris for?

00:34:18.000 She's not going to drive out black voters.

00:34:19.000 I'm killing her in my own primary.

00:34:21.000 There's no reason for me to pick Kamala Harris.

00:34:24.000 So there's been a lot of talk about what sort of dirt Trump could throw at Joe Biden.

00:34:28.000 And they've talked about the plagiarism stuff or maybe his stance on criminal justice reform.

00:34:33.000 I don't think so.

00:34:33.000 I think that the only piece of damaging information that would really hurt Joe Biden at this point is if there was something to the corruption allegations being made about Hunter Biden, his son, And don't forget, Biden deserted you.

00:34:44.000 operative contract in countries in which Joe Biden was doing business as vice president of the United States.

00:34:48.000 That would hurt Joe Biden.

00:34:49.000 Attacks that are not going to fly are ones like this.

00:34:52.000 Here's President Trump saying that Joe Biden left Pennsylvania for another state.

00:34:56.000 Note, Joe Biden left Pennsylvania when I believe he was 11 years old.

00:35:00.000 And don't forget, Biden deserted you.

00:35:03.000 He's not from Pennsylvania.

00:35:05.000 I guess he was born here, but he left you, folks.

00:35:10.000 He left you for another state.

00:35:12.000 Remember that, please.

00:35:14.000 I meant to say that.

00:35:15.000 This guy talks about, I know, Scranton, I know, well, I know the places better.

00:35:20.000 He left you for another state, and he didn't take care of you, because he didn't take care of your jobs.

00:35:26.000 He let other countries come in and rip off America.

00:35:31.000 That doesn't happen anymore.

00:35:33.000 Now, again, that line of attack is that he did a bad job as vice president is a much more telling line of attack than that he left Pennsylvania when he was 10 or 11 years old.

00:35:41.000 Nonetheless, the purpose of the investigations that we are seeing right now are to create a feeling of disquiet around President Trump, a feeling that he exacerbates by being the man that he is.

00:35:51.000 And that means that Biden is doing exactly what I suggested he was going to be doing.

00:35:55.000 I've been suggesting this for years, that Biden would be a strong candidate against Trump.

00:35:58.000 I doubted he could get through the primaries unscathed the way that he has so far.

00:36:02.000 But when it came to a general, I've always said that Biden was a much more dangerous candidate for Trump than anybody else, mainly because he could run a 1920 Warren G. Harding-style return to normalcy campaign.

00:36:11.000 He could say, Trump is out of the box.

00:36:13.000 This guy's crazy.

00:36:14.000 Look at him.

00:36:15.000 He says wild stuff all the time.

00:36:16.000 And here I am, Uncle Joe, you know me.

00:36:18.000 I'm not crazy.

00:36:19.000 And if I am crazy, it's the kind of crazy you're used to.

00:36:22.000 And that's the feel that you are getting from Democrats who are basically voting for him because they think that he is electable.

00:36:28.000 They're voting for him because he is capped in electability as opposed to some of the other wilder Democratic candidates, the Bernie Sanders and the Elizabeth Warrens.

00:36:36.000 This is the case that Chris Matthews, that everybody say, is trying to make.

00:36:40.000 He says, everybody's ripping on Joe Biden.

00:36:42.000 Why are they ripping on Joe Biden?

00:36:42.000 Why?

00:36:43.000 I come out here.

00:36:44.000 I come out of that show.

00:36:47.000 Drunk looking?

00:36:48.000 And then I talk about Joe Biden.

00:36:50.000 He's trying to rescue us.

00:36:51.000 He's trying to save us, Joe Biden.

00:36:52.000 If I were drowning in a river, my dog was drowning in the river.

00:36:54.000 I think Joe Biden would save me, not the dog.

00:36:56.000 He's a good guy, Joe Biden.

00:36:57.000 Go!

00:36:58.000 Biden is basically running for America against Trump.

00:37:02.000 He's trying to rescue us from Trumpism and Trump himself.

00:37:05.000 It was very powerful.

00:37:06.000 I don't know if it'll go all the way through to Milwaukee at the convention.

00:37:10.000 I don't know.

00:37:10.000 I'd say, you know, it's 50-50.

00:37:12.000 All this business, there's always a front runner, there's always a main challenger.

00:37:16.000 But his emotion is patriotic.

00:37:18.000 It's not anger.

00:37:20.000 Unfortunately for him, a lot of the Democratic Party is about anger right now.

00:37:23.000 Anger against corporations, against fossil fuel.

00:37:25.000 Listen to Bernie yesterday, Sanders yesterday on Meet the Press.

00:37:28.000 It was all anger.

00:37:31.000 He was angry at Ed Rendell.

00:37:32.000 He was angry at everybody.

00:37:34.000 But I think Biden's going to have to grab that anger and turn it against Trump.

00:37:39.000 Okay, so that's what's going to happen here.

00:37:40.000 He's going to run as a solid, unifying candidate who hates Trump's guts.

00:37:44.000 That's going to be great.

00:37:45.000 Let's just do it!

00:37:45.000 Chris Matthews, let's go!

00:37:46.000 Yeah, Chris Matthews.

00:37:47.000 Okay, so.

00:37:49.000 The benefit for Biden, and this is the narrative that's being built, is that Trump is volatile and Biden is solid.

00:37:56.000 The problem for Democrats is that many Democrats, as Matthew says correctly, many Democrats don't believe that Biden is going to punch Trump hard enough.

00:38:05.000 So we'll take an example.

00:38:07.000 Actor Jeff Daniels, who I don't know why he's on TV talking about politics.

00:38:10.000 I'm just confused.

00:38:11.000 Like the fact that he was on Newsroom and read lines written for him by the wildly overrated Aaron Sorkin.

00:38:17.000 Here's my rip on Aaron Sorkin.

00:38:18.000 Every character that Aaron Sorkin writes is Aaron Sorkin.

00:38:21.000 So when it's a woman speaking to Aaron Sorkin line, it's Aaron Sorkin wearing a wig.

00:38:25.000 And when it's a black guy reading an Aaron Sorkin line, it's Aaron Sorkin, just played by a black guy.

00:38:30.000 Like, every line that Aaron Sorkin writes, he does not know how to distinguish characters.

00:38:34.000 But that's an artistic critique, not really a material critique.

00:38:37.000 Jeff Daniels, I don't know what his political expertise, other than that he played a guy on TV.

00:38:42.000 He literally, his case is, I played a guy on TV.

00:38:44.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:38:45.000 Here he was on MSNBC, however, Why is he there?

00:38:50.000 Because he's playing Atticus Finch, I guess, in some Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird, which, wow, that does confer expertise.

00:38:58.000 I've also read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was eight.

00:39:01.000 So thank you, Jeff Daniels.

00:39:03.000 Here's Jeff Daniels explaining, though, and this does say something about where the Democratic Party is.

00:39:07.000 He says his great fear is that Biden can't punch anyone.

00:39:11.000 If politics, you know more than I, is a 180 degree swing, I think that's part of the eight years of Obama.

00:39:19.000 Let's go for the whitest guy we can.

00:39:21.000 I mean, I think there's an element out there in the middle of the country.

00:39:27.000 The other thing, what was the question?

00:39:29.000 Who are you watching?

00:39:31.000 So to go away from the toddler-in-chief, let's go to Kamala Harris.

00:39:36.000 Let's go somebody with a brain in their head.

00:39:38.000 Let's go with someone with some intelligence who doesn't tweet all day.

00:39:42.000 Mayor Pete, I'm looking at intelligence now.

00:39:45.000 I love Joe Biden.

00:39:47.000 Is he the guy that can stand up and punch him in the face and win?

00:39:50.000 That's for you guys to decide.

00:39:53.000 Jeff Daniels' take on intelligence is definitely worth my time, I think.

00:39:58.000 But this is the conflict inside the Democratic Party.

00:40:01.000 Is Biden the guy who can punch Trump and take Trump down?

00:40:06.000 I think what Democrats are failing to recognize is that the guy who can placidly take a punch from Trump is the guy who's likely to win.

00:40:12.000 It's not the guy who's likely to punch Trump.

00:40:14.000 It's the guy who can take a punch from Trump and emerge unscathed.

00:40:17.000 This is why Mayor Pete is actually threatening to Trump.

00:40:20.000 When Trump hit him with the Alfred E. Newman thing, which is a great characterization by the way, just on a humor level.

00:40:24.000 It is grade A characterization.

00:40:26.000 But when Mayor Pete says, that seems like an old person thing.

00:40:29.000 And then he just sort of lets it go?

00:40:31.000 That is a smart take by Pete Buttigieg.

00:40:34.000 When Biden acts unflapped by President- Like, one of the things that Trump was able to do really well, and he's got a gift for it, was he was able to get under the skin of everyone he ran against in 2016.

00:40:44.000 And part of that is because Trump speaks like Trump, meaning that a lot of intellectual elitists run for office.

00:40:50.000 Those are people with Ivy League degrees who are fond of the way that they command the language.

00:40:54.000 President Trump's command of the language is not spectacular.

00:40:57.000 He is basically a stand-up comic who doesn't read books.

00:41:00.000 And his popularity is baffling to a lot of people who got A's, straight A's, when they were in high school.

00:41:07.000 And it gets under their skin that Trump is more popular than they are in a lot of ways.

00:41:10.000 You saw that in 2016, Hillary Clinton was like, listen, I've been achieving from the time I was seven years old, and here's this doofus who grew up on daddy's money strolling in the front door and beating me.

00:41:19.000 How is this even possible?

00:41:20.000 That was that famous clip from Hillary in 2016 where she said, I should be beating this guy by 20.

00:41:24.000 How is this not?

00:41:26.000 So whichever Democrat does not have that level of arrogance, whichever Democrats like, yeah, he's popular and he's going to say a bunch of crap, but in the end, you know, doesn't have any impact.

00:41:36.000 That person is probably going to do best against Trump.

00:41:38.000 But that's not what the base wants.

00:41:39.000 What the base of the Democratic Party wants is somebody who punches.

00:41:42.000 And you're starting to see disquiet build in the in the intelligentsia about Joe Biden, specifically because Trump doesn't seem to get under Biden's skin in the same way that he gets under the intelligentsia's skin.

00:41:55.000 What's really fascinating about modern politics is that the people who are the most woke, the people who are the most militant, the people who are the most obnoxious, politically speaking, are not the people in the middle of the country.

00:42:07.000 It's not the unwashed masses.

00:42:09.000 The people who are the most obnoxious and woke and bothersome are the elite who write for The New York Times, the elitists who write for The New York Times, people like Jamal Bowie.

00:42:16.000 So Jamal Bowie has a column today about Joe Biden.

00:42:20.000 Sorry, it's Michelle Goldberg, another New York Times elitist.

00:42:24.000 She has a piece in the New York Times called, I don't want an exciting president.

00:42:28.000 Joe Biden makes his supporters feel safe, but nominating him is risky.

00:42:31.000 Why is it risky to nominate Joe Biden?

00:42:34.000 She says, what worries me about Biden is that in contemporary politics, the quest to find an electable candidate hasn't resulted in candidates that actually win.

00:42:41.000 Voters don't do themselves any favors when they try to think like pundits.

00:42:45.000 This, of course, is simply not true.

00:42:48.000 The fact is that many of the Democrats who were elected on a congressional level ran as moderates in 2018.

00:42:53.000 They were not the hard left AOC types.

00:42:54.000 AOC won in a deep blue district by winning 16,000 votes in a primary against another deep blue guy.

00:43:01.000 Michelle Goldberg, however, says that basically Democrats should vote with their heart and their heart should say anger, anger, not solidity, not stability, rage.

00:43:10.000 And this is Trump's best prospect.

00:43:11.000 Trump's best prospect is that the Democrats shoot themselves in the foot here.

00:43:15.000 That they've crafted this entire world-beating narrative about President Trump, the chaotic man, the man of absolute, sheer confusion.

00:43:22.000 And into the phrase steps a solid rock of a human, Joe Biden.

00:43:27.000 I don't know how that happened, but sure.

00:43:29.000 And then Democrats destroy that narrative by saying, you know what?

00:43:33.000 Can't have Joe Biden.

00:43:33.000 Would rather have a chaotic figure like Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

00:43:38.000 Let's step into that fray.

00:43:40.000 That is Trump's best prospect at re-election.

00:43:43.000 According to Michelle Goldberg, she says, Democrats are now in a complicated spot as they make their electoral calculations.

00:43:49.000 If what you care about most is a candidate's chances next November, pretending otherwise is an artificial exercise, particularly if it's just in the service of making a better judgment about electability.

00:43:58.000 Some enthusiasm for Biden is genuine, if not passionate.

00:44:00.000 Often, when people I spoke to at the rally described him as safe, they meant both as a candidate and as a potential leader.

00:44:06.000 Fair enough.

00:44:07.000 For many voters, what Biden is promising, a rebuke of Trump and a return to normalcy, is what they want more than anything else, and it makes sense for them to back him.

00:44:14.000 What's counterproductive is when voters try to think past their own desires.

00:44:18.000 Man, I hope that Michelle Goldberg somehow convinces her party that she is right.

00:44:21.000 into a movement matters.

00:44:22.000 That's especially true in a country as polarized as ours where turnout is as important as persuasion.

00:44:27.000 Man, I hope that Michelle Goldberg somehow convinces her party that she is right.

00:44:31.000 That's what I hope is that Michelle Goldberg and that wing of the party decide to destroy the narrative that is being built brick by brick by the Democrats in Congress and by Joe Biden on the other side in favor of somebody so woke that Michelle Goldberg is happy but the rest of America is alienated.

00:44:47.000 Time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:44:49.000 So time for the thing that I like today.

00:44:52.000 So there's a great book with basically all of Justice Scalia's writing.

00:44:58.000 Justice Scalia, of course, one of the great writers in the history of the Supreme Court.

00:45:03.000 They've now taken some of his writings and they've compiled them along with essays from other people about Scalia's thinking into a little booklet called On Faith.

00:45:11.000 Lessons from an American Believer.

00:45:12.000 The foreword is by Justice Thomas.

00:45:15.000 It is edited by Christopher Scalia and Ed Whelan over at one of the foundations whose name escapes me right now.

00:45:24.000 The book is really great.

00:45:25.000 For people who are of faith, it's a great reminder of why you believe certain things.

00:45:31.000 It's a reminder that Scalia was not just a great thinker, that he was a good man who tried to live a virtuous life, and an intellectually rich life as well.

00:45:39.000 And it's also a reminder that the sort of scorn that so many people in the intelligentsia have for people of faith is totally unjustified.

00:45:47.000 If you truly believe you're living in New York or LA or something, and you truly believe that you are a higher IQ person than Justice Scalia, or a better thinker than Justice Scalia, because Justice Scalia was one of these rubes who believes in the whole Jesus thing, Read the book, and I challenge you to think beyond your own boundaries.

00:46:03.000 By the way, I always encourage people who are of faith to read atheist books and think beyond their boundaries as well.

00:46:09.000 But I've never really run into religious people who are averse to listening to thinkers on the other side.

00:46:15.000 It's very rare to find somebody who's an atheist, a militant atheist, who's willing to at least hear the argument on the other side.

00:46:22.000 It's why I treasure my friendships with people like Michael Shermer, who is an atheist, or at the very least an agnostic, who's interested in having those conversations.

00:46:29.000 In any case, go check out On Faith by Antonin Scalia.

00:46:32.000 It really is a great book.

00:46:33.000 It's only a couple hundred pages.

00:46:34.000 It's a pretty quick read.

00:46:35.000 Okay, time for some things that I hate.

00:46:41.000 OK, things that I hate today.

00:46:43.000 So AOC and her fellow Democrats are constantly complaining that we don't want them to be able to speak.

00:46:50.000 This is so confusing.

00:46:52.000 Has anybody on the right tried to silence AOC or Ilhan Omar?

00:46:56.000 Like really tried to silence them?

00:46:57.000 Not that I'm aware of.

00:46:58.000 In fact, every time they say something, we sort of trumpet it because what they say is so unerringly silly.

00:47:05.000 So AOC, though, claims that the opposition is afraid when she speaks.

00:47:09.000 If that were the case, she would not be a very famous person right now.

00:47:13.000 That lack of fear of fellowship is exactly what the opposition does fear.

00:47:20.000 That and any time Rashida or Ilhan speak, they're scared too.

00:47:25.000 Myself included.

00:47:26.000 And, you know, it is great that they got more than they bargained for.

00:47:32.000 Oh, yeah, that's exactly what happened.

00:47:33.000 We're so scared when AOC speaks.

00:47:35.000 I'm particularly scared when she starts talking about vegetables.

00:47:37.000 Here's AOC yesterday.

00:47:39.000 She must be silenced.

00:47:40.000 We must silence her.

00:47:41.000 This is deeply frightening stuff.

00:47:43.000 Here's AOC explaining why cauliflower is a colonialist vegetable.

00:47:47.000 I'm not kidding.

00:47:48.000 It's a thing, she said, as a human.

00:47:49.000 When someone says that it's too hard to do a green space that grows yucca instead of, I don't know, cauliflower or something um it you're what you're doing is that you're taking a colonial approach to environmentalism if i went to a predominantly white community and said okay you guys are going to be growing plantains and yuca

00:48:17.000 and all these things that you don't know how to cook it's and that your palate isn't accustomed to it's gonna be like cute for a little bit but it's not easy Um, yeah, I'm scared.

00:48:33.000 We need to silence her because she's talking about plantains.

00:48:38.000 I'm confused.

00:48:38.000 So apparently there's a group of, are there really a group of environmentalists who go around telling Latinos that they should not be, they should not be planting yucca?

00:48:48.000 Is this a thing that I'm not aware of?

00:48:50.000 Apparently this is a thing that happens down in the Bronx.

00:48:53.000 This is a thing.

00:48:53.000 People just walk around door to door and they're like, are you planting yucca in that window garden still?

00:48:59.000 Is that what you're doing right there?

00:49:00.000 Is that yucca?

00:49:01.000 Cauliflower, kale, do it!

00:49:04.000 Also, cauliflower is delicious and yucca tastes bad.

00:49:08.000 Okay, maybe that's just my different cultural sensibility speaking to me here.

00:49:13.000 But also, I don't care if you grow yucca.

00:49:14.000 Again, who are these people?

00:49:17.000 Colonialist vegetables.

00:49:19.000 Man, I'm gonna say that these are first world problems.

00:49:22.000 That would be a first world problem right there.

00:49:24.000 Somebody came today, they came to my door and they told me, you stopped growing that sweet potato, you stopped growing that yam, it's time for you to grow some asparagus.

00:49:32.000 And I was like, whoa!

00:49:33.000 Slow your roll there!

00:49:35.000 Slow your roll, that is some cultural appropriation right there!

00:49:38.000 My garden is my own, and if I choose to grow indigenous crops to the United States, well then that's my business.

00:49:44.000 You white people and you tell...

00:49:45.000 You white people and you're...

00:49:46.000 Flips card.

00:49:47.000 Cauliflower?

00:49:47.000 All righty, lady.

00:49:54.000 Okay.

00:49:54.000 Sure.

00:49:55.000 Yeah, we're deeply frightened.

00:49:56.000 Mm-hmm.

00:49:56.000 Okay.

00:49:57.000 Meanwhile, a final thing that I hate today.

00:50:00.000 So I did mention Jamal Bowie earlier erroneously.

00:50:02.000 Now I'm going to mention him non-erroneously.

00:50:04.000 He has an incredibly dumb column today in the New York Times.

00:50:07.000 Deeply overrated thinker, Jamal Bowie.

00:50:09.000 He has a piece in the New York Times called, Anti-abortion and pro-Trump are two sides of the same coin.

00:50:13.000 Both seek to reinforce and re-establish hierarchies that were beginning to lose force.

00:50:17.000 I am so bored with the argument that every time I disagree with you politically, it's because I'm trying to reinforce a power hierarchy.

00:50:25.000 Not everything is power hierarchies.

00:50:27.000 I understand, according to Marxist and post-Marxist thought, that power hierarchies are everything.

00:50:33.000 That either it's economic hierarchies or it's hierarchies of race or hierarchies of sex.

00:50:38.000 I understand your deconstructionist crap about how ideas about the protection of human life are secretly nefarious ways to control women's bodies.

00:50:46.000 Ooh.

00:50:47.000 I'm familiar with the nonsensical motives that you put on pro-life people, but it is so sneering and dumb that it is hard to overstate how sneering and dumb it is.

00:50:56.000 So Jamel Bowie, his piece today says, all of the measures, all these anti-abortion measures, as well as the heartbeat bill signed in April by Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio, are designed to bring fetal personhood to the Supreme Court.

00:51:08.000 And then he talks about, in 2016, anti-abortion conservatives, and white evangelicals in particular, supported Donald Trump on the expectation that he would nominate anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court.

00:51:18.000 Well, partially, yes.

00:51:20.000 I mean, they expected that he would nominate judges to the Supreme Court who would not read abortion into the Constitution of the United States, which is both a legal and moral absurdity.

00:51:29.000 But he says, the story of that support, which is also the story of these new laws, isn't purely transactional.

00:51:33.000 It's about shared commitment to the same overarching goal.

00:51:36.000 Now, everybody on the right's going, right, the same overarching goal would be to stop the killing of the unborn.

00:51:40.000 No!

00:51:41.000 Wrong you are!

00:51:42.000 According to Jamal Bowie, if you vote for pro-life laws, it's because you hate women and seek to keep them under your thumb.

00:51:49.000 Take that, patriarchy!

00:51:52.000 He says the animating impulse of Trump's campaign was a defense of traditional hierarchies.

00:51:56.000 Oh God, it's so boring.

00:51:58.000 It's so boring.

00:51:59.000 Honestly, it makes the conversation boring because I say, here's my pro-life position and here's why I believe it.

00:52:03.000 And you say, that's not really why you believe it.

00:52:05.000 I'm like, well, no, that is, I just expressed to you exactly why I believe it.

00:52:08.000 Like, nope, nope, that's not why you believe it.

00:52:10.000 You believe it because you're nefarious.

00:52:12.000 You believe it because you're evil.

00:52:14.000 You believe it because you hate women.

00:52:15.000 I can't have a conversation with you along those lines.

00:52:17.000 Once you start saying that what I believe and my articulated stance on that belief system is not actually my real stance, my real stance is a secret Hitlerian motivation to keep women down or something.

00:52:29.000 Then I don't... We can't have a conversation at that point.

00:52:31.000 You've launched a character attack on me.

00:52:34.000 If I say I'm pro-life because I believe in biology and I believe in the inherent value of human life, and you say, no, you just want to take us back to the dark ages, I got nothing for you.

00:52:43.000 There's no conversation that can be had.

00:52:45.000 This is the kind of argument from Bowie that is meant to quell conversation, not to have conversation.

00:52:50.000 It says, Trump promised explicitly to weaken America's commitment to principles of fairness and equality, to strengthen privileges of race, gender, and wealth.

00:52:58.000 Did he promise explicitly to do that?

00:53:00.000 Weird, I don't remember Trump saying that.

00:53:02.000 Trump promised explicitly to weaken our principles of fairness and equality?

00:53:06.000 Did Trump say, you know what?

00:53:07.000 Fairness and equality are bad.

00:53:09.000 I want racial hierarchies to be reestablished.

00:53:13.000 See, explicitly is a word that has a meaning.

00:53:15.000 It means that it's explicit, like you say it.

00:53:19.000 His personal life, says Jamel Bui, was defined by its hedonism, excess, and contempt for conservative morality, but he pitched himself as a bulwark against cultural and demographic change, a symbol of white patriarchal manhood, aligned against immigrants, feminists, and racial minorities.

00:53:32.000 A bulwark against cultural and demographic change, despite his stated tolerance for same-sex marriage.

00:53:36.000 Again, now the idea is that Even though Trump was pro-gay marriage, that that wasn't enough.

00:53:42.000 His secret motivation was he wants more white people and fewer non-white people, which would also not explain why he would be pro-life when a disproportionate number of abortions are of minority people in the United States.

00:53:54.000 So none of this makes any sense.

00:53:55.000 But according to Jamal Bowie, it's the same thing for pro-lifers.

00:53:59.000 He says the underlying dynamic is straightforward, explains Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, in his book The End of White Christian America.

00:54:07.000 Trump's promise to restore a mythical past golden age, where factory jobs paid the bills and white Protestant churches were the dominant cultural hubs, powerfully tapped evangelical anxieties about an uncertain future.

00:54:18.000 There's no restoring that past, but with his nomination of conservative judges and Mitch McConnell's successful drive to confirm them in the Senate, Trump has given white evangelicals and their Republican representatives the opportunity to pass the laws and measures that reflect their ultra-traditionalist ideals.

00:54:33.000 So even if Trump distances himself from any particular law, that's how one should understand the new wave of abortion restrictions as direct attacks on the social and economic autonomy of people who can become pregnant designed to strengthen strict hierarchies of gender.

00:54:50.000 And then he just tells an open lie.

00:54:52.000 This is an open lie in the New York Times.

00:54:59.000 He says, This is an absolute lie.

00:55:02.000 He's just telling lies now.

00:55:03.000 It is not true.

00:55:05.000 We spoke on our radio show yesterday with the architect of the Georgia bill.

00:55:08.000 This is an open lie now being repeated into the pages of the New York Times to make the case that the real reason that these evil, evil pro-lifers want to save babies, and disproportionately black babies, by the way, The real reason these pro-lifers want to do that is because they want to see what?

00:55:24.000 A white supremacist hierarchy where there are more black people and brown people in the United States being born?

00:55:29.000 None of this makes sense, but again, it is...

00:55:31.000 I will say this, Jamal Bowie is badly motivated.

00:55:34.000 He's a badly motivated guy.

00:55:35.000 You're a badly motivated person if your immediate response to somebody explaining their theory of why law should be the way that it is, is that, no, that's actually not their real motivation.

00:55:46.000 Their real motivation is obviously something nefarious and evil.

00:55:49.000 You can't have a conversation with somebody like this.

00:55:51.000 Alrighty, so we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of coverage.

00:55:55.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.

00:55:56.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:56.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:58.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:56:05.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:56:06.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:56:08.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:56:10.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:56:12.000 Edited by Adam Sajovic.

00:56:13.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

00:56:15.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:56:17.000 Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.

00:56:18.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:56:20.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

00:56:23.000 Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:56:25.000 You know, if it weren't for the fact that the Democrats own the news and entertainment media, it would be obvious by now that they are living in a blithering fantasy world.

00:56:34.000 Donald Trump is a racist, except who's he racist to?

00:56:37.000 He's a dictator, except what does he dictate?

00:56:39.000 He's lawless, but what laws has he broken?

00:56:43.000 They have invented a Donald Trump of the imagination, and he ain't the real Donald Trump at all.

00:56:47.000 We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 21, 2019

The Democratic Strategy Emerges | Ep. 785

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