In this special episode of the Ben Shapiro Show, host Ben Shapiro sits down with Turning Point USA President and Founder Charlie Kirk to discuss the importance of conservative student activism on college campuses, and why the same Democratic candidate he hopes will face President Trump in 2020 is the one that terrifies him the most. In our conversation, Ben and Charlie dive headfirst into whether President Trump has been good for the conservative movement, what it will take for Republicans to hold the White House in 2020, as well as why he thinks the same Democrat he hopes to face in the next election is also the one he fears the most! Thanks to our sponsor, Dailywire, for sponsoring this Sunday Special. The Daily Wire is a conservative organization dedicated to educating, training, and organizing conservative college students through their campus chapters and yearly events across the country. To learn more about Dailywire and their mission, visit dailywire.media/TheBenShapiroShow. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Subscribe to our newsletter! Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: "Advertiser" to receive 10% off your entire purchase when you shop online at adSense.me/AdSense. Our ad-free version of the show goes live on Nov. 19th! We'll be giving away a limited edition copy of our newest issue of AdSense's newest book, "AdSense's new issue "The Only Idea That Will Win the Future," available exclusively to AdSense memberships starting on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Watch the adSense will be available in the App Store, wherever else you get the ad must be able to watch the show on the webcast starting on Tuesday, Nov. 18th, starting on the 15th of the 27th of that day! Subscribe and review the ad will also be available on the 21st of the 31st of Dec. 9th, 2019! Thank you for listening to the show? Subscribe? Subscribe on Podcoin? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Podcoin, Stitcher, Strava, and Stitcher? Subscribe to Podcoin Connect? and Strive24? Download the Strive4 Provencio? You'll get 20% off the show, Subscribe to the Final Cast? Thanks for listening and Subscribe to my podcast, Subscribe on iTunes?
00:00:25.000Turning Point USA, an organization whose mission is to educate, train, and organize students through their campus chapters and yearly events.
00:00:32.000Over the past eight years, Charlie has grown TPUSA's reach to over 1,500 campuses throughout the nation.
00:00:38.000In 2016, Charlie joined then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign, and he's been a steadfast supporter of the president ever since.
00:00:44.000His newest book is The MAGA Doctrine, The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future.
00:00:48.000In our conversation, Charlie and I dive headfirst into whether President Trump has been good for the conservative movement, what it will take for Republicans to hold the White House, as well as why the same Democratic candidate he hopes will face President Trump in 2020 is also the one that terrifies him most.
00:01:11.000This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
00:01:55.000So, Charlie, I met you when you were but an even younger Whippersnapper.
00:01:59.000You're only 26 now, but I think I met you when you were maybe 18 years old at like a Horowitz Freedom Retreat.
00:02:04.000And you were just starting Turning Point USA, so at 18 years old, you didn't go to college.
00:02:10.000How did you decide, number one, not going to college, number two, going to do student activism, and number three, going to start one of the largest student organizations in the country?
00:02:33.000Ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me.
00:02:35.000I convinced my parents to allow me to take a gap year before entering college.
00:02:39.000And one gap year has now turned into eight gap years.
00:02:42.000And the great irony of the whole thing is I run an organization that's focused on college campus outreach that I actually go into college myself.
00:02:48.000But it's now, you know, on 2,000 high school and college campuses.
00:02:51.000You spoke at our last event, which was down in Palm Beach at the end of last year.
00:02:57.000You visit a lot of campuses across the country.
00:03:00.000There's a crisis happening right now in higher education, where students are being taught to hate our country, where anti-Americanism is on the rise.
00:03:06.000And I think conservative values and conservative ideas are being given an opportunity to really have a revival and a renaissance.
00:03:13.000And, you know, we see that at Turning Point USA.
00:03:15.000We see that, the work that we're doing and the speeches that I give and the visits that, you know, I partake in.
00:03:20.000And it's been a great journey over the last eight years.
00:03:22.000And it's been fun seeing, of course, you when I first met you, you were, you know, working and writing and doing radio.
00:03:27.000And then, of course, that was before The Daily Wire and seeing that kind of take off.
00:03:30.000So it's been fun kind of, you know, throughout the last couple of years, kind of seeing both entities grow.
00:03:35.000So what is your relationship like with President Trump?
00:03:38.000I'm of a personal and a business, like that's what that's what people kind of want to know.
00:04:00.000I wouldn't say that's the extent of everything I do, but that's definitely how people will stop and say, hey, you know the president, don't you?
00:04:17.000in the summer of 2016 after I spoke at the Republican National Convention.
00:04:21.000I felt our country was going to go in a horrible direction if Hillary Clinton got elected president originally.
00:04:27.000I was a Ted Cruz supporter and then endorsed Trump as he was the nominee because that was what a lot of people did, including Mike Pence, who was a Cruz then Trump guy.
00:04:38.000and I said, look, we need to do something with students and youth infrastructure.
00:04:41.000I have a couple of years of experience under my belt.
00:04:43.000I would love to travel with you across the country and maybe organize some student events.
00:04:47.000And he was his willingness to do that was unusual in politics.
00:04:50.000Usually you have to go through a hierarchy and there really wasn't much of a hierarchy in the Trump campaign in those days back in July and August of 16.
00:04:57.000Obviously, surprising election happened and kind of it was stunning for a lot of different people.
00:05:03.000And, you know, the president, you know, I developed a pretty good relationship with him.
00:05:08.000And he's been he's been extraordinary in a lot of different ways.
00:05:11.000He's delivered results for our country the likes of which I wouldn't have even predicted, you know, for the conservative agenda and for, you know, the American revitalization agenda.
00:05:20.000And, you know, spending time with him has been a real thrill for someone that, you know, never went to college and just started this organization on a whim to be able to, you know, meet with the President of the United States and be able to, So, how do you bridge the gap between sort of what you do on college campuses and your activity with President Trump?
00:05:41.000What I mean by that is that by looking at polls, President Trump is wildly unpopular with young people, right?
00:05:46.000This is the one area where he is probably most unpopular just in terms of the polling data.
00:05:50.000Now, conservatism is never supremely popular with young people, particularly people on campus, but President Trump seems to have Raised a particular level of ire with people 18 to 21.
00:06:01.000At the same time, you're running this major campus organization.
00:06:03.000He has people who love him on campus, no question.
00:06:15.000So what do you think the mission of TPUSA is and how does that combine with sort of what President Trump does and where it puts you guys in the position of maximizing the conservative movement when on the one hand it gets your supporters super passionate, on the other hand Trump is such an alienating name for people who are young on campus.
00:06:30.000And look, so there's positives and negatives in any presidency when it comes to college campus outreach.
00:06:36.000And the positives has been it's opened a huge amount of enthusiasm and interest on college campuses, where we have thousands of students attending our events, lots of opposition that comes.
00:06:46.000And that makes the events far more exciting and with a lot more energy than it otherwise would have been.
00:06:55.000I can say from the moment that President Trump got elected, College campus activism from Turning Point USA side doubled, tripled, quadrupled almost overnight, and it emboldened college conservatives to stand for conservative principles even more so pre-Trump.
00:07:10.000And now mind you, I've been doing this for a couple decades, so my reference point is only about eight years, but I could tell you that the Mitt Romney Republican Party, We would not have kids that were doing what they are today, where they're starting students for Trump groups at UC Berkeley or University of California, Irvine.
00:07:24.000I think that's one of the positives of the Trump presidency, is that conservatives are less afraid than ever before to say what they believe and to stand with conviction.
00:07:32.000And, you know, the president has definitely, I think, taught us that you can punch back twice as hard to use a Barack Obama expression that, you know, you use quite often.
00:07:41.000And I think that's one of the great positives of the Trump presidency and him as an individual, is that You have to recognize that the left is a destructive force in our country.
00:07:49.000And I think Newt Gingrich says it best, if President Trump's ideology can be best summed up, he's an anti-leftist presidency.
00:07:57.000And I think that if you recognize the left in media, culture, Hollywood, and academia as a corrosive force to our culture and our country, and you make them the enemy and we're going to put them in opposition, I think that's been very, very helpful to us as an organization fighting on the ground in college campuses.
00:08:12.000So what do you do with the folks who are in the middle and convincible?
00:08:14.000So as I say, Trump is phenomenal at firing up the base.
00:08:46.000I'd love to get your feedback, because you go to these campuses too, and you get a lot of different questions from people.
00:08:51.000And there are people that come to the front of the line and ask questions, and they'll say, Charlie, I like what you say, I like the ideas, just I'm not there yet on Trump.
00:08:59.000My perspective on that is, look, I believe what I believe.
00:09:03.000I'm going to defend the president and his agenda and what he's done for our country.
00:09:06.000And more times than not, students will say, OK, I might not agree with all that, but I appreciate the fervency that you support him with, and you explain it better than most people would.
00:09:18.000And I think the movable middle, if you will, has become more winnable than ever before because of the Marxist insurgency in the Democrat Party.
00:09:24.000And I think that it's presenting a huge opportunity for people like you and people like me to make convincing arguments for conservative ideas.
00:09:30.000Now, I will say, though, that the traditional conservative outreach on college campuses, let's say the last 40 or 50 years, where it's just talking about corporate tax cuts and just talking about the same sort of macroeconomic issues, it wasn't always doing the job on campuses.
00:09:45.000What Trump has liberated, though, is more cultural issues as well.
00:09:48.000where he's saying, you know, maybe English should be the official language of the United States.
00:09:51.000We're going to talk about immigration.
00:09:54.000And there are a lot of young people that are deeply passionate about these issues, just outside of, you know, the discussions about GDP growth, which I care about a lot.
00:10:02.000I mean, of course, I want a robust free market economy.
00:10:04.000But I think the Trump presidency and Trump in general, him weighing into different cultural issues, I think has also opened the door for us to win over a lot of young people that otherwise might not be registered and not have been voting at all in the first place.
00:10:16.000Because you spend so much time kind of defending Trump, do you ever feel the necessity on campus to separate yourself off from things that he does wrong?
00:10:22.000Because obviously he's a human being like anybody else.
00:10:24.000He's got his foibles, some may say more than others, at least in public life.
00:10:28.000So when you're on campus and somebody asks you a question about something that Trump has done, of which you don't approve, do you ever feel the necessity to defend it?
00:10:35.000Well, look, I don't agree with everything he's done.
00:10:44.000And I don't consider that to be my role, and I don't consider that to be helpful at all to the threat that we're facing up against dominant Marxism and leftism in our country and our culture.
00:10:55.000Where I think my particular role right now is that there are not enough people doing a full-throated defense of the Trump presidency and administration, especially on college campuses.
00:11:04.000Where it is so unusual for someone to come and say, no, President Trump might be one of the most successful presidents in modern American history.
00:11:11.000And students will say, they're so puzzled and flummoxed if somebody says that.
00:11:15.000And then I'll start to recite some facts and some statistics that they might not have heard.
00:11:21.000Economic success, lowest ever black unemployment, Hispanic unemployment, Asian unemployment, energy independent, things that you and I know just off the cuff that students might not hear.
00:11:31.000But look, I don't agree with everything that he's done from a policy perspective or position.
00:11:34.000I agree with almost all of it, though, because a lot of it, and you've talked about this, is traditional conservative stuff.
00:11:40.000Is stuff that we've talked about, you know, in the conservative circles for the last couple decades.
00:11:45.000Things that people have promised and never delivered upon.
00:11:47.000Like energy independence, like moving the embassy to Jerusalem, like deregulating the economy, like cutting taxes.
00:11:53.000These sorts of things are traditional conservative free market ideas that have been, you know, tossed around for quite some time.
00:11:59.000But I make the argument in the book as well, why did it take Trump to actually do this?
00:12:03.000Like, why didn't George W. Bush ever speak at the March for Life?
00:12:06.000Why didn't George W. Bush ever move the embassy to Jerusalem?
00:12:09.000Why didn't George W. Bush recognize the Golan Heights?
00:12:11.000Why was it Trump, the billionaire businessman from New York, who's a recent, you know, conservative, who at one point in his life held a pro-choice position, why would he go and defund Planned Parenthood funding?
00:12:21.000And I make the argument it's because this is the populism at its best.
00:12:25.000It's because the conservative movement and the people in America that supported him hold these positions and he promised to fulfill what he said he was going to run on.
00:12:34.000And actually doing that as a president, I think is so, in my opinion, unusual and something that deserves praise.
00:12:41.000I mean, there's no question that his willingness to violate long-held conventional wisdom, it definitely has its upsides.
00:12:46.000I mean, people tend to focus a lot on the downsides, you know, the Twitter account and Yeah, and look, I'll give like three examples.
00:13:06.000You know, from a pure theoretical position, I'm not a fan of tariffs.
00:13:11.000If we just talk about macroeconomics, tariffs or taxes.
00:13:14.000However, from a national security position, I'm a huge fan of tariffs on China because I think China's our greatest enemy geopolitically and otherwise.
00:13:22.000And you look at what China's done, building islands in the South China Sea, hacking our cyber grid, basically sending spies from the CCP on Confucius Institute college campuses.
00:13:30.000President Trump basically threw up the entire chessboard on China and said, No, this entire way we've been viewing China has been incorrect.
00:13:39.000Republican and Democrat presidents, both alike, from H.W.
00:13:42.000Bush on, have just kind of had this agreement to not really solidify the southern border and just to allow unlimited amounts of green cards to be issued.
00:13:49.000He had an unorthodox position on that.
00:14:21.000President Trump is, I agree, the most anti-left president of the modern American era.
00:14:26.000I mean, this is what he campaigned on.
00:14:28.000I mean, there's a reason that Rush Limbaugh, in the middle of the 2016 campaign, rechristened the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies to the Institute for Advanced Anti-Leftist Studies, really sort of as an homage to President Trump.
00:14:39.000That comes along with some rewards and it comes along with some risks.
00:14:43.000The reward is that it makes very clear who the opposition is, which is something that Republicans, conservatives traditionally have not done.
00:14:49.000I think the clarification is necessary.
00:14:51.000The risk is that anti-left is broader than conservative.
00:14:55.000And suddenly you may be associating with people who oppose the left, but who also are not only not conservative, but oppose a lot of the ideals of conservatism.
00:15:04.000Or you may be willing to overlook in the simple binary battle, you may be over willing to overlook activity that is not conservative in the name of anti-leftism.
00:15:14.000So this is where you get into President Trump's heresies, bad things that he has said in the past, bad things that he has done, the fact that nobody in the Republican Party seems to give a damn about spending anymore.
00:15:24.000I'm old enough to remember when we all cared about spending.
00:15:25.000But you and I agree completely on this.
00:15:27.000Yeah, and now obviously we are blowing out the spending to an extraordinary extent.
00:15:32.000And if you criticize that, then you are accused of being an aid to the left because you are opposing a principle that is a principle of the left.
00:15:40.000But because Trump is anti-left, then it's the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.
00:15:44.000So where do you draw the line between Forwarding conservatism and forwarding anti-leftism?
00:15:49.000I try to answer that question in the book, where I say, what is the doctrine of the Trump presidency?
00:15:54.000You know, Monroe had the doctrine, Monroe Doctrine.
00:15:56.000I call it the MAGA doctrine, which the argument I make is that it's a blend of conservatism, populism, common sense, and a pro-American approach.
00:16:04.000And I look back to the Reagan era, and we had eight years of awesome conservative wins under Ronald Reagan, and H.W.
00:16:13.000He put back bureaucrats that Ronald Reagan fired.
00:16:16.000And all of a sudden, we kind of saw a dissent away from Ronald Reagan conservatism.
00:16:19.000And we have to remember, Reagan was a populist, too.
00:16:22.000I mean, Reagan was both a conservative and a populist.
00:16:24.000I think there's dangers to populism and its furthest extent, but I don't think that we as conservatives should be afraid of it.
00:16:31.000I think that there's a lot of positives when it comes to listening to the people and actually bringing dignity back to forgotten America.
00:16:37.000And so what is the doctrine of the Trump presidency?
00:16:39.000I make the argument that it's Analyzing every decision and every deeply held belief in Washington DC by the ruling class, so the wise men of Washington, and asking the question objectively, has this been serving our country well?
00:16:52.000And then if no, what is the proper approach to it?
00:16:55.000And by using that kind of common sense approach, he's actually come Organically to conservative positions that other people that ran on conservative positions would not have organically come to, such as standing for life.
00:17:22.000Well, what he's trying to do is really hard, which is to try to recover and renew a country that was almost in managed decline by a bipartisan big government consensus and a globalist consensus under kind of the Bush-Clinton-Obama years, which was, all right, you know, George W. Bush would be more, we'll get corporate tax cuts, we'll kind of keep the borders open, and we're going to be more hawkish on foreign policy.
00:17:42.000Obama, exact opposite, we're going to send billions of dollars to the evil Iranians, still keep the borders open, but we're going to have anemic economic growth.
00:17:49.000I make the argument, the doctrine that he espouses and that he believes in is one we can learn from and we should advance for the next, you know, couple decades and hopefully next century, which is, are we actually seeing results for the people that he ran to represent?
00:18:05.000And it seems as if we had a ruling class party sent, you know, post Reagan, and Donald Trump, I believe, has positively disrupted that.
00:18:12.000One of the questions that I have about Ideas like the MAGA doctrine is, are we trying to enflesh a skeleton that can be enfleshed in a number of different ways?
00:18:35.000He doesn't sit around reading Milton Friedman.
00:18:36.000He's openly bragged about having written more books than he has read.
00:18:40.000And so trying to sort of graft a broad ideological agenda onto that, as opposed to, I think common sense is a fairly good description of how he sees his own agenda, but trying to graft on an ideology.
00:18:52.000I mean, Tucker's tried, Tucker Carlson has tried to graft on one particular ideology.
00:18:56.000You've seen, I think, Jared Kushner try to graft on a different ideology.
00:18:58.000I think you've seen Pence try to graft on a different ideology.
00:19:00.000And it seems like there's this constant exercise going on in which there is sort of a skeleton of feelings and instincts that is good.
00:19:08.000And then everybody tries to Try to put flesh on it and sometimes it looks like a lion and sometimes it looks like a chicken and it's not super clear what exactly it is.
00:19:18.000I think his doctrine first and foremost is from the first time he announced for the presidency, he said through instinctual observance of where the country was going is, we're not winning anymore and there's something deeply wrong with who's been running our country and how they've been running our country.
00:19:33.000And his agenda or his doctrine and those people you mentioned have all placed more, I would say, political philosophy behind it.
00:19:39.000But let's take a step before that is, how are we going to renew and revitalize the country?
00:19:43.000How are we going to bring this back to a place of excellence?
00:19:46.000And it goes back to a phrase that you and I believe and the left does not believe.
00:20:04.000It's like, I care about this like I care about my son or I care about a beloved.
00:20:09.000And sometimes he's going to engage in braggadocia or he's gonna do things that are off the wall and atypical.
00:20:16.000And there's been unlimited coverage of all that.
00:20:19.000However, he goes back to a default position of, I've been elected by forgotten America, because a lot of people showed up for the first time in a long time, people switch parties, and I think there's something to that, to bring dignity to those parts of the country that have been disenfranchised by the ruling class, because our country was taken advantage of for so long.
00:20:37.000And it's a blend of nationalism, populism, conservatism, and those two words, common sense, I think make I think that frames it up really well.
00:20:46.000And it's also, it's challenging the ruling class consensus.
00:20:49.000And I think there's a lot of truth to that, which is, have these people been right about what they've been feeding us the last 30 or 40 years?
00:20:57.000Maybe about certain things, and about other things, maybe not.
00:21:00.000And especially when it comes to these positions, such as, oh wow, we should never challenge China?
00:21:06.000It seems like both parties have just been I'm kind of okay with allowing the rise to China with a couple of senators here and there that have been speaking out.
00:21:13.000President Trump has opened and has given oxygen now to an America First agenda towards China that I think will benefit for generations to come.
00:21:23.000So to answer your question, I think the doctrine, if you will, is that I love my country so much.
00:21:29.000I believe it's a gift that's been given to us.
00:21:30.000I'm going to do whatever it takes to try to save it and revitalize it.
00:21:33.000I can't say that about Bernie Sanders.
00:21:35.000His agenda is this place is a mistake.
00:21:55.000But first, let's talk about a sad reality.
00:21:57.000You're bad at predicting the future, not just you, like all the humans, because If people were great at predicting the future, you'd just go to Vegas and you'd be rich, and then you wouldn't need life insurance.
00:23:00.000OK, so let's talk about how President Trump is perceived.
00:23:03.000So I think one of the critiques that some people make of you particularly is that maybe you're giving the president too much credit on his sort of how much of this is planned.
00:23:12.000So I, for example, love a lot of the policies that you just talked about.
00:23:16.000I also happen to think that politics is much more veep than house of cards, and I think that everyone is basically a moron.
00:23:20.000And so when the president says things that appear to me to be not brilliant, I will say that appears to me to be not brilliant, that I think that's kind of dumb.
00:23:29.000You've been criticized for sort of the 40 chess model of thinking of President Trump, that President Trump is thinking three steps ahead, that when he says a thing about Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem, he's not doing that because it's just a gut instinct that he's tweeting out, but because he's actually thought through the ramifications of whatever it is he said.
00:23:46.000Now, that may not be a fair characterization of you, but how do you think about that?
00:23:50.000I don't necessarily think it's a fair characterization, but it's fair to say I get that accusation.
00:23:55.000I will say, from my time spending time around him and seeing him be able to predict things correctly, for example, he said, I'm being spied on.
00:24:13.000And one of the things I talk about in the book, and otherwise, is that he does have 40 years of built-up experience in a wide variety of different endeavors, from pop culture, to television, to building buildings, to the woman rink, that does make him a very unique individual to be able to address this multitude of problems and these issues.
00:24:34.000And so I ask myself the question, People should ask themselves the question too, like, is it instinct?
00:24:41.000Is he just, you know, hitting things in the dark?
00:24:44.000I believe it's instinct because if it was just flying blind in the dark, why was it that other Republican presidents that we've seen in the last 30 years were able to do what he's been able to do and have the courage and the conviction?
00:24:56.000Why did it take President Trump to renegotiate NAFTA, the USMCA, which is great for our country, bipartisan consensus, big credit to Jared Kushner and his team that worked really hard on it.
00:25:05.000Why did it take President Trump to be able to get, you know, to get the VA Accountability Act done or get right to try?
00:25:11.000And I make the argument that he's not afraid to push boundaries of kind of the bureaucratic consensus in DC.
00:25:17.000Where they'll give him no for an answer and a traditional politician that was born and bred in politics in the U.S.
00:25:23.000Senate will probably take that more seriously.
00:25:26.000And he's unafraid because of his experience and because of where he's been and who he is to say, when he's saying no, what do you mean by that?
00:25:33.000And he's not afraid to push those boundaries.
00:25:35.000I think that's a healthy thing for our country.
00:25:37.000And one of the things that frustrates me the most about critics of President Trump, and you in no way embody this at all, but people on the left do this.
00:25:44.000They think everything he does comes from a sinister, Machiavellian perspective.
00:25:55.000Now I have to give you credit for that because it's nonsense.
00:25:57.000It's like, wait, so he gets some sort of weird pleasure for kids being locked up in cages, even though that was under Barack Obama, right?
00:26:03.000It's like, it's either, you have to, you can't just alternate.
00:26:06.000It's either that he's playing 4D chess and he's, you know, a Bond villain, or he's just has no idea what he's doing because you can't, you can't be one one day and one the other.
00:26:15.000I come from the perspective that his motives are pure and his motives are good, that he does deeply care about He really does.
00:26:21.000And he gets, when he gets the most upset, he gets the most angry, is when our country gets taken advantage of.
00:26:26.000When he sees bad deals being brokered, or he sees us going in a direction that will make us less competitive for future generations to come.
00:26:33.000And I talk about, quite often, you look at the rallies.
00:26:35.000These rallies that we've seen him do, they're a political phenomenon.
00:26:38.000We've never seen presidents a year and a half from election be able to draw 35,000, 40,000 people.
00:26:45.000When you go to these rallies, and I encourage people to do it, there's something really unusual that happens, that very few people are on their phones texting.
00:26:52.000And it kind of struck me after the fourth or fifth or sixth rally I went to, I said, they look at him as their vessel back to representative government.
00:27:00.000And it might not be as, you know, as, let's just say, as pure and simple as that, but I think it works.
00:27:08.000Because there's a lot of people, millions, tens of millions of people in this country that have felt disenfranchised by just the traditional political class.
00:27:14.000And they see in him, in the most unusual way, you couldn't have predicted it or wrote it, a brash billionaire from New York City that has given more voice to the working class in this country than, you know, than I would say just a traditional U.S.
00:27:26.000Senator from some of these Midwestern states and some of the states that I think have, quite honestly, at the expense of the ruling class agenda, have seen their lives not necessarily progress in the way that they saw fit.
00:27:36.000So going into the 2020 cycle, I've seen a couple of different sort of defenses and possible defenses of the Trump presidency pushed forward in terms of advertising.
00:27:45.000There's one that I think is less successful and one that I think is more successful.
00:27:48.000So one that I think is less successful is the attack.
00:27:52.000The president is a magnificent patriot who knows exactly what he is doing.
00:27:55.000He is fully in control of everything and everything is swell because of all those things.
00:27:59.000The other one is the ad that his campaign cut, which I think is an excellent ad, where he said, you may not like him, you may not like his foibles, you may not like all the things he tweets, but do you like your wallet?
00:28:09.000And I think that that is a more successful approach to Trump.
00:28:13.000So I wonder how you feel about that, because do you think that it's off-putting to people, the overt defense of somebody who... I mean, people make their own decisions about Trump.
00:28:20.000It's not like when you say, Trump's a wonderful guy, I know him personally, we get along great, we go fishing together, that people all of a sudden... We don't go fishing together.
00:28:26.000I can't see President Trump fishing, to be honest with you.
00:28:29.000But with that said, I wonder, you know, when you make the character defense of Trump, that seems like a much harder defense of Trump because people have their own... No, it might be.
00:28:41.000I don't make it because it might be easier or harder.
00:28:43.000I will say, though, the easier argument to make is to say, Qasem Soleimani would be alive if a Democrat was President of the United States.
00:28:51.000I mean, you like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh because they wouldn't be on the Supreme Court if you had a Democrat or even a different type of Republican.
00:28:57.000And I think the ad that the campaign cut to your excellent point, he might be the tough guy, but he's a tough guy we need.
00:29:06.000It was he might be rough around the edges, but we need that fighter.
00:29:10.000And I think making the street brawler argument can resonate with a lot of people because what you're doing, it's an old salesman trick, right?
00:29:16.000You take the criticism off the table immediately.
00:29:18.000Right, so people might, they look at the ad, they're like, oh yeah, I kind of agree with that, because that is a deep, that's a belief that people have, where they're like, I like what he does, I might not like his style, and you hear it a lot, and I hear it a lot, and, but if you take that off from branding his presidency or branding his message, and you say, wait a second, You look at what he's done, maybe there's, maybe all those things that you consider a negative, the brawler, the street fighter, maybe our country's needed a street fighter for some time.
00:29:42.000I think that is an effective way to brand it, but also saying the left has gone so off the rails, especially when it comes to just things that should stop at the water's edge.
00:29:52.000I mean, the Soleimani thing really bothers me, because this guy's a maniac, and he deserved to die.
00:29:58.000And if Pete Buttigieg is the nominee, low likelihood that happens, right?
00:30:01.000He basically said, yeah, Soleimani would still be alive.
00:30:04.000That, I mean, for a family in Florida that's wondering who to vote for, that's a pretty stark contrast that, like, Kassim Soleimani would be alive or not alive.
00:30:13.000A guy that killed, you would know better than I, 500, 600 Americans, you know, in the Iraq war.
00:30:18.000And so I think that kind of binary choice does a lot.
00:30:21.000And I think the president is going to be really hard to run up against because I think he gets more popular, the more binary the race becomes.
00:30:30.000It's not, do you want this water reclamation district or not, right?
00:30:33.000It's, do you want Bernie Sanders or do you want President Trump?
00:30:36.000Or do you want Bloomberg or do you want President Trump?
00:30:38.000And I think as some of those match-ups, all of a sudden President Trump becomes a lot more appealing to a lot more people.
00:30:42.000So this may be a moot point because President Trump has not been supremely malleable to criticisms of his excesses, but there are kind of two perspectives about about dealing with President Trump that we've seen inside the administration and outside.
00:31:12.000I think that he has been hemmed in by his advisors on a wide variety of occasions, in which has been quite good for him to listen to his advisors.
00:31:18.000Where do you come down on the Twitter is a good example.
00:31:21.000I'm of the view, and I think a lot of people in and out of the administration are of the view, it would be wonderful to have one person read his tweets before he hits send.
00:31:38.000We've seen this break into the open relatively recently with regard to Attorney General Barr, who was like, can you just stop tweeting about the cases I'm handling here?
00:31:52.000So, look, I'm gonna make an argument that will be a little kind of atypical, which is there are people in this country, when you go to these MAGA rallies, you go to Iowa, you go to Ohio, they love the tweets.
00:32:05.000And I don't interface with them every single day.
00:32:07.000I interface with them more than most, and they love it.
00:32:10.000And there is a point to this, though, and a common criticism I get And part of the rise of Bernie Sanders is the authenticity argument.
00:32:17.000Oh yeah, that Marxism stuff, I'm not really a fan of it, you know, like the fact that our country's gonna burn.
00:32:21.000But he really seems like he knows what, he is who he is.
00:32:24.000I would make the argument that if President Trump became too political, became too DC, and became too vanilla, he would lose a lot of his base.
00:32:35.000But there are people that are pleased that he's the same person that he was on the escalator that he is today.
00:32:41.000I'm not saying he's turned down from like a spinal tap 11 down to like a 2, but like an 11 to an 8.5.
00:32:46.000And look, none of us will know the balance of how much you get and how much you lose.
00:32:51.000I will say this, though, that he does command the news cycle better than any other president we've ever seen.
00:32:56.000And there have been high-level quality social media tweets and trolling of the left, the likes of which is going to be legendary in the halls of Internet culture.
00:33:39.000Well, then we got to take Samson out of the Hall of Faith.
00:33:41.000I mean, Samson was a man who, in a prostitute's bed, God came to him and revealed to say, basically, I need you to go fight the Philistines.
00:33:48.000And with a jaw of a donkey, he killed a thousand Philistines.
00:33:55.000I would make the argument that Trump, for lack of a better term, was called for a moment like this to be that brutal street fighter that we really needed.
00:34:02.000And if it's indelicate and if it's not, you know, right down the fairway, so be it.
00:34:07.000Because there's an enemy, there's an opposition to a blessing that God gave us that is this country that is in need of that kind of street fighter.
00:34:13.000I mean, my only critique of that would be it would still be better if Samson had not been stripping the prostitute at the time.
00:35:28.000But one thing that worries me about the anti-left attitude as opposed to the conservative attitude, and I think that you need both, right?
00:35:35.000Conservatism is anti-left because it's conservative, not just because anti-left is anti-left, is something that you've come up against, and that is the gatekeeper problem.
00:35:42.000So there are a lot of people who consider themselves anti-left who also happen to believe Yeah, and you and I have both denounced them publicly at events and all that.
00:36:22.000I mean, the phrase e pluribus unum is part of the American trinity, e pluribus unum, in God we trust and liberty.
00:36:27.000And so, here's where I make the argument in the MAGA doctrine, and so you have conservative values, Incorporated anti-leftism and populism, right?
00:36:35.000But let's take it to a further extent, which is, and President Trump has denounced the hatred, he has denounced the vile, you know, insidious nonsense that is out there.
00:36:45.000And he has, and he's gotten more forceful, and he's gotten more ahead of it as time has gone on.
00:36:50.000Because unfortunately, they're a minority of a minority, but they're out there.
00:36:54.000And they have real hatred for certain individuals, and I'm not going to say any names, but that's just how it is.
00:36:58.000And I go up on college campus sometimes, I get questions that are horrible about Jewish individuals, you know, and horrible, horrible things, and I denounce them and I fight back against it.
00:37:08.000However, that's where it comes into our moral position and our conservative position of the belief in the American Trinity.
00:37:15.000But if you take it to a further extent, right, if we're nothing but just Conservatism on a chalkboard, right?
00:37:23.000And we're nothing but just always saying we're in a free trade with everyone, always.
00:37:27.000Well, what's the extent of that, right?
00:37:29.000So the inverse would be, what if we take the other too far and we allow the rise of China to be too much?
00:37:44.000We have the healthy dose of anti-leftism, populism, and conservatism.
00:37:48.000However, when that hatred comes up and it rears its ugly head, we have a moral obligation as conservatives to kick out the demons in our own ranks.
00:37:56.000And it's something the left will never do.
00:37:57.000They never, ever exercise the demons in their own ranks.
00:38:12.000And they've been approaching you on campus, and these specific criticisms Aside from the sort of just plain racism of it, it seemed to be that you're too socially liberal.
00:38:20.000So what is your perspective on social politics?
00:38:22.000Well, look, I mean, I believe marriage is one man, one woman.
00:38:47.000And I think it's so backwards that they would believe that we should somehow grow the influence of the conservative movement by the process of subtraction.
00:38:56.000Of people that are turned off by the left, turned off by woke culture of the left.
00:39:00.000Somehow they believe that the conservative movement should be closing its doors to people that all of a sudden might be interested in your podcast or your position or your speeches.
00:39:17.000But also, I won't apologize for having people that are gay on my staff, sharing the stage of people that are gay, that have served our country, and that are veterans.
00:39:26.000It's not something I'm going to apologize for a second for.
00:39:28.000And it doesn't compromise my Christianity, my moral positions on marriage, or my conservative beliefs.
00:39:33.000OK, the other critique they've been hitting you with is that you're supposedly too soft on immigration.
00:39:37.000So I want to give you a chance to respond to their charge that you are You are some sort of open borders.
00:39:42.000Yeah, again, I appreciate you actually bringing it up because I can clear the air on it.
00:39:48.000Let's just say I said a position that I reclarified where I should have said it more stringently, but I believe in less legal and illegal immigration.
00:39:57.000I support Senator Tom Cotton's act where essentially he wants to limit the amount of green cards to 500,000 a year.
00:40:04.000I mean, I have been defending ICE facilities up against ICE protesters, building the wall, deporting illegal aliens, making English the official language of the United States.
00:40:23.000However, if your drive for that immigration policy is rooted in hatred of another group and position, or in racial supremacy, that's wrong.
00:40:32.000If it's from a position that, well, our country's being taken advantage of, and it's, we can't afford or take a million green cards every single year, that's a conversation I can have, and that's one I actually sympathize with.
00:40:45.000And I think we should have less legal and illegal immigration.
00:40:47.000But again, the accusation is unfair through and through.
00:40:49.000Okay, so in one second, I want to ask you about the other side of the aisle.
00:40:52.000I want to talk about the left and Bernie Sanders.
00:40:53.000But first, let's talk about why you should protect your data on the Internet.
00:40:57.000So, you wouldn't like go home, open up your safe, open up your front door, and then just think to yourself that humanity is filled with wonderful people.
00:41:03.000So why would you unlock your Internet activity?
00:41:37.000If you don't use a VPN and your data and browsing history are taken from you, that's sort of on you, considering how easy it is to get ExpressVPN, so just go do it.
00:41:45.000Be responsible, take care of your own data.
00:41:47.000If you're like me and you believe your online activity is your business, secure yourself today by visiting expressvpn.com slash ben.
00:41:53.000Use my exclusive link, expressvpn.com slash ben, and you can get an extra three months for free.
00:42:01.000Okay, so let's talk about the other movement that you've been dealing with on campus, and that, of course, is the Bernie Sanders movement.
00:42:06.000So, young people particularly are resonating to Bernie Sanders, almost as a counter-reaction to Trump in some ways, but kind of separate and apart from.
00:42:14.000So, Bernie is wildly popular on campus.
00:42:16.000To what do you attribute the vast bout of insanity happening on our college campus?
00:42:20.000I mean, look, it's very easy to be generous with other people's money.
00:42:23.000It's very easy to want to spend other people's resources.
00:42:26.000And look, from a very basic position, if you've never been taught that our country is a gift or a blessing, why would you want to conserve that blessing?
00:42:33.000I mean, if you've been taught hatred of our country, that we're racist, bigoted, homophobic, backwards, then why not have a revolution against it?
00:42:39.000And Bernie Sanders, he embodies the same college professor that's been screaming at them since they first got to college.
00:43:18.000They actually think that he's on the side of freedom or liberty in some sort of distorted, bizarre concoction.
00:43:24.000They think that he's actually the fighter and the crusader for liberty.
00:43:27.000And nothing could be further from the truth.
00:43:29.000So I always ask the question to Bernie Sanders supporters, do you trust the government?
00:43:34.000And almost always they say, no, no, the government's bought by lobbyists and corporations and by the war machine, you know, all this stuff.
00:43:39.000I say, why on earth would you want to make that government bigger?
00:43:42.000And they had no response, of course, but that's the whole kind of summation of how I think you approach Senator Sanders, Marxists that support Senator Sanders, which is his whole position, his whole worldview is getting more people, more bureaucrats, and more power to the very government you say you distrust.
00:43:56.000It seems pretty obvious that President Trump would prefer Senator Sanders as the nominee of the Democratic Party against him.
00:44:02.000The reason I say that is because he obviously has been sort of trying to, via his Twitter account, stir up chaos inside the Democratic Party, which he's quite good at, by targeting everybody except for Sanders and suggesting to Sanders supporters that they're going to be robbed of the nomination eventually by the Democratic upper echelon.
00:44:18.000It seems that, number one, you agree with that characterization that that's what Trump wants.
00:44:23.000I wouldn't say it full-throated though, because I've seen President Trump, you know, in interviews and time I've sat with him, have a good amount of hesitancy by saying, oh yeah, all in, let's run against Bernie.
00:44:37.000I think it's really hard to run against free, and I think the media would go all out for him, especially the younger journalist, Marxist activist class.
00:44:44.000They'd be more excited than ever to try to paint him as the salvation that America needs.
00:44:48.000Bloomberg or Bernie, who would Hollywood go all in more for?
00:45:41.000He is on a mission to radically redefine and deconstruct our country from within.
00:45:46.000You know the school of deconstructionism.
00:45:48.000It basically is the whole school of thought is create cultural chaos everywhere and that will give rise to an authoritarian Marxist to allow them to create something that will eventually not work at all but give a lot of power to the ruling class to try to create some failed communist communal state.
00:46:03.000I mean, it does seem like Sanders should be the one that Trump is rooting for in the sense that President Trump is a wrecking ball man, and that is his specialty.
00:46:10.000I've always said about politics, that politics is the art of making it very difficult to vote for your opponent and making it very easy to vote for you.
00:46:17.000And President Trump may not be spectacular at the latter, but he is phenomenal at the former.
00:46:21.000Making it very difficult for people to vote for his opponents, that is that man's specialty.
00:46:24.000Well, and I have to say, you know, in a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity, President Trump comes right out of the gate and says, why did he honeymoon in Russia?
00:46:32.000I was like, yes, he's already on that.
00:46:34.000I mean, that's a great critique, though.
00:46:35.000I mean, why did he honeymoon in the Soviet Union?
00:46:37.000It would take a traditional Republican, like, months of workshopping and poll testing.
00:46:42.000President Trump just comes right at it, says, yeah, Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
00:47:38.000I mean, it was perfectly obvious that no one had ever just asked him straight to his face about the fact that he's a millionaire with a lake house and nobody else on the stage had done it and he didn't have an answer for it.
00:47:46.000And I just thought to myself, Donald Trump is going to drive to Bernie Sanders' lake house, pry up a floorboard and figuratively beat him to death with it.
00:49:29.000Because he's going to walk out of that convention and he'll just say to his people, listen, I'll campaign for the nominee, but they're all going to stay home.
00:49:35.000I mean, they're all going to stay home.
00:49:36.000And Michael Bloomberg's bizarre bet that if they get to the convention and he has the second most delegates, that he's going to be able to walk in with his giant bag of cash plopping on Tom Perez's desk and say, I'll spend $5 billion on this election if you just throw Bernie out.
00:49:48.000I can't see Tom Perez taking that deal because the press is just too bad for him.
00:49:51.000Well, yeah, and again, if you look at the numbers, and this is a flawed way to look at primaries, like, oh yeah, this person drops out and all their votes is going to go somewhere else.
00:50:29.000I mean, they want, tear it all down, Donald Trump is the worst president in American history, this country is horrible, and we're going to take it back.
00:51:28.000And especially if they nominate, you know, Bloomberg or Buttigieg, which again, I think is unlikely.
00:51:32.000But I still think against Senator Bernie Sanders, I think that I think black Americans, and Jared Kushner and his team deserve a lot of credit for this, have delivered a lot of results for black America that otherwise would not have been delivered.
00:51:42.000Criminal justice reform, opportunity zones, low-server black unemployment.
00:51:59.000Presumably he moves to make those permanent.
00:52:01.000And he's done the judges and presumably there will be more vacancies and he'll fill the vacancies.
00:52:06.000But we haven't really seen from President Trump what are his plans for a second term, because that Republican agenda, unfortunately, has become extraordinarily short, right?
00:52:14.000Because spending cuts are very unpopular.
00:52:16.000The president has basically pledged that there will be none.
00:52:18.000He's pledged that for a long time, is that he's not going to cut Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid.
00:52:24.000The budget that he proposed proposed some future cuts to futures, to future increases.
00:52:41.000Here's what gives me confidence, though, is that the White House is getting to a place where it's working as well as it ever has.
00:52:49.000And I could tell you that from Jared Kushner to people that are back in the White House that are not spying and leaking on the President of the United States, where you have disloyal people that are writing books and trying to counter him.
00:53:01.000I think it's nonsense and I think it's garbage.
00:53:02.000I think that you serve the President of the United States who's a vessel of the American people.
00:53:05.000You're not there to try to leak or to try to earn goodwill with journalists.
00:53:09.000So I have confidence that in the second term of this presidency that you're going to have a better working, functional White House than you did in the beginning stages of the first term.
00:53:16.000But you need some really big agenda items.
00:53:18.000And if I were to, kind of, my wish list, I would agree with you.
00:53:22.000Size and scope of government and government spending.
00:53:24.000We've got to get back to the Tea Party movement of deficit hawks.
00:53:28.000We have to have harsh government spending and we've got to get this under control because you and I both can either experience hyperinflation or anemic economic growth or uncompetitiveness if we don't get our spending under control.
00:53:39.000And that's what originally got me fired up about Barack Obama was the amount of debt.
00:53:43.000And I know President Trump has submitted budgets that, you know, do have some spending cuts, but Congress is not taking them seriously at all.
00:53:49.000And I think Mick Mulvaney being in the White House is a positive thing because he is a deficit hawk and he is a debt hawk.
00:54:01.000And this whole idea of comprehensive immigration reform, that's a talking point, I think, of the left and the soft right, just to try to get amnesty for a bunch of people so they can vote for Democrats in the future.
00:54:10.000So I don't know how you're going to work with Congress on that, but that's going to be something that has to be addressed.
00:54:14.000I think the third issue is taking on the tech companies.
00:54:16.000That doesn't mean that has to be a huge amount of regulation.
00:54:20.000But if I have to say one of the top issues in the conservative base is censorship and is the tech companies just acting as if they're total authoritarians in our country.
00:54:29.000And I'm hesitant for government regulation.
00:54:31.000As a free market guy, I actually think regulation could help the very people that I'm critiquing more than not.
00:54:35.000It could actually be a shield for the monopolies.
00:54:38.000But he has to do something about that in his second term.
00:54:40.000Okay, so looking forward beyond Trump, and I know that that's nearly impossible because Trump is not only the lodestar of sort of all politics right now, the gravitational center, he's the black hole of all media attention, right?
00:54:51.000Everything not only revolves around it, but is sucked into it.
00:54:54.000And so it's hard to foresee a future in which President Trump either is not president or is not sort of the directing force in the Republican Party.
00:55:09.000You'll be alive longer than President Trump, barring you being hit by a car or an early case of terminal cancer.
00:55:13.000So with that being the case, beyond 2024, what does the Republican Party look like?
00:55:18.000Because there are these really, I think, large internecine wars that are being glossed over and papered over by the fact that there is a Republican president in the White House.
00:55:27.000Yeah, and it's going to surface sooner rather than later.
00:55:30.000And that's part of why I wrote the book, is what is the doctrine?
00:55:33.000You're starting to see it right now between common good conservatism and right-based conservatism.
00:55:37.000And I actually, I genuinely see both sides of the arguments.
00:55:40.000And I, depends on the issue, I sympathize with one side over the other, all depending on it.
00:55:44.000But that's going to be a huge, huge debate going into the future.
00:55:47.000But what is the, I think that one, couple things that the Republican Party or the conservative movement can take away from President Trump, which is take the populace that you represent really, really seriously.
00:55:57.000Don't ignore issues that might be politically incorrect that are harming people's lives, like immigration or trade, ever again.
00:56:05.000And those are things I talk about in this book that he ran on, that the Republican Party was like, oh, yeah, we're just going to kind of get along on these issues.
00:56:12.000Now, President Trump ran on less immigrants, you know, stricter border control and renegotiated trade deals.
00:56:18.000I don't want the Republican Party to go back to be the party of the ruling class.
00:56:24.000I don't want the party of Lake Champlain on Labor Day.
00:56:27.000Like, that bothers me, where it's just an elitist party, where it's just the same people circulating the same sort of elitist talking points.
00:56:33.000I want to be the party of the people that shower before work and shower after work.
00:56:37.000I want to be the party where labor unions think the Republican Party stands for them, too.
00:56:40.000And we have disagreements on how labor unions raise the cost, and I think there's some validity to that.
00:56:44.000But totally disenfranchising labor in our country, I think, was a big mistake, and President Trump, I think, proved that.
00:56:49.000I don't want to be the party of the Rockefeller, Romney, Bush, you know, kind of philosophy.
00:56:54.000And I think those arguments are going to play itself out.
00:56:57.000Tremendously, and I think that where rights-based conservatism has really, really good points, which is you only got one gun, you make this point, right?
00:57:05.000Don't ever do anything with this gun you don't want someone on the left to do.
00:57:10.000Where common good conservatives make the point, which is We have a declining culture and country right now, and people that are really suffering.
00:57:17.000Why are we not doing more to help them right here, right now?
00:57:21.000They're going to play itself out, and I think it's going to be pretty heated, to be perfectly honest with you.
00:57:28.000And to your point, President Trump being the anti-leftist president has kind of kept all that at bay.
00:57:34.000But post-Trump, whatever that looks like, if he gets re-elected January of 2021, you are going to have a jump ball, to use a basketball analogy, the likes of which the conservative movement has not seen since the time for choosing speech Ronald Reagan back that he gave at the convention.
00:57:47.000So, I do want to ask you one final question, Charlie, and that is, What your plans are, like what do you plan to do over the next 15 or 20 years?
00:57:57.000But if you want to hear Charlie's final question, then you have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:58:02.000When you do, and when you go subscribe, then you will get the rest of our conversation over there.
00:58:07.000Now be sure to go pick up your copy of the MAGA Doctrine because it has gold lettering on it and a picture of the president hugging the flag.
00:58:13.000So it is an exercise not only in brilliance, but subtlety.