Ben Shapiro and Adam Carolla discuss the ethics issues surrounding Donald Trump s business interests, Mitt Romney's dinner with Donald Trump, and the potential trade war between the U.S. and China. Plus, the latest in the Trump-McMitt Romney saga, and much, much more. Ben Shapiro is on The Ben Shapiro Show on Comedy Central's Late Night with Seth Meyers, and is a regular contributor on the and radio show on KWVS Radio in Springfield, MA. He is also the host of the conservative radio show on CBS Radio's "The O.C. Morning Show". He can be reached at ben.shapiro@cnn.com and is one of the most influential conservative voices in American politics. His work can be found at cnn.fm/TheBenShapiroShow and he is a frequent contributor on conservative media outlets such as CNN and the New York Times. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! if you re a supporter of our show and/or have any other recommendations or suggestions for future guests. We ll be looking out for you in the coming weeks. on our new bi-weekly presidential candidates! on the next episode of The Weekly Standard, coming soon! Subscribe to our new podcast, The FiveThirtyEight. Subscribe on iTunes and rate/subscribe to our newest podcast, FiveThirtyeight! Learn more about your ad choices! and our upcoming releases! Thanks for listening to FiveThirtynine s newest episode: Subscribe and review our newest episode of Five ThirtyEight's New Year's Eve special! is out now! - click here to get exclusive ad-free version of the show recommendations and much more! Thank you for listening and reviewing our new episodes coming soon on The Six Sigma s newest issue of The Six Figures Podcasts! in the next issue of Six Sigma's newest issue, Six Figures is out on Tuesday, February 14th and 15th, out on all major podcast directories and social media platforms everywhere else gets a chance to review the best of the best vids on the web? The Sixteenth episode of FourThirtyEight's newest podcast on the Fourteenth episode on the Six Sigma Podcasts Network? Subscribe for the latest Sixteenth Podcasts review the latest episode of Six Figures podcast?
00:00:00.000One of the biggest problems dogging the incoming Trump administration would be Donald Trump's vast business holdings conflicting with his performance as president.
00:00:07.000In the week after the election, the Washington Post reported that Trump D.C.
00:00:10.000hotel officials had done outreach to local foreign embassies.
00:00:14.000Trump met with Indian businessmen who work with his brand.
00:00:16.000Ivanka Trump took part in a state meeting with the Japanese prime minister.
00:00:19.000An Argentinian reporter said that Trump and his daughter had requested a business favor on a phone call with the Argentinian president.
00:00:25.000By the way, the favor was later granted.
00:00:27.000Trump himself told the New York Times that he'd be capable
00:00:49.000While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important as president to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.
00:00:57.000Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations.
00:01:01.000The presidency is a far more important task.
00:01:20.000In a joint statement, Richard Painter, who's George W.'
00:01:23.000's ethics lawyer, and Norman Elson, who's Obama's ethics lawyer, they said Trump's continued business interest would, quote, sometimes conflict with the public interest and constantly raise questions.
00:01:36.000We can actually hope that he'll be cautious enough to silo his businesses and political interests, preventing the taint of his scandal from destroying his White House before it launches.
00:02:18.000The way Legacybox works is they allow you to keep all of your memories by basically sending all your old films, we're talking reels, we're talking VHS videos, and they convert all of this stuff
00:02:52.000They put a sticker on there with a barcode so you can actually see where in the process all of your film is.
00:02:57.000They have experts who go through it, make sure that it still works, make sure that it's all in order.
00:03:01.000And I'm very big on preserving memories of the past, because I think you lose the past, you lose your family history, that's a real tragedy.
00:03:07.000There's a reason why, when everybody says there's a fire, you grab your photo album.
00:05:32.000Go back to the first picture for a second.
00:05:33.000Uh, the first picture of Trump sitting there and he's lit from the bottom like you're in a campfire and they're, they're doing like a, you're gonna tell a horror story.
00:05:40.000And he's lit from below and his face is red.
00:05:42.000It's like, it looks like Mitt Romney just signed away his soul in a really bad business deal to Donald Trump.
00:05:48.000And Trump's sitting there grinning like Satan, like the Cheshire Cat.
00:06:26.000It's just Romney being fed his own brain by Donald Trump.
00:06:30.000The best one, though, was this tweet that somebody had.
00:06:33.000They put it in black and white, this picture, and in black and white it's even better.
00:06:36.000It says, I made the Trump-Romney photo black and white and it looks like a Twilight Zone episode where a guy just made a foolish deal with the devil.
00:06:42.000And that, of course, is exactly right.
00:06:54.000Somebody photoshopped Trump and Romney into the dinner scene from Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo walks into the room and realizes that Lando is sold about and Darth Vader is sitting at the other end of the long table.
00:08:16.000Then Mitt Romney came out afterward, and he made this statement after the dinner, and he just looks—I mean, Trump and his people had asked for basically an apology from Mitt Romney.
00:08:25.000And Romney clearly wants the gig, and so now he's apologizing.
00:09:22.000The other way to read this is that Romney believes and thinks that Trump could use some staid, steady, sober judgment around him until he's willing to undergo the humiliation of dealing with Trump and maybe being thrown under the bus by Trump in order to do it.
00:09:36.000Again, Trump hasn't selected him yet for Secretary of State, so this could all go wildly wrong, right?
00:09:40.000There are only two possible ways this plays out as far as Romney is concerned in terms of public image.
00:10:11.000That he goes out, he makes his obeisance to Trump, and then Trump aheads him and picks Rudy Giuliani, which would be hilarious, I will say.
00:10:49.000It's very entertaining, I will admit that.
00:10:51.000And I have all of my Bachelorette outtakes for when he actually makes this call, because the Bachelorette outtakes will fit Giuliani or Romney.
00:10:57.000One of the two will be sobbing in a car about how they were so deeply in love, and then they were left at the altar.
00:11:03.000But, in reality, is Trump playing this right?
00:11:05.000Trump is playing this about as well as he could have played this, really.
00:11:07.000I mean, he's making Romney look foolish.
00:11:09.000He's making Romney look like he has to bend the knee to him.
00:11:12.000And then, if he actually picks Romney, it's a brilliant move politically, because it looks like he's getting over his own pettiness about Romney in order to stock his cabinet with people who are good.
00:11:20.000And if he doesn't pick Romney, well, then he's done what a lot of people expected him to do.
00:11:24.000On his own side, you know, in his own base, and he stomped Romney in the face.
00:11:27.000And he's going to get a lot of credit for that from his own base.
00:11:40.000This sort of stuff typically is not done in front of the cameras, and yet Trump is doing it all in front of the cameras, which is going to make for a very, very entertaining four years.
00:11:50.000Trump is being given a lot of credit for this, for Carrier keeping a bunch of jobs.
00:11:56.000Carrier is an air conditioner manufacturer and they just announced they're going to keep a thousand jobs in Indiana.
00:12:02.000And I want to talk about this in a pretty serious way because I think that a lot of people are ignoring the real story here and that's a problem.
00:12:11.000A lot of people are immediately celebrating the fact that Trump kept jobs in America.
00:12:16.000Except for that's not the actual story.
00:12:19.000Lots of people can use the government to keep jobs in a particular place.
00:12:22.000Barack Obama used the power of government, the threat of the pitchforks and torches, to leverage the banks to do things that he wanted.
00:12:29.000Barack Obama was able to make the auto companies come on bended knee to him in order so that he could get them to do what he wanted by threatening them.
00:12:36.000The bottom line here is not the thousand jobs saved.
00:12:38.000The bottom line is what we still don't know, which is what did Trump do to get Carrier to keep its jobs there?
00:12:43.000So a lot of people are saying we shouldn't even ask the question.
00:12:45.000We should just sort of accept what it is.
00:12:47.000We should just sort of take it how it is.
00:13:37.000Here's what we know, or at least the little that we do know.
00:13:40.000According to the New York Times, United Technologies, which is the owner of Carrier, is among the country's biggest military contractors, producing engines for the Pentagon's most advanced fighter jets, receiving more than $5 billion annually from the federal government.
00:13:52.000That equals 10% of the company's revenue.
00:13:55.000So there's the idea that perhaps Trump said, we'll have the Defense Department cut our contracts to you if you move those jobs.
00:14:09.000Not getting the best deal for the American people because presumably the reason that they're contracting with United Technologies is because United Technologies provides the best service at the best price.
00:14:18.000Quote, while terms of the deal are not yet clear, the sources indicated there were new incentives on offer from the state of Indiana, where Pence is governor, that helped clear a path for the agreement.
00:14:27.000Well, while United Technology was seeking the savings that would come from moving some production to Mexico, people familiar with the situation indicated the savings were not worth incurring the wrath of the incoming administration, including the potential threat to the significant business United Technologies currently conducts with the U.S.
00:14:43.000government, largely in the form of orders for jet engines and other defense-related equipment.
00:14:47.000So it's the federal government leveraging people.
00:14:49.000Now, I don't like the federal government leveraging people, whether the person at the head of the federal government is a Republican or a Democrat.
00:14:55.000That is not the job of the federal government.
00:14:57.000The job of the federal government is to preserve your rights.
00:15:00.000And if it has contracts that it needs to do, then it should contract with the best available operator, not the operator that makes bad financial decisions in order to please the federal government, right?
00:15:09.000That's a backdoor form of bribery from United Technologies.
00:15:12.000And by the way, this also sets up a pretty bad precedent.
00:15:14.000A company says, we're going to move 2,000 jobs to Mexico, and then they wait for Trump to come in with an oodle of cash and just dump it on them.
00:15:21.000Okay, this is not particularly a rip on Trump.
00:15:24.000It's a rip on the policies that are bad.
00:15:27.000Look, Trump made a promise and Trump is trying to keep that promise, but the way you keep the promise matters to me.
00:15:31.000The principle doesn't change just because the name of the guy in power changes.
00:15:36.000And I understand everybody's going to celebrate the thousand jobs, but these kinds of headlines routinely, routinely come out from administrations ranging from Barack Obama's to Hugo Chavez's.
00:15:45.000The question isn't whether Carrier keeps the 1,000 jobs in Indiana.
00:15:49.000The question is why they kept the 1,000 jobs in Indiana.
00:15:51.000If Carrier kept the 1,000 jobs in Indiana, if they kept the 1,000 jobs in Indiana because Donald Trump was pursuing positive economic policies that benefit everyone, and they say in expectation of lower taxes and in expectation of loosened regulations,
00:16:07.000We've decided that we're going to keep the jobs here.
00:16:11.000If they say we're keeping the thousand jobs here because Donald Trump bribed us, or because Donald Trump threatened us, that's not something that I'm cool with.
00:16:17.000And as a conservative, you shouldn't be cool with that either, because that's just using government to pick winners and losers.
00:16:23.000And as I am fond of saying, I'm old enough to remember when we thought that was bad, when Obama did it with green jobs and stimulus packages and auto bailouts and bank threats.
00:16:30.000Again, Barack Obama actually used the threat of pitchforks and torches.
00:16:34.000He actually said, he brought bankers to the White House in the early part of his administration.
00:16:38.000He said, my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.
00:16:42.000And then he leveraged them into doing what he wanted.
00:16:43.000He did the same thing to the health insurance companies.
00:16:45.000He said to them, listen, I'm going to offer a public option if you don't cave to me and give me what I want.
00:17:35.000When people talk about the swamp needs to be drained and crony capitalism,
00:17:39.000This is the definition of it, and it doesn't become good just because our guys are doing it.
00:17:43.000So before we get too excited about the Carrier Decides to Keep a Thousand Jobs in the United States headline, let's find out how it was done.
00:17:50.000If the headline said, Cylindra Decides to Keep a Thousand Jobs in the United States Thanks to Obama Promises, we'd all be saying, wait a second, that's bribery, you can't do that.
00:18:00.000I know people get upset with consistency in principle.
00:18:03.000I know people get very upset with the idea that we're going to hold everybody to the same standard, or that we're going to mandate that Donald Trump actually act in accordance with conservatism.
00:18:11.000But the fact is, that if we don't hold him accountable for his sins, then who are we going to hold him accountable to?
00:18:35.000But, if this was just another crony capitalist payoff to Carrier, so that he could have his headline in his moment in the sun, where he said that he kept Carrier there with its thousand jobs, that's a bunch of crap.
00:18:43.000And it's crap whether a Democrat does it, and it's crap whether there's a Republican that does it, okay?
00:18:47.000These things do not change just because the name at the top of the ticket changes, the name in the White House changes.
00:18:53.000The minute you sacrifice principle for political convenience, the principle no longer matters.
00:19:38.000And this whole idea, you know, Steve Bannon has said this, we're going to create a 50-year dominance based on big government spending and Obama stimulus packages.
00:19:47.000It was bad when Obama did it, it's bad when Trump does it.
00:19:49.000I don't need to beat a dead horse here.
00:19:51.000Okay, now as far as the sort of drain-the-swamp language,
00:19:55.000As far as the drain the swamp language, remember everybody's chanting drain the swamp, drain the swamp.
00:19:59.000Let's go through some of the picks that Trump has made.
00:20:01.000We're still waiting on Secretary of State.
00:20:04.000The people who are currently up for it, I guess Bolton has fallen out of contention on the latest reports, which is too bad.
00:20:09.000I think Bolton knows the State Department, knows that place has to be absolutely gutted.
00:20:14.000And knows how foreign policy works, but he's fallen out for some reason, probably because he and Trump don't agree on foreign policy.
00:20:20.000That's actually one of the more bizarre aspects of the Romney thing, is that no one has actually said that Romney shouldn't be Secretary of State, because he and Trump disagree on foreign policy.
00:20:41.000I guess it sounded like Corker and Romney and Giuliani, and Petraeus are the ones that they're discussing.
00:20:47.000All big names of the people who are left, Romney and Petraeus would probably be at the top of my list, probably Romney at the top of the list, then Petraeus, then Giuliani, and then Corker.
00:20:56.000Corker would be the worst of all of them.