Time Magazine named Donald Trump their Person of the Year, and the left had a field day comparing him to Adolf Hitler. But there's something rather telling about the media in comparing and contrasting their 2016 and 2012 Person Of The Year cover art. In 2016, it's the Godfather. In 2012, it was the President of the United States. Trump is the president of the Divided States of America, and according to Time Magazine, that's because he's a gangster. Trump didn't spring out of the ground like a demon. He's the product of a divided America. But the media continue to purvey the lie that only Republicans divide the country. No wonder nobody trusts them. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News and host of the Daily Show with Bill Maher. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and other media outlets. He is also a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, and has been featured in The Daily Mail, The New York Post, and The Huffington Post. Ben's new book is out now, "The Dark Side of America: A Guide to America's Most Influential People in America." is out on all of the social medias, including Amazon Prime and Vimeo, and is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. If you haven't already checked out his work, you can do so by going to the App Store or wherever else you get your favorite podcast listening to podcasts, listen to him on the pod, and subscribe to his podcast, Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, "Ben Shapiro's Show." and subscribe on Podchaser, Ben's Show is a must-listen to all of his stuff, too! , and more! . Thank you for listening to Ben's work? Subscribe to his work? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices? Subscribe at bit.ly/BenShannon's work is also linked in the podcast on The Six Sigma Podcasts? and Ben's podcast is also on The FiveThirtyEight's Podchronicity is on Six Sigma and more than $5 stars in his podcast is on The Hill? on the Podchore Podcasts on The Six Figure Podcasts, and other places he also gives a review on his profile on The Root is a podcast on Six Figure Thing?
00:01:39.000But even more clearly, Time is attempting to suggest that Trump is somehow indicative of the divide of an America that didn't exist when Obama was on the ballot.
00:01:47.000In 2012, you'll notice, they simply labeled Obama President.
00:01:50.000Trump, however, is President of the Divided States of America, as you can see.
00:01:55.000Presumably, according to Time, that's due to Trump, or at least because of his supporters.
00:01:59.000Now, does anyone believe that if 80,000 votes in the swing states had gone the other way and Hillary had been on the cover, Time would have labeled her President of the Divided States?
00:02:38.000Alrighty, so much to get to on today's Ben Shapiro show.
00:02:41.000Ooh, I'm so excited to be back, and it feels so good.
00:02:44.000It's good to be back in a studio where we're not, you know, flanked by weird curtains from the Holiday Inn Express, but it's good to be back in a normal studio with a normal microphone and all of our capabilities brought to bear, so today's show must therefore be unbelievably spectacular.
00:02:58.000But before we get to all of the magic and wonder of today's show, and there's plenty of magic and wonder yet to come, we need to give a shout-out to one of our great
00:04:39.000Okay so I want to begin with just it's been a very weird kind of experience being somebody who didn't vote for either of these candidates because I get to take part in the celebration that Hillary Clinton was not elected at the same time I have some trepidation obviously about Trump being president we're gonna get to all of that in a second but
00:04:56.000I'm definitely... I do have to laugh when I see these just overdramatic, insane responses by the left.
00:05:44.000Valerie Jarrett, the architect of so much terrible policy, feeling the gut punch of having all of those policies rejected and many of them wiped away, that is absolutely delicious.
00:06:00.000Um, and then there's this article from New York Magazine, and I love New York Magazine because it's got some actually good content on rare occasions, and then it's got stuff like this, this taking very seriously the insanity of the left.
00:06:13.000The post-Trump haircut by Heidi Mitchell.
00:06:16.000For the past 20 years, Juliana Evans, the director of marketing for The Lumberyard, a contemporary performing arts company based in New York City, has had the same flowing brown locks.
00:06:25.000Her stylist in her hometown of Washington, D.C.
00:06:26.000has been trimming her hair every 12 months, for as long as she can remember, and always colors it the same medium brown shade.
00:06:31.000Then came the November 8th election upset.
00:06:35.000And Evans fell into a downward spiral.
00:06:37.000I cried for three days, the Atlanta native 45 recalls, which is, by the way, insane.
00:06:42.000If you cried for three days over an election result, you're a crazy person.
00:06:45.000I remember in 2004, when I thought Bush was going to lose, I went and I bought Mozart's Requiem.
00:06:50.000And I figured, OK, that would be my my kind of wallowing in the depression.
00:06:54.000And then when it was over, I'd go out and live my life three days.
00:06:56.000I felt like it was the worst thing politically that ever happened in my lifetime.
00:07:00.000Really, the worst thing politically that ever happened in your entire lifetime?
00:08:17.000So that sense of malaise is spreading across D.C.
00:08:20.000as women stare up at that glass ceiling still hanging over them.
00:08:24.000And contend with a bleep-grabbing kleptocrat moving into the nearby White House there collectively, however subconsciously, making their own statements of rebellion by challenging traditional notions of beauty.
00:08:33.000Good idea, let's just be ugly to challenge Trump.
00:08:36.000See, whenever people say non-traditional, usually when people say non-traditional it means really crappy.
00:08:41.000When they say things like, we're going to have a non-traditional Christmas, that usually means that we're going to throw out all the nice things about Christmas, and then we're going to like an art show at the Modern Art Museum and stare at a pair of shoes.
00:08:52.000When somebody says that they're going to challenge traditional notions of beauty, what they really mean by that is we're going to look all fire ugly.
00:09:07.000It says, when you see that much blonde hair on the floor, you know something is going on, says Nicole Butler, creative director and master colorist at Daniel's Salon in DuPont Circle.
00:09:17.000During the notoriously slow month of November, her salon received a startling number of bookings, with at least three women a day sitting in her chair asking for a drastic change, like cutting off six inches, going black, or going platinum.
00:09:26.000Usually stuff like this is planned for weeks and put on the books after several consultations, but this was very spontaneous.
00:09:51.000So Taylor says you can spend up to $200 or $300.
00:09:54.000Usually a guy, it's like, for a guy to have a drastic change, usually it's like, you go in there, the guy starts giving you a bad haircut, and then you're like, continue, it's too late, you buzzed me too close.
00:10:02.000And that's how Jonathan Hay ends up with his current haircut.
00:10:59.000Plus, let's face it, women's hair has been getting significantly uglier over the past few years.
00:11:03.000I don't know what the hairstylists are saying or why they're doing this, but
00:11:07.000I know several very good-looking women who have decided for no reason at all to just color their hair like Harley Quinn, and it turns out that that's not nearly as good-looking in real life as it is on the chick who plays Harley Quinn in the movie.
00:11:18.000Mainly because the chick who plays Harley Quinn in the movie is extremely good-looking.
00:11:21.000Okay, so, putting all this aside, the insanity of the left, I want to talk a little bit about
00:11:27.000About some of the new Trump department picks.
00:11:29.000Trump has picked some new secretaries, and some of them are quite good.
00:11:32.000We haven't had a chance to talk about all of them.
00:11:34.000Secretary of Defense James Mattis is the General James Mattis, Mad Dog Mattis.
00:11:41.000What I really want to talk about, I'm going to do a couple of things next, and this is why you should subscribe so you can see the whole analysis.
00:12:15.000We don't know what Trump is going to be.
00:12:16.000So all we can do is try to read the tea leaves that are in front of us, or at least make our judgments based on the evidence that are in front of us.
00:12:22.000So this breaks down into really two categories.
00:12:24.000Category one is the cabinet picks, which I would say 8 out of 10.
00:12:29.000Very, very solid cabinet picks for President-elect Trump so far.
00:12:32.000If he picks somebody good for Secretary of State, that'll raise to a 9 out of 10.
00:12:36.000I think that he's made a lot of very solid cabinet picks, and we'll go through some of those in a minute.
00:12:40.000You can almost do good Trump, bad Trump this way.
00:12:43.000And then there's what he does and says on Twitter and what he's been doing with these companies, which I think is absolutely abysmal.
00:12:49.000And who you think Trump is going to be sort of depends.
00:12:52.000Do you think that Trump is going to be the guy who appoints and delegates?
00:12:54.000He appoints a bunch of people who he's going to delegate to, and they're going to take care of business, and he's just going to sit there and reap the rewards for having appointed good people?
00:13:02.000If you're a good manager, by the way, most of the work is done by your subordinates, and maybe that's Trump.
00:13:08.000Or is Trump going to be the micromanager who keeps sticking his thumb into the pie because he needs the attention, he wants to get the headline, he needs to be the man in control, like he is on Twitter and as he has been with the economy.
00:13:17.000And so we're going to go through sort of the two sides of this coin and we're going to determine which Trump is the real Trump, which is the one that we ought to watch, or should we watch both and then just take it as it comes, which has been my approach thus far.
00:13:27.000But let's start with the Cabinet pick.
00:13:28.000So this is obviously good Trump, okay?
00:13:32.000So here is the new pick for Defense Secretary James Mattis.
00:13:35.000Here's some of the things he's had to say in the past.
00:13:37.000We're up against an enemy that means what they say and we should not patronize them.
00:13:50.000This is a group that deserves no support from anyone, and we should try to shut down its recruiting, shut down its finances, and then work to fight battles of annihilation, not attrition, but annihilation against them.
00:14:03.000So the first time they meet, the forces that we put against them, there should be basically no survivors.
00:14:10.000The enemy gets a vote, is the way we put it.
00:14:12.000You may want a war over, you may declare it over.
00:14:15.000The enemy may not agree, and you have to deal with that reality.
00:14:48.000I think that, obviously, I think Bannon's a bad pick for White House Chief Strategist.
00:14:52.000I think Mike Flynn at NSA is far too pro-Russian and also very erratic.
00:14:57.000I think that's not a very good pick, but, I mean, he does know more than certainly the fiction writer who currently occupies that office, Ben Rhodes, who literally wrote fiction and then Obama made him National Security Advisor because, I don't know, he likes his unpublished fiction?
00:15:11.000But some of these other picks are not so great.
00:15:13.000Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, I think, is a silly pick.
00:15:15.000But most of these picks are pretty good.
00:15:17.000And he just added three yesterday that are quite good.
00:15:20.000One of them is Scott Pruitt at the EPA.
00:15:22.000Another is General John Kelly at Homeland Security.
00:15:44.000Even if you believe that climate change is man-caused, that doesn't necessarily explain to what extent it's man-caused, doesn't explain how you're going to fix that.
00:15:52.000The biggest problem with the climate change argument is that you sort of have to have a solution to it, and nobody on the left has a solution other than living 19th century standards of living, and that's unworkable.
00:16:01.000Pruitt's been an outspoken opponent of EPA over-regulation.
00:16:04.000He sued the EPA before, and now he's gonna head it up, all of which led Dan Pfeiffer, who is an Obama advisor, to tweet this, which is a great indicator.
00:16:11.000He said, at the risk of being dramatic, Scott Pruitt at EPA is an existential threat to the planet.
00:16:51.000Southern Command for years, working with countries south of the border.
00:16:54.000He will be a far cry from soft foreign policy notions of the Obama administration.
00:16:58.000There are questions for people whether he's going to be as hard on illegal immigration, unrelated to terrorism, but there's not a lot of indicators he's going to be soft on illegal immigration.
00:17:07.000And finally today, Trump also named this Labor Secretary, Andy Puzder.
00:17:14.000So you've heard of him because he's been in the news before.
00:17:16.000He's the longtime CEO of CKE Restaurants, which is Hardee's and Carl's Jr., and he understands how economics works, and the left is losing their mind because he's not going to cave to the labor unions.
00:17:25.000He spent his entire career saying to the labor unions, guys, you can protest as much as you want, but flipping a burger, flipping a burger is not exactly a job that requires a $20 an hour salary.
00:17:36.000And you can pretend that's not the case, but we'll just end up building machines that can do it for less.
00:17:40.000This is the sort of stuff that really, really ticks off the left, and that's why he's a really good pick.
00:17:45.000Here's a little clip of perspective labor secretary Puzder.
00:17:51.000The policy guys call it the welfare cliff.
00:17:55.000Because you get to a point where if you make a few more dollars, you actually lose thousands of dollars in benefits.
00:18:00.000And quite honestly, these benefits are essential for some people.
00:18:02.000They're how they pay the rent, they're how they feed their kids.
00:18:05.000So what happens is, we have people who turn down promotions, or if minimum wage goes up, they want fewer hours, they want less hours, because they're afraid they'll go over that cliff.
00:18:15.000And we really make the distance between dependents and independents too broad to gap.
00:18:20.000Instead of these handouts, there's something called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which actually could help people better than any of this stuff.
00:18:27.000Yeah, it's already lifted millions of people out of poverty, and what it is basically is right now it's an annual check, it should be a monthly or maybe a bi-weekly check, but it's a government supplement, so you don't end up in all these complex programs.
00:18:39.000You know, they're difficult to satisfy, people have to figure them out, they have
00:18:43.000Okay, so I'm not a big fan of the Earned Income Tax Credit, but Puzder is very up on what businesses need, and that is obviously something that is necessary.
00:18:51.000And in just a minute, we're going to get to
00:19:12.000The other side of the coin, which is, you know, what about all the other things he's doing and which one is the true Trump?
00:19:18.000But first, we have to say hello to our advertisers over at Birch Gold.
00:19:21.000So if you are looking at the economy and you are concerned about the future of the economy, if you look at the stock market, you think it's a little bit inflated.
00:19:27.000Sure, you're optimistic about where we're going, but $20,000 for the Dow looks kind of high to you and you're worried maybe about tariff policy.
00:19:33.000Well, now's the time for you to go and purchase some gold over at Birchgold Group.
00:20:09.000Well, as we continue here, we're going to be talking, as I say, about what Trump's been doing not with the cabinet picks and how much cabinet picks matter.