Vlad Putin has an excuse for Hillary Clinton losing a near-guaranteed presidential election, and it's a good one! President Trump meets with Kanye West and makes a major announcement from Trump Tower, and the rest is history. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down and explains why this is a huge deal, and what it means for the future of the economy and the world, and why we should all be worried about what's going on in the stock market and the economy's future in general, not what's happening in the world and the news in general. Ben also explains why Kanye West is a genius, and how he and Donald Trump have a warm relationship, and talks about how Kanye and Trump have been friends for a long time, which is a weird thing for people who mock President Obama incessantly for having a relationship with celebrities, but it's not a bad thing in the long-term, right? Also, Ben explains why he thinks Kanye West was wearing a white suit to meet with Donald Trump and why that's weird, and also why it's weird that Ray Lewis wasn't wearing a suit to a meeting with President Trump. And much, much more! Ben and Ben discuss it all on today's episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Podcast! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, and subscribe to our other podcast episodes. The opinions expressed in this podcast are our podcast are those of our own, Ben Shapiro's The Weekly newsletter, Ben's Unfiltered Version of The Daily Mail Online. Send us your thoughts and thoughts on the podcast. and opinions on our new podcast, and we'll be posting them on the internet! and other media related to Ben's podcast, too! on The Six Sigma Podcasts and other social media platforms! We'll be looking out for your comments and posts on Ben's posts on The FiveThirtyEight and other places that Ben's thoughts on Ben Shapiro s podcasting on the world's best posts on the FourThirtyEight Podcasts, and Ben's YouTube channel! Thank you Ben Shapiro is a fellow Ben Shapiro and other things that Ben Shapiro does more Ben's work on this week's "The Six Sigma and much more. on this podcast is a great podcast on the New York Times, so don't forget to subscribe to him on social media!
00:00:08.000White House spokesman Josh Earnest explained, quote, So he certainly had a pretty good sense of whose side this cyber activity was coming down on the last several weeks.
00:01:06.000Pretending that a bunch of rubes reading false headlines on Facebook elevated Trump to the presidency.
00:01:10.000If only they'd paid attention to the real fake news distributed by the White House and members of the mainstream media, all would have been well.
00:01:16.000And of course, Obama thinks the legacy of racism is responsible for the backlash against his presidency.
00:01:22.000He was appearing with the execrable Trevor Noah and he explained, quote, we have by no means overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism.
00:01:30.000Obama continued by stating he had handled the issue of race just beautifully.
00:01:34.000I mean, ignore the race riots, and the DOJ targeting police departments, and Obama making stupid comments about black people being shot by the cops, but he's a genius, and not everybody had appreciated that.
00:01:43.000He said, quote, I don't think that trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln put it, is somehow compromised.
00:01:50.000There are many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost, but Putin, fake news, and racism aren't among them.
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00:04:00.000He wasn't the only one to show up, by the way.
00:04:01.000Apparently, Ray Lewis showed up, also wearing his white suit.
00:04:04.000Ray Lewis, the linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens.
00:04:06.000He was wearing his white suit, which had Secret Service deeply concerned, because last time Ray Lewis wore a white suit, somebody got stabbed to death.
00:04:31.000As somebody who mocked President Obama incessantly for meeting with celebrities, I have to mock Donald Trump for doing exactly the same thing.
00:04:40.000We have now entered the realm of the surreal.
00:04:42.000Kanye West at Trump Tower with Donald Trump.
00:04:50.000If you recall, Donald Trump, and this is going to be a running theme, Donald Trump tends to treat people who praise him and bow before him as friends and wonderful, sweet political lovers.
00:06:07.000Speaking of people who he'll never say bad about because they say nice about him, Vladimir Putin, apparently, he's got nothing bad to say about that.
00:06:14.000So Donald Trump has rolled out his new secretary of state nominee, the person he's picked, it's Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson.
00:06:21.000He was so excited about it, about making America great again, that he actually
00:06:24.000In his announcement, he actually played the National Anthem.
00:08:08.000He's not somebody that you want to play with.
00:08:09.000There are three separate presidents who have now tried to play footsie with Vladimir Putin, and three separate times Vladimir Putin has humiliated them by doing exactly what he wants to do, running roughshod into other countries, murdering people.
00:08:20.000In Syria right now, people backed by Vladimir Putin are murdering women and children.
00:08:24.000There are women who are committing suicide rather than be raped by Assad's forces in Aleppo.
00:08:28.000It is Putin who's standing behind Assad's forces.
00:08:30.000Putin's a very bad guy and all these people who think that you're going to be able to use Vladimir Putin to your advantage.
00:08:35.000No, Vladimir Putin is not used by you and he's not used by Trump.
00:10:35.000He has shut down freedom of the press.
00:10:37.000Vladimir Putin is an absolute kleptocrat dictator, and he's an evil, evil fellow who's engaged in some of the worst human rights atrocities that we've seen in the past 10, 15 years.
00:10:49.000He also has obviously invaded surrounding countries, Crimea.
00:10:52.000He invaded Georgia when George W. Bush was president.
00:10:55.000Now, a lot of people are pointing out that Condi Rice and Bob Gates and some kind of heavyweights have endorsed Tillerson.
00:11:09.000He is not somebody who presumably has business interests directly with Tillerson.
00:11:14.000James Baker, who actually works with Putin very closely, has praised Tillerson.
00:11:19.000Again, I'm not saying Tillerson's a bad guy.
00:11:21.000I'm not even saying that Tillerson is, you know, anti-American or has Putin's best interests at heart or any of that.
00:11:27.000What I am saying is the only thing that Trump knows about him and the only thing anybody knows about him on foreign policy is that he's super tight with Putin, and that was the reason why Trump picked him in the first place.
00:11:36.000That should be disturbing to anybody who cares about this sort of stuff.
00:11:39.000Again, Vladimir Putin's a very, very bad guy, and it is disturbing to me how many Republicans are willing to embrace this just because it's Trump doing it.
00:11:47.000You can call hypocrisy on Democrats, and I'm happy to do that.
00:11:54.000I mean, you really don't get to claim that you are anti-Putin if you're then going to sit around claiming that Donald Trump is doing wonders by siding with Putin.
00:12:30.000How large it is, is what is very hard for anyone to predict.
00:12:34.000And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are.
00:12:41.000He's come out in favor of a carbon tax as well, a cap and trade, which is the Al Gore program.
00:12:46.000So all these people who are very excited about Scott Pruitt understand that the Secretary of State does not agree with Scott Pruitt on global warming.
00:12:52.000Or, it's possible to read it as, he was saying what he had to say because he was head of ExxonMobil, but we don't know the answer to that right now.
00:13:01.000If a major head of an oil company whose main foreign policy experience was being best friends with Vladimir Putin was nominated, you would think Republicans might oppose this.
00:13:17.000Mitch McConnell also praised Rex Tillerson.
00:13:19.000He said, I look forward to supporting his nomination.
00:13:21.000So forget about, you know, actually having the hearings and determining what his views are.
00:13:24.000He looks forward to supporting his nomination.
00:13:27.000And it is fascinating to watch as people do this.
00:13:31.000Now, I think the motivation here is that there are a lot of people in Congress, Republicans in Congress, who think that if they are really, really nice to Donald Trump, if they give him everything that he wants, he'll be nice to them.
00:13:42.000I don't know what Paul Ryan is... I think Paul Ryan is actually delusional at this point about Trump.
00:13:46.000I think he thinks, if I'm really nice to Donald Trump, if I give him all the things he wants, then Donald Trump will do entitlement reform.
00:13:56.000Donald Trump is going to do what Donald Trump wants to do.
00:13:59.000Newt Gingrich, who's just become the pseudo-intellectual shill for Trumpism, he did a lecture at Heritage Foundation today that was called The Principles of Trumpism, which is a new one.
00:14:08.000I wasn't aware there were any principles of Trumpism other than what Donald Trump feels like this morning.
00:14:13.000The first principle of Trumpism, according to Newt Gingrich, is
00:14:16.000Praise Trump to the skies and then up your speaker's fee based on that.
00:14:19.000But he gave a speech about principles of Trumpism and he called Trump a grizzly bear who basically, if you get his attention, is going to claw off your face.
00:14:25.000He compared him to the grizzly bear from The Revenant.
00:14:28.000I guess that we have yet to see whether there was some sort of rape that went on with Leonardo DiCaprio, a bear rape that went on with Leonardo DiCaprio, when DiCaprio visited Trump Tower.
00:14:38.000The idea that you're gonna control Trump is just, this is such an illusion, and it's something that I think McConnell and Ryan are both engaging in.
00:14:44.000This idea that if you're nice to him, he's going to give you what you want.
00:14:48.000Not unless he already has a predilection toward you.
00:14:50.000And this is the caveat, you know, he said earlier about Kanye West, Kanye's been nice to me, so I'll be nice to him.
00:14:56.000Right, because he doesn't lose anything.
00:14:57.000Putin is nice to him, so he's nice to Putin, right, because Donald Trump is the kind of guy who is attracted to power and thinks power is attractive, and so he likes the fact that Putin is strunk like bull.
00:15:08.000So of course he's going to be okay with Vladimir Putin, but that doesn't mean he's going to start green-lighting entitlement reform, which he's opposed the entire way through.
00:15:14.000He thinks entitlement reform is a political disaster.
00:15:17.000He's not going to back Paul Ryan's play on that.
00:15:19.000Republicans keep going along to get along,
00:15:21.000That's going to have consequences because all you're doing is convincing people that Trump is right where he's wrong, and then he's just going to screw you anyway.
00:15:28.000As Mitt Romney found out, Mitt Romney put out a statement, and he's not Secretary of State obviously, and Mitt Romney put out this little statement about not being Secretary of State.
00:17:18.000To have good relationships with your enemies.
00:17:19.000You only make peace with your enemies.
00:17:21.000Here is Reince Priebus, the show for the Trump administration.
00:17:25.000But the truth is, is that having relationships with people is not a bad thing.
00:17:29.000I don't know how we got to the place where having an actual functional relationship with someone who might not be a person that we first think of to have that relationship with is suddenly a bad thing.
00:17:41.000I mean, we have a lot of problems in this world, and we're not going to solve those problems by making believe that people don't exist.
00:17:57.000We're going to be tough across the world.
00:17:59.000And President-Elect Trump and Rex Tillerson and Vice President-Elect Pence are going to take every day with that mindset in place.
00:18:07.000Okay, so I love that he doesn't have any real defense for this, so instead he just starts shouting, America first, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, AMERICA FIRST, NOT PAYING ATTENTION, NOT LISTENING, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, MAGA!
00:18:18.000Okay, this doesn't have anything to do with America First, the question is, how close are you supposed to be to one of the worst dictators on planet Earth?
00:18:23.000Marco Rubio gets this right, here's Rubio's statement about Tillerson, he says, quote, while Rex Tillerson is a respected businessman, I have serious concerns about his nomination.
00:18:31.000The next Secretary of State must be someone who views the world with moral clarity, is free of potential conflicts of interest, has a clear sense of America's interests, and will be a forceful advocate for America's foreign policy goals to the President within the administration and on the world stage.
00:18:43.000I look forward to learning more about his records and his views.
00:18:46.000I will do my part to ensure he receives a full and fair hearing, etc., etc.
00:18:49.000That's basically the tactic that a lot of these people should be taking, but that is not the tactic that a lot of people are taking.
00:18:55.000Everybody is just ignoring serious questions that ought to be asked about Russia and Vladimir Putin and what he's doing in favor of sort of partisan breakdowns.
00:19:03.000And we'll get to more of that in just a bit.
00:19:04.000Plus, Democrats overreacting because they can't help themselves.
00:19:07.000It is amazing that just every landmine they have to jump on with both feet.