The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 282 - Trump's Big Syria Conundrum

First daughter Ivanka Trump secretly met with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in January, according to the Daily Beast. Is she part of the problem since she hasn t publicly opposed her father's opposition to funding Planned Parenthood? Plus, Devin Nunes recused himself from the Russia investigation, and Steve Bannon is out at the National Security Council. Plus, President Trump is making open overtures now to the left, which is not a good thing, which means she may have her father s ear even on issues upon which they disagree, and that is not good in the least. Today's show is brought to you by Lyft and Shazam, a ride-sharing company that makes sure you're safe and that you ride in a clean car and the driver isn't a creep. Lyft is all about making sure you re safe everywhere you go, no matter where you go or who you go to get there. You can get a $10 credit when you use the promo code SHOUTOUT, which gives you 3 free rides up to $30 when you sign up for a new vehicle inspection. Shazima is a great company that does background checks, background checks and background checks so you re not gonna get a 19-point vehicle inspection so you don t get pulled up in a clunker that looks like it looks like you ve got a 19 point vehicle inspection, so you ll be safe and you ll not get pulled over by a car with a driver who isn t a thief. It s safe, reliable, and it s not a creeper. I know because my wife uses Lyft. She s a lot of times, and she takes Lyft and she s a great driver, and I trust her home to make sure her home is a safe and a safe place to pick me up at night after a night out with her home. I know she s all about safety and she loves to take care of her kids at night, so she takes her kids in the morning and she doesn t get a good night out in the late-night ride home after a nap in the early morning in the car after a full day at the babysitter sips on the way home from the park. . Thanks, Lyft! Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro, The Daily Beast is a writer, the wife of a doctor, the mom of a pediatrician, the daughter of a good friend of my wife, the girl who works at my place in Los Angeles.

00:00:00.000 According to the Daily Beast today, first daughter Ivanka Trump secretly met with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards in January.

00:00:06.000 The story does not make clear whether the meeting took place before or after Trump's inauguration, but Ivanka is Trump's most trusted advisor along with her husband Jared Kushner, and she's a moving force behind much of the action in his administration.

00:00:17.000 According to the Daily Beast, quote, the purpose of the meeting, from Cecile's point of view, was to make sure that Ivanka fully understood what Planned Parenthood does, how it is funded, and why it would be a terrible idea for Planned Parenthood to be removed from being able to see Medicaid patients, said Dawn Lugins, an executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

00:00:34.000 The main thing that Cecile was doing was explaining that the money doesn't actually go to abortions, we get reimbursed the same way a hospital does.

00:00:40.000 We're clearing up misinformation about how this works, unquote.

00:00:43.000 Richards now says that Ivanka is part of the problem since she hasn't openly sounded off on her father's opposition to funding Planned Parenthood.

00:00:50.000 According to Richards, quote, anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy we've seen in this administration. 1.00

00:00:58.000 It's worth noting that just yesterday, Ivanka told Gayle King on CBS This Morning that she sounds off against her father's policies all the time, behind closed doors.

00:01:06.000 So, is Ivanka still stumping for Planned Parenthood behind closed doors? 0.99

00:01:14.000 Trump has made clear he's willing to use Planned Parenthood as a cudgel to motivate Republicans, but he also spent months talking about all the non-abortion great work Planned Parenthood does, which accounts for a minute fraction of their revenue.

00:01:26.000 Trump may have shifted his position for politics, but Ivanka probably hasn't.

00:01:29.000 She's a career leftist on a variety of issues, from climate change to abortion to same-sex marriage.

00:01:33.000 Her speech at the Republican National Convention was an ode to government-sponsored childcare.

00:01:37.000 As Stephen Miller of Heat Street pointed out, Ivanka has donated thousands of dollars to prominent Democrat candidates, including Harry Reid, Andrew Cuomo, Eleanor Holmes Nolten, Kirsten Gillibrand, Gavin Newsom, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Eliot Spitzer, Hillary Clinton's Senate, and 2008 presidential campaign, and just recently to New Democrat star Senator Kamala Harris.

00:01:54.000 In the interest of fairness, she did donate to McCain and Romney 2012,

00:01:57.000 But according to sources, contributions to Republicans make up less than 10% of her overall donations.

00:02:02.000 Ivanka was not even able to vote for her father in the GOP primary, as she did not switch her party affiliation by the deadline.

00:02:08.000 Ivanka is the person closest to Trump's heart in this administration.

00:02:12.000 An administration filled with people with little political background, but who compete to demonstrate their loyalty to the president.

00:02:18.000 Ivanka will not be Trumped in this regard.

00:02:20.000 That means she may have her father's ear, even on issues upon which they disagree.

00:02:24.000 And that is not a good thing.

00:02:26.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:02:26.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:02:32.000 So today's an extremely busy news day.

00:02:33.000 We're going to get to Nunes.

00:02:35.000 Devin Nunes has now been recused.

00:02:37.000 He's recused himself from the Russia investigation on the House Intelligence Committee.

00:02:41.000 We'll tell you what that means.

00:02:42.000 Steve Bannon is out at the National Security Council.

00:02:45.000 So a lot of turmoil happening inside the Republican caucus.

00:02:48.000 Plus, President Trump is making open overtures now to the left, which is not a good thing.

00:02:54.000 But before we get there, we have to say, and we should say, obviously, thank you to our advertisers over at Lyft.

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00:04:25.000 Devin Nunes, who is the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he announced on Thursday he has recused himself from the committee's investigation into Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 election.

00:04:35.000 Now, this poses a problem for the Trump administration, because the Trump administration basically funneled all of the information about Susan Rice unmasking members of the Trump team and the Trump transition team.

00:04:46.000 They funneled all that to Nunes by bringing him to the White House, and then he didn't update his House Intelligence Committee

00:04:52.000 Friends and foes.

00:04:53.000 And then he went back to the White House to update Trump.

00:04:55.000 So it looked like Nunes was working for Trump.

00:04:57.000 That was really what this came down to.

00:04:59.000 The reason that he is recusing himself is because the House Ethics Committee has now put him under investigation.

00:05:05.000 Now, to be clear, they're not investigating him because they're saying he's a tool of the White House.

00:05:10.000 They're investigating him because anytime somebody allegedly leaks classified information, they are investigated by law.

00:05:18.000 Nunes has explained in a statement that he is not recusing himself because he did anything wrong.

00:05:24.000 He says, several left-wing activist groups have filed accusations against me at the Office of Congressional Ethics.

00:05:29.000 The charges are entirely false and politically motivated and are being leveled just as the American people are beginning to learn the truth about the improper unmasking of the identities of U.S.

00:05:37.000 citizens and other abuses of power.

00:05:38.000 Despite the baselessness of the charges, I believe it is in the best interest of the House Intelligence Committee and the Congress

00:05:44.000 For me to have Representative Mike Conway, with assistance from Representatives Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, temporarily take charge of committee's Russia investigation while the House Ethics Committee looks into the matter.

00:05:54.000 I will continue to fulfill all my other responsibilities as committee chairman.

00:05:58.000 And the ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Ethics Committee issued a statement.

00:06:02.000 They said, the committee is aware of public allegations that Representative Devin Nunes may have made unauthorized disclosures of classified information in violation of House rules, law, regulations, and other standards of conduct.

00:06:13.000 The committee, pursuant to Rule 18A, is investigating and gathering more information regarding these allegations.

00:06:20.000 So, all of the leading Republicans from Trump to Ryan have expressed confidence in Nunes.

00:06:25.000 What's amazing about all of this is that I actually think Nunes is doing the right thing here.

00:06:30.000 I said a while ago I thought that Nunes should recuse himself after there were questions about whether he was working for Trump, mainly because it overshadows the actual scandal here, which is Susan Rice unmasking Trump officials and then disseminating that information widely to the Obama team.

00:06:44.000 Does it mean that Devin Nunes did something terribly wrong?

00:06:47.000 No, it doesn't mean that Devin Nunes did something terribly wrong.

00:06:49.000 The headlines are just not going to be good.

00:06:51.000 The question here was basically, would it be better for Nunes to stick it out through the House Ethics Committee and muddy the waters, or would it be better for him to step aside and hand it over to people like Gowdy and Conaway and allow them to pursue the leaks investigation about Susan Rice and Mike Flynn?

00:07:05.000 Clearly I think for Trump it is better for Nunes to take the bullet on this one and step to the side.

00:07:10.000 So I think that Devin Nunes did make the right call here.

00:07:13.000 Don't pay attention to everybody who's saying this is obvious proof that he did something deeply wrong.

00:07:17.000 That's not right.

00:07:17.000 The House rules command.

00:07:19.000 It's not even it's not even a just a possibility.

00:07:21.000 It's an actual command.

00:07:22.000 The House rules say that

00:07:24.000 And if there's an allegation brought against you of leaking classified information, they must investigate.

00:07:28.000 They have to investigate and they have to open an inquiry by law.

00:07:31.000 So it's not like they found something credible and then went after Nunes.

00:07:35.000 They were forced to by the rules of the committee.

00:07:37.000 So don't pay attention.

00:07:38.000 It's a bit of a nothing burger.

00:07:39.000 Don't pay attention to everybody who's making a huge deal out of Nunes stepping away, not proof that he did anything wrong or that he was specifically working for Trump.

00:07:47.000 I thought that he should... My feeling was that after he went to the White House and learned all this stuff, he should have updated the members of the House Intelligence Committee before running back to Trump's report.

00:07:55.000 It was that second trip to the White House that looked particularly bad.

00:07:59.000 And I wish he hadn't done that, but I don't know that he actually did anything wrong here, and I think it's premature to say that he did.

00:08:06.000 Okay, in other news that surrounds Trump, Trump has done an interview with the New York Times, and in this interview with the New York Times, he is now saying that he wants to do a great infrastructure plan.

00:08:17.000 And on that side, I will say, we're going to have, I believe, tremendous Democrat support.

00:08:23.000 So basically he's looking for Democrat support for a trillion dollar infrastructure plan and there were questions about whether a lot of this money was going to come from public-private projects.

00:08:30.000 So out here in Los Angeles, we have public-private projects at places like the Grove and the Americana.

00:08:35.000 There's basically a lot of stadiums are public-private projects.

00:08:39.000 Places where people invest their private dollars and those are matched by a certain amount of government money.

00:08:44.000 Still not my favorite thing, but better than just pure public investment.

00:08:48.000 Trump says he doesn't even want public-private projects anymore because he can borrow money more easily and he knows what to do with your money better than you know what to do with your money.

00:08:57.000 He says we may take that trillion and we may also in addition use public-private but we're talking about an investment of a trillion dollars.

00:09:03.000 He explicitly said

00:09:05.000 That it's not going to be 200, 300 billion dollars of public money and the rest private.

00:09:08.000 It will be a trillion dollars of public money.

00:09:12.000 And he said the reason for that is because he can borrow money so cheap.

00:09:15.000 Well this was exactly what Steve Bannon had been saying for a while was going to be Trump's plan.

00:09:20.000 So the idea that Steve Bannon's influence with the administration is over, I don't think that's right.

00:09:24.000 I also think that it's not just Bannon's idea.

00:09:26.000 Donald Trump made his name in life building really big things with other people's money.

00:09:30.000 That's what he's done his entire life.

00:09:32.000 Build really big things with other people's money.

00:09:33.000 He's not going to stop doing that now that he has trillions of dollars at his disposal.

00:09:38.000 And there are a lot of people on the right who seem okay with this sort of infrastructure spending.

00:09:42.000 You weren't okay with it when it was Obama. 0.96

00:09:44.000 When Obama was spending 800 billion dollars on random crap, 0.99

00:09:47.000 It was bad. 0.99

00:09:47.000 It was called a stimulus plan and we said it's a waste of money. 0.99

00:09:50.000 This also is a waste of money.

00:09:51.000 The fact is that everybody talks about the interstate highway system as though it's going to cost a trillion dollars to fix up the interstate highway system.

00:09:57.000 It doesn't cost a trillion dollars to fix up the interstate highway system.

00:10:00.000 Plus, it is worthwhile noting that states and localities have an interest in maintaining the interstate highway system since it carries all sorts of goods and products and services through their towns.

00:10:10.000 One of the great myths, by the way, of American politics is that the Eisenhower interstate highway system was some sort of magnificent creation that never would have happened if it hadn't been for the intervention of the federal government.

00:10:21.000 It's just not true.

00:10:22.000 People drove long before the 1950s.

00:10:24.000 This was a car country going back to the 1920s.

00:10:27.000 The interstate highway system cost a lot of money.

00:10:30.000 It drove right through towns.

00:10:31.000 It destroyed a lot of businesses.

00:10:33.000 If you ever see the movie Cars, you know, the Pixar movie Cars, remember the whole movie is set

00:10:38.000 In this little town called Radiator Springs, which is off of Route 66.

00:10:41.000 And as you recall, Route 66 is basically abandoned.

00:10:44.000 Well, Route 66 used to be one of the thoroughfares of American commerce.

00:10:48.000 Right?

00:10:48.000 Nat King Cole had a whole song about get your kicks on Route 66.

00:10:51.000 Route 66 was an actual thing.

00:10:53.000 What happened is that the federal government built the I-40.

00:10:55.000 The I-40 bypassed Route 66.

00:10:56.000 All of these people who'd spent their life savings and all their time and money putting routes down around Route 66

00:11:03.000 All of them were left behind and destroyed.

00:11:04.000 So when you talk about forgotten people, there are a lot of people who are forgotten because of the interstate highway system, or whose houses were completely bulldozed by the interstate highway system.

00:11:12.000 The case I'm making is not there shouldn't be an interstate highway system, it's that states have an interest in connecting their state highway systems, and most of it should have been absorbed at the local and state level.

00:11:21.000 So when people say we need lots of infrastructure spending now because it was so great back in the 50s, it wasn't that great back in the 50s, it isn't that great now.

00:11:29.000 And when Trump does this routine, what he really wants is to build big spectacular things.

00:11:33.000 He doesn't actually want to fix up the roads and bridges that matter, per se.

00:11:37.000 He just wants to build big stuff so that he can stamp the big T on it and then say that he built something, which is what a lot of these folks want to do.

00:11:44.000 Obama wanted to do it.

00:11:45.000 Obviously, FDR made his name doing this.

00:11:48.000 It's not good policy.

00:11:49.000 There's another poll, by the way, as long as I'm going to get all the bad Trump news out of the way at the beginning, there's another poll that's out today that says that 40% of Trump supporters would back a single-payer health care system, which just demonstrates what folks like me have been saying all along and the great damage that Trump could do, and he hasn't done it yet, but the great damage that it is possible for him to do is the soul-sucking of the Republican Party into a big government

00:12:11.000 Nationalist party as opposed to a small government patriotic party, which is not quite the same thing.

00:12:16.000 Well, all of that said, the big story of the day is we'll get to the Republican chaos in a second, but the big story of the day is what is going to happen in Syria.

00:12:24.000 So if you've been watching the pictures that are coming out of Syria,

00:12:27.000 Obviously, they are horrifying.

00:12:28.000 We talked about this a little bit yesterday.

00:12:30.000 There are all these pictures of dead children who have been gassed to death by the Bashar Assad regime.

00:12:36.000 And that comes just a few days after the Trump administration came out and said Assad would remain in power.

00:12:41.000 I said, that's not a coincidence.

00:12:42.000 If it had happened under Obama, I would have said the exact same thing.

00:12:45.000 I have a very simple standard when it comes to what I expect from my politicians.

00:12:49.000 And that is, you know, your word matters and what you say has credibility.

00:12:54.000 And it turns out that in foreign policy particularly, it matters when you say things, so...

00:12:58.000 The fact that Trump's people said Assad will stay in power and then three days later he's gassing children, I don't think that's any sort of major coincidence.

00:13:06.000 A survivor of a 2013 Syria chemical attack, he was on CNN and he was talking about what he thinks Trump should do.

00:13:13.000 If I may just say a few words directly to President Trump, if you'll just give me the chance.

00:13:18.000 Please.

00:13:19.000 Mr. President, Mr. President, please, please, in the name of every woman and child and elder,

00:13:26.000 who got killed by the Assad regime.

00:13:28.000 Please come in and help us.

00:13:30.000 Don't make the same mistakes that President Obama did.

00:13:34.000 You criticized Obama for failing to punish and act when Assad crossed the red lines.

00:13:41.000 Now is the moment of truth.

00:13:43.000 Now you should show the world that those days are over.

00:13:47.000 We can't just keep living in this unprecedented crimes against humanity.

00:13:54.000 We just can't keep living like this.

00:13:56.000 I would personally love to come to the United States and meet you and tell you my personal story.

00:14:02.000 You know, obviously the media is happy to put this sort of stuff on TV because they're saying, you know, Trump should do something.

00:14:07.000 There are two questions here.

00:14:09.000 One, whose fault is all of this?

00:14:10.000 And two,

00:14:12.000 Excuse me, what should President Trump do right now?

00:14:14.000 Those are the two big questions.

00:14:17.000 It's pretty clear that this is Obama's fault.

00:14:18.000 It's pretty clear that this started under Obama, that it was Obama who was saying for years and years and years that we had disarmed the Assad regime.

00:14:24.000 He proclaimed himself a massive political genius for having drawn a red line, then backed away from the red line after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.

00:14:32.000 And then he said that he had disarmed Assad and left Assad in power while Assad continued to gas folks.

00:14:38.000 John McCain correctly says this is Obama's legacy.

00:14:42.000 He is obviously, as we all are, appalled.

00:14:45.000 Could I make two points?

00:14:46.000 One, this is the legacy of Barack Obama.

00:14:49.000 The last time this happened, Barack Obama said they'd crossed a red line, called me and Lindsey Graham down to the White House and did nothing.

00:14:58.000 One thing worse than doing nothing is saying you're going to do something as the most powerful leader on earth and doing nothing.

00:15:05.000 So this is a legacy of Barack Obama, and it's been going on now for the intervening four years.

00:15:12.000 So what we need to do, we need to stop Bashar Assad's planes from flying, and we can do that easily.

00:15:19.000 You have been bringing this issue up to the forefront.

00:15:21.000 I know it's been a great frustration for you.

00:15:24.000 I gotta go, but just very quickly, are safe zones viable?

00:15:26.000 Let me mention again, Barack Obama had an opportunity to stop this, and would have long ago, and he took a hike, and that's a terrible legacy.

00:15:35.000 Okay, and McCain is exactly right.

00:15:36.000 And listen, McCain is no friend of Trump, so when he says this is on Obama, you can trust that Senator McCain is exactly right on this. 0.52

00:15:41.000 This certainly is on Obama.

00:15:43.000 But, that doesn't answer what we should do now.

00:15:44.000 I'm going to discuss that in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our advertisers over at CISO.

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00:17:38.000 For free.

00:17:38.000 So, the question is, what exactly should the United States do in Syria now that we've seen all of these terrible images coming out of Syria?

00:17:45.000 But, for you to get the answer to that, you're gonna have to actually subscribe to the show.

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00:17:58.000 You can also get an annual subscription, and when you do that, you get a free signed copy of the masterwork, Reasons to Vote, Democratic Comprehensive Guide, the most thorough book on democratic thinking ever created by Michael Knowles.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - April 07, 2017

Ep. 282 - Trump's Big Syria Conundrum

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