The Ben Shapiro Show - Media LIES About Trump Explode In Their Faces!

00:00:00.000 A ton coming up on today's show.

00:00:01.000 A series of lies the media are telling to undermine President Trump.

00:00:05.000 One story about illegal immigration went totally viral and turned out to be totally untrue.

00:00:09.000 Updates on the Ahmed Khalil story.

00:00:11.000 You remember that student who the Trump administration tried to deport?

00:00:14.000 Well, he just exposed himself, pants himself on CNN last night.

00:00:18.000 But first, we are celebrating a decade of the Daily Wire.

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00:00:47.000 All righty, folks.

00:00:48.000 So we obviously live in an age of narrative.

00:00:50.000 Narrative matters more than the facts.

00:00:53.000 And many of the people who know that are in the media.

00:00:55.000 Many of them are opponents of Donald Trump's agenda.

00:00:57.000 And that means that anytime President Trump tries to forward his agenda, he may face down actual false stories that are promulgated by that media that are antithetical to his actual agenda items.

00:01:10.000 The latest example is this insane example that has been totally undercovered, but is indicative of the way that so many in the media actually cover these stories.

00:01:19.000 They don't actually have personal knowledge of the story.

00:01:21.000 They just report out a story and it turns out the story is not true.

00:01:24.000 So according to the UK Guardian, this was reported on Sunday, an 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who said they have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.

00:01:39.000 According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, longtime Allentown resident Luis Leon, who was granted political asylum in the United States in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency.

00:01:55.000 So he and his wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.

00:01:58.000 When he arrived at the office on June 20th, however, he was handcuffed by two ICE officers who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said.

00:02:05.000 She said she herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.

00:02:09.000 And then they tried to find him and they couldn't figure it out where he went.

00:02:12.000 And then on July 9th, according to Leon's granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming that Leon had died.

00:02:19.000 That'd be an immigration lawyer supposedly who called claiming that Leon had died.

00:02:22.000 A week later, they discovered from a relative in Chile, Leon was alive after all, but now in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection.

00:02:30.000 Okay, so this was widely reported.

00:02:33.000 This was reported by a wide variety of left-wing sources, ranging from The Hill to Newsweek to The Guardian.

00:02:42.000 It went totally viral on X because, of course, the left is looking for a case of blatant mistreatment of an innocent person in order to discredit President Trump's entire immigration agenda, which remains incredibly popular.

00:02:54.000 In fact, President Trump's success on the immigration agenda is so complete that the immigration issue is dropping off people's radar as a chief issue.

00:03:01.000 He was elected to clean up the border, and he did it so unbelievably quickly that people are forgetting that he even did it.

00:03:07.000 Now, President Trump said yesterday that no people came in last month.

00:03:12.000 Zero.

00:03:12.000 That's how quickly he has solved this crisis.

00:03:14.000 Here's President Trump yesterday.

00:03:17.000 We have the strongest border anywhere in the world now.

00:03:20.000 Maybe even stronger than your border, if you can believe it.

00:03:22.000 We have no people came in last month.

00:03:24.000 Zero.

00:03:25.000 Which is pretty amazing.

00:03:26.000 I'm not even sure I can believe that.

00:03:28.000 But liberals are the ones that do that calculation. 0.97

00:03:31.000 But we had no people come in.

00:03:34.000 A year ago, we had hundreds of thousands of people come in.

00:03:37.000 Hundreds of thousands of people.

00:03:40.000 Well, because Trump has been so successful on this issue, the left has been looking for some sort of horror story to tell.

00:03:46.000 And so they've been telling horror story after horror story.

00:03:48.000 Something terrible is happening at Alligator Alcatraz.

00:03:51.000 The person who was deported as a suspect in MS-13 wasn't, in fact, an MS-13 suspect.

00:03:56.000 He was, in fact, an innocent Maryland father.

00:03:58.000 And it turns out that wasn't true either.

00:04:00.000 Well, this story about the 82-year-old Chilean man deported for trying to renew his green card or get a fresh green card because he lost his old one.

00:04:07.000 It turns out it's complete bunk.

00:04:09.000 The Department of Homeland Security, according to Newsweek, has denied reports an 82-year-old Chilean man was deported from the United States to Guatemala after losing his green card.

00:04:19.000 Like, it's just not true.

00:04:20.000 The DHS denied it as completely false.

00:04:24.000 Apparently, again, his family had told that paper morning call they couldn't locate him and they were told he died and then he turned up in Guatemala.

00:04:30.000 A DHS statement issued to Newsweek late on Monday said, quote, the DHS set the record straight on misleading and false reporting that ICE secretly deported a so-called Allentown grandfather to Guatemala.

00:04:40.000 Additionally, reporting claimed he died in ICE custody.

00:04:43.000 The DHS said the article had been published without any fact from DHS about major allegations made against law enforcement.

00:04:50.000 The department statement said, quote, the family of the individual allegedly told reporters he was handcuffed and taken by federal officers at a green card appointment in Philadelphia.

00:04:57.000 This claim is completely false.

00:04:59.000 There is no record of the man appearing at any green card appointment in or around the area of Philadelphia on June 20th.

00:05:05.000 Furthermore, says DHS, ICE has not deported Luis Leon, a Chilean national to Guatemala.

00:05:11.000 ICE's only record of this individual entering the United States is in 2015 from Chile under the visa waiver program.

00:05:16.000 So the idea that he entered in 87 as a refugee from Pinochet is not even true.

00:05:21.000 According to reporting by the Associated Press, the Guatemalan Institute of Migration, which coordinates with ICE on all deportations to Guatemala, claims they have not received anyone matching the name, age, or nationality of Luis Leon back into Guatemala.

00:05:34.000 According to the report, says the DHS, the family alleges a woman claiming to be an immigration lawyer called and offered to help them, but did not disclose how she knew about the case.

00:05:42.000 The family claims this individual also told them Leon died in ICE custody.

00:05:47.000 DHS Assistant Secretary Trisha McLaughlin said, ICE never arrested or deported any Luis Leon to Guatemala, nor does ICE disappear, people.

00:05:54.000 This is a categorical lie being peddled to demonize ICE agents who are already facing an 830% increase in assaults against them.

00:06:01.000 So again, why is this story important?

00:06:03.000 This story is important because it demonstrates how information flows in the modern world, especially in the online world, where this went totally viral on X. And why?

00:06:12.000 Why does it work this way?

00:06:13.000 Because X is a machine built for instantaneous response.

00:06:16.000 Mark Twain famously suggested that a lie has its chance to make its way all the way around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on in the morning.

00:06:24.000 That was somewhat true when Mark Twain was saying that back in the late 19th century.

00:06:28.000 But it is much more true now When the online world means that lies are promulgated at an extraordinary rate, a truly extraordinary rate.

00:06:36.000 And it's true over and over and over again.

00:06:38.000 All right, folks, tons coming up on the show.

00:06:40.000 Mahmoud Khalil, you remember him?

00:06:42.000 Trump tried to deport him.

00:06:43.000 And then the court said, no, no, no, no.

00:06:45.000 He's sort of a moderate.

00:06:45.000 He's not pro-terrorist or anything.

00:06:47.000 We have some updates plus.

00:06:48.000 Epstein files updates plus President Trump cutting some pretty interesting trade deals.

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00:09:00.000 Take, for example, the case of Mahmoud Khalil.

00:09:02.000 So Mahmoud Khalil was freed by a court after the Trump administration tried to deport him.

00:09:07.000 He was, of course, a person who had garnered a student visa under false pretenses.

00:09:12.000 He got a student visa claiming that he was coming to the United States to study when, in fact, he was coming to the United States in order to act as a professional agitator.

00:09:21.000 He came to work with Students for Justice in Palestine and various other groups on the Columbia College campus, where he was going to promote wild anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sentiment.

00:09:30.000 And so Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, this is not what we are looking for in our immigrants.

00:09:35.000 You're gone.

00:09:36.000 And a court said, no, no, no, no, no.

00:09:37.000 You can't do that.

00:09:38.000 He's exercising his free speech rights.

00:09:40.000 And Rubio's like, well, hold up.

00:09:41.000 We get to decide who comes in the country. 1.00

00:09:43.000 We have the plenary power at state to decide whether someone is violating the edict that we make the decision as to whether someone is of net benefit to the United States.

00:09:52.000 And the entire media came to Khalil's defense, suggesting that Khalil was just, you know, a normie student who had no support for terrorist groups.

00:10:00.000 All the talk about him supporting terrorist groups, all of that was just false.

00:10:02.000 He never would do something like that.

00:10:03.000 He's just a normal left-wing guy who just really, really doesn't like what Israel is doing in Gaza.

00:10:09.000 Well, he blew all of that up yesterday.

00:10:12.000 He did an interview on CNN.

00:10:13.000 Again, he's the hero of the left, Mahmoud Khalil.

00:10:16.000 He did an interview on CNN, where it turns out, he says, that the Trump administration is quote-unquote weaponizing anti-Semitism.

00:10:22.000 He's not really anti-Semitic.

00:10:23.000 He's not really a threat in any way.

00:10:25.000 It's just that the Trump administration is using anti-Semitism as a way of throwing out people they don't like.

00:10:31.000 This is simply weaponization of anti-Semitism to silence the speech.

00:10:36.000 And Wolf, as you've mentioned, I've been always, whether publicly or privately, against any form of discrimination and of racism, including anti-Semitism.

00:10:45.000 But they want to use that as smokescreen so they can just benefit from that, unfortunately, that very hateful speech that's happening.

00:10:58.000 So they can't silence my speech.

00:11:00.000 simple and clear.

00:11:02.000 He really hates anti-Semitism.

00:11:03.000 He's a moderate, you see.

00:11:04.000 And so the Trump administration was super wrong to try to deport him, except later in the same exact interview, he was asked multiple times whether he condemned Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, for what they did on October 7th and beyond.

00:11:20.000 And over and over again, he refused to denounce Hamas.

00:11:23.000 Here's Mahmoud Khalil, supposed to...

00:11:24.000 Supposed moderate, supposed victim of the Trump administration on matters of immigration, just saying the quiet part out loud, which is that he will not condemn Hamas.

00:11:33.000 Just to be clear here, though, do you specifically condemn Hamas, a designated terrorist organization in the United States, not just for their actions on October 7th?

00:11:45.000 I condemn the killing of all civilians, full stop.

00:11:50.000 But what I don't want to get into is I'm very clear with condemning all civilians. 0.99

00:11:59.000 I'm very straight in my position in that part.

00:12:04.000 But it's disingenuous to ask about condemning Hamas while Palestinians are the ones being starved now by Israel.

00:12:11.000 It's not condemning October 6th, where 260 Palestinians were killed by Israel before October 7.

00:12:19.000 So I hate this selective outrage of condemnation.

00:12:24.000 Okay, so again and again and again, he's not going to condemn Hamas.

00:12:27.000 Do you need people in the United States who don't condemn State Department labeled terrorist groups?

00:12:34.000 Are those the kinds of people you need?

00:12:35.000 That was Marco Rubio's entire case.

00:12:37.000 That was the case of the Trump administration when they tried to deport him.

00:12:40.000 We don't need people who like Hamas in the country. 0.51

00:12:43.000 That seems relatively inarguable.

00:12:45.000 It's one thing if you're already a United States citizen.

00:12:47.000 You're a citizen.

00:12:47.000 There's nothing we can do about it.

00:12:48.000 Sure, you suck, but lots of people suck in the United States and have terrible views in the United States.

00:12:54.000 We don't get to kick you out for having terrible views in the United States if you are a citizen.

00:12:57.000 However, if you lie about why you came To the country, and you came here as a political agitator on behalf of terrorist organizations.

00:13:05.000 Well, at that point, we should probably kick you out.

00:13:07.000 But remember, the entire media went along with the idea that he was a wounded innocent who was merely parroting the rhetoric of mainstream Democratic officials.

00:13:15.000 That was never true.

00:13:16.000 Go back to May 2024 when he was tussling with Columbia public safety officers trying to confiscate tents.

00:13:22.000 Here's the footage.

00:13:32.000 You can see him.

00:13:33.000 He's getting into it.

00:13:33.000 He's walking around.

00:13:38.000 He seems like a wonderful, the kind of person we desperately need here in the United States.

00:13:42.000 But it just goes to show you, it just goes to show you that these narratives, they may go around very, very quickly.

00:13:48.000 And then it takes a long time to debunk them.

00:13:50.000 And by that time, it is just too late for the debunking to happen.

00:13:53.000 And this is happening all over the world.

00:13:55.000 It's not just true of the Trump administration immigration agenda.

00:13:57.000 It's true all over the world.

00:13:59.000 The claims that are currently being made by mainstream media, just parroting, for example, the Gaza Ministry of Defense, which is to say, Hamas, about Israel supposedly for no reason shooting people who are trying to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

00:14:12.000 Those are lies.

00:14:13.000 It is not true.

00:14:14.000 What is happening is that Hamas is infiltrating those lines and they are literally shooting at the IDF soldiers, trying to draw fire in response.

00:14:21.000 Israel is attempting to separate off Hamas terrorists from civilians.

00:14:25.000 Hamas is literally killing people who are taking the aid from Israel because they wish to hijack the aid.

00:14:30.000 In fact, there was a report just yesterday that Hamas may be going bankrupt because they can no longer steal the aid and then sell it back to the Palestinians at inflated prices, thus to fund their ongoing war machine.

00:14:41.000 Okay, but that's not the only lie that is currently being told.

00:14:44.000 Obviously, there's the generalized genocide lie, but one of the big lies that was told last week was this lie that extremist local Jewish West Bank residents had set fire to a 1,500-year-old church of St. George in the Palestinian village of Taiba.

00:14:57.000 Now, this is part and parcel of a broader attempt right now by some to claim that Israel is targeting Christians, which is not true.

00:15:04.000 They're doing this based on this false report and also the lie that Israel purposefully targeted a church in the Gaza Strip.

00:15:10.000 They did not purposefully target a church in the Gaza Strip.

00:15:13.000 That would be a moral, intellectual, and strategic absurdity.

00:15:19.000 What would generate that?

00:15:20.000 Why would Israel purposefully target a church?

00:15:23.000 Israel says it was an accident.

00:15:25.000 Clearly, it was, in fact, an accident.

00:15:27.000 But it's been run with by many of the people who are now trying to generate outsized pressure on Israel by claiming somehow that Israel is filled with people who hate Christians, which is very strange considering that Israel is literally the only place in the entire region where Christians can live safely and securely practicing their religion.

00:15:43.000 The only one.

00:15:45.000 The only one.

00:15:46.000 So they are linking that story up with another story suggesting that extremist Jews in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria, set fire to this church in Taibat.

00:15:58.000 Well, it turns out that that's not true either.

00:16:01.000 It turns out that the press service of Israel did an independent investigation.

00:16:05.000 And again, this report was spread so wide that there were American officials repeating it before investigating.

00:16:11.000 Well, what actually happened?

00:16:12.000 Well, it found that local Jewish residents were fighting the fire, that there was a fire nearby the church and that local Jewish residents were going up there to fight the area near the church.

00:16:23.000 But in case you don't believe me, here's actual footage of the church.

00:16:26.000 It is made of rock.

00:16:27.000 There are no burn marks anywhere.

00:16:28.000 It's 1500 years old.

00:16:29.000 It doesn't have a roof because it hasn't had a roof for a long time.

00:16:32.000 It's essentially an ancient site.

00:16:34.000 Here is video of the site showing what it's like right now on the ground.

00:16:44.000 Here I am in the outskirts of the church.

00:16:47.000 You can see the apse over here.

00:16:49.000 And even on the outskirts or the outer walls, there are no signs of fire.

00:16:55.000 I can't find any.

00:16:57.000 So it doesn't look like the church has been burned down.

00:17:00.000 But not far from the church, there was shrub that was most probably burnt in the fire.

00:17:06.000 This happens all over Judea and Samaria.

00:17:08.000 You can see that these stones would have stopped the fire.

00:17:11.000 And I still believe it's important to find out who set the fire.

00:17:14.000 So who has the interest to display this bonfire as the settlers burning down the church?

00:17:21.000 Someone is behind this, that the Jews are burning down the church.

00:17:25.000 Someone has an interest for you to believe that.

00:17:29.000 Okay, now the reality is that there is contemporaneous footage that is now showing young men from nearby farms running up the hill with fire extinguishing equipment, according to the Jerusalem Post and Reflective Vest, attempting to put out the flames.

00:17:41.000 So, again, this is just another one of these narratives that runs out of control, that runs out of control very, very quickly and is spread on services like X that do a pretty terrible job of separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of what is true and what is false.

00:17:56.000 And it is that exact thing that leads to wild distrust on every issue.

00:18:00.000 It is very difficult to lock down the facts.

00:18:02.000 And one of the things that I try to do on the show is to take enough time when a controversial claim is made to determine whether or not it is true.

00:18:10.000 And so I might wait a few hours to determine what actually happened in a given situation or even a couple of days in murky circumstances.

00:18:17.000 But that is not what the internet favors these days.

00:18:19.000 What the internet actually favors is immediate response right now without information.

00:18:24.000 And if you wait, you are condemned for waiting because the idea is that if you wait, you must have some secret sympathies in some way or another.

00:18:31.000 Whereas if you just react and jump to your preferred conclusion that backs your narrative, somehow this means that you are more honest in some way.

00:18:38.000 It is not true.

00:18:38.000 That is not true.

00:18:39.000 Waiting is frequently the best thing to do in unclear circumstances so as to allow time for the truth to arise.

00:18:48.000 That is the thing that actually should matter.

00:18:50.000 And again, you can speculate, you can theorize, but people aren't in the business anymore, even speculating or theorizing.

00:18:55.000 They're not even clear that they are speculating or theorizing anymore on any topic.

00:18:59.000 They simply jump to whatever conclusion is the most advantageous for their narrative and for their position.

00:19:05.000 And then they insist that position is true, regardless of the next set of facts that comes out.

00:19:10.000 That is true across the political board.

00:19:13.000 It also happens to be true with regard to, for example, the Epstein case.

00:19:16.000 So Democrats continue to fan the flames on the Epstein case, suggesting without evidence that there is tons of evidence that is still out there that has yet to be uncovered by the Trump administration.

00:19:25.000 Now, again, the Trump administration has an ongoing case in federal court asking for release On documentation in the Epstein case.

00:19:32.000 Perhaps that will be released.

00:19:33.000 Perhaps the judge will say it's under seal.

00:19:34.000 We don't know.

00:19:35.000 The Trump administration also has made clear at this point that there are no quote-unquote Epstein tapes, tapes of Epstein or anyone else having with children in the actual bedrooms because those tapes are actually just they have enough evidence to know that Epstein was doing all this stuff.

00:19:51.000 But the idea that there were tapes of third parties who were engaged in this activity, apparently those do not exist.

00:19:57.000 And the DOJ and the FBI, while saying they're going to try to release more information as much as they can legally, are also saying that their original conclusions are correct.

00:20:05.000 Epstein was not a member of intelligence.

00:20:07.000 He was not a member of intelligence, either foreign or domestic.

00:20:10.000 He was not blackmailing third parties according to the evidence they had.

00:20:13.000 Now, again, maybe there's evidence that exists somewhere out there in the ether that he was, but the FBI and the DOJ do not have it.

00:20:19.000 And so calling on them to release evidence they don't have is obviously dishonest.

00:20:23.000 Here is how you know whether someone is telling you the truth or not.

00:20:26.000 If they can cite evidence to their proposition and they're willing to tell you when they don't have evidence to cite their proposition, they're probably being more truthful.

00:20:34.000 If they simply throw out conclusions, conclusory statements without evidence to back it, that is not someone who's telling you the truth.

00:20:42.000 That is someone who's lying to you for a political purpose.

00:20:44.000 That is what Democrats are currently doing.

00:20:46.000 And yes, some horseshoe theory Republicans and pseudo-MAGA who are attempting to batter President Trump so as to seize control of the MAGA movement, which is a thing that is happening right now.

00:20:56.000 Coming up more on President Trump and the Epstein pressure and all the rest of that.

00:21:00.000 Plus, President Trump actually signing some trade deals to avoid that August 1st deadline.

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00:23:09.000 According to Politico, it's a fixation of Washington.

00:23:12.000 Now Democrats from coast to coast are plotting how to capitalize on the Jeffrey Epstein saga.

00:23:16.000 An ongoing furor around the government's investigation of the disgraced financier has done more than fracture President Donald Trump's base.

00:23:22.000 It has also injected a volatile new element into midterm elections and created an opening for Democrats scrambling to exploit any perceived Republican weakness as they work to retake the House.

00:23:31.000 And again, Democrats continue to maintain that Trump is hiding something.

00:23:34.000 They know he is not, or at least they suspect he is not, because they literally didn't care about this, like during the entire Biden administration.

00:23:43.000 And there are Republicans who are doing this too.

00:23:46.000 Now, there are questions that certainly remain in the case.

00:23:48.000 Like, for example, where did Jeffrey Epstein get his money?

00:23:51.000 That is an open question.

00:23:52.000 It remains a very open question.

00:23:55.000 Like, there's no question that we have no idea why he got his money from Les Wexner, why he got his money from Leon Black, like why he was being paid these outsized amounts of money.

00:24:04.000 Sure, there can be absolutely credible suspicion on those matters, but that is not the accusation when you say that Trump is covering it up.

00:24:12.000 Meanwhile, there are open questions right now on Ghelain Maxwell.

00:24:15.000 So the DOJ is now being pressured to re-interview Ghelene Maxwell.

00:24:20.000 Politico has a rundown on why this is happening.

00:24:22.000 The answer is, of course, because of all the outside pressure and the suggestion that maybe Maxwell knows something she's not talking about or hasn't in the past.

00:24:30.000 According to Politico, Maxwell has apparently never given her version of events to federal prosecutors.

00:24:35.000 During pretrial proceedings in her criminal case, government prosecutors and Maxwell's defense attorneys acknowledged they never even broached the subject of plea negotiations where such an interview might have occurred.

00:24:45.000 Maxwell's attorney claimed at the time plea bargaining was not an issue because her client maintained her innocence.

00:24:49.000 She did decline to testify in her own defense at trial.

00:24:53.000 What could she know that she hasn't told the DOJ?

00:24:56.000 Maxwell herself says nothing, basically.

00:24:58.000 She argued in court papers ahead of her trial that the allegations against her and Epstein were so old, stretching back to the 90s, that there's little reliable information left to disclose.

00:25:06.000 She contended witnesses may have died or their memories faded, and corroborating documents she might be able to rely on to prove her version of events have long been destroyed.

00:25:14.000 That filing includes categories labeled dead witnesses and lost testimony, lost and missing witnesses, witnesses whose memories have failed or corrupted, lost or destroyed records.

00:25:23.000 While Maxwell, theoretically, could name her own memories, what the hell are prosecutors supposed to do with that if there is no supporting evidence of it, especially because Maxwell might lie in order to try and receive some sort of pardon or some sort of deal.

00:25:37.000 So, again, in the absence of information, the internet tends to run wild, and that is not a particularly good thing.

00:25:44.000 And I mentioned there are people on the right who are glomming onto this with both hands.

00:25:49.000 One of those, of course, is Thomas Massey, the representative from Kentucky, who is essentially a declared enemy of the president of the United States, Donald Trump.

00:25:56.000 They don't like each other very much.

00:25:57.000 Speaker Johnson was asking, what the hell is going on with Massey That he keeps signing on to these discharge petitions, trying to put pressure on Trump to release documents.

00:26:05.000 In disobedience of FBI regulations and DOJ regulations and the law?

00:26:05.000 What?

00:26:11.000 I don't understand Thomas Massey's motivation.

00:26:13.000 I really don't.

00:26:14.000 I don't know how his mind works.

00:26:15.000 I don't know what he's thinking.

00:26:16.000 Thomas Massey could have brought his discharge petition anytime over the last four and a half years, over the last four years of the Biden administration.

00:26:22.000 He could have done that at any time.

00:26:24.000 And now he's clamoring as if there's some sort of timeline on it.

00:26:26.000 It's interesting to me that he chose the election of President Trump to bring this, to team up with the Democrats and bring this discharge petition.

00:26:34.000 So do I have some concern about that?

00:26:36.000 I do.

00:26:37.000 Okay, and Speaker Johnson absolutely should.

00:26:39.000 And you should too, because what is the motivation?

00:26:42.000 The answer is the Venn diagram between the people who are very, very exercised about the Epstein case and the people who are very, very upset about President Trump's Iran policy, Ukraine policy, the Big Beautiful Bill.

00:26:55.000 Those are overlapping circles.

00:26:57.000 And when I say overlapping, I mean that there's a bigger circle of people who think something is missing in the Epstein files and are wondering why Pam Bondi retailed what she did.

00:27:04.000 I understand.

00:27:05.000 That's a big, big circle.

00:27:06.000 But the group of people who do not like Trump's policy have decided to go right in the center of the Epstein circle and just sit there and build a campfire because their goal is actually to undermine President Trump's agenda.

00:27:16.000 They don't like his agenda.

00:27:17.000 They're glomming onto the Epstein thing in order to undermine his credibility with the base and his credibility personally so as to try and take control of MAGA away from President Trump.

00:27:26.000 It is pretty clear that this is what's going on right now.

00:27:29.000 And by the way, it's not as though everyone who promoted RussiaGate is out of the government even now.

00:27:32.000 I mean, we're talking about deep state people, people who have been longtime government officials who have been involved with this sort of stuff.

00:27:39.000 According to Luke Roziak reporting for The Daily Wire, quote, a top lawyer for President Donald Trump's NSA previously worked for Senate Democrats on their discredited probe attempting to tie Trump to Russia, personally urged for Trump to be permanently banned from social media for staging an insurrection, attacked Republicans for opposing a crackdown on disinformation, and defended the treatment of Trump aides Carter Page and Michael Flynn at the hands of the intelligence state.

00:28:00.000 April Falcon Doss is the current general counsel for the NSA.

00:28:04.000 She worked as an NSA intelligence lawyer from 2003 to April 2016, when she took a job at a private law firm.

00:28:10.000 But a few months into President Trump's first term, she took a high-level job working for Senator Mark Warner of Virginia on the Senate Intelligence Committee, investigating supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election.

00:28:22.000 Pretty amazing stuff.

00:28:23.000 I mean, who did the hiring on this one?

00:28:25.000 I want to know the answer on this one.

00:28:28.000 Apparently, June 2022, the NSA, again, under Joe Biden, rehired DOS in a top role without announcing or acknowledging the hire because it didn't want to stir up a hornet's nest among Capitol Hill Republicans, according to the record.

00:28:40.000 That's because in the interim, Democrats, experts, and Intel officers had decried it as improper and ultimately blocked it when Trump had attempted to name a Republican House Intelligence Committee staffer to the same exact role.

00:28:51.000 Still pretty unbelievable that this person has a job under the Trump administration.

00:28:54.000 I would imagine that that is not going to be the case for very long after Luke's article here.

00:28:58.000 Meanwhile, an actual piece of scandal.

00:29:01.000 According to the New York Post, the FBI failed to provide key thumb drives in the Clinton email probe.

00:29:07.000 This is according to the DOJ watchdog files.

00:29:11.000 According to the New York Post, the FBI barely glanced at potentially crucial evidence in its investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State, according to a portion of a watchdog report made public on Monday.

00:29:22.000 A confidential source gave thumb drives to the FBI that contained State Department data acquired via cyber intrusions, including emails from President Obama and others, according to a declassified appendix to a June 2018 DOJ Inspector General report.

00:29:35.000 But the feds declined to comprehensively analyze those drives due to concerns about individual data caught up in the hack, despite an internal draft memo concluding it was necessary to assess the national security risks pertaining to Clinton's private server use.

00:29:49.000 That's unbelievable.

00:29:50.000 Essentially, it means that the FBI, when they were investigating how Hillary Clinton was handling her emails and mishandling highly classified information, the FBI basically decided to ignore thumb drives showing that she had basically exposed emails from people, including President Barack Obama, apparently.

00:30:11.000 That report was penned by then DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who holds the same position at the Federal Reserve Board and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

00:30:20.000 During that 2016 campaign cycle, the FBI cyber division had sought to obtain access to the hard drives to conduct targeted searches for information relevant to the Clinton probe, and they were rebuffed.

00:30:30.000 They were told no.

00:30:31.000 Then FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe asked then-U.S.

00:30:34.000 Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in a memo if he could refer to the drives for the Bureau's probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and that was shot down.

00:30:43.000 So essentially, they didn't do basic investigative work, and they left key pieces of evidence on the cutting room floor, according to Senator Chuck Grassley.

00:30:51.000 Grassley said the Comey FBI's negligent approach and perhaps intentional lack of effort in the Clinton investigation is a stark contrast to its full-throated investigation of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, which was based on the uncorroborated and now discredited Steele dossier.

00:31:04.000 You know, it was on the basis of that, by the way.

00:31:06.000 It was on the basis of Comey not wanting to look at what was actually in those thumb drives, at least partially, that he decided to dismiss the case against Hillary Clinton and claim that there was no violation of law.

00:31:17.000 Another notable detail in the appendix is that the FBI stumbled upon Russian language intelligence, alleging that then U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Comey were interfering in the Clinton email investigation to help the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, respectively.

00:31:30.000 That intel also included claims that the then DNC chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had communicated with two individuals who worked at the Zoros Open Society Foundations and told them she was confident the FBI did not have evidence against Clinton because data was removed from the mail servers just in time.

00:31:45.000 At the very least, there's a lot of information here that basically it looks like the FBI and DOJ decided to ignore because it was inconvenient to Hillary Clinton in 2016.

00:31:54.000 She, of course, was let off the hook by James Comey over at the FBI.

00:31:58.000 So that is an amazing, amazing story.

00:32:01.000 The other story that is being retailed by Tulsi Gabbard is, frankly, less amazing.

00:32:06.000 So recall yesterday on the program, we talked about Tulsi Gabbard suggesting that the Obama administration had specifically gone back on an intelligence community report.

00:32:16.000 That intelligence community report had said that there was no manipulation of the electoral tools, like actual voting machines, for example.

00:32:26.000 And the allegation by Tulsi Gabbard is that the Obama administration basically went back on that and then tried to rewrite it to suggest that there was Russian interference.

00:32:35.000 I read that entire thing on the air just a couple of days ago.

00:32:39.000 Again, she had claimed that in the run-up and immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, Obama intelligence officials, including then DNI James Clapper, took the position, according to Andrew McCarthy, that Russia was probably not trying to influence the election by using cyber means.

00:32:52.000 But later, as top Obama administration officials huddled and executed rapid-fire completion of the IZA, she says they changed their tune to try and sandbag Trump with a bunch of Russian interference memes and nonsense.

00:33:04.000 Now, as we talked about again a couple of days ago, there is no question the Obama administration from the very earliest days of the Fusion GPS steel dossier scandal were looking for a rationale for linking the Trump campaign to a supposed Russian collusion scheme.

00:33:19.000 There is no doubt that was the case.

00:33:20.000 They were maximizing everything.

00:33:21.000 They were issuing illegal FISA warrants against Carter Page.

00:33:24.000 They were using the steel dossier as the basis for things like the FISA surveillance warrant.

00:33:28.000 And then they were leaking that into the public view.

00:33:31.000 All of that is well substantiated and scandalous in the extreme.

00:33:35.000 Gabbard is saying she has something new, and that the new thing is that basically the Obama administration and Obama himself changed an intelligence community ruling in order to suggest that there was Russian interference with actual election infrastructure.

00:33:49.000 But that's not actually what the document said.

00:33:51.000 What it said is that the Obama administration concluded there was no hacking of election infrastructure and that later statements had to deal with Russian interference in the election.

00:34:00.000 Now, was there Russian interference in 2016?

00:34:03.000 I mean, there certainly was memory online.

00:34:07.000 It was minimal, as we talked about.

00:34:08.000 It was not particularly effective.

00:34:10.000 And Russia always attempts to interfere in American elections.

00:34:12.000 They do this all the time.

00:34:14.000 I'm old enough to remember when they interfered on behalf of Barack Obama.

00:34:18.000 You'll remember in 2012, Barack Obama literally sat next to Dmitry Medvedev and was caught on a hot mic saying that if Vladimir could simply cool his heels, cool his jet for the next couple of months, we'll have something to talk about on the other side of the election.

00:34:31.000 Okay, so I'm not sure exactly what the DNI is attempting to accomplish with this sort of new accusation.

00:34:38.000 She says that there are more Russia hoax documents that will be released later this week.

00:34:41.000 We can hope they substantiate her accusations better than the current documents do.

00:34:46.000 He's saying that none of this makes any sense, that this is a distraction.

00:34:50.000 What do you say to that?

00:34:53.000 It's the art of deflection coming from former President Obama, as well as his friends who are still in Congress today, and Senator Warner and Congressman Jim Himes, really all basically saying that exact same statement, which doesn't actually address the issue that was revealed in great detail in the over 100 documents that we released last week,

00:35:14.000 in the documents that we will be releasing later this week, that point to the undeniable fact that you laid out in your introduction to this segment.

00:35:24.000 Okay, so again, did the Obama administration try to interfere on behalf of Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump in the 2016 election?

00:35:32.000 Yes.

00:35:33.000 Was there violation of law?

00:35:35.000 If there was violation of law, it was on the part of FBI directors, deputy FBI directors, and all the rest.

00:35:41.000 The president is sort of immune from a lot of this sort of stuff simply because he has an enormous amount of executive power to have these sorts of conversations, right?

00:35:49.000 This was a Supreme Court decision that actually recently came out with regard to President Trump.

00:35:54.000 You'll recall that there was a Supreme Court decision that suggested that there is executive decision-making that lies out of the domain of, for example, lawsuits.

00:36:04.000 And this probably falls into that particular category.

00:36:07.000 So I asked my friends and sponsors over at Perplexity, what did the Supreme Court recently rule about executive immunity and how would it protect President Obama with regard to accusations his IC report was skewed?

00:36:17.000 Well, as Perplexity says, on July 1st, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Trump versus United States regarding presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.

00:36:26.000 The key points of the ruling are absolute immunity.

00:36:29.000 Presidents are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken within their core constitutional powers.

00:36:34.000 They are also presumptively immune for official acts.

00:36:38.000 Those would be actions taken as president that are neither purely personal nor at the core.

00:36:42.000 And there is presumed immunity, and you can try to overcome the presumption.

00:36:46.000 So when it comes to the IC report accusations, would the Supreme Court ruling shield Trump?

00:36:51.000 Well, again, as perplexity notes, if the actions involve official duties like overseeing, ordering, or approving IC assessments or reports while acting as president, President Obama would enjoy at a minimum a presumption of immunity from criminal prosecution.

00:37:04.000 And absolute immunity could apply if the conduct was seen as a direct exercise of the president's core constitutional authority, like managing the IC.

00:37:12.000 So very difficult presumption to overcome for criminal prosecution.

00:37:14.000 Obama is responding via his spokesperson, quote, out of the respect for the office of the presidency.

00:37:19.000 Our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response, but these claims are outrageous enough to merit one.

00:37:26.000 These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.

00:37:29.000 Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election, but did not successfully manipulate any votes.

00:37:39.000 Now, again, there is another widely accepted conclusion that really Trump is correct to hit President Obama over, and that is the widely accepted conclusion that Obama's entire team was essentially incepting into being a collusion scandal between Trump's team and Russia that supposedly turned the nature of the election and was complete with,

00:38:02.000 again, falsely issued FISA warrants, as well as the mainlining of absolute nonsense via the Steele dossier, which was a Clinton campaign compendium that somehow ended up spurring a full intelligence investigation.

00:38:18.000 It is kind of fun to watch the Potsdam of America boys get really mad about this.

00:38:21.000 I will say.

00:38:22.000 Jon Favreau came out and suggested that if you don't like it, you can go arrest Barack Obama.

00:38:26.000 Well, I mean, let's just put it this way.

00:38:28.000 It's really Democrats who have been attempting to arrest prior presidents of recent vintage.

00:38:32.000 I mean, they tried to do this to Donald Trump many, many, many times, like a lot of times.

00:38:36.000 So I feel you don't have like a moral high horse to stand on so much here because I don't remember you speaking out about any of that as an abuse of justice.

00:38:44.000 The positive America bros are in a bad mood, however, because Hunter Biden attacked them the other day.

00:38:49.000 When it comes to the attacks on Hunter himself, like, okay, let's just, what if we just stipulate for the hypothetical?

00:38:56.000 Like, yes, okay, all your business dealings were above board and legal.

00:38:59.000 All your paintings were purchased by art lovers who loved the product and didn't know your name.

00:39:04.000 Trump is worse.

00:39:06.000 You were on the board of Burisma because of who your dad is.

00:39:09.000 And that is what people hate about Washington.

00:39:12.000 And it was part of the problem.

00:39:14.000 And like, there's some other weird shit.

00:39:16.000 Like, he said, he blames the debate on Biden's staff saying they gave him Ambien on his foreign trip.

00:39:23.000 But like, Biden got back from the G7 on June 14th.

00:39:26.000 The debate with June 27th.

00:39:28.000 A lot of fucking Ambien.

00:39:29.000 If Ambien was the issue, like, I don't think it's Ambient.

00:39:32.000 It's age.

00:39:33.000 Also, like, he was tired, so they gave him Ambien.

00:39:36.000 Also, like, just.

00:39:39.000 Wow.

00:39:40.000 I'm amused that the positive American boys are now telling the truth about Joe Biden after spending a very long time defending Joe Biden's absolute salenility.

00:39:48.000 But it's only when they are threatened, of course, that they speak up loudly and proudly against the corruption inside the Biden administration.

00:39:54.000 Like, solid stuff there, guys.

00:39:55.000 Really, really proud of you for your honesty, your sudden bout of honesty.

00:39:59.000 Meanwhile, I know a lot of people were worried, of course, about the tariffs.

00:40:02.000 I was one of them, honestly.

00:40:03.000 Like, I was worried at the very beginning about the tariffs.

00:40:05.000 And then President Trump backed off a lot of it because he moved control of the tariff talks essentially from Commerce Secretary Howard Luttnick over to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessons.

00:40:14.000 And so it is not a surprise that a bunch of deals have now been announced.

00:40:18.000 President Trump announced yesterday a trade deal with Japan.

00:40:21.000 Here he was.

00:40:22.000 But I just signed the largest trade deal in history.

00:40:25.000 I think maybe the largest deal in history with Japan. 0.60

00:40:32.000 And that was done with Japan. 0.93

00:40:34.000 They had their top people here, and we worked on it long and hard.

00:40:38.000 And it's a great deal for everybody.

00:40:40.000 I always say it has to be great for everybody.

00:40:42.000 It's a great deal.

00:40:44.000 A lot different from the deals in the past, I can tell you that.

00:40:47.000 But we're doing really well as a country.

00:40:50.000 We're strong.

00:40:51.000 We have a lot of money flowing in.

00:40:52.000 The tariffs are kicked in better than anybody other than me and a few of the people in the room thought could happen, Howard and Scott.

00:41:02.000 And I just want to thank you all.

00:41:04.000 You've been unbelievable allies because you're really allies.

00:41:08.000 That's what you've been, and we appreciate it.

00:41:10.000 Okay, so what exactly is the deal?

00:41:12.000 Well, apparently, the massive deal includes reciprocal tariffs of 15% on the country's exports to the United States.

00:41:18.000 Auto duties will reportedly be lowered to that level as well.

00:41:22.000 Japan is going to supposedly invest $550 billion in the United States.

00:41:26.000 According to President Trump, the United States will receive 90% of the profits that presumably to counter any sort of trade deficit.

00:41:34.000 Trump says Japan will, quote, open their country to trade, including cars and trucks, rice and certain other agricultural products and other things, and that it would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

00:41:42.000 Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who is up for re-elect in just a couple of days and so wants to get this off the table, said auto tariffs on Tokyo will be lowered to 15% from the current 25% levied across countries.

00:41:54.000 Auto exports to the United States are a major cornerstone of Japan's economy.

00:41:58.000 They make up 28.3% of all shipments in 2024, according to customs data.

00:42:04.000 So, again, that is higher than it was.

00:42:07.000 However, it is much lower than it could have been.

00:42:09.000 Shortly after Tuesday's announcement, Japan's top trade negotiator, Ryose Akazawa, said mission accomplished in a post on X. So that trade deal is designed again to strengthen the ruling coalition in Japan just before an election.

00:42:22.000 The stock market popped in Japan on the basis of the announcement.

00:42:26.000 Jeremy Schwartz, the global CIO at asset manager at Wisdom Tree, told CNBC's Squawk Box Asia the size of the market reaction meant the market got pessimistic on how things were going and that the goal is to drive again more direct foreign investment in American product.

00:42:41.000 So that's a big win for President Trump.

00:42:44.000 Another big win for President Trump, an announcement of a trade agreement with Indonesia.

00:42:48.000 According to President Trump, it is agreed.

00:42:50.000 Indonesia will open its market to American industrial and tech products and agricultural goods by eliminating 99% of their tariff barriers.

00:42:57.000 The United States of America will now sell American-made products to Indonesia at a tariff rate of zero, while Indonesia will pay 19% on all of their products coming into the United States of America, the best market in the world.

00:43:07.000 In addition, Indonesia will supply the United States with their precious critical minerals as well as sign big deals with tens of billions of dollars to purchase Boeing aircraft, American farm products, and American energy.

00:43:16.000 The deal is a huge win for our automakers, tech companies, workers, farmers, ranchers, and manufacturers.

00:43:21.000 Again, whether you like the tariffs or you don't like the tariffs, this is better than what the alternative would have been if the deal didn't get cut.

00:43:27.000 Again, as a free trader myself, I'm not generally in favor of the idea that we are tariffing Indonesian goods at nearly 20% while they tariff us at zero. 0.51

00:43:35.000 It seems to me that that's a tax on American consumers.

00:43:37.000 With that said, is that a lot better than it was going to be?

00:43:40.000 If no deal had been reached, the answer there is yes.

00:43:42.000 Another deal has been announced also with Philippines.

00:43:45.000 According to President Trump, the Philippines is going open market with the United States, zero tariffs.

00:43:50.000 The Philippines will pay a 19% tariff.

00:43:52.000 In addition, we will work together militarily.

00:43:54.000 It was a great honor to be with President Ferdinand Marcos.

00:43:57.000 He's a highly respected person in his country, as he should be.

00:43:59.000 He is a very good and tough negotiator.

00:44:02.000 So, you know, again, there are two ways of viewing all this.

00:44:05.000 One is, do we really need a trade war with anybody but China at this point?

00:44:09.000 And I've made that case before.

00:44:10.000 The other is the worst aspects of the trade war are, in fact, being avoided by the Trump administration thus far.

00:44:16.000 Is that going to reshore massive manufacturing in the United States?

00:44:19.000 I somehow doubt it.

00:44:21.000 Is it going to be a lot better than it would have been if we had maintained those Liberation Day standards?

00:44:26.000 Absolutely.

00:44:27.000 And again, you can see the markets reacting to all of that.

00:44:31.000 Pretty sanguine about all of that.

00:44:32.000 The markets were up at 180 points yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

00:44:36.000 The S ⁇ P 500 was also up a little bit yesterday.

00:44:41.000 The markets have baked into the cake the idea, I think, already, that President Trump is going to cut a bunch of these deals.

00:44:46.000 Now, where President Trump could go astray is if he attempts to go after Jerome Powell.

00:44:50.000 Now, he has already said he's not going to, the head of the Federal Reserve.

00:44:52.000 I think it would be a mistake for President Trump to do so.

00:44:56.000 With that said, he still seems to be thinking about it at least a little bit.

00:45:00.000 So he is ripping on Jerome Powell's allowance of the renewal of the federal building, the rebuilding of a lot of the federal building, which is going to cost something like $2.7 billion.

00:45:11.000 Now, again, here's my question.

00:45:12.000 Unless Jerome Powell is owner of one of the contractors who's making money hand over fist on all of this, it's hard for me to understand exactly why Powell would get anything out of a massive rebuild of the Fed sufficient to justify his removal.

00:45:27.000 But maybe that Fed Leaf gets used.

00:45:30.000 It's inconceivable.

00:45:32.000 I know the Fed very well that they can be spending $2.7 billion to build a building.

00:45:37.000 They don't do anything.

00:45:38.000 They just, I mean, it's the greatest job.

00:45:40.000 You show up one day, half a day, you make a little speech.

00:45:43.000 The economy is doing well.

00:45:44.000 The economy is not doing well.

00:45:46.000 We're going to raise interest.

00:45:47.000 And he's got it wrong.

00:45:48.000 That's why I call him too late.

00:45:49.000 T-O-O, too late.

00:45:51.000 So what you're seeing right now is some of the Republicans in Congress trying to, I guess, provide the pretext for President Trump to go after Powell if he wants to are pushing this.

00:46:00.000 Representative Ana Paulina Luna, who is from Florida, referred to Powell to the Justice Department on an accusation he lied under oath to Congress last month about the building project.

00:46:10.000 He told senators some of the more controversial parts of the renovation plan, like a VIP dining room or rooftop beehives, aren't being built, although they were included in the original zoning application.

00:46:20.000 I mean, is that really, is that going to be the criminal case against Jerome Powell here?

00:46:26.000 And that's going to...

00:46:28.000 Why is that good for President Trump?

00:46:30.000 Let's say it gets rid of Powell.

00:46:31.000 Is that going to be good for the markets?

00:46:33.000 The answer there, of course, is no.

00:46:34.000 It will not be particularly good for the markets.

00:46:37.000 Now, good news for President Trump.

00:46:39.000 He continues to push forward on many of his signature issues, including his signature issue with regard to transgenderism, no men in the women's sports. 0.75

00:46:48.000 According to the New York Times, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee quietly changed its eligibility rules on Monday to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women's sports and now will comply with President Trump's executive order on the issue.

00:46:59.000 This, of course, makes perfect sense.

00:47:00.000 You don't want the men competing with the ladies. 1.00

00:47:02.000 This is perfectly obvious.

00:47:04.000 It was obvious to everyone.

00:47:05.000 It's so obvious, in fact, that Democrats are starting to run away from their prior radicalism on this issue.

00:47:10.000 That includes Rahm Emanuel, the former Obama chief of staff, who would love to run for president in 2028.

00:47:14.000 Here was Rahm Emmanuel.

00:47:16.000 Can a man become a woman? 1.00

00:47:19.000 Can a man become a woman? 1.00

00:47:22.000 No.

00:47:23.000 Thank you.

00:47:24.000 That's so easy.

00:47:24.000 No.

00:47:25.000 Why don't more people in your party just say that?

00:47:27.000 Because I'm now going to go into a witness protection plan.

00:47:32.000 Okay, so Ron Manuel moving away from it.

00:47:34.000 Gavin Newsom kind of flirting with moving away from it.

00:47:37.000 Because, again, this is such a losing issue for the Democrats.

00:47:40.000 Joining us on the line to discuss the U.S. Olympic committee barring transgender women from women's competition is my friend Clay Travis, founder of AtCec and host of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.

00:47:50.000 Clay, great to speak with you.

00:47:51.000 Good to see you, as always, Ben.

00:47:53.000 Well, Clay, it looks like the winning continues on this issue.

00:47:57.000 It is incredible how the vibe has shifted, as the kids say, on this issue over the course of the last four or five years.

00:48:04.000 I'm old enough to remember when people were getting kicked off of various social media platforms for saying that men should not play against women in sports.

00:48:11.000 And now you have the U.S. Olympic Committee saying that they are not going to allow men to play against women.

00:48:15.000 What do you make of it?

00:48:17.000 I think that what Donald Trump's victory did was enable cowards to blame him for decisions that they know they should have made years ago.

00:48:26.000 And I really think that's what all of this represents.

00:48:28.000 I mean, University of Pennsylvania didn't know that a six foot three dude had an advantage that used to swim on the men's team and switched over to the women's team.

00:48:38.000 They knew all of this.

00:48:40.000 They were just afraid of bearing the onus themselves, and they're looking for someone to come and save them.

00:48:47.000 And I actually think one of the really interesting decisions going forward is what are Democrats going to do about this?

00:48:52.000 Because next year, we're going to hear the Supreme Court decision.

00:48:57.000 I would expect it'll go 6-3 that you can say, hey, compete against your biology, compete against the name, the gender on your birth certificate. 0.55

00:49:06.000 And then Democrats and crazy leftists will have a decision.

00:49:09.000 Do they say, oh, that's just the Trump Supreme Court?

00:49:13.000 We don't like it, but let's just go ahead and pretend this issue doesn't exist anymore.

00:49:18.000 Or will they double, triple, quadruple down on crazy?

00:49:22.000 Will they take the off-ramp that the Supreme Court and Trump have given them?

00:49:26.000 Or will they make this an issue that prevails and continues into 2028?

00:49:31.000 I actually don't know, but I think that's where we're headed here.

00:49:34.000 Yeah, Clay, I agree with you.

00:49:35.000 It'll be interesting to see what Democrats do.

00:49:37.000 It seems like the smarter Democrats are already attempting to move beyond this issue.

00:49:41.000 At the very least, they're trying to have the baby on it.

00:49:43.000 You saw Governor Gavin Newsom of California do this publicly when he suggested that men should not play in women's sports and then, of course, use the law to attempt to allow men to play in women's sports.

00:49:52.000 Rahm Emanuel, who clearly wants to run for president in 2028, he said, as we played on the show a little while ago, that he's going to have to go into witness protection because he believes that men and women should be playing different sports.

00:50:02.000 Seth Moulton, who we've had on the show, Democrat from Massachusetts, was ripped up and down for suggesting that men are not women and women are not men.

00:50:08.000 But the dam is breaking and you can see it inside the Democratic Party.

00:50:11.000 It seems to me that they want to get beyond this issue because it is such a terrible issue for them.

00:50:16.000 Yeah, and also because men, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, if you play sports or you're a fan of sports at all, this is a non-negotiable issue.

00:50:26.000 I don't think any dads out there, I don't think any men who played high school, college, or pro sports, every NFL locker room, every NBA locker room, they know this is a joke.

00:50:35.000 And Democrats are looking at themselves hemorrhage male support.

00:50:39.000 And I think they recognize they have to step off the crazy train.

00:50:43.000 And one way to do that is what Rah Emanuel did, what Gavin Newsom has tried to do, what Seth Moulton, I think, who represents of all places, the Salem witch trial area of Massachusetts.

00:50:53.000 I mean, there is definitely a witch trial component to this for Democrats.

00:50:57.000 I think they're saying we can't win elections and stand for this.

00:51:00.000 And I think other people will get in line.

00:51:01.000 Remember, even according to the New York Times, 67% of Democrats disagree with men and women's sports.

00:51:08.000 This is actually a huge majority issue, even for them.

00:51:11.000 They're just all cowards.

00:51:12.000 They won't admit it.

00:51:14.000 I think it's such a big issue for them, especially because for the Democrats, I think that all normies look at them and they say, we're not even going to listen to you on any other issue that you have something to say if you continue to maintain this totally insane position.

00:51:25.000 Because frankly, you're nuts.

00:51:27.000 It is one thing to make an argument about a tax policy or about Medicare or Medicaid or foreign policy.

00:51:32.000 It is another thing to argue the patently, obviously stupid notion that men are women and women are men and they can just interchangeably switch places, bodies, and lives.

00:51:41.000 And I think that a huge majority of voters look at Democrats, and this is like a gateway issue for them.

00:51:46.000 It's like, I will not even look at the rest of what you have to say if you maintain this position.

00:51:50.000 I can't tell you the number of people that I know from the world of sports who have come up to me and said privately, you're 1 billion% right on this, But because of the politics inside of my company, whether it's an ESPN, whether it is even a Washington Post, a New York Times, where they have men covering sports, they all think it's ludicrous, and yet they feel compelled as a member of that party to try and stay in good graces.

00:52:20.000 They're afraid of getting athwart that issue.

00:52:23.000 But I actually think we're seeing a major cultural shift.

00:52:26.000 And I think basically men across the board, like I said, I think this is a white, black, Asian, Hispanic.

00:52:32.000 Ben, I'm sure you read the article, The They Them ad, which I think was probably the most influential ad that Trump ran.

00:52:39.000 When they said it was really interesting was it moved white women. 0.81

00:52:42.000 And for people who don't remember, it was Trump's for you, Kambala's for They Them. 0.93

00:52:47.000 It moved white women in his favor, many of whom have daughters that they're traveling to sporting events with. 0.99

00:52:52.000 It also moved Hispanic and black men in his favor.

00:52:56.000 So I think that speaks to the degree to which an ad like that crosses over so many identity politics lines and just registers for sane people, regardless of what they might think, as you mentioned, on tax policy or other issues with which we might disagree.

00:53:12.000 So Clay, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about the other women's sporting issues of the day.

00:53:17.000 Obviously, the WNBA is having a bit of a moment right now, specifically because of Caitlin Clark. 0.99

00:53:23.000 And they seem to have created this sort of WWE situation between Angel Rees and Caitlin Clark or the rest of the league and Caitlin Clark.

00:53:30.000 I don't know if the WNBA is creating it or if just all the women hate Caitlin Clark because they're being catty and petty. 1.00

00:53:36.000 But what do you make of the status of the WNBA?

00:53:39.000 Do you think there's any future here or is this sort of a flash in the pan because Caitlin Clark is interesting and popular and a whole narrative world has now been built up around her?

00:53:47.000 Yeah, so I like to look at Caitlin Clark in the historical context of sport for those of us out there who are big fans.

00:53:52.000 Sometimes you catch proverbial lightning in a bottle and your sport can go to a different level because one particular athlete is so transcendently popular.

00:54:02.000 Think about Tiger Woods and golf.

00:54:04.000 Golf had fans, but Tiger took it to a level we've never seen before.

00:54:08.000 Venus and Serena Williams did for women's tennis. 0.82

00:54:11.000 Sometimes you get it for a very short period of time.

00:54:14.000 Ronda Rousey did it for the UFC for women fighters.

00:54:17.000 Everybody suddenly cared about it.

00:54:19.000 Right now, Caitlin Clark is that.

00:54:21.000 What's different is UFC, PGA, WTA, they were all smart enough to recognize that they had an incredible asset and it was going to make everybody else richer.

00:54:31.000 Doesn't mean that it was perfect when they introduced these new athletes, but they were smart enough to get in line and say, hey, let's all pull in the same direction.

00:54:39.000 The WNBA has taken this incredible golden goose and they've tried to strangle it. 1.00

00:54:45.000 And I don't understand.

00:54:46.000 Now, here's the challenge.

00:54:47.000 Caitlin Clark has not been very healthy in season two.

00:54:50.000 She's missed about half the games.

00:54:52.000 She is more valuable than the entire league, Ben.

00:54:54.000 I've never seen this ever.

00:54:56.000 If you told me right now, Clay, you can buy stock in Caitlin Clark or the WNBA, I would buy stock in Caitlin Clark.

00:55:03.000 And I wonder whether in a couple of years, she might decide to just say Sia to the league based on how they're treating her, found her own league with five or six teams and really unlock the value that truly she has brought to women's basketball.

00:55:18.000 They don't have women's basketball fans.

00:55:20.000 They have Caitlin Clark fans.

00:55:21.000 My theory, and I know you've got kids, I think there's a lot of dads out there that just want to share sports with their daughter.

00:55:28.000 And she is an accessible, not threatening way to watch women's sports with your daughter.

00:55:35.000 Very clean cut, very positive role model.

00:55:38.000 A lot of dads, I think, would like their daughters to grow up like Caitlin Clark.

00:55:42.000 And I think the WNBA resents her for it. 1.00

00:55:46.000 I think the fact that she's white is an issue for her. 0.97

00:55:48.000 I think the fact that she's straight in what is both a black and lesbian majority league.

00:55:53.000 And I think they resent her for the popularity she's brought to the league, which is counterintuitive, counterproductive.

00:55:59.000 But I don't know how they're going to reconcile this.

00:56:01.000 Well, Clay, they are definitely not vitiating any of the stereotypes about female caddiness with the way they are treating.

00:56:06.000 That is 100% true.

00:56:08.000 Right now, it is incredible.

00:56:09.000 If you wished to justify all criticisms of the WA, both WNBA, both athletically and then in terms of the feminist notions of the WNBA, they're doing an amazing job of it, that I have to say.

00:56:20.000 Well, Clay Travis, founder of Outkick, hosted the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show.

00:56:23.000 Check out all of his work.

00:56:24.000 Clay, appreciate the time.

00:56:25.000 Great to talk to you.

00:56:25.000 Keep up the good work, Ben.

00:56:26.000 Have a good summer.

00:56:27.000 All righty, folks.

00:56:28.000 The rest of the show continues.

00:56:30.000 Now, Ozzy Osborne has passed away, and we pay tribute to the crazy trained singer.

00:56:35.000 Actually, I like Ozzy Osborne.

00:56:36.000 I know.

00:56:37.000 Weird, huh?

00:56:38.000 Also, more fallout from Stephen Colbert not being paid $20 million in a couple of years.

00:56:43.000 Remember, in order to watch, you have to be a member.

00:56:44.000 If you're not a member, become a member, use Coach Shapiro.

00:56:47.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 23, 2025

Media LIES About Trump Explode In Their Faces!

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