The Ben Shapiro Show - The Battle Royale Begins: Ron vs. Don

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00:00:08.000 Well, last night, the big news was that there's an interview between Ron DeSantis and Piers Morgan.

00:00:13.000 It is supposed to air on Thursday.

00:00:15.000 There is a sit-down interview between Piers Morgan and DeSantis.

00:00:19.000 It is unclear when exactly this was filmed.

00:00:21.000 And that's a little bit important, simply because DeSantis opens up on some of his critiques of Donald Trump.

00:00:28.000 If this was filmed, for example, after Trump had made clear that he thinks he's going to be arrested this week, and this is a major tactical blunder by DeSantis.

00:00:36.000 It was filmed before he'd sort of understand what he is doing.

00:00:38.000 In any case, we're going to go through the politics of this.

00:00:40.000 Here is what DeSantis actually has to say.

00:00:42.000 So, Piers Morgan asked DeSantis about the fact that Trump has been nicknaming him and calling him Miranda Sanctimonious and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

00:00:48.000 And here was DeSantis' good answer.

00:00:52.000 What is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far?

00:00:54.000 Is it Ron DeSanctimonious or Meatball Ron?

00:00:58.000 Even he went off Meatball Ron.

00:01:01.000 I don't know how to spell DeSanctimonious.

00:01:02.000 I don't really know what it means, but I kind of like it.

00:01:05.000 It's long.

00:01:05.000 It's got a lot of vowels.

00:01:06.000 I mean, so we'll go with that.

00:01:08.000 That's fine.

00:01:09.000 You can call me whatever you want.

00:01:10.000 I mean, just as long as you also call me a winner.

00:01:14.000 And it's that last line that DeSantis is going to run on, that he is, in fact, a winner.

00:01:19.000 And as we'll get to in just a second, when it comes to the politics of the primary, there are really three issues at play.

00:01:22.000 And the first one is, who do you think is more of a winner, DeSantis or Trump?

00:01:25.000 Because I effectively think that at this point, this is a two-man race.

00:01:28.000 He also got into some of his deeper critiques of Trump as president.

00:01:31.000 He said, I also just think in terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda.

00:01:38.000 Which, of course, is correct.

00:01:40.000 I mean, one of the big problems for Trump is that he was constantly staffing around him people who did not share his agenda, including, by the way, Michael Cohen.

00:01:47.000 Michael Cohen was his personal lawyer for years, and it is Michael Cohen's testimony upon which this Manhattan DA is now going to bring this flimsy indictment against Donald Trump.

00:01:55.000 Donald Trump has surrounded himself his entire career with not the best people.

00:01:58.000 As it turns out, he was constantly firing people inside his administration.

00:02:01.000 He had an incredibly leaky administration.

00:02:03.000 He didn't fire all the people in the deep state who were targeting him, for example.

00:02:07.000 And that was one of the things that DeSantis pointed out about, for example, Anthony Fauci.

00:02:11.000 He suggested that it was a mistake for Trump not to fire Anthony Fauci, considering he was the president of the United States, which, of course, is correct.

00:02:19.000 DeSantis said, we really focus on knocking out victories day after day.

00:02:22.000 If I get involved in all the undertow, I would not be able to be an effective governor.

00:02:27.000 He says, you know, with regard to Fauci, he suggested that Fauci probably should have been fired by Trump and that there was really no reason for Trump not to fire him.

00:02:38.000 That his leadership style in Florida was very different by nature, which of course is in fact true.

00:02:45.000 Again, all those critiques are well taken.

00:02:46.000 All those critiques are very real.

00:02:48.000 Unlike the Trump critiques of DeSantis, which are basically calling him fat by calling him Meatball Ron, or suggesting that he is holier than thou with Ron DeSanctimonious, or tweeting out random accusations about him supposedly harassing underage girls or maybe boys, literally a thing that Donald Trump tweeted over the weekend, everything that DeSantis says is substantive.

00:03:05.000 But that's not really the question here.

00:03:07.000 The real question here is a strategic one.

00:03:10.000 Because this primary is going to be about three main issues, I think.

00:03:14.000 The first one, as I mentioned, is who is more of a winner?

00:03:16.000 So here you have the evidence of your eyes and then you have the evidence of your heart.

00:03:20.000 And these two things are going to be in a battle for Republican voters.

00:03:23.000 The evidence of your eyes that Ron DeSantis is more of a winner than Donald Trump, at least over the past four years.

00:03:28.000 Because if you look at the last election cycle, every major Senate candidate that Trump endorsed lost.

00:03:32.000 Hershel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Don Balduck in New Hampshire.

00:03:38.000 All of them lost.

00:03:39.000 A bunch of congressional candidates that Trump liked didn't do particularly well in the last election cycle.

00:03:45.000 And that was following a 2021 election cycle in which Donald Trump was almost solely responsible for the loss of two Georgia Senate seats, which resulted in the biggest spending binge in American history under Joe Biden.

00:03:55.000 Because if Republicans even hold one of those seats, then none of that spending gets passed.

00:04:00.000 So Donald Trump's record since 2016 has been one of unbridled failure in terms of elections.

00:04:05.000 Not in terms of policy, he did a lot of wonderful things as president.

00:04:08.000 But in 2018, he got his clock clean.

00:04:10.000 In 2020, he lost to Biden and Republicans outperformed him along nearly every other line.

00:04:15.000 In 2021, he lost two Georgia Senate seats by single-handedly intervening in those Georgia Senate races.

00:04:19.000 And in 2022, all of his handpicked candidates in a very competitive Senate Run for a Republican Party, lost.

00:04:27.000 So that is a bad record.

00:04:28.000 Meanwhile, DeSantis in 2018 got elected by the thinnest of margins, by 0.4% in the state of Florida, and he turned that into a 20-point victory in Florida, and he picked up congressional seats, and he won a supermajority in the legislature.

00:04:38.000 There was a wave, a red wave, in 2022, but it was relegated to the Sunshine State.

00:04:42.000 That was the only red wave in America was happening in Florida.

00:04:45.000 So in terms of just the pure Evidence of your eyes, when you look at who is more of a winner, at least in the foreseeable past, what you see is that DeSantis is more of a winner.

00:04:55.000 However, that's at war with the battle inside the Republican heart, because there is this myth of Trump that's been built since 2016.

00:05:00.000 And the myth of Trump goes something like this.

00:05:02.000 No one could have beat Hillary Clinton except for Trump.

00:05:05.000 No one.

00:05:06.000 Hillary Clinton was a juggernaut.

00:05:07.000 And Trump came along, came out of nowhere, put down everything he was doing, came down that escalator, faced all the slings and arrows up to and including the p-word tape and all the rest of it.

00:05:18.000 And just kept walking and ended up defeating Hillary Clinton.

00:05:21.000 And it was a miracle.

00:05:22.000 It was a miracle because, again, that relies on another piece of mythos, the 2012 mythos, which is that Democrats were never going to lose another election.

00:05:28.000 After 2012, Democrats bought into the idea that they had created a durable minority-majority coalition, along with college-educated white ladies, and that that coalition would be unbreakable for the rest of time after Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, beating Mitt Romney despite losing something like 3 million votes from 2008 to 2012.

00:05:45.000 Normally that doesn't happen.

00:05:46.000 If you're an incumbent, you usually gain votes.

00:05:48.000 You don't lose votes and still retain the presidency.

00:05:50.000 But that's exactly what Barack Obama did.

00:05:52.000 And so a theory went out from the Democrats that Democrats would never lose again.

00:05:55.000 And that was the theory that a lot of Republicans bought into after 2012 as well.

00:05:58.000 And then along comes Trump and he breaks that myth, right?

00:06:01.000 The myth is now that Donald Trump is a unique character who is able to defeat all the forces of political gravity.

00:06:06.000 They just don't apply to him.

00:06:08.000 They don't apply to him.

00:06:09.000 And when Presented with the evidence of your eyes, right, which is that he lost in 2018, lost in 2020, 2021, 2022.

00:06:15.000 When presented with that evidence, people go with the evidence of their heart very often.

00:06:19.000 They'll say, well, he didn't lose.

00:06:20.000 He didn't lose.

00:06:21.000 You know, all Republican presidents are going to lose the midterms.

00:06:25.000 People usually lose the midterms.

00:06:26.000 And then in 2020, when Trump claims that fraud happened and that he lost fraudulently, a lot of people like, well, he is a miracle man from 2016.

00:06:33.000 So if he lost in 2020, it must have been because the only way you can defeat a miracle man is to cheat.

00:06:37.000 So it must have been that the left cheated.

00:06:39.000 Not by setting the rules differently.

00:06:40.000 I agree.

00:06:41.000 That was a cheat.

00:06:42.000 Not by using the media as the baton.

00:06:44.000 I agree that's a cheat.

00:06:45.000 But by actively changing the nature of vote outcomes in states, as Donald Trump suggested, without evidence that they had.

00:06:52.000 And then refused to give him the presidency along Donald Trump's lines by certifying elections that were illegitimate and all of that kind of stuff.

00:06:59.000 So that's the mythos.

00:07:00.000 It's the head versus the heart when it comes to DeSantis versus Trump in terms of who is more likely to be a winner, which is a big issue in a Republican primary.

00:07:08.000 In a second, we'll get to all the other issues in the Republican primary now that the battle has been joined, apparently, between Trump and DeSantis.

00:07:14.000 First, let's talk about the fact that our economy right now, it sucks.

00:07:17.000 I mean, Joe Biden has done a horrible job.

00:07:20.000 Inflation is still raging at six plus percent.

00:07:22.000 It doesn't seem like it's seriously slowing in terms of many of the key prices in your life.

00:07:27.000 And that's why the Federal Reserve is going to have to raise those interest rates.

00:07:29.000 When that happens, you're going to see the economy tip over into recession.

00:07:32.000 Everybody basically acknowledges this at this point.

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00:08:15.000 Okay, so, question number one for Republican primary voters is going to be who's more of a winner, DeSantis or Trump?

00:08:24.000 As we say, that is a battle of head versus heart.

00:08:26.000 Head, DeSantis.

00:08:27.000 Heart for a lot of Republicans, Trump.

00:08:29.000 Hey, the second question is going to be who will govern better?

00:08:31.000 And this is sort of taking a backseat at this point, because frankly, I don't think that many Republican primary voters even think about governance.

00:08:38.000 But this is a clear win for DeSantis.

00:08:40.000 If you're talking about who is going to govern better, Donald Trump did some good things as president, and he was largely thwarted by his own team or his own inability to actually pull the levers on the system.

00:08:48.000 He was constantly being checked and balanced by people inside his own administration.

00:08:52.000 He was constantly being destroyed from within by people working in the deep state.

00:08:57.000 DeSantis, by contrast, came into the governorship of Florida.

00:09:00.000 He fired everyone who was going to impede his agenda.

00:09:03.000 He stacked the executive branch with people who were loyal to him.

00:09:06.000 And then he proceeded to ram through an extremely conservative agenda.

00:09:09.000 An agenda that was popular, by the way, with the voters of Florida because he's smart and meticulous in how he governs.

00:09:14.000 In terms of who would be, just forget all the other questions.

00:09:17.000 Who would be better at running the executive office of the presidency?

00:09:20.000 I don't think there's any question that DeSantis would be better at that.

00:09:24.000 But that's a secondary issue.

00:09:25.000 The primary issue is going to be who is more of a winner.

00:09:27.000 And that is connected to this tertiary issue, this third issue.

00:09:29.000 And this is the one that's going to be really hard for DeSantis to thread the needle on.

00:09:32.000 And this is why I think it was a tactical blunder for him to do this interview with Morgan, where he actually opened up the guns.

00:09:37.000 And this is why I really, really suspect this interview with Piers Morgan was done before all the chaos of the last weekend.

00:09:42.000 Remember, it's only Wednesday right now.

00:09:44.000 It takes a while in post-production to actually put this stuff together.

00:09:46.000 They're using it as a preview for the interview tomorrow night.

00:09:50.000 So my guess is, again, that this interview with DeSantis was done probably Thursday or Friday before all the chaos of the weekend in which it became clear that Trump is likely going to be indicted sometime this week.

00:09:59.000 That third question, that tertiary question, is the question of loyalty to Trump.

00:10:03.000 So let's just get this straight.

00:10:05.000 If the 2024 primaries are going to be a loyalty test to Trump, Trump wins.

00:10:08.000 I mean, it's just that simple.

00:10:09.000 Because there is no one more loyal to Donald Trump than Donald Trump.

00:10:12.000 I mean, end of story.

00:10:13.000 If the question is, which candidate is going to show the most loyalty to Trump, Trump wins.

00:10:17.000 We played this game in 2016, by the way.

00:10:19.000 You'll recall that Ted Cruz in 2016 basically tried to ride Trump's coattails all the way, never saying a bad word about Donald Trump the entire race, and then hoping that Trump was going to fall over and Ted Cruz was going to take the nomination.

00:10:30.000 And it turns out that that was a horrible strategy because he rode Donald Trump's coattails all the way to second place until Donald Trump turned around and just clocked him directly in the face by calling his wife ugly and his dad the murderer of JFK.

00:10:41.000 And Cruz took it.

00:10:42.000 And then he had to go to the primary, and then he went to the convention.

00:10:45.000 And you'll remember that he tried to have the baby.

00:10:47.000 And listen, I know Ted, I really like Ted.

00:10:48.000 This is a tactical blunder of extreme proportions.

00:10:51.000 Ted said, you'll remember at the RNC convention in 2016, follow your heart, which all the Trump, he thought he was going to split the baby.

00:10:57.000 He thought he was going to be saying to the Trump voters, vote for Trump.

00:11:00.000 And to the not Trump voters, don't vote for Trump.

00:11:01.000 And everybody took it the opposite way.

00:11:03.000 All the not Trump voters were like, oh, we can see what you're doing.

00:11:05.000 You kind of want us to vote for Trump.

00:11:06.000 And all the Trump voters were like, you want us not to vote for Trump.

00:11:08.000 So he ended up with no friends, right?

00:11:09.000 You can't play that game.

00:11:11.000 If the game is loyalty to Trump, no one beats Trump.

00:11:13.000 End of story.

00:11:14.000 Done.

00:11:14.000 The primaries are already over.

00:11:16.000 I don't think it's quite about that.

00:11:17.000 I don't think the primaries are quite over.

00:11:20.000 I think that the Republican feeling about Trump is not that you can't criticize Trump.

00:11:25.000 I think the Republican feeling about Trump is generally you cannot give ammunition to people who spend their lives criticizing Trump.

00:11:32.000 You cannot give the left the fodder to go after a fellow Republican.

00:11:37.000 Now, the hard part of this for other Republican candidates is Trump does this all day long to them.

00:11:41.000 Trump does not abide by this rule.

00:11:43.000 Trump is undeterred by Reagan's 11th commandment.

00:11:46.000 He spends all day, every day attacking other Republicans.

00:11:49.000 It's been true since the beginning of his 2015 presidential run when he attacked John McCain.

00:11:53.000 He's been doing this the entire time.

00:11:54.000 It's a great success.

00:11:56.000 Because he's operating essentially as a rogue political actor.

00:11:59.000 He expects everybody else in the Republican Party never to say a bad word about him.

00:12:03.000 Like literally any bad word about him.

00:12:05.000 Which a lot of his supporters make it appear that he has a glass jaw this way.

00:12:08.000 Because if you say the mildest word of reproach about Trump, a lot of people get very, very angry very, very quickly.

00:12:14.000 Hey, but Trump can say whatever he wants about other candidates.

00:12:16.000 He can attack candidates' wives.

00:12:18.000 He can suggest that Ron DeSantis is grooming young girls and or is gay.

00:12:21.000 He can do whatever he wants, Donald Trump.

00:12:23.000 And there's no expectation of good behavior from Trump.

00:12:25.000 And there's kind of a soft bigotry of low expectations for Trump because Trump is being Trump and Trump gets to be Trump and no one else gets to be Trump.

00:12:31.000 OK, fine.

00:12:32.000 What this means, though, is that if you are going to critique Trump, I think that first of all, I think most Trump supporters are OK with hearing critiques of Trump.

00:12:39.000 If they hadn't been, they wouldn't listen to this program.

00:12:41.000 I try to be honest about my critiques of Donald Trump.

00:12:43.000 I have been all the way along.

00:12:45.000 With that said, I think that what people really don't want is for you to give fodder to the other side.

00:12:50.000 If we are in a binary political situation in which reactionary politics is the order of the day, and in which attacks on Trump are expected to be met with fury by virtually all Republicans, if you don't show the proper anger at the attackers, not in defense of Trump, but at the attackers, then people are going to start to get angry.

00:13:06.000 And so as a tactical blunder in the middle of what appears to be just a frivolous and empty indictment by a Manhattan DA against Trump, For there to be an interview with DeSantis in which he criticizes Trump at the same time.

00:13:18.000 Now, again, that's a really tough needle to thread because the media is always attacking Trump.

00:13:22.000 The media, they're always looking to facilitate conflict between Trump and other candidates.

00:13:26.000 They're always looking to find whatever brick they can throw at Trump.

00:13:29.000 And so if the rule is I can't say anything that the media are going to use against Trump, you literally can never say anything about Trump ever because the media will use anything they can get their hands on to attack Trump for a couple of purposes.

00:13:39.000 One, they like to elevate Trump.

00:13:40.000 It's great for their ratings.

00:13:41.000 And two, they like to elevate Trump because they think he's more beatable than DeSantis.

00:13:45.000 If you ask in the halls of media, I know a lot of people in the legacy media, I can tell you, they all are more scared of Ron DeSantis winning than of Donald Trump.

00:13:51.000 They believe, and I think the data back them, that if Trump runs against Biden, there's a very solid shot that Trump loses to Biden.

00:13:58.000 The reason being that in 2020, he lost by 7 million popular votes to Joe Biden, and it's hard to imagine that even a malicious targeting of Donald Trump is going to switch a lot of independence over to Trump.

00:14:07.000 You're not going to see a lot of people who voted against Trump who are like, well, now that he's being indicted on campaign finance charges frivolously, I guess I'm going to vote for him.

00:14:14.000 And who are those voters?

00:14:15.000 I'm not sure they exist.

00:14:17.000 It's going to get Republicans very passionate to go to the polls.

00:14:19.000 Get it.

00:14:19.000 I'm in.

00:14:20.000 But is it going to get independents?

00:14:22.000 Suburban women?

00:14:23.000 Are suburban women who didn't vote for Trump by droves in the last election going to turn around and be like, well, I mean, he did pay off a porn star and that was and now he's being maliciously targeted by a prosecutor for all of that.

00:14:35.000 You know, I probably am going to vote for him.

00:14:36.000 Who are those people?

00:14:38.000 But again, that's a very difficult needle to thread because in the era of reactionary politics, any criticism of Trump is going to be used by the media.

00:14:50.000 And so this means it's very hard for a Republican candidate to give a good criticism of Trump.

00:14:54.000 And that means that timing matters a lot.

00:14:56.000 And so the timing that you saw right here, I agree with all the critiques that DeSantis is making of Trump.

00:15:01.000 I think that he did a terrible job in terms of who he hired and who he fired inside the executive branch.

00:15:05.000 I think he should have cleaned out the deep state right away.

00:15:07.000 I think that Donald Trump's governance on COVID was a mess, frankly.

00:15:12.000 And I think it hurt him pretty bad in 2020.

00:15:13.000 It was Donald Trump who was criticizing Brian Kemp for opening up Georgia and criticizing Ron DeSantis for opening up the beaches.

00:15:20.000 It was Donald Trump who was following Anthony Fauci and all the rest.

00:15:23.000 OK, so that was a mess.

00:15:25.000 And so DeSantis' critiques of Trump along those lines are well taken.

00:15:27.000 But the question is when you give the critiques, when is the time to do that?

00:15:31.000 How do you do that?

00:15:32.000 That is a real tactical question.

00:15:33.000 Because again, if the three questions of the primary are one, who's more of a winner?

00:15:37.000 We don't know, right?

00:15:38.000 I would say DeSantis.

00:15:38.000 Many people would say Trump.

00:15:40.000 Two, who will govern better?

00:15:41.000 I think that's a clear DeSantis win, but a secondary issue.

00:15:43.000 And three, are you going to give fodder to people who attack Republicans?

00:15:48.000 And that rule does not apply to Trump.

00:15:49.000 That imbalance is the hardest thing for any other Republican to navigate.

00:15:52.000 There are no rules for Trump.

00:15:53.000 Trump gets to do whatever he wants.

00:15:55.000 And if you're another Republican candidate, you are expected by the Republican base to kind of Attack Trump in Marcus of Queensberry fashion so that you don't give ammo to the people who hate Trump.

00:16:07.000 That's a very difficult needle to thread.

00:16:10.000 In just a second, we'll get to that frivolous indictment of Donald Trump because it is indeed quite frivolous.

00:16:14.000 It looks like the indictment may in fact come down today.

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00:17:19.000 Okay, so the Trump indictment is expected to come down probably sometime today.

00:17:24.000 According to the UK Daily Mail, Trump will likely be indicted on Wednesday.

00:17:28.000 He wouldn't appear before a judge in New York until next week.

00:17:31.000 Now again, on a political level, very good for Donald Trump because the more Trump is attacked, as I've said for years, he's like the doomsday monster.

00:17:37.000 The more electricity is sent his way, the more he ingests the electricity and grows.

00:17:42.000 So the more he is attacked, the more everybody else in the Republican field is expected to recede and sort of grant him the limelight.

00:17:47.000 And there is a feeling of, you know, my friend Jeremy Boring and I, we have we have another friend, Alan Estrin, who is a producer on Dennis Prager's program.

00:17:56.000 And Alan has said that he believes that Trump will likely win the nomination because this is Donald Trump's story and we're all just living in it.

00:18:01.000 And it does tend to feel like that a lot.

00:18:03.000 It feels like the black hole of political gravity In the universe right now is Trump.

00:18:10.000 And so everything revolves around Trump.

00:18:11.000 So when he gets indicted, all the attention snaps right back to Trump, like right away.

00:18:15.000 And so for him on a political level, that's a very good thing because all the Republicans come to his defense.

00:18:19.000 And if you are not sufficiently, if you're not sufficiently angry, or if you are, if you're not If you level any critique of Trump at this time, then you will be looked at askance by many members.

00:18:28.000 I get it.

00:18:29.000 Listen, I totally get it because when the guy's under attack, you don't want to be attacking him.

00:18:32.000 Totally understand.

00:18:33.000 OK, anyway, Trump is currently in Florida.

00:18:36.000 He's expected to be formally charged tomorrow, after which the Manhattan District Attorney's Office will reach out to Trump and his Secret Service detail to make arrangements for his surrender, according to the insider.

00:18:44.000 So all of that talk, by the way, about how Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, is supposed to stand in the way of an extradition, that was never an issue, as I mentioned yesterday on the show.

00:18:50.000 Number one, doesn't have the constitutional power to actually stop an extradition.

00:18:53.000 Two, Trump's people aren't requesting that he stop the extradition.

00:18:58.000 They want to go to New York and they want to do this quietly and they want to do this in the most legal possible fashion because the last thing that they want is the chaotic scene of some federal agent running into Mar-a-Lago and frog marching Donald Trump out in handcuffs after he loses some sort of extradition hearing.

00:19:12.000 They don't want that.

00:19:13.000 They want this to be done in sort of the most In sort of the nicest way.

00:19:18.000 They don't want a lot of pictures.

00:19:19.000 Like yesterday on Twitter, there are a lot of fake pictures of Donald Trump being arrested, resisting arrest.

00:19:23.000 Like that's what the resistance wants.

00:19:24.000 That's what the left wants.

00:19:25.000 That's what Trump does not want to give them.

00:19:27.000 So the New York Police Department, Metro Police Department, apparently, they're all expected to be in uniform as of Wednesday, ready for anything in the wake of a potential indictment.

00:19:36.000 An NYPD internal memo obtained by CNN shows officers are to be in uniform and prepared for deployment as of yesterday.

00:19:42.000 So presumably, they'll be getting ready all this week.

00:19:47.000 What happens next?

00:19:48.000 Well, we'll get into the actual rundown on the potential Trump indictment in just one second.

00:19:51.000 First, the people who watch the show, we like to prepare for the future.

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00:20:56.000 Ready?

00:20:57.000 How's this indictment actually going to go down?

00:21:00.000 Politico has a pretty good rundown on this.

00:21:04.000 Basically, the idea is that the grand jury is going to vote.

00:21:08.000 All that is required is 12 out of 23 people to vote yes on an indictment.

00:21:13.000 So that's very likely to happen.

00:21:15.000 I mean, you're in New York.

00:21:16.000 The chances you can't find 12 New Yorkers to vote to indict a paper bag, really, really low.

00:21:21.000 If that happens, the vote will be recorded on a form and signed and taken by someone from the DA's office to either the clerk's office or to the office of the judge.

00:21:26.000 It'll be then placed in an envelope, sealed and stamped by the clerk.

00:21:29.000 Once the indictment is stamped, the DA's office will notify an attorney for Trump he has been indicted.

00:21:33.000 At that point, Trump is free to make that information public.

00:21:36.000 So the grand total delay between the grand jury voting and Trump revealing how they voted on Truth Social, That's gonna be like, I don't know, 13.2 seconds.

00:21:45.000 And we're gonna know real fast when Trump is indicted.

00:21:48.000 Because this case happens to be white collar and it's not like a violent crime or something, the DA's office will then ask Trump's attorney when he plans to come to New York to be arraigned.

00:21:55.000 The law does not require the defendant to turn himself in within a specific time frame, so there is some negotiation that could happen.

00:22:01.000 Whenever he comes to New York, he and his attorney will report to the DA's office where Trump will be arrested and booked.

00:22:06.000 That means that he will be fingerprinted.

00:22:07.000 He'll have his mug shot taken.

00:22:08.000 He might also get a DNA swab.

00:22:10.000 It's unclear exactly how Secret Service protection is going to affect all of this.

00:22:12.000 He then is taken to a judge.

00:22:14.000 The DA's office will ask for the indictment to be unsealed.

00:22:16.000 It's possible he would be handcuffed when he's transported from the DA's attorney office to court.

00:22:20.000 It is a short walk away within the same building, but presumably there will be photographers on hand and all the people on the left get their jollies that day because there's a picture of Trump in handcuffs.

00:22:27.000 At this point, he's arraigned.

00:22:28.000 That means he has to answer a plea of guilty or not guilty, and then he will be released because the charges that he is likely to face are non-bailable.

00:22:34.000 So all of those weird dreams that the left was having about, they're going to deny him bail.

00:22:37.000 They're going to keep him in jail.

00:22:39.000 No, that's not going to happen.

00:22:40.000 And he'll be released just like Steve Bannon was released like these people are not held.

00:22:43.000 It's a white collar crime that's being alleged.

00:22:45.000 It's a weak white collar crime at that.

00:22:48.000 Naturally, you can see that the sort of more passionate members of the resistance are very, very excited.

00:22:53.000 That would include, of course, Stormy Daniels, who seems more excited about the prospect of Donald Trump going to jail than she was allegedly to have sex with him.

00:23:02.000 So that, according to Stormy Daniels, didn't stop her, by the way.

00:23:06.000 This, according to her, she said, had so many orders come in today.

00:23:09.000 Thank you for the support.

00:23:10.000 I'm not even mad about having to go to the post office twice.

00:23:12.000 Only 24 more hours left to get this free gift.

00:23:15.000 The order is porn with her in it.

00:23:15.000 With your order.

00:23:19.000 So, only the classiest names.

00:23:21.000 Only the classiest names for the president.

00:23:23.000 So, Tiny paid me to frame himself?

00:23:26.000 You sound even dumber than he does during his illiterate ramblings.

00:23:28.000 I won't walk, I'll dance down the street when he is selected to go to jail.

00:23:33.000 Um, yeah.

00:23:35.000 Talk about a lady who's just, I mean, she's making a bank off that.

00:23:38.000 Not the way she thought she was.

00:23:39.000 She never made it on The Apprentice, but she's doing well.

00:23:41.000 Wow, it's a beautiful morning, she tweeted out.

00:23:42.000 It's always been my dream to sip coffee on my farm porch and watch my gorgeous horse graze.

00:23:46.000 Anything exciting going on today?

00:23:47.000 It's just so obnoxious.

00:23:48.000 It's so obnoxious.

00:23:49.000 Again, you know what would have prevented all this?

00:23:51.000 If the president in 2006 had not been allegedly having sex with Stormy Daniels at a weird golf event.

00:23:59.000 Or with Karen McDoodle or with any of these other folks.

00:24:01.000 But, you know, again, that does not mean that what's happening to Trump is fair, because it isn't.

00:24:08.000 Trump's lawyer for his party says this will be an all out war.

00:24:11.000 If he's indicted, things could get really hairy really quickly.

00:24:14.000 Here is Donald Trump's lawyer.

00:24:16.000 Theoretically speaking, though, if there's an indictment, if there's an arrest warrant, would you ask to have it done, you know, virtually?

00:24:24.000 And what do you expect?

00:24:26.000 What does that process look like?

00:24:28.000 They do what they want.

00:24:29.000 At that point, this is an all-out war.

00:24:31.000 An all-out war.

00:24:33.000 Donald Trump is the toughest human being I've ever met.

00:24:35.000 Most people are going to crumble under allegations like this and with the pressure he's under from political opponents weaponizing the justice system.

00:24:43.000 Donald Trump is not going to ask for anything from them.

00:24:47.000 Okay, so that's Joe Tacopina with Kimberly Guilfoyle, who of course is married to Donald Trump Jr.

00:24:52.000 So, what happens next?

00:24:54.000 I mean, nothing great.

00:24:55.000 Nothing great for the country.

00:24:56.000 That's why this indictment is a really bad idea.

00:24:58.000 And this is why I give some credit to CNN's Van Jones.

00:25:00.000 So, Van Jones and I disagree on pretty much everything.

00:25:03.000 I happen to know Van.

00:25:03.000 I think that he's a very nice person.

00:25:05.000 And he was like, yeah, this is a terrible idea.

00:25:08.000 Like, let's stand down on this.

00:25:10.000 He happens to be correct for the good of the country.

00:25:12.000 He happens to be correct.

00:25:13.000 There are not enough people on the left who actually care about the good of the country to recognize that this is correct.

00:25:17.000 You know, I was thinking the other day about the 2020 election.

00:25:20.000 You'll recall that Bernie Sanders, during the primaries, was in the early going up against Joe Biden.

00:25:24.000 And a lot of people on the right side of the aisle were like, yeah, we should back Bernie because Bernie is more likely to lose to Trump.

00:25:29.000 And I said at the time, I would much rather have Joe Biden as the nominee.

00:25:32.000 I didn't realize how crazy Joe Biden was going to be.

00:25:34.000 But even Joe Biden is not as crazy as Bernie.

00:25:36.000 Bernie's a full on Jeremy Corbyn, Noam Chomsky nutcase.

00:25:40.000 I said I'd rather have Joe Biden with what I said was a 40 to 45 percent shot at victory than Bernie Sanders with a 35 percent shot at victory because Bernie is more dangerous to the country than Biden.

00:25:51.000 That was not underestimating the danger of Biden.

00:25:53.000 That was saying the danger of Bernie was far greater.

00:25:55.000 These are decisions that you have to make in politics.

00:25:57.000 Credit to Van Jones here who's saying like, listen, you think Van Jones doesn't want Trump to go to jail?

00:26:01.000 I'm sure he does.

00:26:02.000 But Van Jones is like, this is a very bad idea, guys.

00:26:06.000 The Trump camp has said that Bragg is, quote, racist.

00:26:10.000 They have called this un-American.

00:26:11.000 I want to get your reaction to that.

00:26:13.000 Well, that's not fair.

00:26:14.000 I mean, listen, you can disagree with his decision to charge or to not charge, and people will disagree no matter what he does.

00:26:20.000 But the idea that he's a racist, frankly, there's a lot of white progressive voters in New York City that have been pushing him to do this.

00:26:27.000 Are they racist as well?

00:26:29.000 I just think that the reality is he's got to make a sober decision now.

00:26:34.000 I agree with David.

00:26:36.000 A charge like this, a porn star payoff seven years ago, somehow tied to the election but not really, it doesn't seem like the right way to go when you look at the history.

00:26:47.000 It's not going to judge Donald Trump based on Stormy Daniels.

00:26:52.000 That is correct.

00:26:53.000 Man Jones is totally correct.

00:26:54.000 So good for him for at least recognizing the reality of all that.

00:26:57.000 Meanwhile, Alvin Bragg is posturing as you would expect him to.

00:27:00.000 So the House of Representatives has said that they would like to investigate Alan Bragg over his decision to indict Donald Trump, saying like, this thing was dead.

00:27:06.000 Where is this coming from?

00:27:08.000 And this led Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, who has not prosecuted pretty much any crime in the city of New York.

00:27:15.000 Short of murder, apparently.

00:27:17.000 Again, the reactionary nature of our politics is really bad for the country.

00:27:26.000 It's really ugly.

00:27:27.000 This idea that anybody who indicts Trump must be just glorious or that Trump's indictment means that Trump himself is spotless on every count.

00:27:35.000 And the lack of nuance is really quite striking.

00:27:39.000 But you know who gains from all of this?

00:27:40.000 The person who's actually gaining.

00:27:41.000 So there's a lot of talk about Trump gaining in the primaries.

00:27:43.000 That's true.

00:27:43.000 I mean, look at the polling data.

00:27:44.000 Trump is doing much better in the primaries than he was even a couple of months ago because whenever Trump is perceived by the Republican base as being the target and victim, people rush to his defense.

00:27:52.000 Understandably.

00:27:54.000 But the person who's actually thriving right now, if you look at the polling data, is one Joseph R. Biden, who is an incompetent, drooling old fool.

00:28:02.000 Joe Biden has been terrible on every aspect of his administration, from the transing of the children, to the equity agenda injected to every aspect of his administration, to a foreign policy that has now solidified the alliance between Russia and China, and given China a green light in the Middle East.

00:28:17.000 To undermining the Abraham Accords, to the pullout from Afghanistan, to a cratering economy with bank failures.

00:28:23.000 This guy has been a failure.

00:28:24.000 He is the reverse Midas of politics.

00:28:26.000 Everything he touches is just crap.

00:28:28.000 It just turns to crap.

00:28:30.000 But it doesn't matter.

00:28:31.000 He's gaining right now because the more attention is on the Republicans, the more people are like, well, well, I mean, he is dead.

00:28:37.000 There is that like the drawback of Joe Biden being a corpse actually becomes the benefit.

00:28:42.000 It's the same thing as 2020.

00:28:43.000 In 2020, the idea was there's so much chaos over here.

00:28:46.000 And then over here is a corpse.

00:28:47.000 Over here is a walking corpse.

00:28:48.000 Who do you want, the walking corpse or the chaos?

00:28:50.000 And a lot of Americans are like, oh, maybe we'll take the walking corpse because after all, he is dead.

00:28:55.000 What kind of damage can you do now?

00:28:56.000 Now we know what kind of damage he can do.

00:28:58.000 But the problem is he's still dead.

00:28:59.000 And so he doesn't appear threatening.

00:29:00.000 He doesn't appear chaotic.

00:29:01.000 Corpses are not chaotic.

00:29:03.000 He could be moldering and putrefying and he could be spreading disease everywhere because of all of that.

00:29:08.000 But that doesn't matter.

00:29:08.000 He still looks like he's dead and it doesn't feel chaotic, even if it is chaotic and even if it is terrible.

00:29:13.000 And if you look at Joe Biden's job approval right now, his job approval is at 46 percent.

00:29:18.000 His negative job approval is at 49%.

00:29:20.000 That is a slow and steady gain for Joe Biden.

00:29:23.000 These are some of the best ratings that he has had in terms of his approval and disapproval since probably March of 2022.

00:29:31.000 And not just that, if you look at the polls in terms of presidential matchups, right now, he stands to, according to the polls, defeat all Republican comers, according to Morning Consult.

00:29:40.000 The same poll that has Trump up on DeSantis, like 54 to 26 in the Republican primaries, Also shows Joe Biden with a three-point percentage lead over Trump and a two-point lead over DeSantis.

00:29:51.000 Now, it is true, obviously, there's more upside for DeSantis than for Trump.

00:29:53.000 Trump has a ceiling.

00:29:55.000 But it doesn't matter.

00:29:55.000 Joe Biden, anybody who believes that Joe Biden is easy to beat just because he stinks at his job, has not been watching politics lately.

00:30:01.000 Stinking at your job is obviously not a prereq to winning, to losing an election.

00:30:06.000 If you stink at your job, you can very easily retain your slot in politics.

00:30:09.000 People tend to fail up in politics, which is why Kamala Harris is the Vice President of the United States.

00:30:13.000 We'll get to Joe Biden in just one moment, because just every day is Joe Biden battling with the English language.

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00:31:15.000 That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro.

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00:32:37.000 So Joe Biden is doing better in the polls because anytime the focus is on Republicans, he does better in the polls.

00:32:42.000 Let us not forget that Joe Biden is a terrible president.

00:32:44.000 Terrible.

00:32:45.000 Now again, his sort of actual drawback as president, which is that he is dead, masks for another much more serious drawback, which is that he is radical.

00:32:53.000 There's a lot of focus on the fact that he's dead.

00:32:54.000 So yesterday, for example, he was out there abachin' the poetry.

00:32:57.000 I mean, first of all, this is not the person who you would choose to read you poetry.

00:33:02.000 And it's time for our latest episode of Fight Night, Joe Biden versus the teleprompter.

00:33:05.000 Let's do this thing!

00:33:06.000 Fight!

00:33:10.000 True international suffrage oppression!

00:33:11.000 Engineer, poet, Cuban-American.

00:33:15.000 Richard Blanco returned to a poem he wrote from the second inaugural Barack in Maine, a poem won today.

00:33:23.000 It says, and always one moon like a silent drum tapping at every rooftop and every window of every country.

00:33:35.000 Let me start this over again.

00:33:38.000 I'm getting so intimidated by it.

00:33:42.000 And always one moon like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop and every window of one country, county, county.

00:33:52.000 All of us facing the stars.

00:33:54.000 Hope, a new constellation waiting for us to map it, waiting for us to name it together.

00:34:01.000 Joe Biden reads poetry is maybe the worst show on television.

00:34:05.000 That is quite terrible.

00:34:06.000 I'm on a rooftop in the drowning of this baby seal.

00:34:11.000 Let me start over.

00:34:12.000 I'm just so intimidated by the Buddha.

00:34:16.000 Yeah, he's terrible at his job.

00:34:18.000 Also, he's a liar.

00:34:19.000 Joe Biden was asked about the fact that his son Hunter was picking up bags of cash pretty much everywhere and that other members of his family were benefiting from Hunter's bags of cash.

00:34:28.000 And he's like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:34:30.000 No one's ever.

00:34:30.000 No, I am clean as the driven snow, said the man from Credit Card County, Delaware.

00:34:36.000 Any reaction to House GOP's memo about your family dealing, sir?

00:34:40.000 Any reaction to House GOP's new memo about your family dealing, sir?

00:34:47.000 Yes, you're revealing that Hunter Biden's business associates sent over a million dollars to three of your family members.

00:34:55.000 Any reaction to that report?

00:34:58.000 No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:35:00.000 And he starts slowly backing away into the bush like Homer Simpson.

00:35:03.000 Meanwhile, his non-radical administration is getting ever more radical.

00:35:07.000 Karine Jean-Pierre, world's worst press secretary yesterday, she was asked a question about whether the Biden administration backs slavery reparations. I'd love to see them embrace this position in a general election. Here's Karine Jean-Pierre, this time not flanked by the members of the Ted Lasso cast who are significantly more serious as humans than she is.

00:35:21.000 What does this administration stand on reparations for slavery and segregation and similar historic wrongs specifically pertaining to black Americans?

00:35:35.000 So look, we understand that there's a legislation on the Hill currently on this, on the study of represent reparations, pardon me. And we think Congress is the, the appropriate venue for consideration, consideration on such action. And so we're going to leave it there for Congress to decide to let them go through their process.

00:35:55.000 So that's not a no on the slavery reparations.

00:35:57.000 Meanwhile, the head of the Health and Human Services Department, Xavier Becerra, he brags about how the Health and Human Services Department has now opened, I kid you not, in an office of environmental justice.

00:36:07.000 Now, I thought that he was the Health and Human Services Secretary, but now we have environmental justice.

00:36:12.000 It's all one big mishmash, meaning bigger government and more control of your life.

00:36:16.000 We know that lived experience is priceless in letting you connect with and encourage people to participate.

00:36:22.000 And so we're not going to wait for folks to come and say, I'd like to participate in your clinical trial for diabetes or for cancer.

00:36:31.000 We're going to go where you are to find out how we can be helpful.

00:36:36.000 I could go on and on.

00:36:38.000 We established a climate change and health equity office at the Department of Health and Human Services, not the EPA, at HHS.

00:36:46.000 We established an environmental justice office Not in the Department of Justice, but in HHS.

00:36:53.000 Because we know that the folks who are hit first and worst when it comes to climate degradation are in the minority communities, are in the low-income communities.

00:37:02.000 Climate equity, McEnvironment, it's all the same thing, right?

00:37:04.000 This is a very, very radical administration.

00:37:06.000 Also, it's a wildly incompetent administration.

00:37:08.000 So the biggest unnoticed story yesterday, it was noticed a little bit, people don't care about foreign policy, is the continued cementing of the relationship between Russia and China.

00:37:17.000 According to the Washington Post, Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping on Tuesday proclaimed their plans to deepen Sino-Russian political and economic cooperation for years to come, sending a strong message to the West about their determination to push back against the global domination of the United States.

00:37:29.000 One of the basic ideas of pushing back against Russia and Ukraine was the idea that it would warn China off of a close relationship with Russia.

00:37:36.000 Apparently, China has faith that whatever sort of strictness we are using with Russia will not apply to China.

00:37:43.000 As the leaders wrapped up two days of formal discussions in Moscow, there was no visible progress on China's ceasefire plan for Ukraine.

00:37:48.000 At an ornate meeting room in the Kremlin, Xi described his visit as a new chapter in strengthening relations between Beijing and Moscow.

00:37:56.000 Xi on Tuesday invited Putin to visit China this year, signaling the most assertive joint stand against the West was just getting started.

00:38:03.000 So this is all joined with the fact that the Middle East is now being surrendered to Chinese leadership.

00:38:08.000 As you'll recall, just last week, the Saudis and the Iranians signed some sort of deal brokered by China.

00:38:13.000 And that was almost solely due to the fact that the Americans decided they were going to alienate Saudi Arabia, allowing China to open up a rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

00:38:22.000 And then Joe Biden is on the sidelines cheering it.

00:38:24.000 So at the same exact time that Joe Biden is saying, Russia's really bad, and China shouldn't be helping him out.

00:38:29.000 He's like, well, China should also be helping out with peace in the Middle East.

00:38:34.000 This is perfect Barack Obama lead from behind garbage.

00:38:37.000 Barack Obama did the exact same thing, you will recall.

00:38:40.000 Barack Obama, it was 2014.

00:38:41.000 And you'll recall that Russia actually invaded Crimea in 2014.

00:38:46.000 And Barack Obama was president.

00:38:48.000 And while he was saying it was really terrible for Russia to be doing that, he was also ceding territory in Syria to Russia so that they could lead the charge in the Middle East.

00:38:55.000 This is pure Obama leading from behind garbage.

00:38:57.000 It has real ramifications for literally hundreds of millions of people around the world, including Americans.

00:39:01.000 But we are told by this administration that Joe Biden is actually an expert on this sort of stuff.

00:39:05.000 John Kirby Who is the national security spokesperson for the president.

00:39:09.000 He says that Joe Biden has a great feel on foreign policy.

00:39:12.000 He was mixing up Joe Biden's feel on foreign policy with feeling up the heads of small children.

00:39:17.000 But here we go.

00:39:19.000 His fine feel and touch, particularly on issues of foreign policy and national security, is very, very distinct.

00:39:27.000 And he asks great questions.

00:39:29.000 There's not a single engagement that I've ever had with him where he wasn't pushing and pressing and wanting more detail and wanting a deeper level of context.

00:39:38.000 He thinks these things through carefully.

00:39:40.000 And I can tell you, this I know for sure, certainly, because of my job at the Pentagon, too, before I came here.

00:39:46.000 That when it comes to putting America's men and women in uniform in harm's way, you won't find another commander in chief who thinks more carefully, deliberately, and consciously about that than President Biden.

00:39:59.000 Well, I mean, except for, you know, the 13 American service members who were murdered at the end of his Afghanistan pullout and the hundreds of Americans who were left behind and all of that.

00:40:06.000 Sure.

00:40:07.000 It's been going great under Joe Biden.

00:40:09.000 You know, one of the reasons it's been going so great, according to John Kirby, is because of our foreign policy priorities.

00:40:13.000 Now, you might think that America's foreign policy priorities are things like America's national interests.

00:40:17.000 What's good for Americans?

00:40:19.000 Securing global supply chains, for example, or pushing back against the predations of America's enemies, China and Russia, for example.

00:40:27.000 You might think that those would be actual priorities, but John Kirby is here to tell you that one of the top priorities is making sure that you can trans the kids in, like, Romania.

00:40:34.000 It's very, very important that LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign rights be advanced everywhere around the globe.

00:40:40.000 Now, I noticed that he's not saying that so much about, like, China.

00:40:43.000 And I noticed that he is not saying that so much about, like, the Middle East.

00:40:47.000 Like, while he's attempting a rapprochement with Iran, I've noticed that he's pretty selective in where he thinks LGBTQI-, like, how's it going in Afghanistan for the LGBTQs?

00:40:55.000 Going great over there, is it?

00:40:56.000 But apparently this is like the elite, this is the thing that the administration cares about.

00:41:00.000 When it comes to foreign policy, the thing that matters more than anything is not the American interest.

00:41:04.000 It is that we make sure that every person can live their best selves as the member of the opposite sex and or shtup, whomever they please.

00:41:12.000 This is not, I'm sorry, this is not an American foreign policy interest.

00:41:15.000 It just isn't.

00:41:16.000 You can say that you think that America, that people all over the world should have more sexual freedom.

00:41:21.000 That may be your moral priority.

00:41:22.000 That has nothing to do with America's generalized foreign policy interests, which have to do with America's national security, which have to do with America's economic growth.

00:41:33.000 Those are the foreign policy priorities of the United States.

00:41:36.000 Not flying the Pride progress flag outside the Vatican.

00:41:39.000 But here's John Kirby.

00:41:40.000 Here we go.

00:41:41.000 President Biden has been nothing but consistent about his uh... belief foundational belief in human rights and lgbtq plus rights are human rights uh... and uh... we again back to the earlier question never gonna shy away be bashful about speaking up for those rights and for uh... for individuals to live as they deem fit as they want to live that's something that's a core part of our foreign policy and it will remain so

00:42:10.000 By the way, good luck with wooing countries that do not agree with that as a matter of morality.

00:42:17.000 Seriously, you're trying to build alliances with various countries around the world that don't happen to share the Western European morality that suggests that sexual self-determination is the core of who we are.

00:42:27.000 And your pressing matter is going, wait, you know, the Prime Minister of Pakistan be like, guys, we really need to work on your queer outreach.

00:42:34.000 No, I'm sorry, that by no measure is that at the tip of the spear of the American foreign policy interest.

00:42:40.000 But remember, Joe Biden is amazing at this.

00:42:43.000 All of these issues should be at the core of any presidential conversation come 2024.

00:42:48.000 The question is whether Republicans are going to choose to put that stuff at the core.

00:42:51.000 Are they going to choose to put financial issues at the core?

00:42:53.000 All of these issues are on the table for Joe Biden.

00:42:56.000 Or at least they should be if the focus were on the current president, who is garbage at his job.

00:43:00.000 Speaking of finances and the Biden administration's handling, if you think that the financial crisis is anywhere close to over, wrong you are.

00:43:07.000 Your first indicator is when Janet Yellen is telling you everything is great.

00:43:11.000 There apparently is a site online that is called Reverse Jim Cramer.

00:43:15.000 And the basic idea is that Inverse Jim Cramer, it's an ETF, and it lets you actively bet against Jim Cramer of CNBC's picks.

00:43:24.000 And apparently it does, like, amazing business.

00:43:26.000 If you just do the precise opposite of Jim Cramer's picks, you apparently do, like, great.

00:43:34.000 And the same thing is true of Jenny Ellen.

00:43:35.000 When Jenny Ellen makes a prediction, you can guarantee that within six months she will be reversing that prediction.

00:43:39.000 So now she says the financial system remains sound.

00:43:41.000 Alrighty.

00:43:42.000 We announced a new facility to provide additional liquidity to the banking system.

00:43:49.000 The Fed's new lending facility, the Bank Term Funding Program, is designed to help banks meet the needs of all of their depositors.

00:44:02.000 The situation is stabilizing, and the U.S.

00:44:05.000 banking system remains sound.

00:44:10.000 Well, I mean, that's weird because you said in the same press conference that we might need additional banking resources and rescues in order to, you know, fill in gaps.

00:44:20.000 So it doesn't sound all that sound, actually.

00:44:23.000 We work with the Federal Reserve and FDIC to protect all depositors in the resolutions of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

00:44:35.000 The steps we took were not focused on aiding specific banks or classes of banks.

00:44:43.000 Our intervention was necessary to protect the broader U.S.

00:44:47.000 banking system.

00:44:50.000 And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffered deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion.

00:45:05.000 That's odd.

00:45:06.000 You say there's further risk of contagion and you're going to stop it?

00:45:08.000 Well, I thought that the risk was over.

00:45:10.000 So lawmakers are apparently now attempting to raise the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's bank deposits backing.

00:45:16.000 Some members of Congress apparently are looking for ways to boost the $250,000 cap, which of course completely destroys all risk assessment for these banks.

00:45:24.000 When you keep filling in the depositors, what you are essentially doing is you are saying to bank managers that they can promise any level of return whatsoever to the depositors.

00:45:31.000 And no matter what happens, the FDIC is there to bail them out.

00:45:35.000 And that's going to be a problem.

00:45:35.000 You know what else is going to be a problem?

00:45:37.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, strains in the banking sector are roiling a roughly $8 trillion bond market, considered almost as safe as U.S.

00:45:43.000 government bonds.

00:45:44.000 So-called agency mortgage bonds are widely held by banks, insurers, and bond funds because they're backed by mortgage loans from government-owned lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

00:45:51.000 The bonds are far less likely to default than most debt.

00:45:53.000 They're easy to buy and sell quickly.

00:45:54.000 That is a crucial reason they were SVB's biggest investment before it foundered.

00:45:58.000 Agency mortgage-backed securities, like all long-term bonds, are vulnerable to rising interest rates, which pushed their prices down last year and saddled banks like SVB with unrealized losses.

00:46:07.000 Now that the FDIC has taken over SVB, investors expect the bonds to be sold off in the coming months, adding supply to the weakened market and pushing prices lower.

00:46:13.000 So in other words, if the big problem for SVB is that they had unrealized losses in the bond market and then there was a run on the bank and they had to liquidate those assets really fast and they didn't have enough money to liquidate the assets, You're about to see some more of that because the amount of agency mortgage debt in billions.

00:46:30.000 Charles Schwab right now is holding like $75 billion in agency mortgage debt.

00:46:38.000 SVB was only holding like $10 billion or something, $12 billion.

00:46:43.000 So the things could get much uglier, much more quickly again, because when you blow out the spending and then you have to reverse engineer a solution to inflation, this is exactly what happens.

00:46:52.000 Meanwhile, home prices are falling in February for the first time in 11 years.

00:46:55.000 So we're starting to see the economy cool down at the same time that the Federal Reserve is probably going to raise the interest rates again.

00:47:00.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the first year-over-year drop in home prices in more than a decade and a dip in mortgage rates snapped a year-long streak of declining monthly home sales, showing the effects of the Federal Reserve's campaign to raise those interest rates.

00:47:11.000 Sales of previously owned homes, which make up most of the housing market, rose 14.5% in February from the prior month, but they were down 22.6% from a year earlier, so the economy is beginning to cool.

00:47:21.000 But the Federal Reserve is going to have to keep the pedal to the metal, particularly because it is now at war with itself.

00:47:25.000 On the one hand, the Federal Reserve is injecting a ton of money into the system by backstopping the banks.

00:47:30.000 And on the other hand, they're trying to raise those interest rates to prevent an inflationary spiral.

00:47:35.000 So things are just going spectacularly, spectacularly well for the Biden administration, which is presumably why you'd want to keep the focus on the Republicans if you're a Republican or something.

00:47:44.000 OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:47:47.000 So things that I like.

00:47:49.000 Richard Dawkins is a Militant atheist, obviously.

00:47:53.000 He and I disagree on very, very many things.

00:47:55.000 But, he is totally correct on the matter of the binary nature of sex.

00:48:01.000 So, the evolutionary biologist made the absolutely inarguable point that men and women exist as dichotomous parts of the human species.

00:48:12.000 Here he was with Piers Morgan.

00:48:16.000 Particularly when it comes to someone's sex.

00:48:17.000 I mean, it's incontrovertible.

00:48:19.000 There's no scientific doubt about this.

00:48:21.000 And yet a small group of people have been quite successful, actually, in reshaping vast swathes of the way society talks and is allowed to talk.

00:48:30.000 It's bullying.

00:48:31.000 And we've seen the way JK Rowling has been bullied, Katherine Stock has been bullied.

00:48:38.000 They've stood up to it, but it's very upsetting the way this tiny minority of people has managed to capture the discourse and to really talk arrogant nonsense.

00:48:52.000 What's the answer to it?

00:48:54.000 Science.

00:48:54.000 I mean, there are two sexes.

00:48:58.000 You could talk about gender if you wish, and that's a subjective... I'm not... But when people say there are a hundred genders, for example.

00:49:04.000 Yeah, I'm not interested in that.

00:49:06.000 As a biologist, there are two sexes.

00:49:09.000 And that's all there is to it.

00:49:12.000 Oh no, he said the truth out loud.

00:49:14.000 Good for Richard Dawkins, who is saying a true thing right there.

00:49:17.000 Meanwhile, people who are saying not true things include, of course, the estimably stupid AOC, she of the fresh and face.

00:49:24.000 So apparently, AOC has now said that not only women menstruate, she says trans men and non-binary people also menstruate.

00:49:33.000 That was responding to an earlier comment that she had made referring to menstruating people.

00:49:38.000 So apparently she had called women menstruating people while explaining the female body.

00:49:42.000 And then she said, not just women, trans men and non-binary people can also menstruate.

00:49:46.000 Some women don't menstruate for many reasons, including surviving cancer that requires a hysterectomy.

00:49:50.000 GOP mad at this are protecting the patriarchal idea that women are most valuable as uterus holders.

00:49:56.000 No, the GOP saying that only women menstruate are defending the idea that biology exists.

00:50:02.000 Only women menstruate.

00:50:03.000 Men do not menstruate.

00:50:04.000 There are some women who do not menstruate because there's a failure of biology in those cases.

00:50:09.000 That's tragic and sad.

00:50:11.000 Also, men don't menstruate.

00:50:13.000 End of story.

00:50:13.000 The fact that you cannot just say that part out loud demonstrates that you know nothing about anything and that your ideology has conquered all.

00:50:20.000 It's so absurd.

00:50:20.000 This is like saying, you know, somebody says, dogs have four legs.

00:50:23.000 Like, not all dogs.

00:50:25.000 Not all dogs.

00:50:25.000 And by the way, cats have four legs too.

00:50:28.000 So, stop pretending that dogs have four legs, because some cats have four legs, and some dogs have three legs because they were hit by a car.

00:50:35.000 That doesn't change the underlying fact that dogs have four legs.

00:50:37.000 You're making category errors deliberately.

00:50:40.000 That's the nature of the beast, is making category errors deliberately.

00:50:43.000 Okay, other things that I like today.

00:50:46.000 So, this is kind of amazing.

00:50:49.000 Apparently, a fan pooped in the aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at a Broadway show.

00:50:55.000 Page six here is that a serial pooper has been stalking the halls of the legendary Schubert Theater, and the last time they struck, a turd appeared in the aisle near Hillary and Chelsea Clinton at some like it hot.

00:51:04.000 A source close to the show insists it was a regrettable one-off incident.

00:51:08.000 There is a picture of Hillary and Chelsea at the show, and there is an older man standing just behind them and looking awkward.

00:51:16.000 I suspect him as the serial pooper.

00:51:18.000 Oh, sorry, no, it's Bill Clinton in the background, as it turns out, who is very unhappy to have been dragged to a Broadway show by Hillary and Chelsea.

00:51:27.000 But yeah, welcome to New York, where people just poop in the aisles.

00:51:30.000 Things are going amazing over there.

00:51:31.000 It's the greatest city on Earth, where people just take a dump directly in the aisles of major Broadway theaters.

00:51:36.000 Well, I mean, there are a lot of steaming piles of hot crap on Broadway, so I guess that makes some sense.

00:51:41.000 Okay, time for some things that I hate.

00:51:47.000 So there is a really good examination of the problem of learned helplessness by a substat called The Rabbit Hole.

00:51:55.000 This is from October 10th, 2022, talking about the fact that the left's focus on the supposed evils of American society have actually convinced an extraordinary number of Black Americans that Blacks don't get ahead because America is racist.

00:52:08.000 And it didn't used to be this way.

00:52:10.000 So, for example, there's polling showing that in 2020, in 2012, a majority of Blacks felt they had agency and could change their personal outcomes.

00:52:18.000 Only 30% felt discrimination was a primary impediment.

00:52:22.000 That is, as of 2012.

00:52:24.000 And then, things started to reverse themselves.

00:52:30.000 They used to say, again, in 1994, In 1994, the percentage of blacks who said that blacks were mostly responsible for their failure to get ahead, that was 34%.

00:52:41.000 Okay, and that rose all the way to 54% by 2012.

00:52:45.000 So, 20% increase, and the number of blacks who said, we can't get ahead because American society is discriminating, went from about 56% in 1994, all the way down to 30% in 2012.

00:52:53.000 And then, the Great Awokening happened, and everything just reversed itself.

00:52:59.000 So polls by 2021 showed only 25% of blacks viewed themselves as having agency for their own condition.

00:53:06.000 68% view discrimination as a primary detriment.

00:53:09.000 So thanks so much to all of those who say focusing on racism will make American society significantly better.

00:53:14.000 Well, actually, what you've done is you convinced a huge substratum of American society that they are not responsible for any of their own decision making and that society is inevitably going to get them.

00:53:23.000 Which is just terrible.

00:53:25.000 It's just.

00:53:27.000 Yeah, again, tell people that they don't have agency in their own lives and the consequences get really ugly really, really quickly.

00:53:34.000 And this is just a perfect example of that.

00:53:38.000 By the way, the Great Awakening is also responsible for a vast uptick in the number of murders of black Americans since 2020.

00:53:43.000 So, well done, all you folks who are like, what if we put our attention on the systemic evils of America?

00:53:48.000 That will make life better for black people.

00:53:49.000 Well, no, actually, it didn't.

00:53:51.000 It didn't because the message should be the same for all Americans.

00:53:54.000 It's a free country.

00:53:55.000 Go make responsible decisions.

00:53:56.000 You say that to literally every American and everyone's life gets better.

00:53:58.000 And if you say to particular Americans that no matter what you do, the system is out to get you, it makes life worse, particularly for those Americans.

00:54:05.000 It is enervating and it is bad for them.

00:54:08.000 And that is precisely what our media have been promoting for years at this point.

00:54:12.000 To the great detriment of American society.

00:54:15.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.

00:54:16.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:54:17.000 We'll be getting into the mailbag.

00:54:18.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:54:19.000 Use code Shapiro.

00:54:20.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 22, 2023

The Battle Royale Begins: Ron vs. Don

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