The Ben Shapiro Show - January 19, 2024


The Big Lie Americans Tell Ourselves

Topics
spending problem unified Republican control immigration politics
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Donald Trump Joe Biden Jill Biden Mike Johnson Kevin McCarthy Elise Stefanik Mark Elias Lady Ballers Border Patrol Barack Obama JD Vance Dmitry Medvedev Bernie Sanders Birchgold Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Ben Shapiro Show E. Jean Carroll Benjamin Netanyahu Nathaniel Morin James Carville and 17 more
Davos vs. The Rest Of Us At Auschwitz With Elon Musk

Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

206.24

Word count

8,748

Sentence count

590

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

37

sentences flagged

Hate speech

12

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss the continuing resolution passed by the House and Senate, and the impact it will have on the $34 trillion dollar national debt. I also talk about the wide open borders debate, and why we should all be concerned about them. I hope you enjoy this mashup, and tweet me if you do! with any thoughts or suggestions on how we can fix it. Tweet Me! Timestamps: 0:00 - Why is it that we keep doing the same stuff? 6:30 - Is it stupid to ask a simple question 7:40 - Why does Congress keep doing stupid stuff 8:20 - Who s the stupidest person in Congress ? 9:15 - Who's sitting in the Speaker's seat or who has the seat or has the majority 11:00- Is it the Speaker, the Speaker or the Minority Leader, or is it the Majority Leader? 13:00 16:20- Why we need to be fiscally responsible 17:10 - Why do we keep spending so much money? 18:10 19:30- What does it matter who s in the chair or who s sitting in it? 21:15 22:15- Why are we paying the price for the problems we're facing? 26:40- What's the problem? 27:30 28:10- How do we need a plan to fix the problem 29:40 32: What are we going to do? 35:00 -- Is it's going to get better? 31:30 -- What is the solution? 36: Does it matter? 37:10 -- What are you want us to fix? 39:40 -- What do we have a plan for the country? 41:00-- Is it better than the problem we're going to fix it? -- How can we fix it, or do we get a plan? 42:00 | Is it enough? 45:30 | What is our country better than we can we have enough money to fix our infrastructure? 47:10 | Is this problem better than it can we can get a grip on the problem better, or are we need more? Theme music by Ian Dorsch? Music by Ian Somerhalder Theme song by my main amigo, Evan Handyside

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, folks, there's a big lie that we in the United States keep telling ourselves.
00:00:04.000 It's particularly true on the right, but it's true across the board.
00:00:07.000 And that lie is that we want our government to be fiscally responsible in some way, shape, or form.
00:00:13.000 That is clearly a lie, because we keep electing politicians to not be fiscally responsible in any way, shape, or form.
00:00:20.000 Regardless of who runs the government, the spending keeps going in one direction, and that direction is up.
00:00:25.000 There's a reason we are running a $34 trillion national debt this point in time and it is likely that that debt is going
00:00:31.000 to continue to accrue because nobody takes this problem particularly seriously. And they're not going
00:00:36.000 to take that problem seriously until we run smack into a wall. That is how typically fiscal crises
00:00:41.000 work. Countries spend too much money, they're unable to rein it back in because there are too
00:00:46.000 many people who become dependent on that spending of the money, and then instead of creating
00:00:51.000 some sort of plan to get out of debt, people just keep running up those debts, keep running up
00:00:56.000 those deficits until the time comes that you have to take extremely harsh, remediating action.
00:01:03.000 That is the high likelihood here.
00:01:04.000 Why do I say this?
00:01:05.000 Well, because yesterday, the House Republicans, as well as the House Democrats, passed overwhelmingly yet another continuing resolution.
00:01:13.000 And this is the way we now fund the government because we're not able to actually have serious negotiations on department-by-department level with regard to spending.
00:01:20.000 We're not able to negotiate over how much should be spent on defense or how much should be spent on education.
00:01:24.000 Instead, we sort of wrap everything up into a ball.
00:01:27.000 And then, when we can't get approval on a year-long budget, Then we go to continuing resolutions, which are these short-form budgets that continue the government spending.
00:01:37.000 And, you know, we just kind of keep the train running.
00:01:39.000 And the train will run until the train runs completely off those tracks.
00:01:43.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Congress cleared legislation extending government funding into March.
00:01:46.000 Because again, the easiest thing in Congress is to get lost in a crowd.
00:01:49.000 but does nothing to alleviate underlying political pressures stemming from high US debt levels,
00:01:53.000 record crossings at the southern border, and an enduring war in Ukraine.
00:01:56.000 The Senate passed that measure 77 to 18, followed by House approval 314 to 108.
00:02:01.000 Because again, the easiest thing in Congress is to get lost in a crowd.
00:02:04.000 The easiest thing in Congress is to simply side with an overwhelming majority of people who say,
00:02:08.000 status quo, let's just keep doing what it is that we are doing right now.
00:02:13.000 The two votes sent the measure to President Biden's desk with time to spare ahead of a
00:02:16.000 weekend deadline.
00:02:18.000 In a replay of recent votes that underscore the fragility of the GOP majority, according to the Wall Street Journal, House Speaker Mike Johnson relied heavily on Democrats to bring that continuing resolution across the finish line.
00:02:27.000 In fact, there was a fraught moment when it seemed as though there would not be a majority of Republicans in favor of the continuing resolution.
00:02:33.000 As it turns out, he was able to get 107 Republicans to vote for as opposed to 106 against.
00:02:38.000 House internal Republican rules prevent any Republican My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have no problem with wide open borders endangering the people that I represent.
00:02:45.000 So I came very close to the wire on this particular bill.
00:02:49.000 Chip Roy, Republican from Texas, who does in fact take spending seriously.
00:02:52.000 He was blasting everybody right, left and center about not only the spending,
00:02:56.000 but the fact that nobody in Congress seems to want to solve serious problems anymore.
00:02:59.000 My colleagues on the other side of the aisle have no problem with wide open borders
00:03:05.000 endangering the people that I represent, none.
00:03:07.000 And in my constituents are the ones left holding the bag and the people of Texas are the ones left
00:03:13.000 spending 12 and a half billion dollars.
00:03:14.000 And my people are the ones who have six kids die from fentanyl poisoning
00:03:18.000 in the school district that I represent.
00:03:20.000 Yeah, it's not fun to smirk at that, is it, when we're talking about dead children from fentanyl poisoning because of wide-open borders, because of the policies of my Democrat colleagues who refuse to do anything about it.
00:03:31.000 Not a thing.
00:03:33.000 Not a thing do my colleagues do about the wide-open borders.
00:03:40.000 And I will continue to speak to my colleagues because— The House will be in order.
00:03:45.000 The gentleman will address his comments to the chair.
00:03:49.000 Well, Madam Speaker, I am addressing my comments to the chair.
00:03:53.000 The House will be in order.
00:03:55.000 I'm addressing the chair on behalf of the people that I represent who are dying in Texas because of Democrats.
00:04:07.000 Directly because of Democrat policies! 1.00
00:04:10.000 Representative Roy then added, it doesn't matter who's sitting in the speaker seat or who has the majority, we keep doing the same stupid stuff. 0.99
00:04:16.000 Which requires us to ask a pretty simple question. 1.00
00:04:19.000 Why is it that we keep doing the same stupid stuff? 0.99
00:04:21.000 Is that a matter of not having the right people in power, or is it just that the American people refuse to recognize the reality about themselves? 0.99
00:04:28.000 Which is that we constantly say that we want to balance the budget, we constantly say we want to spend less money, and then, as soon as there is a poll asking what we would like to cut, we all run for the hills and we have no idea what it is that we would like to cut.
00:04:40.000 The reason being that it's very easy to say broad things about cutting on pork barrel projects here and there.
00:04:46.000 And sure, you can cut a post office in West Virginia.
00:04:50.000 And sure, you can get rid of a bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
00:04:53.000 That is not going to touch the structural entitlement programs that millions and millions of Americans have become dependent upon and who are now unwilling to give that up.
00:05:01.000 All the third rails of American politics now form An extraordinary spider web of third rails that no one can touch under any circumstances, which is why you have seen candidates of both major parties basically decide they're no longer going to talk about the single biggest problem facing the United States in future decades.
00:05:18.000 And that is the spending problem.
00:05:19.000 Donald Trump has vowed he is not going to touch that spending problem, by the way.
00:05:22.000 Donald Trump, in fact, has campaigned from the left against fellow conservatives in the Republican Party.
00:05:27.000 He has said that if you talk about restructuring entitlement programs, this makes you a liberal.
00:05:31.000 Now, again, that makes no sense on the face of it, but it's been an effective pitch.
00:05:35.000 Why?
00:05:36.000 Because, again, as it turns out, many Americans actually don't want to talk about these things.
00:05:40.000 They would prefer to leave that bogeyman in the closet rather than open it up and simply deal with it.
00:05:45.000 This is why it frustrates me when you see all of this talk about Speaker Mike Johnson.
00:05:49.000 Let's just oust him.
00:05:50.000 Let's just get rid of Speaker Mike Johnson over something like the continuing resolution.
00:05:56.000 Okay, I suppose you can do that.
00:05:57.000 And then who will it be?
00:05:58.000 You already did this routine with Kevin McCarthy.
00:06:00.000 You already dumped Kevin McCarthy over.
00:06:02.000 Matt Gaetz did this.
00:06:03.000 Suggesting that Kevin McCarthy had given in too much to the Democrats, despite the fact that the deal that McCarthy was trying to cut was significantly more conservative than the one that actually ended up being cut.
00:06:13.000 And then they put in place Mike Johnson, who again, fine guy, good conservative, but is facing the same exact structural problems that Kevin McCarthy was facing in the first place.
00:06:23.000 Here is the reality.
00:06:25.000 In order for any serious major change to get done, you are going to have to have a unified party control over Congress, Over to the Senate, over to the presidency, and a dedication by that party to take the hit.
00:06:37.000 To take the hit.
00:06:38.000 Democrats take the hits, by the way.
00:06:40.000 This is something that Democrats are good at.
00:06:41.000 Democrats took the hit in 2010.
00:06:43.000 In 2010, they passed Obamacare.
00:06:46.000 And then they got shellacked at the polls.
00:06:48.000 It was a very, very bad midterm for them.
00:06:50.000 And they took the hit because they knew that if they could completely restructure the healthcare system, that in the end, these would become entitlements that people relied upon.
00:06:57.000 They would rather take the short-term hit for the long-term gain.
00:07:01.000 When was the last time Republicans took a short-term hit for the long-term gain?
00:07:05.000 When was the last time they passed something other than, say, a tax cut that actually fundamentally restructured how finances work in this country?
00:07:12.000 And the answer is, they don't.
00:07:13.000 And the reason they don't is because they're afraid they will be tossed out of office.
00:07:17.000 And maybe that's just a, again, a structural imbalance in the way that the two parties work.
00:07:21.000 It's very easy to get reelected suggesting you're going to spend more money that doesn't exist.
00:07:25.000 It's very hard to get reelected suggesting that you're going to cut money from the federal budget, especially from a bunch of people who Say that they need that money in the first place.
00:07:34.000 But this is why it's a point of high irritation when people suggest that it's just that Johnson is a bad guy or something.
00:07:39.000 The people who are telling you that sort of thing, the people who are telling you that it's Johnson's fault this continuing resolution got passed, that if only he had shut down the government, more government shutdowns.
00:07:47.000 Okay, we've done multiple government shutdowns in the past few years.
00:07:49.000 Has that changed the trajectory of the spending in any real significant way?
00:07:53.000 The answer, of course, is no.
00:07:55.000 The people who are on the air right now telling you that the continuing resolution should have been pushed aside in favor of something harsher, in favor of a government shutdown, in favor of a harder bargaining position with Joe Biden.
00:08:06.000 Those people are fibbing to you about the incentive structure.
00:08:08.000 The incentive structure is what the incentive structure is.
00:08:11.000 And unless you have a unified Republican control of the House, the Senate, and the presidency, you're not going to get the kind of spending cuts that make it worthwhile for you to risk your seat.
00:08:21.000 Because I'll tell you what happens.
00:08:22.000 You do a government shutdown, you're going to end up passing a continuing resolution anyway, and a bunch more people are going to lose their seats.
00:08:29.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:09:37.000 So Johnson is taking all sorts of heat over this, again, from members of the right-wing press.
00:09:43.000 Is it really going to do him any damage in the long run?
00:09:45.000 I think not, but it just underscores, again, the central problem in American life.
00:09:49.000 Politicians make a living by lying to you.
00:09:51.000 And you have a choice.
00:09:52.000 Your choice is whether you like being lied to until you decide to go along with their lies or whether you don't like being lied to.
00:10:00.000 Any politician who says he can save you, save your family, save your society by spending money here or by restructuring a program there is lying to you.
00:10:10.000 The vast majority of choices in your life are up to you.
00:10:12.000 And when people rely on politicians too much, They end up shooting themselves in the foot.
00:10:16.000 And then they buy into the next grifter who comes along and suggests that he's
00:10:19.000 going to fix whatever problems are at hand.
00:10:21.000 Now, speaking of grifters, the situation on the border continues to be a full-scale
00:10:27.000 disaster area.
00:10:28.000 In fact, fascinating piece from the New York Post, this has been suggested to me, by the way,
00:10:31.000 by friends over at Border Patrol as well.
00:10:34.000 The numbers of border encounters are dropping fairly significantly since the beginning of the
00:10:40.000 This raises a question.
00:10:41.000 Why is that happening?
00:10:42.000 We recently went down to the border at the very, very beginning of the year, and the end of December had been like a high watermark in terms of number of migrant encounters at the border.
00:10:52.000 We're talking hundreds of thousands of people in one month alone.
00:10:56.000 And then, beginning of January, you saw kinda not so much.
00:10:59.000 One of the theories that was floated by Border Patrol was that basically Joe Biden had cut a deal with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is the leader, AMLO, the leader of Mexico, to basically cut down on the illegal immigration in an election year.
00:11:14.000 And now this is being pretty openly suggested by Todd Bensman over at the New York Post.
00:11:19.000 Again, this would not be the biggest shock in the world.
00:11:21.000 Remember, Barack Obama did this with Dmitry Medvedev in 2012.
00:11:23.000 Biden has struck a secret deal with the Mexican president to help his campaign.
00:11:25.000 Again, this would not be the biggest shock in the world.
00:11:27.000 Remember, Barack Obama did this with Dmitry Medvedev in 2012.
00:11:30.000 He literally sat next to him and said, tell Vladimir I will have more
00:11:33.000 flexibility after the election.
00:11:35.000 Remember, when Donald Trump tells a foreign country he wants them to do
00:11:38.000 something for electoral purposes, that's impeachable.
00:11:40.000 When Barack Obama does it in the middle of an election cycle, that's just politics.
00:11:45.000 Apparently, according to the New York Post, daily border patrol encounters of illegal immigrants crossing the border was 12,000 to 14,000 per day at the end of December.
00:11:52.000 But according to government data confidentially shared with me, it has dropped to a still managerially catastrophic, yet smaller 4,000 to 5,000 per day.
00:12:00.000 Why exactly is that happening?
00:12:01.000 Well, there were a bunch of Biden administration diplomatic missions to Mexico City over Christmas.
00:12:06.000 Mexican media, in fact, has been reporting what was said.
00:12:09.000 Here are some of the news.
00:12:10.000 Quote, Mexican law enforcement officials are rounding up immigrants in the country's north and shipping them by bus and airplane to southern cities like Tapachula in Chiapas State and Villahermosa in Tabasco State.
00:12:20.000 They're all expected to go home or stay put alongside those continuing to enter from Guatemala. 1.00
00:12:25.000 And then, another story.
00:12:27.000 To eliminate another obvious draw, Mexican authorities have emptied and then bulldozed
00:12:30.000 at least one long-standing migrant camp, the sprawling one in Matamoros, across the Rio Grande
00:12:35.000 from Brownsville, and dug deep anti-pedestrian trenches to further deny access to popular
00:12:39.000 crossings there. It was done under US pressure, according to one Mexican newspaper.
00:12:43.000 So apparently it sounds very much as though Mexico is doing Joe Biden a favor.
00:12:50.000 In fact, according to Mexican media, this is part of a broader agreement signed by
00:12:54.000 by Mexico's Immigration Service and Border Patrol to block northbound immigrants on public
00:12:59.000 What exactly is Mexico getting in return?
00:13:01.000 AMLO has called for $20 billion to be shared among his country and some others, for starters, according to media reports.
00:13:06.000 It's also quite possible that Biden is telling AMLO that he's going to do better with Biden than he would with Trump.
00:13:12.000 That would not be a shock in any way, shape, or form.
00:13:15.000 It has become a priority to Joe Biden to get the immigration issue off the front pages.
00:13:20.000 Presumably, this is why Joe Biden is now thinking about caving on immigration, as he should. 1.00
00:13:24.000 I've been saying for months at this point that it is political malpractice for Joe Biden not to cave on immigration.
00:13:30.000 It makes no sense.
00:13:32.000 For him to effectively push the far-left open borders line in the face of terrible polling numbers when he is running in an absolute neck-and-neck dogfight with Donald Trump, it makes zero sense whatsoever.
00:13:44.000 By the way, the latest polling data has Joe Biden with a very, very slim lead over Donald Trump in a potential presidential contest.
00:13:50.000 Now remember, that would be in the popular vote lead.
00:13:53.000 Donald Trump, if he's within one point of Joe Biden nationally, good shot, he wins the Electoral College.
00:13:58.000 There are a couple of surveys that are out, one from Ipsos and one from YouGov, that give Biden a lead of between one and two percentage points.
00:14:04.000 Okay, so this is a dogfight.
00:14:06.000 No matter how you slice it, there are zero polls right now, zero polls, that have Joe Biden up on Donald Trump in any significant fashion, any true significant fashion.
00:14:16.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:15:17.000 So why exactly wouldn't he go ahead and simply cave on immigration?
00:15:21.000 Well, the answer is he's now starting to.
00:15:23.000 Now he's finally starting to see political reality, which actually, by the way, for the country is a good thing.
00:15:26.000 You want President Biden to govern a lot more from the middle than he has thus far.
00:15:30.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, an immigration deal being crafted in the Senate would limit migrants' ability to claim asylum at the southern border.
00:15:35.000 A White House concession, some progressives say, shows that President Biden's leftward shift on immigration as a 2020 candidate was a blip in his long political career.
00:15:44.000 This, of course, would be paired for new war aid for Ukraine, for Israel, for Taiwan.
00:15:49.000 House Speaker Mike Johnson said after a meeting with Joe Biden on Wednesday at the White House, he said we've talked about the necessary elements to solve this problem.
00:15:55.000 He said that would require reform to the broken asylum and parole systems.
00:16:00.000 Parole is basically where Joe Biden simply declares that a bunch of people who are in the country illegally have been paroled and can thus wander the country freely.
00:16:08.000 They haven't been amnestied, but it's fine.
00:16:11.000 And as far as asylum, the current asylum system is, you come to the country, you claim, just wave your hand, you say, I fear to go home to my home country, they release you into the country within 72 hours and you're gone.
00:16:20.000 Republicans would like Remain in Mexico.
00:16:22.000 Biden is not giving them Remain in Mexico so far.
00:16:23.000 This is what they should push for, by the way.
00:16:25.000 Republicans should push for Remain in Mexico as national immigration policy. 0.75
00:16:29.000 However, Joe Biden is in fact moving at this point.
00:16:32.000 He's moving again because the poll numbers for him are dire.
00:16:36.000 68% of those surveyed in a CBS News poll say they disapprove of his border policies.
00:16:41.000 So he is now moving and shifting on this particular issue.
00:16:45.000 Biden apparently again, he doesn't want remain in Mexico because he's afraid that if he says remain in Mexico, then that will give something for Trump to run on, which is weird.
00:16:53.000 And so that's bad logic.
00:16:54.000 If he did remain in Mexico, he would have to admit that Trump was right in the first place.
00:16:58.000 But also he would say that he got it right now.
00:17:00.000 So what exactly is the major issue?
00:17:03.000 Apparently, the president was originally influenced by, wait for it, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
00:17:09.000 It was originally Dr. Jill Biden who pushed him to the left on immigration because she was very upset with family separations and remain in Mexico.
00:17:15.000 She had visited a tent of migrants living just across the southern border in Matamoros.
00:17:20.000 One of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.
00:17:21.000 So he got rid of Remain in Mexico and all the rest.
00:17:25.000 But now it looks as though he's going to have to bring back some of this stuff.
00:17:28.000 He's still uncomfortable with bringing back any form of Remain in Mexico, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:17:32.000 But advisors are bringing him numerous ideas on ways to run that program that give priority to migrants' safety.
00:17:38.000 So maybe he'll bring back Remain in Mexico, which, by the way, according to my friends in Border Patrol, would be the single biggest change he could make that would actually shut down mass migration to the border.
00:17:48.000 In fact, he's being pushed to his right, even by Democrats.
00:17:53.000 According to the Daily Wire, 14 House Democrats voted to denounce the Biden administration's open borders policies on Wednesday.
00:17:59.000 The group of party defectors joined with all voting Republicans in passing a resolution introduced by Representative Nathaniel Moran, Republican of Texas.
00:18:06.000 12 Democrats and 9 Republicans did not vote.
00:18:08.000 In addition to denouncing Joe Biden's border policies, the resolution condemned the national security and public safety crisis along the southwest border.
00:18:17.000 So it'll be interesting to see what exactly happens here.
00:18:20.000 Donald Trump, for his part, is doing something somewhat strange.
00:18:24.000 Trump has been suggesting that perhaps Republicans should not cut any deal with Joe Biden on immigration whatsoever.
00:18:31.000 Because if they cut a deal, then presumably he's going to be able to tout that he's more moderate on immigration than he has heretofore been.
00:18:38.000 But honestly, that is not the way the congressional politics typically ought to work.
00:18:41.000 If you can get a big concession out of a Democratic president, you do it.
00:18:44.000 And Trump can still run on it.
00:18:45.000 I mean, one thing that you're not going to see Biden run on is mass deportations.
00:18:49.000 That's exactly what Trump is running on.
00:18:50.000 Here he was yesterday.
00:18:52.000 But there are also people the countries don't want.
00:18:55.000 They're not sending their best people over.
00:18:57.000 You know, these guys are smart.
00:18:59.000 I know them.
00:18:59.000 The presidents, the dictators, the prime ministers.
00:19:02.000 Some of them call themselves prime ministers.
00:19:04.000 But they're very smart people.
00:19:06.000 And they're not sending their hard workers.
00:19:09.000 You get a lot of people coming into our country that we're not going to want. 1.00
00:19:13.000 We don't want.
00:19:14.000 And we're going to have the largest deportation in the history of this country.
00:19:19.000 Again, Trump is not going to get outflanked by Biden on immigration policy.
00:19:22.000 So congressional Republicans ought to very seriously push Joe Biden as far as they can and then take a win.
00:19:28.000 It is good to take wins from Joe Biden.
00:19:30.000 I understand that we now live in a weird universe in which somehow prying giant concessions out of Joe Biden is considered a loss of some sort.
00:19:37.000 But that's not how this works.
00:19:38.000 The Inflation Reduction Act is a loss because you got zero concessions out of Joe Biden on the Inflation Reduction Act.
00:19:43.000 You could have just killed that one outright.
00:19:45.000 But on this one, Republicans actually do, by and large, want Israel aid.
00:19:48.000 Republicans are split fairly down the middle on Ukraine aid.
00:19:51.000 They do want more aid for Taiwan, and they certainly want more border security measures.
00:19:55.000 And you get what you can get, because frankly, there's no guarantee that Donald Trump is going to be president come January 2025 anyway.
00:20:00.000 You gotta get what's on the table.
00:20:01.000 The fact that Mike Johnson and the Republicans have maneuvered Joe Biden into a bad immigration position is good for them, and if they can get a big concession out of that, they absolutely should.
00:20:11.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:20:12.000 First, The Ben Shapiro Show is supported by Grand Canyon University, an affordable private Christian university with a vibrant campus in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona.
00:20:20.000 Ranked top 20 in the country by Niche.com, GCU is a missional, Christ-centered university that strives to foster a culture of community, giving, and impact.
00:20:28.000 GCU's goal is to help you develop into a servant leader who makes a difference through finding your purpose.
00:20:32.000 Now, speaking of President Trump, I have to say it is truly amazing to see the lengths to which the media will go in order to generate weird stories about him.
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00:20:50.000 Now, speaking of President Trump, I have to say it is truly amazing
00:20:54.000 to see the lengths to which the media will go in order to generate weird stories about him.
00:20:59.000 So, day before yesterday, Donald Trump was spotted coming out of a New York courthouse
00:21:04.000 and he was raising his hand.
00:21:06.000 And he was waving to the cameras.
00:21:08.000 And he appears to have some sort of strange... I don't know what they... wounds on his hand?
00:21:16.000 Red markings on his hand?
00:21:18.000 And this led to widespread speculation on the left about why Donald Trump had these things on his hands.
00:21:24.000 Here was Morning Joe suggesting that maybe it's because he was acting like a baby and banging a table.
00:21:29.000 Do we have any answer on what's on Donald Trump's, like Donald Trump has, his hands are bleeding.
00:21:36.000 Looks like he has a sore.
00:21:37.000 Is that magic marker?
00:21:39.000 Is it magic marker?
00:21:40.000 Because it looks like he has a sore on his index finger there.
00:21:43.000 I don't know.
00:21:45.000 Maybe it's magic marker.
00:21:47.000 I don't know.
00:21:48.000 It looks like a cut.
00:21:49.000 I mean, that's blood, isn't it?
00:21:51.000 I don't want to speculate.
00:21:52.000 I don't know.
00:21:52.000 But was there anything that happened inside the courtroom yesterday, Lisa?
00:21:57.000 There was.
00:21:58.000 You know, there was a point in time during the day where Trump, very frustrated with Judge Kaplan, banged his hands down on the table.
00:22:06.000 I doubt that the blisters or marks that we're seeing there come from that.
00:22:10.000 But could they be exacerbated by that?
00:22:12.000 Perhaps.
00:22:13.000 Oh my gosh, here we go. 1.00
00:22:15.000 By the way, that is actually the least stupid explanation given by Democrats. 1.00
00:22:19.000 I've also heard leprosy. 1.00
00:22:20.000 I'm not kidding.
00:22:21.000 That these would be the beginning signs of leprosy.
00:22:24.000 I'm watching Papillon or something.
00:22:26.000 And then James Carville comes out and says maybe it's syphilis.
00:22:29.000 Ah, these people.
00:22:31.000 If you go to the Drudge Report, and I think it'll still be up, there's a story that talks about Trump having hand cuts.
00:22:39.000 And you can link to it.
00:22:40.000 They don't look like cuts to me.
00:22:42.000 They look like sores.
00:22:44.000 And I've asked a number of MDs what medical condition manifests itself through hand sores.
00:22:51.000 And the answer is immediate and unanimous.
00:22:54.000 Secondary syphilis.
00:22:56.000 All right.
00:22:57.000 I think I think there's a good chance this man has to clap.
00:23:00.000 And I'm not being particularly secretive about it.
00:23:03.000 I am texting the photo.
00:23:06.000 You can link to it. 1.00
00:23:07.000 It's in some operation called a daily mail at some British thing is probably your People are ridiculous. 1.00
00:23:12.000 I'm sorry, they're totally ridiculous. 0.98
00:23:14.000 Maybe the picture was doctored or whatever, but maybe this story will go somewhere. 0.97
00:23:18.000 Maybe it won't, but I'm telling you at one o'clock Eastern, I'm humping this thing
00:23:22.000 like a young dog on old furniture. 1.00
00:23:24.000 People are ridiculous. 0.99
00:23:26.000 I'm sorry. 1.00
00:23:26.000 They're totally ridiculous. 1.00
00:23:27.000 By the way, my most plausible explanation is that Donald Trump was maybe smoking a cigar 0.99
00:23:32.000 and burned himself.
00:23:33.000 Those look like burns, by the way.
00:23:35.000 They don't look actually like syphilis sores.
00:23:36.000 Just for the record, I did ask my MD wife doctor what she thought it was, and she said definitely not syphilis, because syphilis is a marking that is smaller and generally all over the hand, not in like a particular area of the hand this way, is my understanding.
00:23:50.000 I could be getting that wrong, but that's it.
00:23:53.000 The bottom line is that when we are speculating over the marks on Donald Trump's hand, as opposed to, you know, Joe Biden's terrible global policy, Joe Biden is running an uphill battle.
00:24:01.000 That's why he ought to be giving ground on the immigration issue.
00:24:04.000 As far as Donald Trump, Donald Trump's legal cases, again, it seems to me at this point, you know, this is a weird out-of-the-box call.
00:24:12.000 I just don't think they're going to amount to much.
00:24:13.000 I think after all this hubbub, it's going to be like pretty much everything else with regard to Donald Trump.
00:24:19.000 That every single time they think they got him, they don't got him.
00:24:22.000 Every single time they think they have him captured with a butterfly net, there's a giant hole in the butterfly net.
00:24:27.000 That is the latest out of Georgia, where according to the Wall Street Journal, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis is now seeking to avoid being deposed in the divorce proceeding of a colleague she's accused of having an affair with.
00:24:37.000 Calling a recent subpoena for her testimony a form of harassment meant to derail her criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
00:24:42.000 You'll recall this bizarre case in which apparently Fannie Willis hired a dude to be the lead prosecutor in this case who has barely any prosecutorial experience.
00:24:53.000 He is in the middle of a divorce case and apparently she paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars in state money and they were jet-setting around the world and going on cruises together with that money.
00:25:02.000 In a Thursday court filing, Willis did not address whether she had a romantic relationship with Wade.
00:25:07.000 Instead, it said that because the parties agree the marriage is irretrievably broken and the concept of fault is not at issue, there's no information District Attorney Willis could provide that might prove relevant to granting or denying the divorce.
00:25:17.000 So she is trying to avoid having to testify in that particular case.
00:25:21.000 Now, Does that mean that there won't be any more shoes to drop on this?
00:25:25.000 I highly doubt it.
00:25:26.000 I highly doubt it.
00:25:27.000 I would assume there will be a bunch of motions from Team Trump, there already have been, pointing out this particular allegation.
00:25:34.000 And that is going to hurt that case pretty badly.
00:25:37.000 We'll get some more on this in just one second.
00:25:38.000 First, folks, as you can see, 2024 is going to be nuts.
00:25:42.000 You've already seen the economy.
00:25:43.000 It is on tenterhooks.
00:25:44.000 You already see foreign policy.
00:25:45.000 It's a disaster area.
00:25:47.000 So let me ask you this.
00:25:48.000 With all this uncertainty, how are you protecting your savings?
00:25:50.000 Well, if I were you, I would consider diversifying with gold from Birchgold Group.
00:25:54.000 I mean, I actually did.
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00:26:10.000 And this month only, when you open a gold IRA with Birchgold, you'll get a free signed copy of my book, The Authoritarian Moment.
00:26:15.000 But you need to text Ben to 989898 to qualify.
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00:26:23.000 I buy my gold there and you can too.
00:26:25.000 Text Ben to 989898 today.
00:26:27.000 Protect your savings.
00:26:28.000 Claim your eligibility for a free signed copy of The Authoritarian Moment.
00:26:32.000 Again, text Ben to 989898 to get started with my friends at Birchgold.
00:26:36.000 Meanwhile, Donald Trump is still in court with regard to this E. Jean Carroll defamation suit.
00:26:42.000 The reason I said it's not going to damage him is because he already had one E. Jean Carroll defamation suit and it didn't damage him.
00:26:46.000 So what exactly is the damage going to be now?
00:26:49.000 Either believe the lady or you don't.
00:26:50.000 I have serious doubts about E. Jean Carroll's allegations here.
00:26:54.000 She testifies that she was in a Bergman like, I don't know, 25 years ago.
00:27:00.000 Can't name the date, can't name the season, can't name the month.
00:27:04.000 And that she was raped in a dressing room, with no one hearing her not sc- like nothing.
00:27:11.000 When she wrote about this experience, by the way, later, she suggested she had to be talked into the fact that it was a rape by her friend. 0.63
00:27:18.000 In any case, Donald Trump is out ripping on the judge.
00:27:22.000 You just get the feeling.
00:27:22.000 As I said earlier this week, Donald Trump's legal foibles at this point are just tinnitus.
00:27:26.000 They're just a ringing in the background in your ear, and eventually they become part of the white noise of life.
00:27:33.000 You can go to the funeral or you can go to the trial, but you can't do both.
00:27:36.000 I thought it was terrible.
00:27:37.000 I thought it was terrible.
00:27:40.000 So he would rather have me miss the funeral or go to the funeral and miss the trial. 0.97
00:27:46.000 And that's a nasty man. 0.98
00:27:47.000 He's a nasty judge. 1.00
00:27:49.000 He's a Trump-hating guy. 0.99
00:27:51.000 And it's obvious to everybody in the court.
00:27:53.000 It's a disgrace, frankly, what's happening.
00:27:55.000 It's a disgrace.
00:27:57.000 I do love Donald Trump's use of the word nasty.
00:28:00.000 He's bringing it back in his original sense, which I kind of appreciate.
00:28:04.000 Again, is any of this going to have any market impact on Trump's campaign?
00:28:06.000 I think not.
00:28:07.000 There are things that could theoretically have an impact on Trump's campaign, like, for example, him being in the news every day.
00:28:11.000 But it would have to be something that's not already part of the background information of our lives.
00:28:17.000 And that is very difficult to do with Donald Trump.
00:28:18.000 I've said this since 2015. 0.99
00:28:19.000 Donald Trump is a giant mud monster, and the more mud you throw at him, the more he just looks like a giant mud monster. 0.98
00:28:25.000 Joe Biden, that dude was supposed to be good at this and he is not good at this and it's a very, very real problem. 0.99
00:28:31.000 Now, meanwhile, the foreign affairs of the United States are in serious trouble.
00:28:38.000 If you take a look at the Middle East, obviously they continue to be in very serious trouble.
00:28:42.000 Pakistan is now apparently striking inside Iran. 0.69
00:28:45.000 So it turns out that when you don't contain Iran, Iran lashes out at pretty much everybody.
00:28:49.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran's military tested and found a limit to its ability to project power this week as Pakistan responded to a missile attack with the first publicly acknowledged airstrike on Iranian territory in decades.
00:28:59.000 The Pakistani retaliation followed Iran's first direct attacks in neighboring countries since Israel's war with Hamas in Gaza began in October.
00:29:06.000 So now you have Pakistan, which is an ally of Saudi Arabia, firing at Iran.
00:29:11.000 You have Iran firing at Pakistan.
00:29:13.000 You have continuing rocket fire from Iran back to Hamas into Israel.
00:29:16.000 You have rocket fire from Iran back to Hezbollah into Israel.
00:29:19.000 You have rocket fire from Iran back to Houthis at shipping in the Red Sea.
00:29:25.000 And Joe Biden still has no plan for any of this.
00:29:29.000 In fact, it seems like the only sort of plans that are emerging are sporadic strikes on opposing positions that don't seem to be achieving anything like their purpose, and pressure on the Israelis to stop doing what they are doing.
00:29:42.000 That seems like the plan.
00:29:44.000 But guess what?
00:29:44.000 The Israelis are not going to stop because there is widespread support inside Israel to take out Hamas, as there should be.
00:29:49.000 In fact, in breaking news, 21 more hostages, their bodies were just found.
00:29:54.000 Hamas had murdered them.
00:29:56.000 So again, all of this is just going to continue because the Biden administration doesn't actually have any sort of plan for what a realistic Middle East looks like.
00:30:09.000 There's a lot of talk today about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking about the idea that Israel ought to maintain territorial sovereignty over the entire area from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River in order to maintain security.
00:30:22.000 If anyone else has any options, I'm sure people would love to hear them.
00:30:26.000 No other options have been provided.
00:30:28.000 And every time Joe Biden and his team suggest that Israel ought to hand over land in concessions to terrorist groups, all they are doing is fomenting what Iran wants. 0.71
00:30:35.000 The reality is that terrorism is not motivated by poverty and despair.
00:30:39.000 Terrorism is motivated by hope.
00:30:40.000 Hope that the other side will be weak enough to leave you alone, to leave you living after you have committed some of the worst atrocities known to man.
00:30:49.000 It is totally insane that the Biden administration continues to pressure exactly the wrong side on this sort of thing.
00:30:54.000 Now, I will say the Biden administration has provided the military aid so far necessary for Israel to continue its war against Hamas.
00:31:00.000 That is true.
00:31:01.000 But rhetorically speaking, it does make a rather large difference when you keep signaling Two terrorists in Hamas that all they have to do is stay alive long enough and eventually they will get what they want, which is, namely, to be left alone, survival, so they can continue to plan attacks and murder Jews in the future. 0.92
00:31:15.000 It also doesn't help when you have dolts like Bernie Sanders doing this routine.
00:31:18.000 Bernie Sanders yesterday suggested that Israel is going to war with the entire Palestinian people, which is a weird take, considering, again, that Israel has now sacrificed about 200 of its own men and women in an area where they have complete air superiority and don't need to sacrifice literally any of those men.
00:31:33.000 My view from day one, Chris, has been that Israel has the right to respond to Hamas's barbaric attack on October 7th, but they do not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people, which is what we are seeing right now.
00:31:57.000 And as you've just mentioned, The humanitarian situation in Gaza now is unbelievably bad, and we're looking at the possibility of hundreds of thousands of children starving.
00:32:09.000 We cannot allow that to happen.
00:32:10.000 Israel is currently attempting to ship in more aid, and there's no one on the other end to pick up the aid.
00:32:14.000 Hamas is picking up the aid, and they're stealing the aid. 0.78
00:32:17.000 And the world is going to continue to be an incredibly fragile place because of Joe Biden.
00:32:22.000 Weirdly, though, there is this coterie of people who exist at the top of society in our global institutions who believe that they are doing a good job and that the true threat to international security is Donald Trump.
00:32:36.000 We'll get to that in just one second.
00:32:38.000 First, Lady Ballers. 0.99
00:32:39.000 It's the hilarious story of how a group of male losers who can't win against other men decide to identify as, you know, ladies and join a women's basketball league. 0.98
00:32:46.000 Sure, it's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's laughable. 0.97
00:32:48.000 Also, it happens to be very close to reality.
00:32:51.000 Here's a quick look at what is being called the most triggering movie of the decade.
00:32:55.000 Leftists are losing it over Lady Ballers. 1.00
00:32:58.000 Nothing's changed. 0.88
00:32:59.000 This movie is a straight-up and intentional transphobic hate crime.
00:33:04.000 What?
00:33:05.000 I see you.
00:33:06.000 The Lady Ballers movie needs to be banned.
00:33:09.000 I'll cancel you.
00:33:10.000 Can I get the blinds, please?
00:33:11.000 Go to 11.
00:33:13.000 The most toxic BS you've ever seen. 1.00
00:33:16.000 You're a monster. 1.00
00:33:17.000 Yeah! 1.00
00:33:18.000 Next-level hate speech propaganda.
00:33:20.000 That's it?
00:33:21.000 That's the pitch?
00:33:21.000 Watch the most triggering comedy of the decade.
00:33:27.000 Lady Ballers, streaming exclusively on Daily Wire Plus.
00:33:32.000 Don't wait, watch Lady Ballers, the movie Hollywood didn't make, and wouldn't make, so we did, exclusively at Daily Wire Plus right now.
00:33:38.000 Meanwhile, a coterie of very powerful people globally, they're very afraid of Donald Trump.
00:33:42.000 So Joe Biden has basically set the world on fire, because it turns out that the pseudo-sophisticate take on foreign policy, which is basically that you can wish-cast peace into existence, It's false.
00:33:52.000 It's not true. 0.98
00:33:53.000 And so what they're mostly afraid of now is that people will expose their stupidity to the public view, which is something that Donald Trump tended to do with actually a shocking amount of alacrity during his first term in office. 0.98
00:34:04.000 And he would constantly sort of do away with silly shibboleths that have been spoken by the foreign policy elite. 0.99
00:34:10.000 He would break those idiocies on the wheel of reality. 0.92
00:34:13.000 And they've been very upset ever since that he did that. 0.95
00:34:16.000 And so they don't want him back.
00:34:18.000 This, presumably, is why they continue to maintain lie after lie with regard to international politics.
00:34:23.000 So over at the Continuing World Economic Forum over at Davos, various dolts, large and small, continue to maintain that Donald Trump is the truest threat to the world order.
00:34:34.000 A woman named Vera Jourova, she suggests that the biggest problem that we are about to face is disinformation, because disinformation, of course, might mean that Donald Trump gets elected.
00:34:43.000 Disinformation is a security threat.
00:34:45.000 And maybe not many noticed, but it was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war.
00:34:53.000 And we are in it now.
00:34:54.000 And disinformation is a very powerful tool.
00:34:57.000 So how we think about it in the EU?
00:35:00.000 We are focusing on improving the system where the people will get the facts right.
00:35:10.000 We don't speak about opinions.
00:35:12.000 We are not correcting anyone's opinions or language.
00:35:16.000 Yeah?
00:35:16.000 This is about the facts.
00:35:18.000 Yeah, because I don't trust you to be able to distinguish between opinion and fact.
00:35:22.000 That was the VP of the European Commission.
00:35:25.000 Meanwhile, the World Bank president continues to speak factual falsehoods like we can't eradicate poverty without solving climate change, which is weird since we've done a pretty damned good job over the course of the last 45 years on this planet in eradicating extreme poverty.
00:35:40.000 Not only without solving climate change, but according to you guys, by exacerbating climate change, because it turns out that carbon-based fossil fuels are one of the great sources of human wealth ever devised.
00:35:50.000 And so merely saying that I've got a new way of thinking about things or announcing policy pronouncements will not change the reality of what we face on the ground every day.
00:36:01.000 What we have is an existential climate crisis.
00:36:05.000 We cannot think of eradicating poverty without caring about climate.
00:36:10.000 We cannot think about eradicating poverty without caring about healthcare.
00:36:14.000 We cannot think about eradicating poverty without caring about food insecurity and fragility.
00:36:20.000 These are, if you don't like it, tough luck.
00:36:24.000 Yeah, well, I mean, what if I don't think that you're right?
00:36:27.000 What if I think that you're just speaking nonsense and spouting nonsense?
00:36:31.000 What if I think that, in fact, this is a global guise for propping up bad regimes, that very often the climate change talk is about degrading some of the most Productive regimes in the history of mankind, namely places like the United States and Europe, in favor of significantly less productive regimes that are looking for subsidies and handouts.
00:36:48.000 That's precisely what is going on with China, by the way.
00:36:50.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, China is now doubling down on manufacturing to reboot its economy after a turbulent year.
00:36:56.000 The push for new growth drivers comes, as figures showed, the world's second largest economy expanded at 2023 at its weakest rate in decades.
00:37:03.000 What exactly are they going to do?
00:37:05.000 Apparently, they want to dominate global markets in emerging industries like electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy gear.
00:37:12.000 So they want the United States and the EU to subsidize a bunch of Green energy boondoggles where the money eventually ends up in China.
00:37:22.000 They require the subsidies.
00:37:23.000 Those are the places where they're going to earn their money.
00:37:26.000 The hope is that growth in what Chinese officials referred to as the new three industries and other favored sectors will help China's economy banish the specters of deflation and Japan-style stagnation as a real estate crunch weighs heavily on construction investment and consumer confidence.
00:37:39.000 Longer term, Beijing wants these and other high-tech manufacturing industries to be in the vanguard of its push to eventually unseat the United States as the world's largest economy.
00:37:47.000 Well, that's not going to happen.
00:37:48.000 And the reason it's not going to happen is because they're not actually targeting efficient sectors of the market for growth.
00:37:54.000 Instead, what they are doing is finding places that require government subsidization and redistribution in order to have everybody pay them to offshore all of that.
00:38:02.000 Well, good luck to them.
00:38:03.000 But again, this is about global financial restructuring and the people of the WF know that.
00:38:07.000 And Trump is a threat to that because he actually does like America as opposed to many of these other people who seem to have a peculiar global utopia in mind that they wish to pursue.
00:38:16.000 Meanwhile, in breaking news, President Trump apparently, according to Axios, now has a shortlist of his potential VP candidates.
00:38:22.000 And apparently, according to Axios, the shortlist is down to three.
00:38:26.000 Here are the possibilities for Donald Trump's VP candidate.
00:38:29.000 One, Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York.
00:38:32.000 She's the chair of the House GOP Conference, and according to Steve Bannon, who really is a lukewarm oniglis, he says that she's at the top.
00:38:40.000 Stefanik was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump.
00:38:43.000 She's very loyal to him, obviously.
00:38:45.000 She recently suggested that the members of the January 6th riot who are in prison, she called them hostages, which is a strange language to use about people who have been criminally convicted.
00:38:53.000 Even if you put, like, a hostage means that you have to do something to get the hostage released.
00:38:57.000 It's a weird word to use, but she also happens to be very capable.
00:39:01.000 She's an excellent speaker.
00:39:02.000 Now, all the people on the right who are claiming that Nikki Haley is no good because she is too far to the left, I should point out at this point that Elise Stefanik, her heritage action score is not particularly satisfying.
00:39:15.000 She has a 72% heritage action score.
00:39:18.000 She is more liberal than a huge, huge number of Republicans.
00:39:23.000 Her lifetime score Her lifetime heritage action score is 54%.
00:39:28.000 The average House Republican is 79%.
00:39:30.000 She's far more, I mean, she's from a district in New York. 0.58
00:39:33.000 She's far more to the left than virtually every other member of the Republican caucus.
00:39:36.000 So if you're seeking to shore up, say, the evangelical Christian vote, if that's what
00:39:40.000 you're seeking to do with that pick, the way that Trump did with Mike Pence in 2016,
00:39:44.000 Stefanik isn't going to do it.
00:39:45.000 If the idea is double down on your strengths, namely, look politically moderate by picking a bunch of positions that are sort of in the middle, a little wishy-washy, but you have some strength on a few of the sort of pro-Trump issues and also on foreign policy, Stefanik isn't too bad a pick.
00:40:00.000 Her politics honestly look very, very similar to Nikki Haley's.
00:40:03.000 Let's just be real about that.
00:40:05.000 Another candidate on the shortlist is Senator J.D.
00:40:07.000 Vance of Ohio.
00:40:09.000 He is, again, one of Trump's most outspoken defenders in a Senate GOP full of people who are not particularly in love with Trump's policies.
00:40:17.000 The people who are sort of more Paleocon-oriented, really like JD Vance. 0.99
00:40:23.000 JD has drawn a very interesting contrast from his early career.
00:40:27.000 His early career, he was very much not into the idea of sort of a grievance politics.
00:40:31.000 In fact, Hillbilly Elegy is essentially a robust defense of the meritocracy.
00:40:36.000 The suggestion is that when you become too dependent on government, it actually enervates you.
00:40:41.000 He's moved away from that.
00:40:42.000 He now talks about the idea that you do need subsidies in particular areas of the country and tariffs.
00:40:46.000 You need government involvement in a lot more areas of the economy.
00:40:49.000 J.D.
00:40:50.000 has become much more NatCon than he used to be for sure.
00:40:53.000 NatCon stands for Nationalist Conservatives.
00:40:55.000 Nationalist Conservatives tend to be more like European Conservatives.
00:40:59.000 Fine with big entitlement spending.
00:41:01.000 They tend to be more isolationist on foreign policy and they tend to be socially conservative.
00:41:04.000 So they look very much like sort of right-wing parties in Europe.
00:41:07.000 He's also very tight with Trump.
00:41:08.000 I'm not sure what that wins Trump because Ohio is a very red state.
00:41:11.000 So I'm not sure what exactly that brings him politically.
00:41:14.000 Like does it bring anybody in?
00:41:15.000 I'm not certain that it really does.
00:41:19.000 And finally, Nikki Haley.
00:41:21.000 So Haley is still on that short list.
00:41:22.000 And this is what's freaking out a lot of people who are sort of on that NatCon side of the aisle.
00:41:27.000 Nikki is widely perceived, as she is in the primaries right now, as much squishier than Trump on a wide variety of issues.
00:41:32.000 She's obviously much more hawkish on foreign policy than Trump has purported to be.
00:41:35.000 Although again, one of the weird things about Trump as president is that the stuff he said sounded a lot like Pat Buchanan.
00:41:40.000 The stuff that he did looked an awful lot like what Nikki Haley might do.
00:41:44.000 Nikki Haley is on that short list because, again, she has good approval ratings, not with Republicans, but with audiences, generally speaking.
00:41:52.000 If she were, in fact, the presidential candidate against Biden in virtually every poll, she blows him out.
00:41:56.000 She would compete well against somebody like Kamala Harris. 0.67
00:41:59.000 It's an interesting group of people.
00:42:00.000 None of them are hardcore conservatives on the political level.
00:42:04.000 Vance is the one who probably could be considered most conservative on a political level, but even on economics, he really is not.
00:42:10.000 Again, he's more NatCon in orientation.
00:42:11.000 So that is Donald Trump's shortlist right now.
00:42:13.000 It'll be fascinating as we move forward to see what that shortlist starts to look like.
00:42:16.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
00:42:18.000 You're not going to want to miss it.
00:42:19.000 We will jump into the Vaunted Ben Shapiro Show Mailbag.
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