Trump's support base is not going to erode anytime soon. While the media fulminated over Donald Trump Jr.'s reported meeting with then-campaign manager Paul Manus and Trump s son-in-law Jared Kushner in June 2016, and while they mocked President Trump s overtures to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, they largely ignored the importance of one image and one image only for Trump s followers. The image came on Saturday when President Trump retrieved the hat off the head of a Marine standing closest to the staircase onto the helicopter. Because the Marine could not move, he was standing at attention. And again, Trump went and retrieved the Hat. And it may have seemed like a big nothing to the left, but it means a lot to people on the right who feel the Obama White House routinely ignored the dignity of our troops. President Obama bragged openly about using troops as a photo op. He planted friendly troops at pre-screened events. And of course, Obama s Veterans Affairs Administration was a full-scale disaster. The same weekend Trump helped this Marine with his hat, we found out that 500 VA officials had been fired by the Trump administration for malfeasance. And herein lies the point. Because our politics have become so little about policy and so much about intent, that Trump's most ardent supporters are never going to abandon him. And they think Obama didn t want to make America great again, and they're 100% correct. But that also means we re good. And they believe that stuff, which also means We re good, which means we're good, right? So long as Trump continues to demonstrate his obvious reverence for American symbols, it will be very very difficult for the left to carve into his base I think that s amazing, because it actually does speak to why so many conservatives really like Trump. - Ben Shapiro - The New York Times - Today's show on today's show: The Weekly Standard Ben Shapiro's new book, How to Make America Great Again? - Outtro: What's a Good Day in the Middle East by John McCain - On American Relations - on American Relations? on Friday, 9/12/19, on the Council on Islamic Relations on American Relations, Saturday, 7/27, 6/27/19 and On Sabbath, 5/28, And Sunday, 8/9/19?
00:00:00.000President Trump's support base is not going to erode anytime soon.
00:00:03.000While the media fulminated over Donald Trump Jr.'
00:00:05.000's reported meeting with then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and a Russian-connected lawyer in June 2016, and while they mocked President Trump's overtures to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin,
00:00:16.000They largely ignored the importance of one image and one image only for Trump's followers.
00:00:20.000The image came on Saturday when President Trump approached Marine One at the Andrews Air Force Base.
00:00:25.000A strong wind had knocked the hat off the head of a Marine standing closest to the staircase onto the helicopter.
00:00:30.000Because the Marine could not move, he was standing at attention.
00:00:32.000Trump retrieved the hat and put it back on the Marine's head.
00:00:36.000And again, Trump went and retrieved the hat.
00:00:38.000This may have seemed like a big nothing to the left, but it means a lot to people on the right, who feel the Obama White House routinely ignored the dignity of our troops.
00:00:45.000President Obama bragged openly about using troops as a photo-op.
00:00:48.000He forced a Marine to hold an umbrella over him as he gave a statement in the rain outside the White House.
00:00:52.000He planted friendly troops at pre-screened events.
00:00:54.000And of course, Obama's Veterans Affairs Administration was a full-scale disaster.
00:00:58.000The same weekend Trump helped this Marine with his hat, we found out that 500 VA officials had been fired by the Trump administration for malfeasance.
00:01:07.000Because our politics have become so little about policy and so much about intent, Trump's most ardent supporters are never going to abandon him.
00:01:14.000Whether they believe that he's actually making America great again, they think he wants to make America great again, and they think Obama didn't want to make America great again.
00:01:22.000In that assessment, they're 100% correct.
00:01:46.000So long as Trump continues to demonstrate his obvious reverence for American symbols, it will be very very difficult for the left to carve into his base.
00:02:22.000I also want to show you the tape of Trump doing this with the Marines hat, because I think that it actually does speak to why so many conservatives really like Trump.
00:02:29.000But before I get to any of that, I want to say thank you first to our friends and sponsors over at Blue Apron.
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00:04:23.000I will play you the tape of me on Dana Perino's show on Fox News that happened on Friday evening before Sabbath for me, and I was debating a member of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations.
00:05:18.000then makes a statement after this story breaks.
00:05:20.000And he originally had said there were no meetings with the Russians.
00:05:23.000Then he said, well, we did have a meeting with some Russian gal, but it was really more about...
00:05:27.000I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.
00:05:53.000I was not told her name prior to the meeting.
00:05:55.000I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance.
00:06:00.000After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms.
00:06:07.000Her statements were vague, ambiguous, and made no sense.
00:06:10.000No details or supporting information was provided or even offered.
00:06:13.000Okay, so lots of open questions about this meeting.
00:06:41.000There are some legit questions to be asked about this meeting.
00:06:43.000First of all, what you need to understand about this lawyer they met with is that the lawyer is very close with the Russian government.
00:06:49.000So according to the Washington Post today, they talk about who this lady is, and essentially she worked closely with somebody they worked with during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant.
00:07:02.000According to the Washington Post, Trump Jr.
00:07:04.000did not name the acquaintance who fixed up the interview, but in an interview Sunday, Rob Goldstone, a music publicist friendly with Trump Jr., told the Post that he had arranged the meeting at the request of a Russian client and had attended it along with this woman whose name was Veselnitskaya.
00:08:22.000He says he didn't even know her name, right?
00:08:23.000He says, I was not told her name prior to the meeting, which begs the question, why would you drag the three top officials in the Trump campaign at that time into a meeting two days after Trump had secured the nomination, essentially?
00:08:55.000And this is the fulfillment of all the lefty dreams, right?
00:08:58.000The fulfillment of all the lefty dreams is that Trump Jr.
00:09:00.000got Manafort and Kushner in a room, all of them, to hear dirt from the Russian government on Hillary Clinton.
00:09:05.000That is not perfectly drawn yet, right?
00:09:07.000There is no evidence that that is the case yet because, again, we don't know, number one, how close she is with the Russian government, this lawyer, and number two, what they were told.
00:09:46.000He says, who wouldn't meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign?
00:09:51.000He says, just as the Russian collusion fantasy, a resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Clinton's stunning defeat last fall, was finally fading from the fever swamps of the resistance and its media mouthpieces, along comes the time with a pair of journalistic nothing-burgers.
00:10:03.000And he says that this is a nothing-burger because no campaign in its right mind would turn down an offer of information on their opponent.
00:10:09.000This is what OPPO research is all about.
00:10:11.000You can bet Hillary wouldn't have hung up on the person who claimed to have dirt on the Donald.
00:10:15.000That's probably true, but we would have cried bloody murder, right?
00:10:17.000If the Russians had approached Hillary Clinton and said, we have dirt on Donald Trump, and she had met with the Russians, we would have said, okay, this is insane because obviously that's the quid, so what's the pro quo?
00:10:28.000If you're handing information from the Russians, what is the pro quo?
00:10:31.000And, you know, Sean Hannity came out last night and he was tweeting about how the Clintons did all these corrupt things and there were no consequences.
00:10:41.000So we can't have a different standard when it comes to President Trump.
00:10:44.000So I don't really buy Michael Walsh's defense here.
00:10:47.000You know, again, I think the best defense here is just ignorance.
00:10:50.000As always, the best defense here is ignorance, which is why lawyers always tell people your first rule on the stand is, I don't recall.
00:10:57.000But we don't know enough for this to really go anyplace yet, but the media is going to overplay it.
00:11:03.000It's fascinating the way that the Republicans are treating this.
00:11:06.000So Reince Priebus, who's the White House Chief of Staff, he was on TV yesterday, and he made the, he promoted the theory, which had been pushed on a website called Circa, that Russian operatives set up the meeting as basically a sting for Donald Trump Jr.
00:11:19.000Here is Reince Priebus making that case.
00:11:22.000On the January 8th edition of Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Priebus point blank, Does he accept that the Russians were behind this hacking campaign?
00:11:32.000I mean, he's not denying that entities in Russia were behind this particular hacking campaign.
00:11:39.000However, the incoming White House Chief of Staff then seemed to place at least some of the blame on the Democrats, saying,
00:11:56.000Pribis was then pressed about who was really to blame, and he admitted, the primary actor is the foreign entity that's perpetrating the crime to begin with, no doubt about it.
00:12:05.000In the past, Trump has expressed skepticism about Russian hacking claims, at one point saying, it's a very hard thing to prove, while later calling it a political witch hunt.
00:12:14.000Okay, but then Pribis went on to repeat the Circa statement, and that's the important part.
00:12:18.000The Circa statement was basically that Russian operatives set up this meeting with Trump Jr.
00:12:36.000I think it's more smoke but no fire, yet again, I don't know why exactly top Trump campaign officials would be meeting with a Russian lawyer for a non-nefarious purpose here, but I'm not going to buy Michael Walsh's routine either where he says, who wouldn't meet with an OPPO researcher claiming to have ties with the Russian government, even if that were true?
00:12:54.000In 2000, Al Gore, who is no paragon of morality, in 2000 somebody leaked the Bush briefing book, the Bush debate briefing book, to Al Gore.
00:13:03.000And Al Gore's people promptly called the FBI.
00:13:06.000Okay, so, it's not true that everybody's engaged in this sort of stuff.
00:13:09.000Now, again, are the media getting ahead of themselves?
00:13:44.000And so everybody is going, you know, over the top about a report, I think, that has very little substance to it as of yet.
00:13:49.000Well, meanwhile, you know, President Trump isn't doing himself any favors with all of the Russia stuff.
00:13:55.000So over the weekend, there was a lot of talk about what exactly Trump had said in his meeting with Vladimir Putin.
00:14:00.000So you recall late last week, Trump met at the G20 with the Russian dictator.
00:14:04.000And coming out of the meeting, President Trump essentially said that he had gotten along well with Putin, that Putin, he had brought up the election hacking stuff to Putin.
00:14:33.000Again, his opinion is apparently that there was some Russian hacking, but it also might have been the Chinese and a 400-pound guy in a bed somewhere, so kind of unclear what he means by that.
00:14:41.000Then he says, But he didn't stop there, he continued.
00:14:50.000Putin and I discussed forming an impenetrable cybersecurity unit so that election hacking and many other negative things will be guarded.
00:14:57.000Okay, so this is the tweet that got everybody going was, okay, if Trump really believed that the Russians were behind the election involvement and interference, why is he forming a cybersecurity unit with them?
00:15:49.000Why did Obama do nothing when he had info before election?
00:15:52.000So all of this is, if he's attempting to say, I took election hacking super seriously, and then I put the screws to Putin, this little tweet storm is not exactly assuring people.
00:16:04.000It's not making people feel very reassured about all of this.
00:16:07.000So, you know, he rips Obama, he rips the fake news.
00:16:10.000As for Putin, he says, I've already said what I'm going to say, and we're going to form a cybersecurity unit.
00:16:13.000Okay, well, there's a bunch of fallout, and then later that evening, like 12 hours later,
00:16:17.000Trump comes back with his final tweet, right?
00:16:22.000Well, he continues, sorry, along these lines.
00:16:24.000He says, sanctions were not discussed in my meeting with President Putin.
00:16:27.000Nothing will be done until the Ukrainian and Syrian problems are solved.
00:16:29.000So I'm not getting rid of any of the sanctions, but I'm not increasing the sanctions.
00:16:32.000Okay, so the cybersecurity thing is what got people all hot and bothered.
00:16:36.000Later in the day, he came back and he said, the fact that President Putin and I discussed a cybersecurity unit doesn't mean I think it can happen.
00:16:42.000It can't, but a ceasefire can and did.
00:16:45.000Okay, well, I'm glad that he's coming to the right conclusion about cybersecurity, but he sent all of his people out all day talking about how he was actually going to form a cybersecurity unit.
00:16:54.000Just shows that there's a bit of confusion at the top with regard to what President Trump actually believes about all of this.
00:17:02.000If you are trying to promote an image of yourself as a guy who is independent of Russia, this is not the way to do it.
00:17:08.000But I'll tell you what I think is actually really going on.
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00:18:28.000Putin was Trump's puppet master, and Trump was the puppet.
00:18:32.000And now, President Trump should be drawn distance.
00:18:35.000And in Poland, he started to do that, right?
00:18:36.000He gave a great speech in which he talked about Western civilization, and he talked about the importance of standing up to Russia in Ukraine, and he called out Russia on Syria, and then he has a meeting with Putin, and it basically looks like he got rolled.
00:18:48.000It looks like he came out, and the only things that happened were he comes out and rips his own intelligence community, he rips the media, he rips the Democrats, and then he's pretty kind to Putin.
00:18:57.000And then he says, we'll have a cyber security unit where we cooperate.
00:19:00.000And then finally, he says, well, we won't have a cyber security unit because that's kind of dumb.
00:19:03.000It doesn't mean I think it can happen.
00:19:04.000It can't really happen, but we can have a ceasefire so we can still be best friends, of course.
00:19:09.000These sort of mixed signals do not assure.
00:19:12.000Now, what I actually think, I want to show you a little bit more of the mixed signals, but then I want to tell you what I think is actually happening here.
00:19:18.000First, on the mixed signals, Corey Lewandowski, who of course is still close to President Trump, there's talk about him re-entering the White House.
00:19:25.000He's a former campaign manager for Trump.
00:19:27.000He says, listen, the Russians say they didn't hack, and so that's basically the end of the story.
00:19:32.000What we saw yesterday, and what's been reported yesterday, is that the president took this issue directly to Vladimir Putin, questioned him if they were involved in meddling in the elections in any way, shape, or form.
00:19:43.000And from what we're hearing, the Russians have denied this.
00:19:45.000But this is the type of president that takes a problem, delivers it directly to the person who has the solution for it, and pressed him very tough to find out if Russia had anything to do with the outcome of the U.S.