Donald Trump announces his third presidential campaign, pledging to make America great and glorious again. Joe Biden starts his own 2024 campaign in response, and NATO puzzles over a missile strike on Polish territory. Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers? Me neither? Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.me/BenShapiroShow and get 50% off your very first month with code SHAPIRO. It's PureTalk. You can get $50 off your first month of PureTalk membership when you use the promo code SHOPBOARD50 at checkout. Shout out to Puretalk for sponsoring the show. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on the FiveThirtyEight Radio Network. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, and is a frequent contributor to The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The Weekly Standard, wherever you get your news and financial advice. And don't forget to leave us a five star rating and review our newest episode on Apple Podcasts! It'll help us spread the word to the world about what's going on around the financial world! and help spread our word out there about what we're talking about! to potential new products, services, trends, and everything else going on in the world. We'll be looking out there! Tweet us your thoughts on our social media accounts! and we'll be checking out your feed! in the next episode of The Daily Mail! Timestimations! - Timestamps: 5 Star Trek: What's up? 6:00 - What's your favorite thing you're listening to? 7:30 - What s going to happen next? 8:15 - Who's the most important to you? 9:20 - What are you listening to in your brain? 11:40 - What do you think of this episode? 12:00 | What's going to be your favorite podcast? 13: What s your favorite pastime? 15:00 16:30 | What would you like to hear from Ben Shapiro? 17:40 | Is it a good thing? 19:30 21:40 22:15 27:00 +
00:00:34.000Things are not looking great right now for the economy.
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00:02:38.000I mean, when the former president of the United States announces a new presidential campaign, his third presidential campaign, that is a rather large announcement.
00:04:22.000And the obstacles that Donald Trump makes for himself are the biggest obstacles that he faces, not the obstacles made by other candidates about him.
00:04:27.000Hillary Clinton tried to make him the object of ire in 2016, and it failed.
00:04:32.000Donald Trump made himself the object of ire in 2020, and it succeeded.
00:04:36.000Well, the problem is that if you launch this quickly, I mean, this is this is unprecedented.
00:04:39.000I'm not aware of any other presidential campaign, certainly not by a major figure like the former president of the United States launched about a week after the midterm elections.
00:04:49.000And it's a it's a weird strategy, because if you really are that intimidating, why don't you slow play this thing?
00:04:56.000If you really believe that simply having your name out there is going to prevent people from jumping in, which, by the way, it might, then why would you launch this quickly?
00:05:04.000What it sort of betrays is that Trump, his campaign, is very concerned with the possibility of other people getting in.
00:05:11.000If you watch his Truth Social feed, you see a lot of this, right?
00:05:13.000Donald Trump is attacking candidates who have not yet announced and may never announce.
00:05:17.000I'm not aware that Glenn Youngkin is going to run for President of the United States.
00:05:19.000I'm not sure what Glenn Youngkin's support base would be.
00:05:21.000He's a very moderate Republican in Virginia.
00:05:24.000Ron DeSantis, bit of a different story.
00:05:25.000And a lot of speculation that he's going to run specifically because he's termed out, right?
00:05:31.000So that means that no matter what, he's leaving office in 2026 as governor of Florida.
00:05:36.000So if he's going to go, he sort of has to go, but he's not jumping in right now.
00:05:39.000And so the question, if you are Donald Trump, is if I jump in yesterday, November 15, 2022, and Ron DeSantis doesn't jump in until the after the end of the first legislative session, meaning in like June of 2023, That gives you, by my count, and I'm no expert, but I know how a calendar works, that gives you eight months to simply be out there saying things.
00:06:00.000It means you're the only person at issue.
00:06:02.000I mean, if Ron DeSantis just goes about governing and doesn't pay any attention to the stuff that you're saying, and you're spending every day on Truth Social ripping into him, is that good strategy?
00:06:10.000And do you really think that Trump has the discipline not to do that?
00:06:13.000Now, if Trump spends the next eight months ripping into Biden, Then that would be a durable campaign.
00:06:17.000But do you think he's going to do that?
00:06:18.000Or do you think that he's going to be so irritated with the fact that other people are very likely to jump in halfway through next year that he's going to preemptively try to launch strikes against them?
00:06:26.000And they're meanwhile just going to be going about their business and governing and doing their stuff.
00:06:31.000Trump runs the real danger of looking petty.
00:06:33.000The first real damage that Trump has done himself in terms of his 2024 presidential campaign, aside from all the January 6th stuff, Aside from sort of the oddities of what he says on Truth Social, the really big damage that he did to himself over the course of the last several months, besides picking not great candidates and not spending money on those candidates, was really over the last week when he decided that just before the election, he was going to attack DeSantis.
00:06:55.000And then after the election, he decided he was going to attack DeSantis and Junkin.
00:06:57.000And Republicans looked at him and they said, wait, dude, who are you attacking?
00:07:16.000He could see what the political circumstances are like in six months.
00:07:18.000What this feels like is Donald Trump is trying to buy the pot with a pair of sixes.
00:07:22.000And basically, you got a pair of sixes?
00:07:24.000Not an amazing, like a small pocket pair?
00:07:28.000And he's scared of the flop because on the flop, you could get a seven and somebody else could have two sevens or on the flop could be a king and somebody else just has one king.
00:07:35.000And so what he's going to do right now is try to buy the pot by going all in with a pair of sixes.
00:08:30.000Like so long that Fox News actually cut out of it about halfway through.
00:08:33.000Because the speech went, I believe, 64 minutes, which is, by any standard, a very, very long speech.
00:08:39.000And it read, in some ways, almost like a State of the Union address.
00:08:41.000It had its high points, it had its low points.
00:08:42.000We're going to go through what the president said in relaunching his 2024 campaign.
00:08:48.000But the optics of it were a little bit strange, mainly because when he did it in 2015, and there was no base of support, and he came down the escalator, and it was like, wow, I can't tell whether this is cheesy or whether this is brilliant.
00:09:00.000It turns out that it was quite brilliant optically.
00:09:02.000Doing it at Mar-a-Lago looks like he's sort of holed up in his house, right?
00:09:14.000If you were going to launch a popular movement, what you'd really want to do is do like a giant rally, right?
00:09:18.000You announce this in advance, like I'm going to announce and we're not going to have a thousand people in the room.
00:09:23.000We're going to have 20,000 people in the room, right?
00:09:26.000We're going to show the power of the Trump train.
00:09:28.000This train is going, it has no brakes, as they say.
00:09:30.000And we have 20, 30,000, like, we'll fill a stadium with people who love Donald Trump.
00:09:35.000And we'll scare the living bejesus out of everybody.
00:09:37.000Because we'll be out there with a giant crowd.
00:09:39.000Instead, he launched it at Mar-a-Lago, essentially in his backyard, in a ballroom, with like a thousand people, all of whom were sort of hand-picked friends, including people like Roger Stone, which, again, if you're going to have your campaign supporters, you probably should not try to stack people who are, actually have been indicted for crimes, like as a general matter.
00:09:55.000You actually want kind of the best and the brightest.
00:09:57.000Roger Stone is not the best and the brightest when it comes to like the people you want in your front row.
00:10:02.000So there's some optical issues here too.
00:10:04.000And what it really speaks to is that I got to say, just as an optical matter, this did not feel like it had the same sort of extraordinary impact as it did when Trump ran in 2015.
00:10:15.000When Trump ran in 2015, it was like a bomb went off.
00:10:22.000And so your campaign as a former president versus your campaign as a real estate guru who's very famous for being on The Apprentice in 2015, that's a totally different thing.
00:10:30.000And if you're running a very similar campaign to 2015 in 2022 or 2023, it doesn't feel the same.
00:10:37.000And he has the gravitas of having been president behind him.
00:10:39.000Which means he should be doing the Obama thing, right?
00:10:42.000When Obama ran for re-election in 2012, he was doing it in, like, giant stadiums, Greek pantheon kind of stuff, fog machines, right?
00:10:49.000That's what Trump really should have done last night in re-announcing that he was launching.
00:10:54.000Instead, he did it in what felt like sort of the safest and most cautious way.
00:10:58.000And he read from a teleprompter, which, of course, you would imagine he should do.
00:11:01.000And it gave everybody who's a big Trump fan the opportunity to say, this is the moment Trump finally became president.
00:11:05.000Listen, when he was president, I thought that best Trump was teleprompter Trump.
00:11:09.000Whenever Trump was reading off the teleprompter, I was like, oh, thank God, he's going to say a bunch of useful things.
00:11:12.000And then when you get off teleprompter, you're like, uh-oh, where is this going?
00:12:37.000We can keep kind of breezing past this, but it happens to be the chief characteristic of the man is that he's extraordinarily volatile, which means he's unpredictable.
00:13:31.000If you think that a bunch of people who voted against Donald Trump in 2020 are going to vote for him in 2024, I challenge you to name who those people are.
00:14:55.000He tried to spin the 2022 election as victory for him.
00:14:58.000That, as we'll talk about, is not particularly accurate, but he has to do it, obviously.
00:15:02.000Yes, that's kind of section one, is why I should be president.
00:15:04.000Then he got to the Festivus section of the speech, which we'll get to in a bit.
00:15:09.000The Festivus section is where he went into his grievances.
00:15:12.000And honestly, the question is where the grievances are going to play.
00:15:15.000The part about whether Donald Trump was a good president, I think that most people agree that Donald Trump did good things while he was president of the United States.
00:15:22.000His post-presidency is another question.
00:15:23.000I think most people agree that Joe Biden is a crappy president.
00:15:27.000The real question is whether Trump is going to be able to channel his grievances into grievances on behalf of everybody else.
00:15:32.000That was section two, was the Festivus section of the speech.
00:15:35.000And then there was the State of the Union section of the speech where he just started kind of throwing out policy ideas.
00:15:40.000So we begin with the actual core of the speech, which is, America is great under me and it sucks under Joe Biden.
00:15:45.000And fair enough, here was Donald Trump talking about how the world was at peace when he was president.
00:15:50.000My opponents made me out to be a warmonger.
00:15:54.000And just a terrible person who would immediately go into war.
00:15:59.000They said during the 2016 campaign that if he becomes president, there will never be a war within weeks.
00:16:06.000And we will have wars like you've never seen before.
00:16:46.000But what he's saying there, that the world was at peace, that we were set for a great economic recovery, that the economy was excellent under Donald.
00:17:59.000And then Trump got to the section where he sort of had to, I would say, recapitulate the 2022 election.
00:18:05.000He has sort of recast it as a win for himself.
00:18:06.000Because the problem for Trump in the 2022 election is that in the swing states, he endorsed in primaries a lot of candidates who then went on to lose.
00:18:14.000And he didn't give them a lot of money.
00:18:15.000And virtually all of the candidates who are in sort of the most contested areas and Trump got behind did really, really poorly.
00:18:23.000So his record in the midterms was not good.
00:18:24.000He has to recapitulate that as a big win for Republicans driven by him.
00:18:30.000I think most Americans, most, most Republicans are still extraordinarily disappointed about the results of last week's election because that was supposed to be a wave election.
00:18:39.000Republicans are going to take the house by like two seats.
00:18:41.000That is not a good result, and they lost the Senate.
00:18:43.000So again, Trump has to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse here, so he does his best.
00:18:50.000Exactly one week ago, our citizens voted in the important midterm elections.
00:18:56.000And despite a ridiculously long and unnecessary period of waiting, far longer in fact than any third world country, just a short time ago, the Republicans won back control of the House of Representatives.
00:19:12.000And it was with a great Trump-endorsed candidate, Congressman-elect Kevin Kiley, who is a fantastic person.
00:19:21.000Okay, and then he made his final point here, which is that Nancy Pelosi is fired, so that means it's a big win.
00:19:29.000Okay, well, getting rid of Nancy Pelosi was sort of a given.
00:19:45.000The problem for him is that he didn't win in 2020.
00:19:47.000He lost two Senate seats in Georgia in 2021, and his candidates lost a bevy of races in 2022 in the greatest single first-term underperformance by an opposing party in modern American history.
00:19:57.000So he has to somehow come up with a victory.
00:19:58.000So what he's going to come up with is Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.
00:20:35.000I mean, the reality is that it was a bunch of moderate Republicans in New York who put Republicans over the top in the House, and virtually all of them don't even want him to run.
00:20:43.000So on a factual level, what he's saying is not true, that he was like the guy who put Republicans over the top.
00:20:47.000Factually speaking, he was the guy who kind of nearly prevented Republicans from going over the top in the House and did prevent them from going over the top in the Senate.
00:20:55.000But again, he's running for president.
00:20:56.000So of course he's going to play this in the most positive possible light.
00:20:59.000I just think that most Republicans are not on board for that.
00:21:02.000We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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00:25:14.000So this notion that he's sort of running as an outsider, I don't think that it has the same sort of appeal because he's in control of the levers.
00:25:21.000And he has been in control of the levers since 2016 when he won the nomination.
00:27:00.000That was the original pitch, is I was a good president, Joe Biden was a bad president, we don't need a conventional politician, we need an outsider, even though I'm pretty establishment at this point.
00:27:07.000Again, when you control the leaves of power, you're no longer the anti-establishment candidate.
00:27:11.000You are the establishment candidate, just formally speaking.
00:28:07.000You should let him sort of punch himself out.
00:28:08.000George Foreman sticking against Muhammad Ali style, just strategically speaking.
00:28:12.000So this is the thing that I think a lot of people love about him, is the fact that he is actually the complaints.
00:28:18.000Like all the things the left hates about him the most, which is that he's constantly complaining about how he's victimized and all this.
00:28:23.000People on the right feel as though they have been victimized by the left.
00:28:26.000They feel as though they've been targeted by the government.
00:28:28.000They feel as though the cultural forces are arrayed against them.
00:28:31.000And so when he complains about this stuff, they feel solidarity with Trump.
00:28:33.000People see this as a weakness of Trump.
00:28:35.000It actually isn't a weakness of Trump.
00:28:36.000It's a strength of Trump, at least with his base.
00:28:38.000Now, do I think that runs broad spectrum?
00:28:40.000I don't think the American people are truly invested in candidates who treat themselves as victims.
00:28:45.000I think that's off-putting to the American people.
00:28:47.000But to the base, Many of whom understand that the forces of culture and the forces of government and the forces of academia and the forces of federal law enforcement, like there are a lot of things.
00:28:58.000The educational system are arrayed against their interests.
00:29:01.000Him complaining about it actually isn't a bug, it's a feature.
00:29:05.000Trump, near the very beginning of the speech actually, implied that China had stolen the 2020 election, which is a new theory I hadn't heard before.
00:29:12.000No president had ever sought or received one dollar for our country from China until I came along and we were getting hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:29:24.000Many people think that because of this, China played a very active role in the 2020 election.
00:29:45.000And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place?
00:29:46.000in 2020. OK, fine. And then he goes on to talk about the raid on Mar-a-Lago. And this is like well into the speech. This is 50 minutes into the speech. A lot of people are already asleep at this point. But here here's Trump, including the raid of a very beautiful house that sits right here. The raid of Mar-a-Lago. Think of it.
00:30:05.000And I say, why didn't you raid Bush's place? Why didn't you raid Clinton? Thirty two thousand emails.
00:30:13.000Why didn't you do Obama, who took a lot of things with him?
00:30:19.000Well, I mean, not to get technical, but the reason is because the National Archives approached Trump about 27 times and asked him for the documents and he didn't turn them over.
00:30:26.000Again, do I think that means that the FBI should have gone into his house searching for these crucial, vital documents?
00:30:36.000I think it's very difficult to hold that standard about the mishandling of classified information when Hillary Clinton had it on an internet server, which James Comey admitted could have been hacked and probably was hacked by foreign adversaries, while Trump had printed out documents in a box in the back room.
00:30:49.000Now the FBI is admitting that he did it not because he was going to sell it to the Russians or the Chinese, but because he just likes documents.
00:31:05.000He suggested that his son Eric was being put upon in the manner of Al Capone, which is a strange comparison because Al Capone was an actual criminal.
00:33:26.000You were president during the beginning of COVID, and I think a lot of people are going to remember that.
00:33:30.000He also pledged to plant a flag on the surface of Mars.
00:33:34.000I like when presidents make promises that they don't actually have any way to achieve.
00:33:43.000It's like when Joe Biden's like, I'm gonna cure cancer, all we need to do, if we take a fire hose of money, and we shoot it at cancer, a man dressed in a cancer outfit, we shoot him with a fire hose of money, like a shotgun, bang, bang, twice in the air, with a fire hose of money, and cancer will go away, we'll cure it, by some ball, cancer.
00:34:04.000That's not actually how you solve scientific problems.
00:34:06.000But here's President Trump pledging that he's gonna put a flag on the surface of Mars.
00:36:01.000Is he going to recapture the excitement of the base?
00:36:04.000After the debacle of 2020, 2021, and 2022, I have doubts.
00:36:07.000The door is very much open on the nomination in 2024, and anybody who's trying to close that door is going to have a real hard time of it this early, when literally no one else is in the race or is going to get in the race for another eight months.
00:36:31.000Now everybody gets to sit out and watch this thing play for eight months and see how, I mean, maybe Trump does amazing and he's consolidating the base and 75% of Republicans are into him.
00:38:17.000The worst thing for Trump is he jumps in, cannonball in the pool, and no one else in the pool, and they're all like, okay, I guess someone jumped in the pool.
00:38:25.000If that's what happens to Trump, then he hasn't generated the attention he needs.
00:38:49.000I mean, first of all, they make tons of money off Donald Trump.
00:38:52.000The Washington Post, the New York Times.
00:38:54.000I mean, Washington Post literally put up a slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness, after the 2016 election because they basically had declared themselves enemies of Donald Trump.
00:39:03.000The New York Times blew up in terms of subscriber numbers when Donald Trump was president, and then it sort of flatlined after he wasn't president anymore.
00:39:10.000CNN's ratings were so much better when Trump was president.
00:39:13.000MSNBC was doing amazing when Trump was president.
00:39:16.000In other words, the entire media infrastructure desperately wants Trump for two reasons.
00:39:43.000Why do you think that Joe Biden was sending out fundraising emails literally in the middle of Trump's speech?
00:39:48.000He literally was sending fundraising emails in the middle of the speech because he knows that he can raise tremendous money from Democrats simply by uttering Trump's name.
00:39:56.000It's why Democrats ran against Trump in this election cycle.
00:39:58.000They didn't run against Kevin McCarthy.
00:40:00.000They didn't run against pretty much anybody else.
00:40:02.000It was all Trump and quote-unquote the Trump candidates.
00:40:05.000It was the mega-mega, saga-jaga Republicans.
00:40:39.000If Democrats declare that Donald Trump is the worst person in the world, Republicans will immediately reject the media and say, no, no, no, he's the greatest.
00:40:47.000Sometimes it works to their benefit, right?
00:40:49.000Sometimes it works to the benefit of Republicans.
00:40:50.000Media labeled Ron DeSantis the enemy of the people in 2020.
00:40:54.000And now Ron DeSantis won Florida by 20 points.
00:40:56.000Sometimes it's the media saying, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the danger to the Republican.
00:40:59.000Suddenly Marjorie Taylor Greene is like doing photo ops with Trump because the base is like, well, if the left takes Marjorie Taylor Greene, she must be the greatest.
00:41:05.000Not just like a Republican, the best Republican.
00:41:08.000And so this is the game they're playing with Trump.
00:41:10.000It's actually what he wants, which is why you are seeing the media do it in part.
00:41:14.000And they get to win all and this is winning for the media involves making money and also achieving your political results.
00:41:20.000And again, they may be cruising for a bruising.
00:41:22.000They may get Trump nominated and then lose to him as they did in 2016.
00:41:25.000Or maybe maybe they do what they actually did in a bunch of Republican primaries.
00:41:29.000Democrats, remember, spent millions of dollars to put Trump backed candidates over the top in places like New Hampshire, specifically because they thought they were weak and they were right.
00:41:39.000Where Democrats were able to get more MAGA candidates nominated in states during the 2022 election, those people generally lost.
00:41:47.000It was really cynical and really ugly, and they did it.
00:41:49.000And they're doing the same thing with Trump himself now.
00:41:50.000This is why NPR runs headlines like this.
00:41:53.000Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.
00:42:01.000Why do you think NPR is running that headline?
00:42:14.000Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he is running again.
00:42:18.000You think the Washington Post is doing that because they are following objective journalism?
00:42:21.000I mean, I could just as easily run a headline about Joe Biden.
00:42:24.000Joe Biden, about whom there are serious mental health questions, age questions, and corruption questions, and who has been credibly accused of forcible sexual assault.