Ben Shapiro talks about the latest White House meeting with Democrats and Republicans, and what it means for the future of the country. Plus, the White House is in chaos, and a new hire is being brought in to fill in for a fired White House employee, and more. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" on the conservative website Daily Wire. He's also the host of "The Daily Wire's" flagship show, "Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire" and hosts "The Weekly Standard's" "Politics with Ben Shapiro" and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, and other media outlets. Ben is also a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire and has been featured on CNN and CBS. His latest book, "The Devil Next Door" is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code "UPLEVEL" at checkout to receive 20% off your first month with discount code UPLEVEL at checkout. Thanks to our sponsor, Skillshare! for sponsoring the show! To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Our ad-free version of the show will be live on all major podcast directories and social media platforms, including Apple Podcasts, CBS Radio, Hotwire, Crackle, and The Huffington Post, wherever you listen to the show. Subscribe to our new episodes on Audible, Podcoin, and we'll be giving you the best deals on the best listening experience in the landline, including The Hill, The Root, The PodCast, and Yelp, wherever else you get the best reviews are getting the most amazing reviews and most professional listening experience possible. We'll be looking out for the best in the best browsers and the most authentic reviews of the best coffee and most authentic coffee and the best human interaction on the highest quality in the most professional bibles on the internet. . Thanks for listening to our show on social media and most importantly, your feedback is helping us to create the best experience possible! Thank you for listening and reviewing the show is much more than you can be heard on the show on the most important podcast on the podcast and most influential podcast in the world? - The Shapiro Show is a must-listens everywhere!
00:00:16.000So if you sense some ennui in me, if you sense a little bit of tiredness, that's because I was up at 2 o'clock in the morning Pacific Time so I could fly back and do the show.
00:02:07.000Yesterday, the president of the United States decided that he was going to hold another one of these open meetings with Democrats and Republicans in front of the cameras.
00:02:14.000Now, usually in front of the cameras, the president tries to please members of both parties.
00:02:18.000The president, above all, is a performer, right?
00:03:20.000They're not going to do any of the things that he wants them to do here because they don't have the votes for it.
00:03:24.000The reason I say this is because the president did exactly the same thing with DACA.
00:03:27.000You recall that he had a meeting with a bunch of Democrats, and at that meeting on DACA, he specifically said that he would be fine with passing a clean DACA bill.
00:03:52.000Now, of course, all of his overtures to Democrats in that meeting meant nothing.
00:03:55.000The same thing is probably happening here on guns, but it is important to note, the president only became an advocate of gun rights relatively recently.
00:04:01.000Up till 2012, the president was a gun control advocate.
00:04:04.000The president was not a big fan of guns.
00:04:05.000And so, when it goes back to the gut level for President Trump, when he goes back to his gut on this issue, there's certain issues where the president's gut is very much in line with sort of conservative policy.
00:04:16.000On guns, this is a guy whose gut is from New York, and New Yorkers, people from New York City, they're not particularly big into the Second Amendment rights of all of it.
00:04:24.000So, the president has this meeting yesterday and he says a bunch of things that are just laughably awful.
00:04:30.000So, he starts off in a conversation with Pat Toomey.
00:04:53.000And that piece of legislation would have forced federal background checks for any sale of any weapon in the United States except between family members or close friends.
00:05:01.000So if I wanted to sell a gun to somebody in the office with whom I was not friendly, then I would have to go to a federally licensed firearms dealer.
00:05:08.000Now the only way to enforce that, the problem with this policy, is the only way to enforce that law is that you actually have to have a full gun registry.
00:05:14.000Because in order for the government to keep track of how I sold my gun to somebody, they have to know that I owned the gun in the first place.
00:05:19.000A federally licensed firearms dealer keeps records with the federal government.
00:05:22.000They know how many guns are in that gun shop, and so when that firearms dealer is requested for records by the NRA—rather, by the ATF, then the ATF knows where the guns were, how they were transferred, and all the rest of it.
00:05:35.000That would have set up a gun registry in the United States.
00:05:37.000Gun registries are a really troubling concept.
00:05:39.000You really don't want the government knowing who has a gun and where, because it's none of the government's business.
00:05:44.000There are two purposes to the Second Amendment.
00:05:45.000One is self-defense, in which case you don't really care about the government knowing you have a gun.
00:05:49.000And the second is being free of government tyranny.
00:05:52.000And in that case, you really don't want the government to know who has how many guns and where.
00:05:57.000And obviously, there's a certain amount of knowledge the government has with regard to federally licensed firearms dealers, but having a full gun registry is not quite the same thing as all that.
00:06:06.000The government would have to come into your house and check every so often.
00:06:09.000The government would have to figure out whether you were telling the truth.
00:06:11.000The government could theoretically charge you with perjury for lying on federal forms if you did not fill out the forms properly in these hand-to-hand transfers.
00:06:19.000In any case, the Manchin-Toomey bill went down to defeat.
00:06:24.000But Toomey, who proposed it, was bucking the NRA when he proposed that.
00:06:28.000So Toomey, actually his NRA rating was demoted from an A to a C. And it was demoted from an A to a C. Not only was it demoted from an A to a C, in 2014 the NRA declined to endorse Toomey.
00:06:37.000So they had endorsed Toomey in his last senatorial race, and then they un-endorsed Toomey in 2008.
00:06:43.000So that's how seriously the NRA took all of this, and that's how much at odds Toomey was with the NRA.
00:06:48.000Well, Trump, because he always wants to be the guy saying the brashest thing in the room, he starts ripping into Toomey for some reason and suggesting that Toomey is a tool of the NRA, which is just idiotic.
00:06:57.000It doesn't make sense that I have to wait till I'm 21 to get a handgun, but I can get this weapon at 18.
00:07:22.000But Trump is accusing Toomey of being afraid of the NRA, which is just great press for the NRA, considering the entire Democratic Party and the media have been claiming that the real reason Republicans are pro-gun is because they're afraid of the NRA.
00:07:32.000So well done, Mr. President, for doubling down on that idiotic message.
00:07:35.000Then the president went even further, and that's the clip we're about to show you where Dianne Feinstein jumps for joy.
00:07:41.000Amy Klobuchar, who's the senator from Minnesota, she suggests that they add an assault weapons ban to Manchin-Toomey.
00:07:46.000So not only would there be a full gun registry, now you would not be able to buy an assault weapon, meaning any rifle in the United States that has a couple of features added to it, like a pistol grip and a certain type of barrel, for example, or a sight.
00:08:00.000If you added those things, if the gun looks scary, it's an assault weapon.
00:08:03.000Republicans have opposed this forever.
00:08:05.000Amy Klobuchar says, why don't we do it?
00:08:07.000And Trump immediately says, yeah, let's wrap that up into an even bigger gun control package and watch Dianne Feinstein's reaction.
00:08:13.000Dianne Feinstein is 84 years old, but suddenly she's a little girl again.
00:08:16.000Dianne Feinstein, she's been my senator virtually my entire life.
00:08:19.000She's been senator here since I was 10 years old, Dianne Feinstein, or nine years old.
00:08:23.000I have never seen Dianne Feinstein smile.
00:08:43.000Just doing something on this background check issue and using that as a base, and then I would like to add some of these other things we've talked about, I think would make a major difference.
00:08:52.000So if you can add that to this bill, that would be great.
00:08:55.000Diane, if you could add what you have also, and I think you can, into the bill.
00:09:30.000If you're saying things about guns that are making Dianne Feinstein gleeful, let me suggest that you have undermined the Second Amendment and that you are not standing with conservative ideas on the Second Amendment.
00:11:03.000To have your gun rights temporarily suspended if they show, past a certain burden of proof, that there is evidence that you are a danger to yourself or others.
00:11:12.000So the due process can go in a couple ways.
00:11:14.000You can have the hearing before the guns are removed, or you could have a preliminary hearing in which all of the evidence is shown, and then the guns are temporarily removed because we don't want people sitting around there with guns, and then the guy realizes that the cops are going to come take away his guns, he goes and shoots up the school.
00:11:29.000OK, so you can have due process in the sense that you have the right to confront the accuser, but it's done on a really spontaneous, quick basis.
00:11:36.000Or you could have a full, drawn-out hearing.
00:11:39.000So Mike Pence explains the proposal, and Trump proceeds to pile-drive the proposal.
00:11:44.000Trump proceeds to take Pence's proposal, the gun violence restraining order proposal, the David French proposal, and he proceeds to say something so wildly unconstitutional and so wildly unconservative that it boggles the mind.
00:11:54.000I mean, if Barack Obama had uttered these words, we would all be up in arms.
00:11:58.000The reason that it's different if Obama had said them than Trump saying them, honestly, is that Obama knew what he was talking about on these issues, and Trump clearly doesn't.
00:12:05.000Anyway, here's Mike Pence saying something smart, and then Donald Trump following up with something so egregiously stupid that minds of small children were blown all over the country.
00:12:13.000Because a lot of times, by the time you go to court, it takes so long to go to court to get the due process procedures.
00:12:20.000I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man's case that just took place in Florida.
00:12:43.000But it is astonishing to me that the same people on the left who are afraid of Trump becoming an authoritarian are sitting there laughing with glee when the President of the United States says somebody applies to have somebody else's gun rights taken away and we should all just shrug.
00:12:56.000I mean, honestly, that's what the President of the United States says right there.
00:12:58.000The President of the United States just said that you should be able to go into the police.
00:13:03.000You should be able to go into your house.
00:13:05.000I should be able to go to the cops and say to them, my next door neighbor's crazy.
00:13:20.000We fought an entire revolution to prohibit this sort of thing.
00:13:23.000We fought an entire revolution so there would be a right to habeas corpus, so you know why you're being arrested and your rights are being violated.
00:13:28.000We fought an entire revolution so there are no ex post facto laws, laws that were specifically designed after the fact in order to get certain people.
00:13:36.000None of this is part of the constitutional order.
00:13:39.000But the president, who is a Republican, was sitting there saying this stuff with a straight face.
00:13:43.000Now, this brings us to our—I'll get to the last question as to whether any of this is important in a second.
00:14:39.000It's usually transferable over to another state.
00:14:42.000If you have a liquor license in one state and it fulfills the obligations of the other state, then it should be able to be fulfilled in that state, I believe.
00:14:49.000But when it comes to concealed carry, there's questions as to whether you should be able to take your concealed carry license from Oklahoma and bring it over to California.
00:14:57.000And so Trump is told by Steve Scalise that they want this concealed carry reciprocity.
00:15:12.000And there were a lot of our members that said, look, we want to close these problems and fix these problems with the background check system.
00:15:19.000And we came together and actually passed a bill.
00:15:22.000But we also felt that, if you look at the concealed carry population, these are people, by and large, who are helping us stop crimes.
00:15:29.000These are people who are well-trained, who actually go out there and help prevent crimes.
00:15:33.000So I would hope that that's not immediately dismissed, because there is a lot of talk of just putting that on the side and just waiting for it to happen.
00:15:43.000I think that maybe that bill will someday pass, but it should pass as a separate.
00:15:48.000If you're going to put concealed carry between states into this bill, we're talking about a whole new ballgame.
00:16:02.000All the Republicans are going, where is this coming from?
00:16:05.000This is the guy who, days ago, was talking about how great the NRA was.
00:16:08.000This is the guy who was, a few days ago, talking about the value of gun rights.
00:16:11.000This is the guy who, a couple of days ago, was talking about how we needed to protect our right to keep and bear arms.
00:16:16.000And it does shed some light on something that the president said during his CPAC speech.
00:16:20.000During that CPAC speech, he had this very weird line where he said, if you could choose between tax cuts and gun rights, which would you choose?
00:16:26.000And he was expecting everybody in the room to say tax cuts.
00:16:28.000And everybody in the room said gun rights.
00:17:13.000But what happens if, in November, Democrats take back the House of Representatives?
00:17:17.000And let's say they get really lucky and they take back the Senate.
00:17:20.000Let's say the Democrats suddenly have control of the Senate and the House of Representatives.
00:17:23.000Then, all of a sudden, the President of the United States saying these things may actually make a difference.
00:17:28.000Because you could see a situation in which Democrats are the ones writing the bill.
00:17:32.000Right now, the check on the President saying dumb things is a Congress that's not going to write dumb things.
00:17:37.000But what happens when the Congress can write dumb things?
00:17:39.000What happens when Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, and she's sitting in a meeting like this with the President of the United States, and he says, I want you to put X, Y, and Z into a bill, and it's a comprehensive gun reform bill that's going to require full background checks for every sale in the United States, which will require registry, and everything that the President says about assault weapons will be wrapped into a bill.
00:17:57.000And no concealed carry reciprocity, and raising the age to buy a rifle.
00:18:00.000And the president says all this in front of Nancy Pelosi, and she says, sure, Mr. President, we're with you.
00:18:05.000And what happens when Chuck Schumer is the Senate Majority Leader, and he says to Trump, sounds great, Mr. President.
00:18:18.000Because that's exactly what happened on the budget last year.
00:18:21.000You recall that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were using the debt ceiling debate as a way to cut some spending.
00:18:27.000And the President of the United States had in Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and he said to them directly, listen guys, I don't care about cutting anything, let's just blow out the spending.
00:18:34.000And they said fine, and they walked out.
00:18:36.000And Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were just stunned, because the President did have the capacity to do that.
00:19:36.000So Charlie Cook over at National Review had a great point about this last sentence, where it says we want free, fair, and smart trade.
00:19:42.000And he says, if you use the words free, fair, and smart about, for example, speech, if you say we want free, fair, and smart speech, you'd realize that this is a violation of free speech principles, right?
00:19:51.000Fair speech and smart speech are not requisites.
00:20:02.000The reason I say it's silly is because comparative advantages since the days of Ricardo has suggested that you are an idiot if you heighten tariffs on your own just because the other guy has heightened tariffs on you.
00:20:14.000As I'm constantly saying, let's say that you are in the business of building shelves at the local grocery store and they stop using you.
00:20:21.000They've essentially set up a tariff on you.
00:20:23.000Do you stop shopping at that grocery store if they have the lowest prices?
00:20:26.000Only if you want to get poorer do you do that.
00:20:28.000But the president doesn't understand how trade works.
00:20:30.000The president thinks that trade is not reciprocal.
00:20:33.000The president thinks that all of these industries have been quote-unquote decimated.
00:20:36.000So today, the president had a meeting with all of these steel and aluminum industry leaders, and he said that he was going to raise tariffs dramatically on steel and aluminum.
00:20:44.000He apparently said that he wants to raise the steel tariffs by 25%.
00:20:46.000He wants to slap an overall steel tariff of 25% on foreign steel and a 10% aluminum tariff on aluminum.
00:21:00.000The reason this is a full-scale disaster area is because these are inputs for other industries in the United States.
00:21:05.000For every job in the steel industry, there are 40 jobs in other industries that use steel, which means that if you're in the car industry and you use steel and suddenly the price of steel goes up,
00:21:27.000Tariffs are a terrible economic policy.
00:21:29.000They've always been a terrible economic policy.
00:21:31.000For every job that is saved by steel, by these tariffs, other jobs are lost.
00:21:37.000When the Bush tariffs on steel went into effect from 2001 to 2004, about 21 months, when those tariffs were in effect, the United States lost approximately 200,000 jobs by studies.
00:21:49.000And not only that, the economy suffered overall because of that.
00:21:54.000According to estimates, every single steel job created by a tariff, American consumers paid an additional $200,000 to $2.3 million.
00:22:01.000That's how much it costs to preserve a steel job.
00:22:28.000I mean, when he says that the steel and aluminum industries in the United States have been decimated by decades of unfair trade, it's not true.
00:22:36.000In 2016, the steel industry actually did really well, thanks to dramatically increased car sales.
00:22:40.000Nucor is the nation's leading steel manufacturer.
00:22:43.000It hit $16 billion in sales that year.
00:22:46.000Last year, its net earnings increased 65% over 2016.
00:22:50.000The average salary at that company, by the way, is $80,000.
00:22:53.000Most job loss at Nucor has happened thanks to technological advances, not thanks to foreign trade.
00:22:58.000Right now, 70% of all steel sold in the United States is American steel.
00:23:03.000As for the argument that we need steel tariffs in order to protect the capacity of our military to have steel to use for its weaponry, that's like 3% of all the steel production in the United States would have to be used for a full-scale military mobilization in the United States.
00:23:55.000There are already 160 duties on steel imports, and if you think this is just a way to screw China because China is dumping its cheap steel on us, nonsense.
00:24:02.000China ranks 11th in steel importation into the United States.
00:24:07.000OK, how about, and again, the most important thing here is the number of jobs this is going to cost in another industry.
00:24:12.000The CFO of Anheuser-Busch said this, quote,
00:24:39.000He wrote a book on trade that makes no sense and is supremely foolish.
00:24:44.000And he is Trump's guru on trade, because Trump has always felt that America is getting screwed.
00:24:48.000Because Trump's vision of what American industry is, is guys who are working a blue-collar job in downtown Manhattan building a building with steel.
00:24:56.000He's got a very 1955 version of what American industry looks like.
00:24:59.000That's not what American industry looks like right now.
00:25:02.000The job loss in the steel industry has been brought about by technological change.
00:25:05.000And, of course, the vast majority of jobs in this country are no longer in manufacturing.
00:25:10.000Now, when the president says that I'm supposed to pay more for a car to preserve that steel job, what he's really doing is penalizing me for being in an industry that's more efficient than the steel industry has been on a global level.
00:25:21.000We, by the way, are still the number two producers of all steel on planet Earth.
00:25:24.000But again, this is bad economics from the president.
00:25:27.000The president is just saying things, except this time he's actually going to do it.
00:25:29.000So next week he's supposed to impose these tariffs.
00:25:32.000And the market is reacting just exactly how you would think it is reacting, right?
00:25:37.000This is going to be a big trade war because not only is it going to have a—not only is it going to have
00:25:44.000A significant impact on the steel industry and industries that are fed by steel in the United States.
00:25:50.000It's going to have impact on other industries because other countries are going to raise their tariffs on us in retaliation.
00:25:54.000They shouldn't, but they will in an attempt to back us down.
00:25:58.000They're going to now raise their own tariffs.
00:26:00.000So today, as of this point, the stock market has been dropping pretty precipitously.
00:26:29.000There's still a lot of doubt as to whether this actually gets imposed, because again, Trump says so many things.
00:26:35.000It is not true that the president of the United States saying these things does have an impact if he ends up imposing them.
00:26:41.000So this is why I say on gun policy, I think people are cutting him a lot of slack because they don't think it's actually going to happen.
00:26:45.000But when it comes to trade policy, the president does have the unilateral authority to raise tariffs this way.
00:26:50.000And this could be a full-scale disaster for the economy.
00:26:53.000It could be a real disaster for a number of industries, especially if he decides that he is going to go to trade war with every country that slaps tariffs on us.
00:27:02.000You can see Trump saying, we're going to put the steel tariff, the aluminum tariff.
00:27:05.000And then you can see France saying to us, well, if you're going to do that to us, we're going to put tariffs on not just steel and aluminum.
00:27:11.000We're going to put tariffs on all your other goods, too.
00:27:25.000Now again, one of the reasons I think this is happening is because the president obviously feels isolated.
00:27:29.000The president feels like a lot of his favorite people have been marginalized in the last couple of weeks.
00:27:36.000So, over the last week, Josh Urfel, who is the comms director for Jared Kushner, has been marginalized.
00:27:42.000Kushner himself has been marginalized a little bit, as I said, by the revocation of his interim top-secret security status.
00:27:49.000There's a story today in The New York Times that's very damaging to Kushner about his family business receiving loans after he held meetings with business people.
00:27:56.000So, according to The New York Times, early last year, a private equity billionaire started paying regular visits to the White House, Joshua Harris.
00:28:02.000A founder of Apollo Global Management was advising Trump administration officials on infrastructure policy.
00:28:07.000During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior advisors.
00:28:12.000Among other things, the two men discussed a possible White House job for Harris.
00:28:15.000The job never materialized, but in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Kushner's family real estate firm, Kushner Companies.
00:28:23.000The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper.
00:28:27.000It's triple the average size of their property loan.
00:28:29.000It's one of the largest loans Kushner Company received last year.
00:28:32.000An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent the firm and one of its partners $325 million.
00:28:38.000to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn.
00:28:41.000That loan was made in spring of 2017, right after Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup's chief executive, Michael Corbett.
00:28:48.000According to people briefed on the meeting, the two men talked about financial and trade policy and did not discuss Kushner's family business.
00:28:54.000This is one of the problems with having people in the White House who are deeply connected to their businesses still.
00:28:59.000And it's one of the reasons why his interim security clearance has not been granted at this point, is because of these business connections.
00:29:07.000If this were happening under Hillary, it would not be good.
00:29:09.000It's happening under Trump, and it's not good.
00:29:11.000It doesn't matter whether you like the people who we're talking about personally.
00:29:13.000It doesn't matter if you like the policies they're espousing.
00:29:16.000The media obviously have an agenda, which is to knock Kushner off the hill.
00:29:20.000Right now, they want to see chaos inside the Trump administration, but they're holding this.
00:29:23.000But that's not something that Kushner should have been doing.
00:29:25.000If Trump wanted him to have meetings with Citigroup and financial leaders, then Kushner should have basically become disassociated in entirety from all of the Kushner companies.
00:29:52.000And one of the best-liked people in the White House, everybody I know in the White House, who knows?
00:29:56.000Hope Hicks says that she's a wonderful person.
00:29:58.000Well, she was, according to CNN, excoriated by the president, because a couple of days ago, she went in front of Congress and she was asked whether she'd ever had to lie on behalf of the president.
00:30:06.000She said, well, she told some white lies, like about audience size, like crowd size.
00:30:09.000And that apparently ticked off Trump, according to CNN, and supposedly Trump yelled at her, and then Hope Hicks quit.
00:30:21.000People in the White House are routinely talking about leaving because it's a very chaotic place, a very high-stress job.
00:30:26.000There's a lot of turnover at any White House, but particularly in a White House that's run from the top this way.
00:30:31.000So, Hope Hicks leaving has some impact on the administration.
00:30:34.000I'll explain what impact it has and what it means for Trump in just a second, but you're going to have to go over to Daily Wired and subscribe for the rest of it.
00:30:40.000So for $9.99 a month, you can get your subscription to The Daily Wire.
00:30:43.000That means you get the rest of this show live, The Andrew Klavan Show live, The Michael Molls Show live.
00:30:46.000You get to be part of my mailbag, which is happening tomorrow.
00:30:48.000So now's a great day to subscribe so you can ask all the questions that your little heart desires and make your life that much better.
00:30:55.000Also, if you want the annual subscription, finally, here in my hands, I have it, the greatest tumbler in the history of mankind.
00:31:01.000I'm back in L.A., and I can feel the warmth and the energy surging through me as I hold this, the Best Beverage Vegetables.
00:31:21.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:29.000So, as I say, Hope Hicks has sort of been pushed to the side.
00:31:32.000Jared, right now, is being pushed to the side, apparently, according to reports by General John Kelly, the chief of staff, which means that Kelly is the guy who's sort of bringing people into the center of the room.
00:31:42.000And that means that Trump is more likely to reach out to other people that he wants to talk to.
00:31:46.000If he feels like Kelly is shutting him off from Jared Kushner and that Hope Hicks is going to leave, then he's going to start reaching out to other people he's comfortable with.
00:31:53.000Well, one of the people he likes a lot, apparently, is Peter Navarro.
00:31:57.000And it's not a coincidence that while all this chaos is taking place, Peter Navarro is suddenly making appearances in the Oval Office, and Trump is hanging out with him.
00:32:04.000The people that Trump feels personally comfortable with are the people he's going to want to talk to, and unfortunately, a lot of those people have pretty bad ideas, because personal comfort should not be the gauge of whether somebody's policy is good, but the president doesn't know a lot about policy, and he's very susceptible to being told things by people that he likes.
00:32:20.000So, Hicks being out has more of a personal impact on Trump than it does a policy impact.
00:32:26.000But she is known as sort of the person—she's sort of the Trump whisperer.
00:32:29.000She's the person who can handle Trump and has been able to hem him in a little bit, make him feel better about his presidency, make him feel better about things.
00:32:37.000Her being gone is not going to be a good thing.
00:32:39.000Again, Josh Raffel—I think it's pronounced Erfel—is a press aide whose initial portfolio is primarily focused on Kushner and Ivanka, and he apparently is leaving also.
00:32:50.000And apparently, Dina Powell left a few weeks ago.
00:33:56.000And the answer is because the AG is not supposed to be the president's wingman.
00:33:58.000The AG is supposed to administer the law.
00:34:00.000Jeff Sessions actually takes that rather seriously.
00:34:02.000So one of the areas where this has happened is that Jeff Sessions asked the inspector general to investigate potential FISA abuse.
00:34:09.000There's been a lot of talk about FISA abuse, their supposed abuse by the FBI and the DOJ of the FISA warrant process in the attempt to get a warrant on Carter Page, that former Trump campaign aide, that former Trump foreign policy aide.
00:34:23.000And Sessions said, listen, I don't want the DOJ investigating itself.
00:34:26.000I don't want the DOJ investigating the FBI.
00:34:28.000Let's set somebody else who's independent, because here's the thing.
00:34:30.000If I, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, come down with the conclusion that the Obama DOJ and the Obama FBI went ahead and invaded the campaign, people are going to note a couple of things.
00:36:13.000That's exactly what he should be doing.
00:36:14.000So, it's an absurdity that the President is attacking his own Attorney General.
00:36:18.000So, very bad 48 hours for the President.
00:36:20.000He's attacking his own Attorney General, dumping all over gun rights, and then talking about raising tariffs dramatically that would have a serious impact on the economic growth that he's attempting to reach.
00:36:29.000So, very bad 48 hours for the President.
00:36:31.000And, again, I think this is what the President looks like when he's unmoored, which is why you have to have checks in the White House.
00:36:35.000It's why you have to have good people surrounding him.
00:36:37.000It's why you need a Republican Congress.
00:36:39.000If you had a Democratic Congress and a bunch of advisors around the president telling him to do the popular thing with Democrats, this presidency could go sideways very quickly.
00:36:47.000So while there was talk last week about the president being an ideological leader of the conservative movement, that is not true.
00:36:51.000The president has governed like a conservative so far.
00:36:54.000But he's not an ideological leader, he's a vehicle for the conservative movement.
00:36:57.000That means that if the conservative movement doesn't call him out, if the conservative movement doesn't provide a check when he commits anti-conservative heresies, then there's a possibility that Trump moves significantly to the left.
00:37:08.000And again, if the Democrats were smart, they would know this.
00:37:10.000If the Democrats had any brains at all, they would spend all day just praising Trump.
00:38:03.000Over at CNN, who I criticized pretty heavily last week for what I thought was an egregiously awful town hall, and then I praised this week for doing an interview with Sheriff Scott Israel in Parkland, Florida.
00:38:14.000He did a tweetstorm yesterday that I think is quite good, where he attacked Democrats who attended Louis Farrakhan's speech.
00:38:20.000It is an amazing thing that the mainstream media think it utterly not worthy of note that Louis Farrakhan, an open anti-Semite, an open racist,
00:40:10.000I mean, he's one of the worst people on planet Earth.
00:40:12.000This is the guy, Keith Ellison, who could have been the head of the DNC.
00:40:16.000He was endorsed by Chuck Schumer to be the head of the DNC.
00:40:19.000He was a member of the Nation of Islam.
00:40:20.000He defended Louis Farrakhan for years.
00:40:22.000The Congressional Black Caucus has defended Louis Farrakhan.
00:40:25.000The Democrats are so radical that it's unlikely they would have the brains to actually triangulate with Trump, but their radicalism is also—they're allowed to get away with it.
00:40:32.000There was a poll yesterday that showed 57% of Americans supposedly think Trump is a racist.
00:40:36.000It's like 20% of Republicans and 80-plus percent of Democrats.
00:40:39.000OK, how many people think that Louis Farrakhan is a racist and therefore the people who associate with him are racist?
00:40:45.000The reason that people think that Trump is a racist is because of the associations with the alt-right during the last campaign and some of the comments that he's made.
00:40:52.000Well, if you're going to hold a standard, that standard has to be held on both sides.
00:40:55.000I don't see a lot of people in the media doing it.
00:41:10.000But he'd written a book in secret that was essentially a parody of Stalin's Russia.
00:41:16.000It was recommended to me, actually, by Jordan Peterson, and it's quite an interesting book.
00:41:19.000I'm only about halfway through it, but it is a funny book.
00:41:23.000Basically, the concept is that you are in Stalin's Russia, and suddenly Satan shows up and starts having conversations with all the people there.
00:41:29.000And simultaneously, there's a retelling of the story of Jesus, not along biblical lines, but with parallels to what's going on in the Soviet Union.
00:41:40.000As I say, I'm about halfway through it.
00:41:42.000I look forward to giving you my full analysis of it when I finish the book, but Jordan has good taste in literature.
00:41:47.000So, whatever Jordan recommends on literature, I'm always apt to read.
00:41:50.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:41:56.000All right, so let's begin with a flashback.
00:41:58.000So in the 2012 election cycle, you will remember that the president of the United States at that point said that the 1980s had called him one of their foreign policy back because Mitt Romney said Russia was a geopolitical threat.
00:42:12.000And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.
00:42:16.000OK, and then Vladimir Putin today announced that he had developed invincible nuclear weapons that can hit anywhere in the world and cannot be stopped by missile defense systems.
00:42:26.000So while the president of the United States, Obama, was sleeping on Russia, Russia not only interfered in our election, they also were building these weapons.
00:42:33.000Now, President Trump has been a lot harsher on Russia.
00:42:37.000But, again, Democrats don't have a lot of ground to stand on when they talk about the Russian threat and then talk about how terrible Trump is on Russia.
00:42:44.000So Chuck Schumer—I talked about the radicalism of the Democrats on race.
00:42:47.000Chuck Schumer demonstrated it full-scale yesterday.
00:42:50.000So he was talking on the floor of the Senate about a judicial nominee that President Trump had put forward, and he issues just a blatantly racist statement, and everybody overlooks it because it's racism against white people.
00:43:02.000The nomination of Marvin Quattlebaum speaks to the overall lack of diversity in President Trump's selections for the federal judiciary.
00:43:10.000Mr. Quattlebaum replaces not one, but two scuttled Obama nominees who were African American.
00:43:56.000You're not supposed to use your personal experience to decide cases.
00:43:58.000You're not supposed to use your race to decide cases.
00:44:01.000You're supposed to use the words of the law to decide cases.
00:44:03.000Unfortunately, Democrats don't care about that any longer.
00:44:05.000They've moved into this intersectional quagmire from which they're having difficulty escaping.
00:44:09.000If they want Trump to win re-election, they should keep going with exactly this kind of stuff.
00:44:12.000But if they also want the country to be ruined, they should continue to polarize this race from race and suggest that skin color should be the chief qualifier for being a federal judge.