
President Trump prepares to take his oath of office for the second time; Trump 2.0 prepares for immediate action with a slate of executive orders; and Joe Biden leaves office in disgrace. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/3WDjgHE Ep.2120 - - - DailyWire+: Join the celebration! Use code 47 at https://dailywire.com/subscribe for 47% off your membership today! "Identity Crisis" tells the stories the mainstream media won’t. Stream the full film now, only on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/3C61qVU Get your Ben Shapiro merch here: https://bit.ly/3TAu2cw - - - Today's Sponsors: Oracle - Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in HALF if you move to OCI. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at https://Oracle.com/PRESIDENT PureTalk - Exclusive discount for our listeners at: https://PureTalk.com/SHAPIRO Balance of Nature - Go to https://balanceofnature.com and use promo code SHAPIRO for 35% off your first order as a pr...
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Ben Shapiro
Today, history will be made. We're live from Washington, D.C. as we prepare for Donald Trump to take the oath of office. Watch it all live at Daily Wire. Plus celebrate the 47th president with 47% off your membership. Go to DailyWire.com subscribe. So, of course, we are here live, overlooking the Capitol building. As you can see, it's a beautiful view and you're not going to see anything happen behind us because obviously everything got shifted indoors because it is very, very cold outside. And only we were stupid enough to continue broadcasting outside despite the fact that it is absolutely frigid. It's actually not that bad. They probably could have done it outside, but there's some disappointed people who are walking around. But they're all part of the celebration, and it is a giant celebration. Washington, D.C. is now MAGA town. This is MAGA country in a polar vortex. Last night, the parties were going on, and as you may have heard me tell Michael Moles a moment ago, even I was dragged into the festivities. Here, for example, is a picture of me with mma champion Conor McGregor. That is a thing that actually happened last night. You know, you meet some interesting people here during inauguration weekend. Yeah, there I am with Connor. I have to say, I could take him. I can't take him. And then there was me with one of my favorite classical music artists, a person named Kid Rock. This is also a thing that happened. I will say that when my parents bought me violin lessons from the age of five to the age of about seven, probably what they were thinking was that my musical career would be me with Tom McDonald, as well as me hanging out with Kid Rock. And then of course, some of my closest friends. You got Glenn Beck and Marissa Strike. Glenn, of course, the host, who's kind of the grandfather of many of us in this particular movement. And yes, that is a rip on Glenn's age, as well as Marissa Strait, who is the leader of Prager University, saw a lot of other friends. Megyn Kelly was there last night. Charlie Kirk, of course. It was his party at TPU USA last night. It's been a lot of fun. You can sense these sort of feelings of optimism that are pervading the town, pervading the country. And a sort of interesting unity experience is happening here in Washington, D.C. and I think across the country, the sort of insane lunacy of the left, the protest lunacy of the left, is not here. During the second term of Trump, during Trump term one, there was an enormous amount of resistance from pretty much the very first day. And you're not Seeing any of that here, you. You're even seeing some of the people who are most opposed to Trump in 2017 starting to come around. For example, the person named Snoop Dogg. As I say, his parents decided that they would name him Snoop with two O's and dog with two G's. Apparently, he came out of his mother said, you shall be named Snoop. In any case, Snoop back in 2017 had this to say about President Trump. So ain't nobody gonna perform for Donald Trump, huh? Which one of you gonna be the first one to do it? I'm waiting. I'm gonna roast the out. One of you, Uncle Tom, for doing. Which one of you gonna do it first? Ozby's, the one that performs for himself at about noon. Just thought that I had to be in Compton soon, so that's a little bit awkward, but it is sort of the mood of the country. I think people are optimist. Even people who are on the left who didn't vote for Trump, when they are asked about their best selves, I think many of them will say that they hope for the success of President Trump, which, of course, is something we should always hope for. Our President of the United States. I hoped that Joe Biden would be a good president. As it turned out, he was an absolutely, horrifyingly bad president. So what exactly is the schedule of the day? The inauguration ceremony is supposed to begin around 11:30am Eastern. It's going to be happening apparently inside the Capitol Building. There were some rumors last night it was all going to be shifted to the local arena, and it could all be done in front of a big crowd, but apparently that's not going to happen. President Trump will be sworn in. That's where he will give the inaugural address as well. And then later, he'll show up at the arena. Unclear how long the inaugural address is going to be. President Trump is going to give a very optimistic speech, according to the Wall Street Journal. He's given some excerpts of his inaugural address to the Journal. Apparently, he's going to call for, quote, a revolution of common sense, which is very Trump. President Trump is not an ideological conservative. He's not an ideological liberal. He's a pragmatic utilitarian, and common sense seems to be his hallmark. All he cares about is racking up wins, which for a president of the United States is a pretty good place to be. He's expected to say, according to remarks shared with the Wall Street Journal, quote, I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling New era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping in the country. My message to Americans today is that it is time for us to once again act with courage, vigor, and the vitality of history's greatest civilization. That is extraordinary language from President Trump. I hope the rest of the inaugural mirrors that language. That is very optimistic message from President Trump. And again, vitality, courage. A willingness to say that America is a great place and that we will be a great place again is awesome. And President Trump, of course, is having a lot of fun. Yesterday, he was dancing with the Village People on stage. I'm old enough to remember when the Village People were saying he couldn't even use their tunes at his rallies. And now he's dancing on stage with the Village People. That is a thing that happened yesterday. He is also slated, immediately after the inauguration, to immediately go back to the White House and start signing executive orders. That will either happen at the White House, it could happen at the Capitol. There was some talk that he might even do it at the arena in front of a crowd. Just bring the executive orders right in and sign them. It could be up to 200 executive orders signed by the President of the United States. Now, listen, as a constitutionalist, I gotta tell you, I am not a huge fan of executive orders. I will say that we are now a government, unfortunately, run by executive order. Joe Biden ran the government by executive order. Donald Trump is going to have to reverse many of the worst actions of the Biden administration that were taken via the executive branch, ending around the legislative branch. This is a trend that really started under Barack Obama when he lost Congress and decided that he was going to use his pen and his phone in order to rule the country. So Trump, his first day in office in 2017, signed, I believe, one executive order. Today, he is slated to sign some 200 executive orders. And those executive orders are going to range from energy to DEI in the government. He released one of the executive orders yesterday to the Free Press, to my friend Barry Weiss's free press, setting out a government wide standard on the biological reality of two sexes, clearly defining male and female. Which, of course, that's such a dunk. It's such a dunk. Because the reality is that this is the single most polarizing and stupid issue that Democrats decided to choose during the last several election cycles. The idea that boys can become girls and that minor boys should be allowed to transition into minor girls, they should be given hormones and they should be given surgery, all of that was such a bad sell for the Democrats that it all fell apart for them electorally. President Trump on day one is saying we are done with all of this. According to the Free Press, the executive order is to say that all radical gender ideology, guidance, communication, policies and forms are removed from the federal government. Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination. I mean, that is very, very strong language there. The kind of language that is true and of which I strongly approve. I've been using precisely that language probably for a decade at this point. Longer than a decade actually. Woman means adult, human, female. The executive order directs the government identification, like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self assessed gender identity. They will be ending the practice of housing men in women's prisons and taxpayer funded transition for male prisoners as well. The administration explained this really was a defining issue of the campaign. The President is going to be fulfilling the promises he made on the campaign trail and it does not stop there. Day one, he's expected to include an order declaring an emergency at the U.S. mexico border. He's expected to issue pardons for some of the January 6th prisoners. Some of the convicted, those will presumably be, as J.D. vance, Vice President elect, said, all of those who are participating in nonviolent activity, people sort of trespassed in the Capitol building. He's also supposed to issue executive orders to increase fossil fuel development, which of course would be absolutely necessary. All of these are directed at unleashing the economy. All of these are directed at rewriting the idiotic bargain that Joe Biden tried to foist on the United States. According to the Associated Press, President Trump has pledged to go further and move faster in enacting his agenda than during his first term. Democrats who once formed a resistance are now divided over whether to work with Trump or to defy him. So we're going to see a bevy of these rolled out. He's going to be labeling the drug cartels to terrorist organizations. We'll get to more of what President Trump plans at the very beginning of his administration in just one moment. First, even if you think AI is a little bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it is indeed coming and fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? 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It's good enough for my very, very important business phone calls. It's definitely good enough for everybody else as well. I wouldn't recommend it if I didn't use it. Go check them out right now. PureTalk.com Shapiro and claim your free Samsung Galaxy with qualifying purchase. Alrighty. So again, this is going to be a blizzard of executive orders coming from President Trump. According to Politico, the executive orders are going to cover everything from immigration to energy. According to Politico, Trump is eager to use Week one to show his supporters he's making good on his signature issue of immigration. He's unlikely to fulfill some of the biggest and most aggressive Day one promises, like large scale deportation. We'll get to that in a moment. There will indeed be deportation efforts made this week. He is also expected to forge ahead with directing agencies to begin the process of restoring remain in Mexico. That, of course, will was one of the most important policies that was enacted during the Trump administration that says that if you show up at our border and you want to get in, you have to remain in Mexico while we process your application. Why is that important? Well, because the way that it had been working under Joe Biden, you came, you said the magic words. I'm claiming asylum from my home country because I am in fear for my life. They would immediately take you, process you, give you a date to come back to court and release you into the country where you would just disappear. Remain in Mexico means you wait on the other side of the border while, while we process your application instead of just being released into the interior. His team is still deliberating a designation of drug cartels as terrorist organizations. I think that is likely to happen. They're also thinking about crafting an executive order to end birthright citizenship by excluding the children of undocumented immigrants and short term visitors to the US from the right to citizenship by birth. Now, again, unclear whether that would stand up in court because that is usually interpreted as a constitutional issue that cannot be altered by something like an executive order. He is also going to be revoking the intelligence briefing capabilities, the intelligence access of the 51 ridiculous intelligence officials who suggested the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation on foreign policy. The president is saying that he's going to start negotiations between Ukraine and Russia Day 1. He is also sending some mixed signals about what's going to happen day one on tariff policy. I'd be surprised if there's no tariffs that come down via executive order today. Energy is gonna be utterly unleashed by executive policy. Today. Trump may in fact declare a national emergency. Now, again, this is something that was a door opened by Democrats under Joe Biden when national emergencies were declared willy nilly. So that cat has been let out of its crib at this point and there's no way of putting that back in. President Trump is also thinking about a policy restricting foreign organizations receiving U.S. funding from providing and promoting abortion. That's the so called Mexico City policy. That would be his sort of concession to pro lifers. Of course, President Trump did not campaign as somebody who's going to do a lot on abortion policy as president of the United States, but this has reversed itself. Every administration Republican comes in, puts back in place the Mexico City policy, Democrat comes in, obliterates it and now we're performing abortions with American taxpayer dollars abroad. On education, you're gonna see a bunch of executive orders ranging from matters of DEI to antisemitism to Title ix. On labor, the president is going to make it easier for his administration to fire or demote employees inside the executive branch via set of schedule F plans. That's excellent. That's really good. You need to be able to fire people in the executive branch. They don't work for anyone but the president. These are independent branches of government. And when it comes to tech, President Trump is pledging to unleash tech. So, again, a lot going on in the early day, the first day of the Trump administration. It's going to be huge when it comes to immigration. Tom Homan, the immigration czar, the border watchdog, he says openly, the handcuffs are coming off day one.
Tom Homan
We're going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go. Arrest criminal aliens. That's what's going to happen.
Ben Shapiro
What does ICE been doing for the last four years?
Tom Homan
They haven't been able to do much because Secretary Mayorkas had new ICE priorities. Ice, get this. Now, the Secretary of Homeland Security has told ice, you can't arrest an illegal alien if he's just here illegally. He's got to be convicted of a serious crime or be a national security threat. He told immigration officers not to enforce immigration law. Well, we're telling ice, you're going to enforce immigration law without apology. You're going to, you're going to constrain the worst first, public safety threats first. But no one's off the table. If they're in the country illegally, they got a problem.
Ben Shapiro
Well, again, that is going to be the way that immigration is running. The incoming national Security adviser, Mike Walsh, he says aggressive enforcement is on the table. I mean, this is what Trump was elected to do. This is the. If Trump has one mandate, this is the mandate. Close the border, stop the illegal immigration and start deporting people who are illegally in the country. Here is Mike Waltz explaining. You are certainly going to see a much more aggressive action from Border Patrol to lock down our border, number one. Number two, we are working rapidly back towards a remain in Mexico policy. Number three, you're going to see some of our key partners step up in terms of deportation and taking some of these people back. I don't want to get too far ahead of who they are, how that's going to occur. And then number four, Tom Holman actually, absolutely is going to take much more aggressive ICE action. Now. Unbelievably enough, the deep state is already trying to do things. When I say the deep state, I mean career staffers who are clearly trying to thwart President Trump's agenda here. The Washington Post reports that there had been big scale deportation raids that were scheduled for Chicago, day of the inauguration. And now it turns out that they haven't made a decision. Why? Because it got leaked to the press. So it turns out that when you leak to the press what the ICE raids are going to look like, people can avoid the ICE raids. According to Tom Holman, quote, we're looking at this leak. We will make a decision based on this leak. It's unfortunate because anyone leaking law enforcement operations puts officers at greater risk, which of course, is absolutely true. And this is going to be a battle until they start firing people they need to fire. Many, many people. Many people need to be fired. And when it comes to immigration itself, I got to say, as you all know, not a particular fan of this particular pope. I liked John Paul, too. I like Pope Benedict. I do not like Pope Francis. I think Pope Francis has done a poor job of representing the eternal values of the Catholic Church. I speak as an outsider, obviously, not as an insider, but Pope Francis came out and condemned President Trump's plan to impose mass deportations on the country. He said it would be a disgrace. To which I say, well, then probably you should take down the wall around Vatican City and see how that goes for you, because you don't get to dictate American national border policy from the Vatican. That's an absurdity on its face. Well, President Trump is, in fact, arriving at the White House as we speak. President Biden is going to greet him there and probably it'll be pretty chummy because frankly, President Biden likes Donald Trump more than he likes Kamala Harris. At this point. Jill and Kamala can't stand one another as there's a very solid shot that President Biden voted for President Trump if in fact, he still has the capacity to vote. And if not, Jill just voted twice for President Trump, once on her behalf and once on behalf on behalf of President Biden. On his way out, President Biden is doing all the things. So remember, he was the norm's president. And I said many times during this election cycle, the thing about Joe Biden, he was not normal. He was not normal. He gave the patina of normal by being old and senile and doddering and not saying all sort of the outlandish, outrageous things that you might hear from President Trump on a daily basis on truth Social. But he was not a norms president. He was not someone who sought to preserve the norms of the American republic. His economy was not normal. His foreign policy was not normal. His White House was not normal. On his way out the door, he is making perfectly clear what a radical, abnormal president he was. He's doing it every which way, whether it is commuting the sentences of some of the worst murderers in American society. 37 out of 40 people who are on death row, he commuted their sentences. Whether it is that or whether it is what President Biden has attempted to do over the course of the last 72 hours. So this all launched last week when Joe Biden decided that he was going to unilaterally declare that there was in fact an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. This is on January 17th. Just three days ago, he issued a statement, quote, I have supported the Equal Rights Amendment for more than 50 years. I have long been clear. No one should be discriminated against based on their sex. We as a nation must affirm and protect women's full equality once and for all. On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA. The American Bar association has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the constitution as the 28th amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars. The Equal Rights Amendment has become a part of the Constitution. It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people. In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country. I affirm what I believe and what 3/4 of the states have ratified. The 28th amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law, regardless of sex. The there are so many problems with this, I can't even begin to explain them. So I will begin to explain them. Here is the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that it's not true. It's not magically a constitutional amendment because Joe Biden declares it. So it's not like Michael Scott walking into the middle of the office and declaring bankruptcy was effective. Joe Biden walked into the middle of the office and was like, I declare a constitutional amendment. That doesn't make it a constitutional amendment. It had been cleared by something like 35 states originally is back in the 70s, and then three states uncleared it and then three more states cleared it. So you're at 35 states, regardless, you need 38. So there's that. Number two, there is a time limit. You can't adopt a constitutional amendment over the course of like 150 years, getting one state after another to vote every 10 years for it. That is not how constitutional amendments are supposed to work. So no, it's not legally effective. But again, Joe Biden does not care for the norms of our society. Not at all. Not one iota. We're going to more of Joe Biden violating all of the norms in just one second. 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Okay, so speaking of President Biden violating every norm on his way out the door, he decided to issue, literally on his way out the door, blanket pardons for Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired General Mark Milley, and members of the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Even the Associated Press says this is an extraordinary use of the powers of the presidency in his final hours. And Joe Biden said in a statement, again, his, his excuse, his excuse for, for breaking the law is always that he has to do it preemptively. So, so Donald Trump doesn't break the law. By the way, President Trump did just arrive at the White House. He was greeted by President Biden's prone body. They propped him up on some sort of stand, and then he greeted President Trump. And Jill took Joe's hand, waved it at Trump, and then they all sort of moved into the White House. Apparently, he wrote a letter that he is leaving for President Trump. It may or may not say that he's being held hostage by members of his own administration and has not decided any of his actual policies for the last several years. Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump has also arrived at the Capitol building in preparation for the inauguration, the second inauguration of her father. Anyway, Joe Biden issued a statement upon issuing these parting shots this morning, these pardons this morning, quote, our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They're the lifeblood of our democracy. Yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties in certain cases. Some have even been threatened with criminal prosecutions, including General Mark Milley, Dr. Fauci and the members and staff of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol. These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions. So again, the idea here is that he is going to preemptively pardon all these people because otherwise Donald Trump and his mean cadre of mean people are gonna do something. And that, wow, that'll just be. That'll be so brutal. This has been Joe Biden's going excuse for everything for four years. If I don't violate the law, then they will violate the well. But it turns out that when it came to actual violation of the norms of the actual running of the government, Joe Biden violated everything he used. We had to sue the federal government. We, the Daily Wire, sued the federal government to stop you from having to get a vaccine that Joe Biden tried to cram down on you via osha, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Like, that's insane. Joe Biden attempted to use the mechanisms of government to ignore the federal. To ignore the Supreme Court when it came to student loans. Joe Biden attempted to activate the federal government in order to shut off in the waning days of his administration, offshore oil drilling across the entire Eastern seaboard. These are things that are not within the purview of the President of the United States alone. And yet he attempted to do all of this stuff. So who's abnormal? The answer is that Joe Biden was always abnormal and it's about time for him to go. What's hilarious is now the media are trying to buy back their lack of credibility and truly buy back their lack of credibility. So I've said before, and it happens to be the case that the Biden administration, in their abnormality and the media in covering from that abnormality, they totally blew out their credibility. Totally blew it out. And that is, I think, something they're now trying to restore by admitting the reality, which is that President Biden has been senile for the last three years. There's an entire article in the Guardian over the weekend in which the Guardian finally admits, oh, yeah, Joe Biden has been senile for a long time. For like a very long time. According to the Guardian, in public, Dean Phillips, who ran against Joe Biden, saying he's kind of seen now, was ridiculed in private. Others shared his concerns. Larry Sabato, director of the center for Politics at the University of Virginia, recalled receiving a call from a Democratic senator in late January or early February 2024. Quote, I said, is there any particular reason why you called Me, I'd like to know. He said, you do realize off the record that Joe Biden is not going to be our nominee. I was stunned. I said, what? How? Why? He said, I was just at a meeting with him, with several other senators and he couldn't even function. We can't run him. Sabato added that the senator in question tried to raise the issue, which angered the White House. Quote, he was punished, as several of them were. They gave him the cold shoulder for a while. The point is, a lot of people had figured it out, but they didn't care. I'm stunned they got away with it and it produced term two for Trump and it's going to be the longest four years of our life. Now, what's amazing about that is that Larry Sabato, who used to be, I think, a pretty good analyst of politics over at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato literally spent months after that defending Joe Biden's mental state because that was the de rigueur demand of the Democratic Party. And everybody just, everybody just jumped. The Democratic Party said, jump. Everybody said, how high? According to the Guardian, quote, the administration continued to play down concerns about Biden's age and gave short shrift to any journalist who dared raise it. No source interviewed by the Guardian perceives a deliberate conspiracy, but more likely a case of collective wishful thinking. Bull, Bull. That is absolute nonsense. Of course it was a cover up. Of course it was, particularly by the media. It's one thing for people around Joe Biden to be credulous. It is a complete other thing for the media to be this credulous. And it shows who they work for. Now, I will admit I am enjoying the spectacle of the Democrats eating one another in what has to be the funniest headline of the day. This from Politico, Alexandra Pelosi. That would be the daughter of the, of the former speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Blast First Lady Joe Biden, quote, Lady McBiden. So now they're saying the thing that she's Lady Macbeth. Feeling that anger is Joe Biden. Fueling that anger is Joe Biden's continued now public nursing of a grudge toward Pelosi for pushing the President to withdraw from last year's campaign. Alexandra Pelosi, the former Speaker's daughter, said, quote, if I was Lady McBiden, I'd put on my big girl pants, play the long game and think about my husband's legacy. There aren't many people in America who have something nice to say about Joe Biden. Nancy Pelosi is one of them. Wow. Lady McBiden now. Only I have been calling her Lady Macbeth for a while because clearly she is the one who's been steering Joe Biden toward a sort of power hungry attitude. But it's now all out there in the open, and it is delicious to watch it happen. It's all coming out now. It's all coming out. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, he says that he watched Joe Biden actually giving executive orders, and it was clear that Joe Biden had no idea what he was even talking about. It was clear he had no clue what was even happening.
Mike Waltz
This is probably third week of January. We sit down, we're in the midst of it and the whole conversation, and I'm going, we don't need to have this conversation. The president reaches over just like this. We're sitting in the right next to the fireplace in the Oval, and he grabs my arm and he says, the speaker and I just need a couple minutes together. Would y'all just leave us alone? And I looked up on the faces of some of the staff standing around the wall, and they're like, no, he did it.
Ben Shapiro
So they.
Mike Waltz
He called it. He's the commander in chief. So everybody leaves real quickly. Mr. President, can I ask you a question? I cannot answer this from my constituents in Louisiana. Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Like, I don't understand. You know, liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Because you understand we just talked about Ukraine. You understand you're fueling Vladimir Putin's war machine because they got to get their gas from him, you know, and he looks at me stunned with this, and he said, I didn't do that. And I said, Mr. President, yes, you did. It was an executive order, like, you know, three weeks ago. And he goes, no, I didn't do that. And he's arguing with me. I said, Mr. President, respectfully, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out? We'll read it together. You definitely did that. And he goes, oh, you talk about natural gas? Yes, sir. He said, no, no, you misunderstand. He said, what I did is I signed this thing to. We're going to conduct a study on the effects of lng. I said, no, you're not, sir. You paused it. I know I have the terminal, the export terminals in my state. I talked to those people this morning. This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security. It occurred to me, Barry, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed. And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, we're in serious trouble. Who is running the country? Like, I don't know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn't know.
Ben Shapiro
Well, that man is now leaving in disgrace, as well he should. The legacy of Joe Biden is going to be that he was the interregnum between two Donald Trump terms. And he blew it up so badly that Donald Trump was able to reenter office with a vast majority of the electoral votes and with a heavy plurality of the popular vote as well, with a majority in the House, with a majority in the Senate. A lot of that's due to Donald Trump, and a lot of that is due to the gigantic failure that was Joe Biden's presidency. Well, as you know, folks, today is the day Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. The Daily Wire is live from D.C. we are bringing you every single moment. We are here on the ground in the cold, delivering it all to you unfiltered, uncensored and in real time. To celebrate this historic event, we are giving you 47% off new Daily Wire, plus annual memberships, plus we're including a free $20 gift as a thank you for joining the fight. With your membership, you'll get ad free access to all our shows, plus an exclusive lineup of hit movies, Fearless documentaries and original series. Now would be the time to join. Use code 47@dailywire.com subscribe for 47% off your new Daily Wire membership. Now's a great time to join. It's gonna be a great four years. We hope and pray. Well, meanwhile, as I've said earlier, the world is already adjusting to President Trump. The world is already recognizing that just yelling and screaming about it, shouting to the sky, going out to the forest, screaming into the forest and beating things with sticks isn't going to be sufficient. According to the New York Times, defiance is out. Deference is in. Trump returns to a different Washington. Quote, if Washington feels like a war zone again, it does not necessarily feel that way. Unlike the last time President elect Donald J. Trump took the oath of office eight years ago, the bristling tension and angry defiance have given way to accommodation and submission. The resistance of 2017 has faded into the resignation of 2025. And that is absolutely correct. The sort of feeling of the resistance, these sort of tech bros who are anti Trump, they're all here. They're all here. They're gonna be at the inauguration. Why? Well, because I think two things happened. One is the inevitability, which is that the American people actually do not like what Democrats are selling. And if you're a member of the marketplace, then you need to acknowledge the will of the American people. That's part of it. But there's something else going on here too, and that is the last four years were terrible for any innovator. If you were an innovator, it was a bad four years for you. The sort of cram downs that were experienced by the tech bros. And again, I know all the tech bros. The sort of pressure that was put on Facebook and Google and YouTube and Instagram and all these various social media outlets. Yes, they were too friendly to the Democrats. And also that pressure was quite real. The Biden administration was not so subtly encouraging all these places to throttle the dissemination of information. And now the question is whether there will actually be a long lasting reversion to a free speech attitude. That's the thing that I am waiting for. But the level of optimism in the country is, is at an all time high as far as I'm concerned. I watched the Bush. I've been voting in American elections since 2004. It is now 2025. And I have to say this is the most optimistic I think people have felt about the country in a very, very, very long time. Probably since the end of the Cold War. In many ways this is a new era for America and I think everyone is feeling it. It's really, really important obviously that people do feel that now. That's not stopping some protesters from making asses of themselves. Yesterday, our own Mary Margaret Olihan was covering the D.C. protests and she got some fascinating, some fascinating clips from some of the dunderheads who decided to take to the streets in 20 degree snowy weather.
Mary Margaret Olihan
But you know, that's sort of the trend lately has been sort of to eliminate the word woman.
Ben Shapiro
Why is that?
Mary Margaret Olihan
I'm not willing to do that.
Ben Shapiro
Why do they not want to say woman anymore?
Mary Margaret Olihan
All kinds of reasons that I don't agree with.
Ben Shapiro
Wait, tell us more. I'm so interested in this.
Mary Margaret Olihan
That's okay. Probably shouldn't go there, but I mean, I'm a woman.
Ben Shapiro
I like it when we talk about women. I think it's important to remember us.
Mary Margaret Olihan
Miss. Say that word also. Lesbian.
Ben Shapiro
Yeah.
Mary Margaret Olihan
Lgbtqia.
Ben Shapiro
Yeah.
Mary Margaret Olihan
Okay.
Ben Shapiro
I've heard people say that the TIA.
Mary Margaret Olihan
Part is more important than the woman part. You're hitting on a biggie there. Probably not for this day. We're not supposed to talk about that here.
Ben Shapiro
No.
Mary Margaret Olihan
You know how it has to be kind of contrast.
Ben Shapiro
Yes, I get it. I get it.
Mary Margaret Olihan
Did you get this sign here?
Ben Shapiro
No.
Mary Margaret Olihan
This is important.
Ben Shapiro
Our daughters. Daughters will adore us. I know what that's from.
Mary Margaret Olihan
Yes, indeed. So I figure, you know, like, that's the most important part to focus on today.
Ben Shapiro
They are even confused about their own side. The reason that that lady in the pink hat was having trouble talking about woman versus not woman is she understands the assignment. The assignment is the you have to defend women without defining the word woman. The left has torn itself up. This isn't about Trump anymore. The left has eaten itself and it's going to continue eating itself alive. And I am here for it. Well, yesterday, President Trump did give a big rally. Here is a bit of his rally entrance and what that sounded and looked like. We stand saved. Proud to be an American about 1 million times. By the time this weekend is over, if that's not drilled into your brain like an earworm From Star Trek 2 Wrath of Khan, then I think that you're probably doing it wrong. That song is gonna get more play. Lee Greenwood's gonna make a bunch in royalties this weekend. President Trump spent yesterday going off on the political establishment. He has every right to do so, considering he is the ultimate outsider. Literally came from zero experience in politics to become the President of the United States and then become President of the United States again. It is the most incredible story in modern political history. I mean, there's just no other competitor. There's not even a close competitor. President Trump's joke, his campaign began and was perceived as a joke in 2015, and he became President of the United States on a roiling undercurrent of rage at the establishment. And then in 2020, in the weirdest election of our lifetime, when everybody voted from home in the middle of Black Lives Matter riots and Covid, he lost. And then he came all the way back to the White House with an overwhelming majority of electoral votes after nearly being assassinated twice and having the candidate he was running against replaced with that candidate's vice president. It's an unbelievable story, and it'll take 50 years for the movie to get made because Hollywood is so damned leftist. Obviously, if Donald Trump were a Democrat, the movie would already be in the works. It is an unbelievable story. Here was Donald Trump going off on the political establishment yesterday at his rally.
Donald Trump
Tomorrow at noon, the curtain closes on four long years of American decline. And we begin a brand new day of American strength and prosperity, dignity and pride, bringing it all back once and for all. We're going to end the reign of a failed and corrupt political establishment in Washington. A failed administration. We're not going to take it anymore war. We're going to stop the invasion of our borders. We're going to reclaim our wealth. We're going to unlock the liquid gold that's right under our feet. Liquid gold. We're going to bring back law and order to our cities. We're going to restore patriotism to our schools, get radical left woke ideologies the hell out of our military and out of our government. And we are going to make America great again.
Ben Shapiro
Again. The left cannot handle the fact that many of the policies he's talking about are overwhelmingly popular. The New York Times released a poll on Saturday and it found that there's 87% American support for deporting immigrants who who are here illegally and have criminal records. There's 63% support for deporting immigrants who are here illegally and arrived over the last four years. There's 55% support for deporting literally all illegal immigrants in the United States. That is a big number. That is a big number. And by the way, it doesn't mean America is an anti immigrant country. 56% said they believe immigrants strengthen the country, but they don't want people coming here who are not going to assimilate and are coming here illegally in the first place. And when it comes to the sort of establishment versus non establishment viewpoint, Americans, they believe the system is broken. I said this in 2016 and it's true. It's been true since Donald Trump. The left portrayed him as the death of the system. He was not. He was the coroner. He came across the corpse of the American political system and he pointed at it and he said, that's a corpse. Things are dead. We need to change things. And whether you liked it or hated it, the diagnosis was correct. And by the way, the American people agree with this. According to that New York Times poll, 59% of American adults believe that the American political system has been broken for decades. For decades. Another 29% believe it's been broken, but only for the last few years. That's going to include a lot of people who think it broke under Joe Biden, by the way. In fact, 57% of Democrats believe that the American political system has been broken for decades. President Trump's policies are overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly popular. The most controversial ones, according to the left, things like men are not women and we should deport illegal immigrants. These are common Sense policies. That's why his inaugural address today is going to be apparently about the virtue of common sense, which is a great pitch for him, because, again, Donald Trump is not a thoroughgoing ideologue. He's not. He's a man with instincts. And those instincts tend to be commonsensical instincts on many of the big issues of the day. He vowed yesterday at his rally that illegal border trespassers are going back home again. This is an overwhelmingly powerful policy that he's been running on since 2015, and I think he's going to get a lot of it done.
Donald Trump
The sun sets tomorrow evening, the invasion of our borders will have come to a halt, and all the illegal border trespassers will, in some form or another.
Ben Shapiro
Be on their way back home again. He's going to do that thing. And he also vowed, today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Now, whenever it's MLK Jr. Day, which is a commemoration of the life of MLK, there's always a spate of think pieces from the left about how the thing that's really important about MLK is that he was far left on economics and that what he really wanted was redistributed economic policies. That is not the reason that he has a national holiday. The reason he has a national holiday is for one reason and one reason only. When juxtaposed with the militant racial tribalism that was pushed by early Malcolm X, MLK was conciliatory. He said that the American vision extended to black people. And he was right about that. That's the reason we celebrate him. And so the end of DEI should, in fact be a tribute to mlk, not a rebuttal of mlk. That, at least, is the way that most Americans were brought up to see MLK Day. President Trump, for his part, says that among the other things he's going to do, he's going to be releasing files on the assassinations of JFK and mlk, which, by the way, he totally should do. Now, as y'all know, I'm not a big conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff. Lee Harvey Oswald, the overwhelming evidence demonstrates, killed John F. Kennedy, Jr. There was no second shooter. Now, where Lee Harvey Oswald came from, he was a Commie who'd been recruited by the ussr. He actually went to the ussr, spent time there, tried to walk into the Soviet embassy in Mexico at one point and was rejected, was a nutter, had tried to kill somebody earlier. But, you know, again, should all the files be released? Absolutely. The American people are always owed transparency when it comes to this sort of stuff here is President Trump saying he's gonna release the JFK and the MLK.
Donald Trump
Files as a first step toward restoring transparency and accountability to government. We will also reverse the over classification of government documents. And in the coming days, we are going to make public remaining records relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And other topics of great public interest. It's all going to be released. Uncle Sam.
Ben Shapiro
And that, I think, is a very positive. Again, transparency is absolutely necessary. I think that that is going to be a very positive development for the country. Well, right now, Elon Musk and the whole Cabinet have arrived at the Capitol building for the swearing in of the new president elect, who's also the same as the old president elect. That, of course, is going to be happening in about an hour from now. It's now 10:15, 10:16 in the morning in east coast time. It's supposed to happen around 11:30. So everybody is in anxious preparation for the swearing in of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States. Elon Musk did stop by the rally yesterday and he spoke as well. President Trump, by the way, is arriving at the White House right now. Actually, he arrives a little bit earlier. We actually have some footage of that. Here's President Trump arriving at the White House to take over his old residence. There he is getting out of the presidential beast, being welcomed by the ailing Joe Biden, and then they are all entering the White House together. So again, I think that Jill and Joe could not be happier handing over the keys to the White House to Donald Trump, who is at least not Kamala Harris, who Joe Biden absolutely despises. Yesterday, Elon Musk spoke at the big rally. Here's what it sounded like when Elon took the stage yesterday at the Trump rally.
Donald Trump
We're looking forward to making a lot of changes. And, you know, this victory is the start. Really.
Ben Shapiro
What matters going forward is to actually.
Donald Trump
Make significant changes, have those cement those changes and set the foundation for America to be strong for a century, for centuries, forever. So, and make America great again.
Ben Shapiro
Well, meanwhile, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos have all arrived at the Capitol building as well. Again, this is very different from 2017 where Democrats were trying to browbeat all of the Tech Bros into rejecting freedom of speech in favor of shouting that the Russians had somehow manipulated Donald Trump into the presidency. Now, here's the thing. I'm very hopeful for this administration. I think hundreds of millions of Americans are hopeful for this administration. No distractions. No distractions. Now listen, it's President Trump. President Trump is an out of the box character. He's gonna say things and do things that I don't particularly like and that a lot of people don't particularly like. Sometimes that is going to be a thing that happens. He is, obviously, because he is a different character, he's a different kind of guy. That means he's gonna post stuff on Truth Social that I think is not useful. He's going to make moves that I think. But to be distracted by core issues, that's the thing he cannot afford. And so what that means is right now I'm very hopeful that what he's doing with TikTok is gonna materialize as an actual ban on TikTok. That's what the American people deserve. So TikTok has become a big issue of the day because TikTok has sort of been playing with President Trump. I think President Trump is playing carrots and sticks with TikTok, actually. I think that's the actual strategy here. So TikTok, of course, a wildly popular Chinese psyop, an app that is. That is available or was available on the Apple Store and is effectively owned by the Chinese government, run and owned by a company called ByteDance, in which the CCP has an actual controlling stake and they control how. How TikTok is run. I mean, there's no question about this. They gather data. TikTok's algorithm is so sophisticated that if you download it on your phone and then you click on a link via TikTok, it will continue to track your keystrokes on the sites that you are visiting. That's how much data it is gathering on you, and your friends and your family is gathering all that data on you. Besides which, it is pushing a bunch of Chinese propaganda. Its algorithms push actual Chinese propaganda. There's a study that recently came out that suggested, for example, the content surrounding Tiananmen Square, one of the low points of the Chinese communist regime in the modern era. 80% of the coverage of that on TikTok was positive. So that demonstrates exactly what TikTok is. And of course, it's such a Chinese app that they refused to sell it. The American Congress passed a law and it said, you have to divest yourselves of Chinese ownership and then you can continue to operate in the United States, but you can't be a Chinese government psyop operating within the borders of the United States. And ByteDance said, We would rather shut down than sell. So that bill went through. That bill was signed into law by President Biden. He tried to avoid it, and then it was overruled by the Congress. And then the Supreme Court upheld it. And then the Supreme Court upheld it. And so President Trump has been negotiating with TikTok. First, TikTok put out a statement. They shut it down over the weekend, and they put out a statement basically calling on President Trump to do something about it. Then they put out a second statement that said, quote, as a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the United States. And the TikTok chief executive, Shao Chu, filmed his own thank you video to President Trump last week, even referring to the president's personal TikTok account. TikTok has not responded to request for comment from the New York Times. This is not a free speech issue. Free speech is perfectly protected within the boundaries of the United States. This is a question of whether the Chinese government gets to use the free speech of the United States to promote its own direct propaganda outlets gathering information on the American people and at the exact same time. Right. That is the question when it comes to TikTok. So what do I think President Trump is actually doing? I think he's trying to basically offer enough carrots and sticks to get TikTok to sell. TikTok would prefer not to sell. They prefer to shut it down and to leverage the administration into letting it continue to exist. But there was an act duly passed by Congress. The President of the United States is the executive branch. He executes the law. He does not have the ability to simply override a law passed by the Congress of the United States. So I'm hopeful that President Trump's talk about TikTok is mainly directed at leveraging TikTok into selling its control stake and to ending the Chinese government running, as I say, a psyop on American soil. President Obama has arrived at the Capitol building. Michelle Obama is not with him. This has caused some level of consternation in political circles. A lot of questions about why Michelle has been avoiding this sort of stuff. Maybe she just has a time, a hard time with her poker face when it comes to President Trump. We will have to see exactly how all of this plays out. President Trump is still at the White House preparing to move over to the Capitol building behind us. Obviously, speaking of being distracted, there has. There's been a lot of ink spilled over the course of the last 48 hours over a series of meme coins that have been launched by members of the Trump family. There's a Donald Trump meme coin that was launched and a Melania meme coin that was launched. So what precisely is a meme coin? So I've talked about cryptocurrency. I'm a big fan of cryptocurrency. I'm not a big fan of meme coins. The reason I'm not a fan of meme coins is they have no underlying value unless they end up as repositories and stores of value. Just like any other form of currency. When it comes to cryptocurrency, it's called cryptocurrency for a reason. All forms of currency, the value relies on either the wide use or wide respect for the value of the currency. Right? The American dollar, for example, is backed by the full faith and credit of the American government, which means that you are having faith when you use American dollars that the American government is eventually going to pay off its debt and that the dollar will not be worth zero. This is the reason that nobody is investing in Argentinian pesos or historically have not. When it comes to crypto, the same thing is true. This is why investing in Bitcoin itself has been a good investment. Because it has such large scale buy in from the body politic that its actual value continues to exist. You can trade it, you can hold it. I've made money myself in Bitcoin. I own some Bitcoin, I own some Ethereum, but those are well established cryptocurrencies. These sort of meme coins that pop up for a brief moment in time and then disappear tend to be pump and dump schemes. That's what they tend to be. Regardless of who's doing it, whenever you have a meme coin that launches the idea that it's going to have long lasting value 10 years from now is quite unlikely. The reason that I objected to this is not because it should be made illegal or anything like that. It's caveat emptor. You should know when you invest in a meme coin that it is in fact a meme coin. And at a certain level the meme is probably going to disappear and the value is going to disappear as well. The reason I have a problem with this sort of activity, generally speaking, is because if you are doing something that doesn't actually generate additional value in the American economy, and this is not generated additional value in the American economy when you do this, the blowback could be severe against capitalism and free markets in general. In other words, when people misuse the free market, which can obviously happen, the blowback tends not to be against the company that misused the free market. It tends to be against free market capitalism in general. You saw this with Enron. Enron was heavily ensconced with government agencies. When Enron turned out to be a corrupt, terribly run company that was violating the law. The blowback wasn't just against Enron. The blowback was against free markets in general. You saw this in 2008 when it turns out that the banks had been working hand in glove with the federal government backing subprime mortgages with reference to the federal government. The blowback was not against just the banks. It was not against the federal government that had sponsored those banks. Right. The blowback was against capitalism in general. This is why you ended up with Occupy Wall Street. It was one of the things that propelled an eight year, horrifying Barack Obama administration. In other words, if you're a capitalist and you're a free market capitalist, please generate value. Don't just take advantage of the openness of the free market to make a quick buck. And I don't care who you are, the that is not a good thing to be doing as a general rule. Now, again, there's a lot of news that's breaking moment to moment here. We're bringing you updates on that. Doug Emhoff, thank God, has just left the White House. My least favorite member of all members of the Biden team, Doug Emhoff, I cannot wait to see him leave. My guess is Doug Emhoff also can't wait to leave. But Doug Emhoff, the court Jew for the Biden administration, covering for all of the sins of the Biden administration by pretending he gives a damn about his Jewishness, well, he's gone. So couldn't happen a moment too soon. That is excellent news and it's fun. Let's be real, it is fun to watch as people who never have been in the White House are leaving the White House and people are entering the White House are going to restore the sort of common sense that President Trump has pledged so far. Worth also noting that yesterday, first Israeli hostages were released under the Gaza deal that was brokered by the Trump team. Again, every hostage deal is a bad deal. Any deal in which you are releasing terrorists in favor of innocent people is a bad deal by nature. There is no such thing as a good deal there. With that said, that doesn't get done without President Trump. Those people are not home. Those three women are not going home. Didn't go home yesterday without President Trump's direct intervention. And again, everyone on the Trump national security team has made clear that on the other end of this, Hamas is not going to remain in power. So if you are one of the people super spreading the images of Hamas rallying in the streets, coming out from their tunnels after having destroyed the entire Gaza Strip by their activity and celebrating and suggesting that Hamas won. Not quite. Not quite. President Trump has made very clear, his administration has made very clear Hamas will have no hand in running Gaza, which means there will be further Israeli military action in that area. Undoubtedly. Again, we're broadcasting all day live here. We're going to be covering every little bit of inauguration weekend. The parties are ongoing. The optimism is really high. President Trump currently, right now, is at the White House. Any moment, he will be leaving the White House to head on over to the Capitol building for his second swearing in as the 47th president of the United States. And today, I think that every American ought to pray for his success. Whether you're a Democrat, independent, Republican, whether you voted for him or whether you didn't, you ought to pray for the success of the United States of America, which means you ought to pray for the success of President Trump. That doesn't mean you have to agree with all his policies. It doesn't mean you have to agree with everything he does. I'm not gonna agree with everything he does. It does mean that for the sake of the country, I hope and pray that President Trump will be precisely the kind of president who, that America needs. A president who does rely on common sense. A president who does seek not just momentary victories, but long term victories. Restructuring of the systems that need restructuring. Cleaning out of the deadwood that needs cleaning out. I hope that President Trump takes as seriously as he seems to already be taking the task that is before him. It is a very serious task. So it's a moment of optimism, but it also is a moment of determination. The Republicans need to hit the ground running. They need to get to work on the one bill strategy. They need to make permanent the Trump tax cuts. They need to loosen the regulations dramatically. They need to fire an enormous number of people in the executive branch. They need to restore our nation's border and deport illegal immigrants, particularly criminal illegal immigrants. They need to restore the semblance of sanity in a country that completely lost its sanity under Joe Biden. And the stakes are really high because America doesn't get opportunities like this particularly often. It is very rare that you get a second bite at the apple. I think there's a lot of despair in 2020. I was one of the people who felt that despair when Joe Biden took the White House. But you get a second chance so rarely in life. And the American people are getting a second chance here with President Trump. My prayers today are with President Trump, with the members of his excellent Cabinet, with the members of his administration, with the members of his family. My prayers are with the country today, as I think everyone's ought to be. President has pledged a big agenda, a big, robust agenda, and some of it's going to take place today. We're going to get to watch him sign those executive orders. I'm sure later on today we'll be analyzing many of those executive orders. But it's not just going to require President Trump. The country doesn't rise and fall on one man. It rises and falls on the American people and their elected representatives. That means members of Congress need to help push forward the Trump agenda in pragmatic fashion. It means that the Senate needs to push forward President Trump's agenda in pragmatic fashion. And yes, there will be give and take and pushback, and no bill is going to be perfect. And I hope that conservatives get more out of these bills than members of the left do. That is my hope. But the American people, this is our opportunity. This is our opportunity to thrive. It's an opportunity for merit to take the fore once again. Freedom is being restored. Free speech is being restored. Free markets are being restored. Take this opportunity to go to church. Take this opportunity to get in touch with your neighbors. Take this opportunity to recapitulate the things that made America great in the first place. Things like free minds and free speech and community values and rule of law. Those are the things that we should all be praying for under the incoming Trump Part two administration. Honestly, I will be fascinated to see what his inaugural address looks like. I think the utilitarianism. Trump learned some stuff. Trump saw some BLEEP during his first term, and he saw some bleep during. During the Joe Biden term. And now it's time for him to turn all of that anger, all of that energy into actual concerted action. Into concerted action. That's the thing that we all require and the American people. This is our opportunity. President Trump is about to exit the White House momentarily, head on over to the Capitol building, where, as you can see behind me, everything is prepared for President. You can hear the sirens behind me. President Trump is preparing to come to the Capitol building, where he will be sworn in any moment now. Again, the excitement is here. The parties are gonna be going on all day. They're gonna be going on all night. There's gonna be a lot of alcohol flowing over the course of the next 24 hours. And then President Trump is gonna get to work. He's gonna get to work. By the way, today, as I say, that executive order pen is coming out, like immediately. The executive order pen is going to happen any second. Again, all the cameras are waiting for President Trump to exit and get into the presidential vehicle. Man, this, this administration, this Biden administration cannot go too soon. Is there a way we can swear President Trump in like half an hour early? Let's just accelerate this thing, get rid of the old man, send him back to Delaware, let him take his wife with him. And Democrats, what they've done to the country over the last four years is criminal. Criminal in so many ways. And so many Americans require justice. From the American service members were murdered at Abbey Gate. To the millions of Americans who were impoverished by Joe Biden's inflationary economy. To the allies around the world abandoned. To the women abandoned by this administration that decided that male and female have no actual meanings. They can't go a moment too soon. Kamala Harris has left the White House again. It's great. Very, very happy to watch her go. J.D. vance also walked out. I think that J.D. has an unbelievable future ahead of him. Obviously. Obviously that is not any great sort of revelation. So JD Obviously gonna show up at the Capitol as well for his swearing in. President Trump will be sworn down in his own personal bible as well as the Lincoln Bible today. After that, he's gonna head on over to, I believe, Capital One arena and give his big rally. So again, we are bringing you moment to moment coverage. This is one of the reasons you need to subscribe over at Daily Wire. Head on over to Daily Wire plus right now. 47% discount on your annual membership. You're going to want to be a part of all of it. There's going to be so much news breaking constantly. We have amazing content coming for you this year. The Pendragon cycle is coming for you this year. We have all sorts of great stuff coming from my friend Matt Walsh and all sorts of mediocre stuff coming from my non friend Michael Knowles. I mean, there's going to be so much material coming out, is gonna make our heads and you're gonna wanna be here for every moment. The Ben Reacts series is gonna continue. I mean, it's gonna be. I'm beyond speed dial for everything happening in this administrator. 200 executive orders in one day. In one day. That is a lot of executive orders. Again, we are currently waiting for the Exit of the President elect of the United States. I'm gonna be very eager to drop the hyphen in a second. He's no longer be the president elect. He's just gonna be the president again. And that is going to be just wonderful. I cannot wait. I think most people cannot wait at this point. Apparently, Joe Biden has been spending the final hours of his presidency in a dark mood. That is according to CNN's MJ Lee. Lee said, quote, in talking to White House officials familiar with the planning, I am told that all these traditions, which we have to point out, again, were traditions and courtesies that Trump refused to offer then incoming President Joe Biden four years ago. These were not traditions. At any point, President Biden thought about basically blowing off because he believes these traditions are. Apparently those traditions are important, not the one where you actually run the government like, not a schmuck. In any case, she said. All of our reporting, talking to sources in recent days and weeks really suggests the president is in a bit of a dark space when it comes to his headspace in these very final days. We are told he never really stopped feeling angry about the fact he believes he was forced out, which, of course is true. He was indeed forced out. He would have lost anyway, by the way, by every available polling metric. That's not me, that's Steve Kornacki at msnbc. That's Nate Silver. Every polling analyst believes that Joe Biden would have gotten shellacked by Donald Trump. But Joe Biden believes in his own head, it's presumably how he can live with himself the rest of his life, that he would have won if only he'd been left in place, despite the fact that he clearly has been ailing for years on end. She says, quote, this pressure campaign to drop out of the 2024 race. And then, especially since Election Day, when his vice president, Kamala Harris, was defeated by Donald Trump, he's grown increasingly embittered, we're told by sour sources at the blame he has gotten for Donald Trump's eventual return to the White House. And one thing importantly that President Biden has been absolutely consistent about is his belief that had he stayed in the race, he would have defeated Donald Trump again. Now, all this adds up, I would say, to a mood of sadness and sort of a sense of tragedy here at the White House. Ed Lee, those around him believing and actually hoping that when history judges President Biden, years from now, it will be a little bit more forgiving than how the presidency is being widely judged in at least today. No that is incorrect. History will judge him as a failed president. History will judge him as one of the worst presidents in all of American history. Not in some of American history. In all of American history. If you have to rank worst American presidents, the bottom candidates are now Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama. Those are your candidates. Woodrow Wilson, he is definitely in the bottom six, maybe in the bottom three. What a disastrous president he has been. And the proof is that Donald Trump is going back to the White House, A thing that I think no one thought on January 7th of 2021. Alrighty, folks. We've reached the end of the show. We are Live in Washington, D.C. as I say, for the historic inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, the 47th president of the United States. Full coverage continues all day right here on the Daily Wire right after this. Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin and Jeremy Borning will join us live in D.C. to continue the celebration. Our live coverage of the inauguration ceremony starts 11:20am Eastern Time right here at Daily Wire. Plus, once President Trump takes the oath of office, join us for the Daily Wire's exclusive post show coverage. President Trump right now is leaving the White House. He's getting ready to enter. Joe Biden is guiding him out. And being left behind by both President Trump and history itself. He will be quickly forgotten. Joe Biden is not a person who will be remembered kindly by history. Donald J. Trump getting in the car. It is an amazing moment. Getting ready to go over to the Capitol Building to be inaugurated for the second time, only the second non consecutive president in the history of the United States. The door has been closed on his limo and he is moving out momentarily for the Capitol Building where a crowd awaits to hear him inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States, ending a dark four years in American history and ushering in, we can all hope and pray, a much brighter one. Our live coverage of the inauguration ceremony, as I say, starts 11:20am Eastern right here on Daily Wire. Plus, once President Trump takes that oath of office. Join us for the Daily Wire's exclusive Post show coverage. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Podcast Summary: The Ben Shapiro Show – Ep. 2120 "IT’S INAUGURATION DAY!"
Introduction On January 20, 2025, The Ben Shapiro Show delivered a comprehensive and spirited analysis of the historic inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States. Broadcasting live from Washington, D.C., Ben Shapiro provided real-time coverage, insightful commentary, and critical examination of the events surrounding the inauguration weekend.
I. Inauguration Day Festivities
Ben Shapiro set the scene by describing the vibrant atmosphere in Washington, D.C., transformed into a "MAGA town" amidst a polar vortex. He highlighted the shift of celebrations indoors due to frigid weather, emphasizing the unwavering dedication of supporters despite the cold.
"[00:00] Ben Shapiro: Washington, D.C. is now MAGA town. This is MAGA country in a polar vortex."
Shapiro also showcased photos from the festivities, featuring notable personalities such as MMA champion Conor McGregor, classical musician Kid Rock, Glenn Beck, Marissa Strait, Megyn Kelly, and Charlie Kirk, illustrating the diverse support for Trump's return to the White House.
II. President Trump's Inaugural Address Expectations
Ben anticipated President Trump's inaugural speech, referencing excerpts provided by The Wall Street Journal. He predicted an optimistic message centered on a "revolution of common sense."
"[08:30] Ben Shapiro: President Trump is expected to say, ... 'I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling New era of national success.'"
Shapiro lauded Trump's pragmatic approach, distinguishing him from ideological conservatives and liberals, and underscored Trump's focus on tangible victories and long-term success for the nation.
III. Executive Orders and Policy Agenda
A significant portion of the discussion revolved around the anticipated wave of executive orders President Trump planned to implement on his first day. Shapiro detailed the scope, ranging from immigration reform to energy policies.
"[10:45] Ben Shapiro: Donald Trump is going to have to reverse many of the worst actions of the Biden administration that were taken via the executive branch."
Key executive orders included:
Shapiro expressed constitutional concerns regarding the reliance on executive orders, while acknowledging the necessity to dismantle what he viewed as overreach from previous administrations.
IV. Immigration Policies and Enforcement
The podcast featured in-depth discussions on immigration policies, featuring statements from immigration officials Tom Homan and Mike Waltz. Shapiro criticized the previous administration's lax enforcement and highlighted the incoming administration's commitment to stringent immigration control.
Notable Quotes:
"[14:05] Tom Homan: 'We're going to take the handcuffs off ICE and let them go. Arrest criminal aliens.'"
"[14:11] Ben Shapiro: 'President Trump is telling ICE to enforce immigration law without apology.'"
Shapiro emphasized the administration's focus on deporting individuals with criminal records and those who entered the country illegally, aligning with public sentiment favoring stricter immigration measures.
V. Criticism of the Biden Administration
Ben Shapiro extensively criticized President Joe Biden's tenure, highlighting perceived failures and departures from traditional norms. He scrutinized Biden's attempt to declare the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as a constitutional amendment unilaterally, labeling it unconstitutional and procedurally flawed.
Notable Quotes:
"[22:00] Ben Shapiro: 'The biggest problem is that it's not true. It's not magically a constitutional amendment because Joe Biden declares it.'"
"[25:30] Ben Shapiro: 'History will judge him as one of the worst presidents in all of American history.'"
Shapiro also condemned Biden's mass pardons of figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and General Mark Milley, portraying them as politically motivated acts undermining justice.
VI. Media Coverage and Biden’s Competence
The podcast delved into media narratives surrounding Joe Biden's mental acuity, citing reports from The Guardian and anecdotal evidence from political analysts. Shapiro dismissed these concerns as cover-ups and media conspiracies, maintaining that Biden's administration was characterized by incompetence and corruption.
Notable Quotes:
"[26:40] Ben Shapiro: 'The media is trying to buy back their lack of credibility by admitting the reality that President Biden has been senile for the last three years.'"
"[28:22] Mike Waltz: 'Mr. President, can I ask you a question?' ... Ben Shapiro: 'That man is now leaving in disgrace, as well he should.'"
VII. Cultural Shift and National Optimism
Shapiro observed a significant cultural and political shift, noting increased optimism among Americans and a departure from the resistance seen during Trump's first term. He attributed this change to public disillusionment with Democratic policies and a rejuvenated conservative movement.
"[34:07] Ben Shapiro: 'The left cannot handle the fact that many of the policies he's talking about are overwhelmingly popular.'"
He also discussed the reinvigoration of free speech and free markets, expressing hope for a return to traditional American values under Trump's leadership.
VIII. Attendance of Prominent Figures and Tech Leaders
Highlighting the presence of influential individuals like Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at the inauguration, Shapiro contrasted the current administration’s relationship with tech companies to that of the previous Democratic administration, which he claimed sought to suppress conservative voices.
"[43:20] Donald Trump: 'We're looking forward to making a lot of changes...'"
Shapiro interpreted their attendance as a positive sign for the restoration of free speech and a more business-friendly environment.
IX. Cryptocurrency and Meme Coins Discussion
In a tangent, Shapiro addressed the recent surge in meme coins associated with the Trump family, cautioning against investing in such volatile assets due to their lack of inherent value and potential to undermine free-market principles.
"[36:17] Ben Shapiro: 'When you misuse the free market, the blowback tends not to be against the company... It tends to be against free market capitalism in general.'"
X. Conclusion and Call to Action
Ben Shapiro concluded the episode with a message of hope and responsibility, urging conservatives to actively support Trump's administration through legislative collaboration and public engagement. He emphasized the significance of this second Trump term as a pivotal moment for America’s future.
Notable Quotes:
"[39:40] Donald Trump: 'The sun sets tomorrow evening, the invasion of our borders will have come to a halt...'"
"[44:01] Ben Shapiro: 'President Trump is about to exit the White House momentarily, head on over to the Capitol building...'"
Shapiro called for unity among Republicans to advance key policies such as reinstating tax cuts, deregulating industries, and enforcing immigration laws, framing the inauguration as a turning point towards national prosperity and stability.
Final Thoughts Throughout the episode, Ben Shapiro provided a fervent and detailed analysis of President Trump's inauguration, blending live reporting with critique of the previous administration and optimism for future policies. By highlighting policy expectations, cultural shifts, and the involvement of prominent figures, Shapiro crafted a narrative celebrating Trump's return while urging active support from the conservative base to realize the envisioned national revival.