Ben Shapiro (19:21)
Well, I mean, it's easier to understand. Unbelievable. So he's getting up, and the reason he's getting up is because he knows that he's being asked to create a war inside the party. What he actually wants is for AOC to run for president. And so, by the way, does the Associated Press quote, bernie Sanders stepped onto a stage in downtown Denver surrounded by tens of thousands of cheering supporters. In what he described as the biggest rally he had ever addressed, the Romont senator put his hand on the shoulder of the woman who had introduced him, a signal for her to stay on stage. Quote, she's become an inspiration to millions of young people recounting her biography from a girl who helped her mother clean houses and later became a bartender before emerging as political insurgent who ousted a powerful New York Democrat in a U.S. house primary. Now, again, that is a very rosy picture of AOC's history. The truth is that she grew up pretty middle class in New York. Again, there's nothing wrong growing up middle class is great, but this kind of idea that she's a total rags to riches story. She went to Boston University. I mean, this is not somebody who grew up totally impoverished and then she ousted a powerful New York Democrat in a House primary that I think she received 15,000 votes in that House primary. The crowd began to chant of her well known moniker aoc. In a leaderless Democratic Party out of power in Washington, Ocasio Cortez has a message in connection with a segment of liberals feeling disenchanted with both parties. Now in her fourth term, the 35 year old congresswoman is working to broaden her appeal beyond her progressive, anti establishment roots. Hitting the road last week with Sanders for his fighting oligarchy rallies, she's addressing people who disagree with her and reframing the divide in the Democratic Party not and as progressive versus moderate, but as those going after Republican President Donald Trump and those being more cautious. She said, quote, no matter who you voted for in the past, no matter if you know all the right words to say, no matter your race, religion, gender, identity or status, no matter even if you disagree with me on a few things, if you're willing to fight for someone you don't know, you are welcome here. Right. So she is posing herself as against the establishment Democratic Party that is unwilling to face up to the challenges of President Trump. Which is smart. It is. And the class warfare aspect of what Democrats are going to steer into that, that is the next step. They're going to steer full scale into class warfare. That is the reason why they are attacking Elon Musk as opposed to Trump. 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The goal right now for Democrats is very simple. There's a reason they're using the word oligarchy. I don't think they're being stupid. I think it's actually quite smart. What they're attempting to do is craft a narrative of a group of people at the top of government, in private industry and in the public sector who are working together to corrupt the system. Now, the comeback to that, typically from the conservative side of the aisle, is, well, if the economy is booming, what are you complaining about? Not that there's coordination and collusion, but of course business is going to support Republican administrations because Republican administrations remove all of the horrible regulations that have led to the downfall of cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Detroit. Republicans get the obstacles out of the way of business. So business tends to support Republicans. This has been sort of a, a long standing theme in American politics for decades. But the way that Democrats are playing it is that there's a sort of corporatist, slimy deal going on at the top of politics, the oligarchy, air quotes in which the Musks of the world are cooperating with the Trumps of the world so that Trump will put money in Musk's pocket and Musk will put money in Trump's pocket and they both go home happy and everybody else gets poor. That is the line. It's not true, but that is the line Democrats are going to use. The reason that's clever is because the way that people tend to filter politics, you and I, we sit here, we talk politics every day. And so if you listen to this show, you're a, you're a member of a tiny cadre in the American public who watches politics at a fairly granular level. You know the players, you know the general arguments. The vast majority of people in the United States have a picture of politics that is significantly less granular. All of us are right up close to the Surat painting, right? George Seurat is a famous impressionist who paints with dots, right? Sunday in the Park With George is a musical based on the life of Seurat. If you ever go and you see his paintings at, for example, the museum in Chicago, if you go and you look at his paintings, it's pointless, right? He's got a bunch of dots and it's like millions of dots. And then when you draw back, you see that it's a picture of something. People who watch Politics closely are like people who are really, really close to a Seurat painting. You can see every single dot, every single. You see every pixel. Then you pull back and you see the whole picture. Most people are people who wander into the room with the Seurat painting. They see a bunch of people who are by a river and walking on a Sunday, and they walk out of the room. It is not a granular view of politics. So if you see a picture of President Trump at the inauguration, flanked by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Tim Cook and Neil Mohan and the rest of the. And Sundar Pinchai and all the rest of these sort of tech CEOs, and they're all in a room together and President Trump is next to them. These sort of bird's eye view. Take half a moment and look at the TV and then move on with your day. View of that is these guys are friends and they must work together. And so what Democrats are banking on, what they are banking on is a close coordination between private industry and the president and then an economic fall. That is what they're banking on. And if there's an economic fall, AOC is poised right there, and so is Bernie. And let's be clear about what the threat level is. This is why the economy must succeed. People on the sort of Trump supportive side of the aisle, maybe they're frustrated with the fact that I've been critical of President Trump's moves toward tariffs, what he's been doing with regard to Canada. The reason I've been saying that is because the greatest danger to the Trump administration's success is an economic downturn. Anything else can be overcome. An economic downturn gets attributed to the president, who is the president, when it happens, whether or not he deserves it. That's just the way it works. And so that is the great danger. And it is great that this White House is very friendly toward business. That's a wonderful thing. But every image showing how friendly this White House is toward business becomes a weapon in the arsenal of people like aoc who doesn't understand business, doesn't understand economics, hates the rich, like truly does not like them, thinks that there's like a moral quality that adheres to you as you gain wealth, that makes you immoral and bad. It's a bizarre, it's a, it's a bizarre sort of Marxist presentiment that makes no sense. Just on a moral level, right? I have been very not rich, and I've been very rich, and I'm basically the same person all the way through. And that's true of pretty much everybody I know who was at one point not rich and then became rich. It turns out I know many people who are wonderful who are not rich. I know many people who are wonderful who are rich. I know many people who are awful who are rich. I know many people who are awful who are not rich. Wealth does not define character. But for people like AOC and Bernie, there's a very flattering view that they can present to the vast majority of Americans, which is that if you are rich, it's because you suckered someone and did something wrong and did something corrupt and you're bad. That essentially participating in the capitalist system makes you morally inferior in some way. The richer you get, the worse you get. This is why Bernie will say billionaires should not exist. He doesn't just mean we should redistribute the wealth. He means there's something literally immoral in being a billionaire. Well, that's precisely the opposite of what President Trump is doing. But people tend to judge politics again based on that. Walking through the room, looking once at the painting, walking out, and if they see closeness between the White House and various industrial capitalists who have done really well, tech bros who have done really well, and then the economy sinks, all of that is going to be tied to the ship. All of that is going to get tied into the sinking ship if the ship should sink, which is why the ship really needs not to sink as part of this. For example, over the. Over the weekend it was reported that the White House, through an outside event production company called Harbinger, is soliciting corporate sponsors for this year's Easter Egg Roll, which is prompting major concerns from ethics experts and shock from former White House officials from both parties. The sponsorship offers range from 75 grand to 200 grand with the promise of logo and branding opportunities. According to a nine page document sent to potential sponsors and obtained by cnn. The Egg Roll has long been privately funded without taxpayer dollars, largely through the American Egg Board, which also provides tens of thousands of eggs for the occasion. All the money raised by Harbinger will go to the White House Historical association, but the solicitation of sponsorships marks an unprecedented offering of corporate branding opportunities on White House grounds. Running counterparts to long establish regulations prohibiting the use of public office for private gain. A former official said. This is an enterprise. This is not your grandmother's Easter Egg Roll, where people lined up outside the gate and go and roll an egg and get a little gift bag and walk out the pitch document includes logos for both the White House and Harbinger, which previously produced the event during President Trump's first term and is offering initial planning and event day execution for sponsors that sign on. It features imagery of Trump First Lady Melania Trump, members of the Trump family, the Easter Bunny, and the White House press corps, including CNN correspondent Caitlin Collins. The document says sponsors of the White House Easter Egg Roll provide financial support activities and giveaways to enhance the event while gaining valuable brand visibility and national recognition. So what does this mean? It means that you can have naming rights for a key area or an element, a sponsor logo featured on event signage, custom branded baskets, snacks, beverages or souvenirs. Now, is any of this, like, truly awful? No. I mean, who cares? This idea that this is some sort of open bribery or something like that. It seems to me that if you're raising money for charity and people want a sponsorship opportunity attached, that's true for pretty much every private charitable enterprise I've ever associated with or seen. Go to seriously a charity dinner and you'll see a bunch of corporate sponsors of the charity dinner. That's where the money comes from. Is this a big deal? It isn't, except that if the economy sinks, then Democrats are going to try to tie this to President Trump. The same thing is true with regard to, for example, Tesla. So President Trump did a big presser, you'll recall a few weeks ago on the lawn over at the White House where he talked about buying a Tesla. And this was, this was ripped on by the members of the media suggesting this is a form of corruption. This is Trump trying to prop up the Tesla stock or whatever. And, well, the truth is that Joe Biden had done exactly the same thing with Stellantis. There's nothing really new here, but that's not the point. The point is the close cooperation, which I think is quite good, between Trump and, and people who are, who are successful in business is going to be wrapped around the Republican Party's neck and capitalism's neck if the economy should shift south. That right there is the biggest problem that Trump is why we cannot afford either as a country or as a body politic for this administration to economically downturn. Because the next thing that comes is a horseshoe theory populism that takes capitalism and stomps its boot on it. What you're gonna get the rise of is on the right, these sort of anti capitalist populists. These people definitely exist. These people are actually an increasingly loud contingent of the Republican Party who believe that capitalism is evil, that Business is bad that capitalism takes away from home. And hearth this very live debate inside the right. And meanwhile on the left, you are going to see the rise of the Bernie Sanders types. Right? Bernie is well placed inside the party right now and whomever he taps on the shoulder is quite likely at this point to be the nominee. Particularly if that person can knit together some of the other aspects of the Democratic agenda. AOC is perfectly on brand when it comes to the wokeness. She obviously is very involved in standing up for DEI and all the rest. So she checks the boxes of the, of the radical left on the woke side, but she is also reaching over, not into that. That's not how she's campaigning. She's campaigning as a full scale Democratic socialist in the, in the mold of Bernie Sanders. Side note, people laughed. I wrote a column back in 2008 when Barack Obama was first running for president before he received the nomination. And I said beware, because the actual danger here is not Hillary Clinton. The actual danger here is Barack Obama. And I think it was in 2007 actually. Well, it turns out that right now the real danger is aoc. I'm just telling you right now, right here that we can laugh at her. I've been laughing at her for years. I think she's a ridiculous figure. I also think that she's talented on camera. I think that she speaks the slogans with passion. And I think that in the Democratic primary, she's a dangerous, dangerous candidate who's gonna run against her and be able to overcome her. Because if you actually try to pooh pooh, aoc, if you try to say, well, she's dumb, which is true, if you try to say that she's dumb in a Democratic primary, she's just gonna say, well, did you oppose Trump sufficiently? Because the smarter people in the Democratic Party are biding their time like Salatkin in Michigan. And if you say, well, you know, she's never done anything, she's gonna say, well, I never got anything done cuz I was just too dedicated to the cause. And she'll have Bernie's support base and Bernie will transfer that support base over to her. She's a dangerous candidate inside the party for sure, for sure. So do not, do not take your eye off the ball there. And for the Trump administration, do not take your eye off the, off the economic ball. That is the single most important thing that you can do, is to calm the economic waters. It is deeply important. Right now, according to the Wall Street Journal, people are selling their stocks, they're Starting to look elsewhere. Just two months after JP Morgan Chase declared American exceptionalism the broad and dominant investing theme of 2025, ordinary investors across the world are looking elsewhere. Instead of riding the wave of US Outperformance, they are parsing the potential implications of tariff wars and major shifts in U.S. foreign policy. And for much of this volatile stretch, markets in China and Europe are outpacing expectations. These are things we do not need. And much of this is being self created. So unless somebody can spell out the long term plan for how this helps the American economy. And by long term, I really mean short to midterm because again, the election is coming up fast. I know we just finished one, but it is 2025, 2028's the election. It's not a lot of time. If the idea is we gotta undergo some economic pain in order to get economic gain, that better be some fairly short term pain for some pretty long term gain if you hope that the successor to President Trump is going to win the White House. Well, meanwhile, speaking of controversies, that could be a problem for the Trump administration. So President Trump right now is going up against an incredibly left wing judiciary, particularly at the district court level. Apparently today there's supposed to be a hearing. The Trump administration has a hearing with a three member appeals panel to overturn a judgment from Judge James Boasberg that was the temporary restraining order that blocked the use of the 1798 Alien Enemies act to deport plane loads of migrants without due process. And that's what the lawsuit suggested. Justice Department lawyers will demand that Boseberg be thrown off the case is according to Politico. So Josh Gerstein of Politico says this is a big test for Trump's team's in your face approach to all the litigation it now faces. Coupling confrontational court filings with an all out fusillade on both cable news and social media against judges who have blocked administration policies. Boseberg, of course, is not going to go along with it. I think it's very doubtful by the way, that the appeals court goes along with Trump's attempt to get Boseberg thrown off the case. According to Politico, there are two Republican appointees on this three judge panel. One is a Trump appointee named Justin Walker the third. The second is a George W. Bush appointee named him Karen Henderson. Josh Gerstein says will they embrace Trump's expansive view of executive power or will they show concern about what Boseberg has called the very frightening possibility of almost any migrant being rapidly expelled to a third country based solely on the say so of the executive branch. Now, it's not clear exactly what happens if the appellate court rules against Trump. Presumably they will then appeal to the Supreme Court, and that's where this needs to go. What we really need at this point is a broad scale understanding of what local district court judges are allowed to put TROs on and what they are not allowed to put TROs on, at least when it comes to national policy. President Trump was asked about defying the judiciary. So the Democrats have been suggesting that Trump is just going to defy the judiciary and keep defying the judiciary and keep defying. Here's Trump yesterday basically making clear that that's not the case. He said, the Secretary of State is in charge of these deportations and determining who will be deported and who will not in many of these cases. And he's going to act in accordance with the law. If there was a flight like tonight with these guys, even though it's still being litigated, if there was a flight tonight full of accused gang members and somebody called and said, Mr. President, I know that this is still being adjudicated, but we can get these guys down to El Salvador right now, would you say that that's okay? I would say that I'd have the Secretary of State handle it because I'm not really involved in that. Okay. So again, that is him deferring to the Secretary of State. Marco Rubio is not going to just willy nilly ignore the law. This idea there's a constitutional crisis going on. If there is, it is in fact a creation of, of overreaching district court judges. But it's not a constitutional crisis. It's going to go to the Supreme Court. There is no evidence whatsoever at this point that the Trump team is going to ignore orders from the Supreme Court of the United States. Meanwhile, these justices, these judges at the low level are, many of them are just nuttly radical, totally crazy. For example, Just last week, U.S. district Court Judge Ana Reyes issued another sweeping injunction against banning trans volunteers and current service members from serving in the military and wrote a 75 page decision. Quote, the military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning. Its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit. Its conclusions bear no relation to fact. Well, Pete Hegseth, the excellent Secretary of Defense, then immediately tweeted back, quote, since Judge Reyes is now a top military planner, she they can report to Fort Benning at 0600 to instruct our Army Rangers on how to Execute high value target raids. After that, Commander Reyes can dispatch to Fort Bragg to train our Green Berets on counterinsurgency warfare. I mean, that is right. And again, that judgment will be appealed to the Supreme Court. Right now, what we need is for the Supreme Court to stop mouthing off about President Trump mouthing off about district judges and actually sign into chat. When is Justice Roberts going to allow the Supreme Court to take up the question of what are district court judges allowed to do in terms of these gigantic temporary restraining orders that stop in their tracks? Any national policy? And again, all the talk right now about how Republicans are gonna run roughshod over the rule of law, it's just not true. So President Trump has been saying, we need to impeach these federal judges. They're not getting impeached. Senator John Curtis of Utah says, listen, President Trump can say whatever he wants. It takes two thirds of the Senate to impeach. And that's not going to.