12/22/17 - 'Grade: C+'? (Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck)

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Love,

courage,

truth.

Glenn Beck.

This has been Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn is on vacation, a well-earned vacation.

And it's an honor to sit behind the microphone for the Glenn Beck program.

A lot of news here as the year wanes, still a lot going on out there.

And the news begins today with Nikki Haley just going off at the UN.

She did this yesterday.

And as I said at the time, Nikki Haley at the UN is basically my spirit animal.

It's just spectacular.

So the UN votes yesterday, 128 to 9, for the proposition that the United States ought to be condemned for moving our own embassy to Jerusalem and Israel.

Now, there are some Americans who think that this is a terrible idea.

Not only is it a terrible idea, but President Trump's threats to retaliate against countries that vote against us in the U.N., those are bullying.

John Brennan,

the former DIA, I think director of intelligence agencies under Barack Obama, he came out and he said it was dictatorial for President Trump and Nikki Haley to threaten funding for countries that don't vote our way in the UN,

which is sort of amazing since we are the ones with a sovereign right to put our embassy wherever we damn well please.

But one of the amazing things about how the left has responded to the international community condemning Trump is they hate Trump so much.

They dislike Israel as a general matter so much that they're fine with the international community condemning.

It's always been weird to me how so many folks on the left are interested in what the international community has to say, is that the Europeans actually have any moral leverage with which to shame us, or the UN, which is filled with dictatorial, tyrannical countries that oppress their own citizens.

Like, we're supposed to sit around listening and waiting for their moral guidance.

It's the United States that has saved civilization time and time again.

It's the United States that has ensured that morality prevails in war after war over the last century and a half.

It's the United States that has stood up when standing needed to be done.

And yet there are people on the left in the United States who think we should look for our cues to places like Germany.

And Germany voted against the United States putting its embassy in Jerusalem.

As though the Germans have anything to say about it.

I mean, the Germans should just sit down and shut up when it comes to Israel overall.

But the Germans certainly should sit down and shut up when it comes to the U.S.

putting our embassy where we please.

If they don't like it, we can always remove our bases from Germany.

I mean, this notion that the international community owes us nothing and that they shouldn't follow our lead.

If the international community followed the United States' lead, the world would be a much better place.

If the opposite occurred, the world would be a much worse place.

So here is Nikki Haley yesterday at the United Nations going off on all these countries that were voting against the United States and trying to shame the United States into moving its embassy back to Tel Aviv in Israel.

The United States is by far the single largest contributor to the United Nations and its agencies.

When a nation is singled out for attack in this organization, that nation is disrespected.

What's more, that nation is asked to pay for the privilege of being disrespected.

The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation.

We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world's largest contribution to the United Nations.

And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.

Yes, yes, Nikki Haley.

Nikki Haley is just fantastic over at the United Nations.

And naturally, you're seeing the usual suspects suggest that there will be violence over Jerusalem.

Now, what's funny is that Hamas yesterday announced that there would be days of blood over this, which for Hamas, the terrorist group that occupies the Gaza Strip,

for Hamas, that's basically any day ending in Y.

Any day ending in Y is a day of blood for Hamas, which is a terror group that has sought to murder Jews and dissenters in like quantities for the last 20 years minimum.

They were founded in 1988, I believe.

And as part of their founding document, the Hamas charter specifically talks about the murder of Jews everywhere, not just in Israel, but the murder of Jews everywhere.

And why exactly they would riot after a resolution that went in their favor is beyond me, right?

The UNGA votes in favor of Hamas and Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority in this resolution, and they're threatening to riot anyway.

And then they suggest that Israel is the one that's breaching the peace.

They suggest that Israel is the group here participating in extortion, or the United States is participating in extortion.

The entire Palestinian strategy.

in the Middle East has been extortion for nigh on 50 years at this point.

Give us what we want or we will murder your children.

That's pretty much definitionally extortion.

Also, worth pointing out, they're saying there's going to be another day of rage.

This would make literally the eighth day of rage inside the Palestinian occupied territories in the last year, since last year.

So over the course of a year, they have eight days of rage.

As I say, they don't really need a reason.

Toilet doesn't flush properly, day of rage.

Actually, I wish that were true.

I wish if their toilet didn't flush properly, there would be a day of rage because then maybe they'd spend their money on fixing the toilet instead of terror tunnels.

But a Jew in Israel sneezes, day of rage.

I want to go through the history briefly of Jerusalem, just so that folks understand that the supposed violence that's going to occur because of President Trump has nothing to do with President Trump.

The supposed violence that is going to occur because Israel is in charge of Jerusalem is not because Israel is in charge of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem has long been a point of contention for Muslims.

In 1929, before there was a state of Israel, before there was even a a glimmer of a notion of a state of Palestine that would come anywhere close to Jerusalem, in 1929,

while the area was called Palestine, but it was British Mandate Palestine.

There were riots by Arabs against Jews in 1929, right?

Again, long before the United States had any position on this because Israel didn't exist.

Why?

Because Jews made the provocative move of bringing chairs for the elderly and the infirm to the Western Wall for prayer purposes.

In October 1928, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem decided to build on top of the Temple Mount and purposefully led mules through the Western Wall area, excreting in the holy area to spite the Jews, which led to a Jewish march to the wall in August 1929, a non-violent march.

The next day, Muslims marched to the wall to show their sovereignty, even though the Western Wall isn't even holy to Muslims.

And the day after that, the Arabs stabbed a Jew to death in the city.

By August 23rd of 1929, Muslims were riding across Jerusalem, 17 Jews murdered, a hospital attacked, in Hebron, in Hevron, in Hebron.

Arabs massacred more than 60 Jews.

Here's the British Shah report.

Again, the reason I'm doing this is because I want to show you that when people say that violence is being caused by Trump or violence is being caused by America's policy on Jerusalem or violence is being caused by the Israelis because of Jerusalem, it's just nonsense.

Again, this is 1929.

No Israel doesn't exist yet.

No Jewish occupation of Jerusalem.

That doesn't exist yet.

No United States policy.

No U.S.

embassy there.

The British Shah report report describes what happened.

Quote, Arabs in Hebron made the most ferocious attack on the Jewish ghetto and on isolated Jewish houses lying outside the crowded quarters of the town.

More than 60 Jews, including many women and children, were murdered.

More than 50 were wounded.

There were also anti-Jewish riots in the 20s and in the 1930s.

In 1948, Israel's existence was supposed to create a peaceful barrier with regard to Jerusalem.

Instead,

If you were cautioned under the 1947 UN partition plan, Jerusalem was supposed to be an international city.

Instead, Arabs cut off all roads to Jerusalem, prevented Jews from reaching the city, and blockaded the Jews who were living inside.

Thousands of Israelis had to be sacrificed, were killed, trying to reach their brethren in Jerusalem.

The outcome was a split of the city between West Jerusalem, which was under Jewish rule and did not include the Western Wall or any of the Old Testament areas really, and East Jerusalem, controlled by Jordan.

While it was under Muslim rule, Jews were not allowed, were not allowed to visit Jewish holy sites.

Under Jewish rule, Muslims always have been.

Muslims actually used used gravestones from the Jewish cemetery, the Mount of Olives, which, if you've ever been to Israel, overlooks the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.

They used those gravestones to pave their roads.

And by the way, between 1948 and 1967, during that period, while East Jerusalem, all the holy sites, were controlled by the Jordanians, the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the Palestinian Authority, the Aser Arafat Group, which now runs the West Bank in Gaza.

Well, Gaza is run by Hamas.

It was formed in 1964 while Jerusalem was not occupied by the Jews, at least the old city.

And they openly said what their goal was.

Their destruction of the state of Israel before Israel controlled Jerusalem.

In 1967, Israel won control of Jerusalem, and not only did they grant Muslims access to holy sites, they actually handed full control of the Temple Mount over to the Islamic Waqf.

A huge mistake, by the way, because the Islamic Waqth now prevents Jews from even praying on the Temple Mount.

So you're talking about intolerance in Jerusalem.

You're talking about repercussions for rule in Jerusalem.

The fact is, just on a moral basis, on who will allow people to visit holy sites, the Jews should be in charge over there.

In 1993, Israel agreed to negotiate with those terrorists in the Palestinian Authority over a future Palestinian state.

In return, the PA said that it would acknowledge Israel's right to exist, which it never has, and cease violence, which it never has.

The Oslo Accords never made any statement about transferring Jerusalem to Muslim rule.

Despite that fact, the number of

terrorist attacks on Israel dramatically increased in the aftermath of Oslo.

In 2000, Israel offered Yasser Arafat control over East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount itself.

The Muslims rejected it, and then they started a violent intifada that ended with the murders of hundreds of Jews.

In 2008, Israel again offered Mahmoud Abbas, the current leader of the Palestinian Authority, and a man who works with Hamas, international control of Jerusalem's old city, including the holy site.

And Omer said at the time, remember my words, it will be 50 years before there will be another Israeli prime minister that will offer you what I'm offering you now.

Omert also offered a near-complete withdrawal from Judea and Samaria.

Abbas turned it down flat, launched another round of violence.

So, when people say that Trump is to blame for violence by Palestinians against Jews, when they say Nikki Haley is to blame, when they say this sort of nonsense,

they're just historically inaccurate.

What they are saying is not historically accurate.

But as we continue, I want to talk about the European response to President Trump's big announcement at the UN and why it makes no sense whatsoever.

I'm Ben Shapiro win for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

This is Ben Shapiro in for Glen Beck talking about the UN Resolution 128-9 yesterday against the United States, saying the United States should remove its embassy from Jerusalem in Israel.

Again, it's insulting that we're paying the bills, paying the freight for this wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Why in the world would we pay for these people to occupy a building in downtown New York so that they can blow through parking tickets, commit crimes, get away with it with diplomatic immunity, and then go and vote against our interests seems like a waste of time to me since our interests are the best interests.

I understand we're not supposed to say that.

I understand that that would be too

take too lightly the interests of other countries, except for the fact that those interests have generally led to human suffering over the last century, while America's interests abroad have led generally to human happiness abroad.

If it were not for the United States' presence in the world, countries would be poor, countries would remain

dictatorial.

The United States has been a force for good in the world.

I think that is a fundamental disconnect between how some people in the United States think about the United States

and how people who are traditionally conservative think about the United States.

And that goes back to a root view of what the U.S.

is.

There are a whole group of people in the United States who take the Howards-in view that the United States is a place founded in the agony and suffering of other peoples, that the United States is built on the back of slave labor, that the United States was built with certain principles of exploitation that were essentially enshrined in the Constitution and that ever since we've been striving to break away from it but failing.

That's sort of the Barack Obama view of the universe.

And then there's the conservative view, which is that the Constitution is the greatest document devised by human hands, that the Constitution enshrines certain rights

and that it represents eternal values both here and abroad.

And the Declaration of Independence does the same.

And that we've strayed from those principles from time to time.

And when we stray, it's tragic.

But that's the point.

Without those principles, without the veracity of those principles, without the truth and the strength of those principles, the world becomes a darker place.

Imagine if the United States had not been there for World War II.

Imagine how that would have gone.

The folks in Britain would now be speaking German.

Imagine if the United States had not been there for the Korean War.

South Korea would now look like North Korea.

Imagine if the United States had not been there.

Yes, in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein would either still be in charge or the place would be now in charge of ISIS and Iran.

The fact is that when the United States does withdraw, the world becomes a worse place.

Vietnam was a worse place because the United States withdrew.

Cambodia was a worse place because the United States withdrew from Vietnam.

Now, I'm not talking about what's in America's interest to do.

I'm not talking about whether we should have been in these places.

The point I'm making is that where American boots step, freedom follows.

Where American boots do not step, freedom is less likely to follow.

That doesn't mean that we have to put American boots everywhere.

It doesn't mean we should put American boots everywhere.

It does mean, however, that seeing the United States as a force for good in the world is necessary in order to understand why the United States really has no interest and should have no interest in boosting countries and granting foreign aid to countries that are dictatorial and tyrannical.

And it is amazing to watch the Europeans try and suggest they have some sort of moral authority over our view of Jerusalem and Israel.

That's bizarre to me.

There are more and more stories these days coming out of Europe.

Jews are moving out of Europe again.

Again, it's like the 1930s.

They're moving out of Europe.

Now they actually have a place to go because Israel exists.

Before they didn't.

But the fact is that Jews are moving out of Europe at record numbers, and there's a reason for that.

There's an article in USA Today

from Berlin.

When telecommunications manager Mikhail Tanayev immigrated to Germany in 1998 from his native Russia as a teen, his Jewish faith didn't matter to classmates or neighbors.

That's because Germany has taken extraordinary steps since the end of World War II to atone for the Holocaust and prevent anti-Semitism from taking hold again.

The country has paid reparations to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, erected dozens of memorials to those murdered, and turned anti-Semitic speech into a crime.

Yet Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision in 2015 to open the nation's arms to 1 million mostly Muslim refugees has created a double threat for Germany's roughly roughly 120,000 Jews, rising anti-Semitism from the newcomers, and a resurgent right-wing nationalist movement spawned by the arrival of so many immigrants.

There's another threat too, which I'll talk about in a second, and that is the secularist threat to religion that threatens Jews as well as Christians.

The anti-Semitic sentiment has become ever more public and virulent since Henayev 32.

When I arrived in Germany, I never saw such displays.

Last week, thousands of protesters in Berlin burned Israeli flags to protest President Trump's decision on December 7th to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

The flag burning prompted a national outcry.

I never thought that could happen in the middle of Berlin, Tainev said.

That's something you see in other parts of the world.

It's really disturbing.

Other instances of anti-Semitism in Germany have become more common and brazen.

Last month, thieves in Berlin made off with more than a dozen cobble-sized plaques embedded in sidewalks memorializing Holocaust victims.

The German military found Nazi memorabilia in soldiers' barracks over the summer.

In 2016, Germany recorded nearly 1,500 anti-Semitic incidents, an increase from previous years that has put Germany's Jewish community on edge.

According to a recent survey, 62% of Jewish respondents said they experience anti-Semitism in their everyday lives.

In France, Jews have been moving out at record rates.

I visited France a couple years ago with my wife, and there are certain districts in France where you do not want to travel if you are a Jew wearing a yarmulke.

My wife was wearing a Star of David necklace.

She put it inside her shirt because

she was concerned because of the violence levels that have occurred in Paris.

In Sweden,

the threat is not just from the rising anti-Semitism of the Muslim population in places like Sweden, in Malmo, Sweden, for example.

It's also coming from the left.

Commentary magazine today reporting the firebombing of a synagogue in Gothenburg thrust Sweden's anti-Semitism crisis into global headlines.

For years, Swedish Jews have lived in fear of such violence, which is almost always perpetrated by the country's large and

ill-assimilated Muslim minority.

According to a 2013 European Union study, four out of five Jews declined to publicly identify as Jewish in Sweden, a damning indictment of a country that likes to portray itself as one of the continent's most tolerant.

Street-level thuggery isn't the only source of the crisis.

Swedish Jews also find themselves pressed by reigning secularism.

The Swedish state is full of solicitude for Jewish citizens after anti-Semitic attacks, but it also seeks to limit their practice to their freedom to practice their faith.

Consider Rabbi Alexander Namdar in his six-year battle to homeschool the four youngest of his 11 children in Sweden.

The rabbi and his wife Leia arrived in the country in 1991 as emissaries of Chabad, which is a Jewish outreach movement.

They served about 4,000 Jews in Gothenburg.

When it came to educating their kids, the public system was out of the question.

So what happened?

Sweden basically tried to force these people to put their kids in government schools.

The Namdars ended up on the sharp end of the anti-homeschooling amendment soon after it came into effect.

The local education board summoned them to a district court and they were fined for failing to send their kids to public schools.

The assault on religion in Europe demonstrates, again, you cannot trust human rights to the Europeans.

You cannot trust freedom of religion to the Europeans.

And you certainly can't trust protection to Jews to the Europeans.

As we continue, let's talk a little bit about American foreign aid.

Where are we spending it?

Where?

And how much should we cut?

Let's save some money.

Ben Shapiro went for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

This is Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck here on the Glenn Beck program.

So, typical of the left is the way that they are treating President Trump's announcement that he is going to cut aid to countries that don't vote as we would wish them to vote at the United Nations.

Nikki Haley, of course, said the same thing at the UN, which was just great, because the UN exists to promulgate freedom.

The United States apparently is one of the few countries on earth that still cares about this.

Having an organization where a bunch of tyrannical countries vote to feat themselves while condemning free countries doesn't seem like the kind of organization that you or I should be funding.

I don't understand why my taxpayer dollars are going to such an organization.

Not only does it seem like a waste of my money, it seems like a fundamental breach of trust to take money out of the pocket of families that make less money than I do, or take...

money out of my kids' pocket in order to pay off some foreign dictator so that he can continue to live a life of luxury and vacation in the south of France while his people suffer.

That just seems like a waste of time to me.

Nonetheless, Phil Mudd, a CNN counterintelligence analyst, former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, predicted that the U.S.

would not pull funding from countries like Egypt for its participation in the U.N.

vote demanding the Trump administration rescind its Jerusalem decisions.

He says, do you think the president's going to get on the phone and say, because of one vote that's non-binding in the U.N., we're going to back down on our partnership with you as you kill ISIS partners in Egypt?

That's not going to happen.

He said, let me be blunt here, Wolf.

This is diplomatic prostitution.

We're telling people, unless you vote with us, we're not going to give you money.

And if your heart doesn't agree with American policies, we're not going to support you in terms of U.S.

aid.

It's not going to happen.

The Americans aren't going to do it, and the president's not going to back it up.

Okay, first of all,

it's not diplomatic prostitution.

That's just called using the levers of diplomacy.

Diplomacy is us saying,

if you do not do X, we will do Y.

Right, that's all diplomacy is.

Diplomacy is a game game where we say, if you do not do X, then we will do Y.

And maybe we can come to some sort of consensus to avoid this terrible fate.

But the idea that we have a moral obligation to pay immoral states to continue to pursue immorality is beyond, it's mind-boggling to me.

Why anyone thinks that we should give $400 million to the Palestinian authorities, that they can use that on building terror tunnels, allying with Hamas, building up a paramilitary force that murders civilians, like why that's a thing?

I don't understand that at all.

And I would hope that legislation would begin moving through the U.S.

Congress immediately, limiting funding to the United Nations, making it project-specific as opposed to broad.

We are the single biggest funder of the U.N.

And I would hope that we would reconsider aid to places like the Palestinian Authority.

I understand that the idea there is to prop up the PA in the hopes that that will prevent the rise of Hamas, but Hamas has already risen, okay?

The fact is that the PA was a terror group, Hamas was a terror group, Hamas is just stupider about how they promulgate their terror than the PA.

But calling it diplomatic prostitution to say that we should use the levers of power at our disposal is really insane.

And usually, by the way, the same people who are saying that we should never, never leverage tyrannical countries into pursuing our interests will say that the government should leverage you into not buying a soda, that the government should leverage you into buying health insurance.

that the government should force you to do what the government wants to force you to do.

That's absurd.

So where is your money going?

So the Washington Post had a good breakdown in October 2016, looking at the breakdown of U.S.

assistance.

Truth is, overall, it's not that much money.

I mean, in terms of the national budget every year,

it's not tons of cash that we are spending on foreign aid, but every dollar that we spend is a dollar that is coming from somebody's pocket or from the pockets of our children who are racking up debt, who have not yet been born.

It's about 1% of the federal budget is devoted to foreign assistance.

It's broken down into two categories.

There's economic and development assistance, and there's security assistance.

Security assistance seems like something worthwhile to me.

And that's where the vast majority of aid to places like Israel and Egypt and Saudi Arabia go.

It's not human rights assistance or economic and development assistance.

It's assistance that is specifically meant to purchase weapons, for example.

The aid package that we send to Israel, that money comes back to the United States almost immediately in the form of weapons purchases from the state of Israel.

The same thing holds true for Egypt, for example.

Economic and development assistance is a little bit different.

And there we should go country by country because the truth is that when you look at foreign aid and development assistance particularly, the record is not good.

Far too often, we send a grant package to some

tyrannical country with a dictator at the top.

And that dictator just takes it and builds a second palace.

And the money never sees the light of day again.

Because who are you going to give the money to?

It's not like we drop helicopters worth of cash.

It's not like we helicopter the money and just drop it out the doors in Nigeria, right?

That has to go to somebody at the top of the government.

So if the person at the top of the government is a corrupt dictator, then that money is going to go to the corrupt dictator.

That's how you end up with Mahmoud Abbas being worth something like $100 million.

It's not because the guy's great at making iPhones.

So let's look at where all of this goes.

In terms of economic and development assistance, the leading countries that receive economic and development assistance from the United States are Afghanistan, which makes a certain amount of sense since we are in a war there and we are trying to win some hearts and minds.

Pakistan, why we're sending economic and development assistance to Pakistan is beyond me.

They've been less than cooperative in the war on terror.

And certainly there should be strings attached to that economic and development package.

Jordan,

that only makes sense in the sense that we're trying to prop up the Hashemite kingdom to prevent the rise of a Palestinian terror group in Jordan from taking over the place.

70% of Jordan is Arab-Palestinian.

Ethiopia is receiving $500 million from us.

Kenya is receiving $620 million from us.

Uganda, $457 million.

Nigeria, $605 million.

Tanzania, $575 million.

Zambia, $420 million.

Have we seen any market effects from this aid?

Are we seeing huge effects from this aid?

Now, I know President Bush was one of the folks who was pushing very hard for more aid to Africa.

And some of that has had an effect.

But targeted aid would be the answer here, not blanket aid to countries where, I mean, like we give $176 million to Zimbabwe.

Until five seconds ago, the head of Zimbabwe was legitimately Robert Mugabe, one of the worst people on planet Earth.

To the Palestinian Authority, we give $327 million a year.

That's a lot of money to give to a corrupt dictatorship.

We're giving money right now.

to places like Ukraine, which makes some sense, but we're also giving money to Syria.

Like, I'm wondering where that money is going.

When we hallmark aid, when we earmark aid, rather, to Syria, $175 million worth, how does that get distributed?

Where is that going?

Does that go through Bashar Assad?

Unclear to me.

Okay, so then there is security assistance by country.

And this is where people are making the mistake of saying, well, you know, you're sending the Israelis money,

or you're sending the Afghans money, or you're sending the Iraqis money, right?

There's a difference between security aid and between human and economic development.

Security aid is about promulgating American interests abroad.

Economic development may be about that, but very often is not.

So the number one recipient of American military aid is Afghanistan.

Again, makes sense.

Number two is Israel.

Number three is Egypt.

Number four is Iraq.

And then you get to Syria and Lebanon and Pakistan and Jordan.

If President Trump has not already, then he should have somebody tasked to go through and determine where this aid can be cut.

And I think that we should zero it, right?

We should start from a zero basis.

Who deserves the aid?

We shouldn't start from who's receiving and what should we cut.

We should start from who deserves it at all and what levers can we use.

There's no reason, again, that we should be spending millions and millions of dollars on dictatorial regimes that are antithetical to our own interests.

That seems foolish to me.

And by the way, as I say, the arms deals that we make with these various countries, the money comes back to us from military aid, but it doesn't necessarily come back in terms of other aid.

Okay, so meanwhile, the Trump administration is now considering a project that I am not big on

with regard to immigration.

I have been in favor of the wall.

I will continue to be in favor of the wall.

I think the wall is a worthwhile idea because, again, it provides a physical barrier that...

forces people to think twice before crossing the border.

Because if you can't get over the border, then why would you travel the thousands of miles necessary from the southern border of Mexico all the way up to the northern border of Mexico because a huge percentage of immigration now is not direct from Mexico a lot of it's coming from the northern part of South America is coming from central and Latin America

well the Trump administration is now considering a new policy and this just seems misguided to me and we should be increasing deportations we should be making it speedier we should be we should be funding ICE to ensure

that we are protecting our own interests.

But this seems counterproductive to me.

This is a story from the New York Times.

The story suggests that the Trump administration is now considering a plan to separate parents from their children when families are caught entering the country illegally, according to officials who have been briefed on the plans.

The forceful move is meant to discourage border crossings, but some people are calling it inhumane, obviously.

The policy is favored by the White House.

So what is the policy?

Apparently, it would send parents to adult detention facilities.

Their children would be placed in shelters designated for juveniles or with a sponsor who could be a relative in the United States, but the the administration may also tighten rules on sponsors.

So now we're going to take kids away from their parents if the entire family comes across illegally.

I guess the goal here, the idea here, is that we are going to try to discourage people from crossing the border illegally by separating families.

In pure PR terms, this is just foolish.

In pure moral terms, I think it's foolish.

We can deport families without separating them.

The problem here is that we're not moving fast enough to deport people who are coming across the border illegally, not that we need to separate them in the first instance.

Immigration has dropped rather precipitously, illegal immigration has dropped rather precipitously under President Trump, not because of the policy of separating families, but because people know with a certain amount of reliability that they will be deported.

And Barack Obama was not deporting people.

When people passed out the false statistic suggesting that he had increased deportations, that's because they fudged the numbers.

They were suggesting that if somebody came to the border and was turned away, this counted as a deportation.

Trump has actually increased deportations.

That's good policy.

But the idea that you have to separate families in order to discourage people from crossing the border,

there are some real moral problems I have with that.

Because the truth is that a huge number of people who are trying to illegally cross the borders are not criminals.

There are criminals who are trying to cross the borders.

When I say they're not criminals, it's criminal to cross the border.

But I mean aside from that.

They're not coming here to deal drugs.

They're not coming here to participate in gangs.

A huge number of people who are coming from places like El Salvador, which is experiencing high levels of violence, or Guatemala, which is falling apart right now.

Those people are seeking a better life.

Now, it doesn't mean they get to stay.

It does mean, however, that the idea of treating them the same way that you would treat a gang member is kind of foolish.

And

I just don't think that, I think there's a way to be both humane and protective of American interests.

I don't think that you have to be deliberately cruel to people in order to protect American interests.

If people know they will get deported, then they're not going to try to cross the border again.

In some ways, it actually increases the tendency for people to use coyotes to cross the border because it'll keep their family together,

to avoid ICE.

You know, the typical way that people have been crossing the border is they actually flag people down on this side of the border thinking they won't be deported.

But what this would encourage is people to avoid doing that because they know that the family is going to be separated.

The headlines are going to be terrible from this.

It's just, it's not smart policy.

It's not smart PR.

And I don't think that it's particularly,

I'm not sure it's going to be particularly effective.

So I would hope that the Trump administration will reconsider this policy, even as they build a wall and increase deportations.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, Papa John's founder was forced to step down as CEO.

You will not believe the reason why.

I'm Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

So, this is breaking news.

The founder of Papa John's International is now going to step down as CEO, handing over his company just weeks after making controversial remarks about national anthem protests by NFL players for which the company later apologizes, according to the Washington Post.

John Schneider, who is featured on Papa John's pizza boxes and in the chains commercials, will now be replaced by COO Steve Ritchie on January 1.

He's still the company's largest shareholder.

He'll still continue to serve as chairman of the board.

So why exactly is he being ousted?

Because he blamed sagging sales of Papa John's, which is a huge sponsor of the NFL, on the league's poor leadership in response to demonstrations during the national anthem.

Okay, that was totally legit.

What he said was entirely correct.

If you spent millions of dollars, millions of dollars on advertising on the NFL, and the NFL refused to do anything about players who are kneeling for the national anthem, even though they certainly have it within their power to do so, they could just have a rule.

Either don't come out on the field or you stand for the national anthem.

Those are the only possibilities.

And the NFL didn't do anything.

They made foolish business decisions and their ratings are down as a consequence.

The NFL has taken it right in the kisser over the last year.

Their ratings are down for a couple of reasons.

By the way, I think that the NFL is actually going to be a thing of the past within within the next 15 years because with all of the new information coming out about brain injuries that are being sustained by members of the NFL, it looks a lot like boxing to me.

In the 1950s and 60s, boxing was enormous.

It was the biggest sport in America through the early 1970s, really.

And then after people realized what kind of damage was being done to these fighters, boxing is now a big nothing.

Nobody pays attention to boxing anymore.

The last fighter anyone cared about was Mike Tyson.

That was the early 90s.

I have a feeling the NFL may be experiencing a similar problem, but it certainly doesn't help when you have players kneeling for the national anthem.

The NFL did not do its job there.

The NFL did not do its job to protect its own business.

Forget about the morality of kneeling.

It was a failure of business imagination to do that.

So the Papa John's founder said something about it.

He had the gall to say something about it.

And now he's basically been ousted.

He's basically been thrown out of business because, uh-oh, he offended all the people who like kneeling for the national anthem.

Demonstrative of the fact once again that when everything becomes politicized, and President Trump was a part of this, when everything becomes politicized, there are no common spaces for us left.

Not in football, not in pizza, nowhere.

And that is not good for the country.

It's really bad for the country in a wide variety of ways.

We need a social fabric, or we're not going to be able to live with each other.

We need to break from politics, or we're not going to be able to live with each other.

When we continue, Congress avoids a government shutdown.

We'll explain how and why.

Ben Shapiro win for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back

Love,

courage,

truth, Glenn Beck.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck here on the Glen Beck program.

Always an honor to sit behind the mic for Glenn.

Congress passed a stopgap spending bill on Thursday, averting a partial government shutdown at midnight on Friday, according to the Washington Post.

It pushes into January showdowns on spending, immigration, health care, and national security.

Among the issues still to be resolved, aid for victims of recent hurricanes and wildfires.

Apparently, the House passed a separate $81 billion disaster relief bill.

The Senate did not immediately take it up amid Democratic objections, of course, because Democrats don't want Republicans to be able to solve that problem and then just put it behind them.

So, here's what it does: the StopGap extends federal funding through January 19th.

It provides temporary extensions of the children's health insurance program.

So, for all those folks like Jimmy Kimmel claiming that Republicans were cutting taxes for the wealthy so they didn't have to pay for the children's health insurance program, a program, by the way, created by Senator Oren Hatch, a Republican, in the first place.

The Republicans are going to continue funding CHIP no matter what.

Like, that is a program that will continue to be funded because Republicans also have an interest in ensuring that people who can't take care of themselves are able to get health insurance.

It's essential that Congress maintain government programs and services for our nation's stability, the stability of our economy, and for the security and well-being of the American people, said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Freelinghuisen, Republican of New Jersey.

It passed passed the House 231 to 188, cleared the Senate 66 to 32.

Those will be the last congressional votes of this year.

So what this does, it sets up in January a major showdown over government spending.

And that's a showdown that should be had.

Because, as I mentioned yesterday on Glenn's show, the reality is that the tax cuts, which I am very much in favor of.

I like the tax cut bill.

I think it's going to do a lot of good things for the economy.

People are seeing money again for the first time in a while.

It does, in fact, create new new deficits.

And the way to solve that is for Republicans to take up the baton and cut spending.

Now, I know that it's politically toxic to take up spending, but at a certain point, don't you actually have to use the power at hand?

This weird idea that Republicans are going to just see a continuing advance of their power on the federal level, I'm not seeing the poll numbers to support that.

I'm not seeing the poll numbers to support that.

So let's assume for just a second.

that Republicans are not going to retain the House in 2018.

The reason I'm assuming that is because the data suggests that they will not.

According to the latest polling data, the Republicans are down 18 on the generic congressional ballot.

That is full wipeout territory.

A lot of that has to do with the personal unpopularity of the president, even if the president has pursued popular policies, which, and as I say, I hope that the president somehow turns it around personally because he is now

inevitably connected.

with whatever policies he pursues.

So if he pursues conservative policies, but he's personally unpopular, that has ramifications for the policy.

I don't want to be popular just because I think Trump as a human being matters to me.

He doesn't.

Politicians don't really matter to me much as quote-unquote human beings.

I have a family for that.

I have friends for that.

I have a community for that.

It does matter to me whether he promulgates an agenda I like and successfully makes that agenda more popular.

But here's where we stand polling-wise for 2018.

I want to go back through the polls over the last several congressional cycles and show you exactly why the polls right now are so terrible.

I don't mean mediocre.

I mean terrible for Republicans.

So, according to Real Clear Politics averages, generic ballots this time before an election cycle.

In 2002, Republicans had a 1.7%

generic ballot average lead, 1.7%.

Republicans gained seats.

In 2004, it was a tied generic ballot.

Republicans gained a couple of seats.

In 2006, Democrats were plus 12, and there was a huge wave that flipped the House to Democrats.

In 2008, Democrats were plus 9.

There's another wave in favor of Democrats.

In 2010, it was Republicans plus 9.

A wave flipped the House to Republicans.

In 2012, the Republicans were plus 2.

Plus 0.2 is basically dead even.

There was a minor change in the Republican-controlled House.

They picked up a couple of seats.

In 2014, Republicans were up 2.4,

and there was another pickup for Republicans in the House, a major pickup for for Republicans in the House.

In 2016, Democrats were plus.06.

There was a minor change.

The Republicans maintained control of the House.

Right now, Democrats are plus 13.

So this looks more like 2006, 2008, 2010 all-wave elections than it does like 2004, 2012, 2016, even 2014.

Democrats are doing...

quite well in terms of turnout in a lot of these special elections.

The reason I'm suggesting this is not because I want Democrats, God forbid, to win the House.

I think that would be terrible.

I think they would immediately pursue bad policy.

The reason I'm suggesting this is because I'm saying power is temporary, but cuts have to be made permanent.

When you have power, you have to do what you can to cut where you can.

And this is always the unpopular part of the Republican agenda.

The unpopular part of the Democratic agenda is raising taxes, which is why Democrats try to avoid raising taxes.

It's why Barack Obama signed on to a re-enshrinement of the Bush tax cuts in both 2010 and 2013.

That's the unpopular part of the Democratic agenda.

And when Democrats are honest about raising taxes, it really hurts them.

Walter Mondale comes to mind in 1984 in San Francisco, announcing that part of his program was to raise taxes.

Bernie Sanders, he can talk about raising taxes all he wants, but once he's a presidential candidate in a general election and he starts talking about raising the middle-class tax rates to 60% like they are in the socialist European countries he loves so much,

That's pretty much going to kill whatever presidential hopes he has.

Democrats are constantly trying to avoid that plank in their platform.

Republicans are constantly trying to avoid the plank in their platform that says you're supposed to cut spending and bring it in alignment with government takings.

And that's a problem because the government spending is going to go up, up, up.

So this government shutdown, the possibility of a government shutdown in January, Republicans should make clear their spending priorities.

And then they should force Democrats into the position of having to argue that they want to shut down the government rather than cutting spending on on foolish programs.

The party in power, supposedly, this is the typical conventional wisdom, the party in power has the upper hand during government shutdowns.

This is why even Republicans, many of them, were upset about Ted Cruz's government shutdown in 2013.

The idea being that Cruz said, we don't want to fund Obamacare, just cut the funding to Obamacare.

And then Barack Obama allowed the government to shut down.

And then the Republicans were blamed, right?

The idea for establishment Republicans, at least, I don't think this is quite correct, but their logic was that Republicans would be blamed for the government shutdown.

And the polling numbers showed there was some truth to that, but it didn't have any long-term repercussions.

But if we're going to use that argument as establishment Republican types, as media types, well, and the same holds true now.

Trump is the president.

If the Democrats shut down the government, then it's on them.

So Trump should make his spending priorities clear.

That means funding the wall.

It means cutting funding in a lot of other areas.

Instead, however, it looks like the Republicans are going to pursue the sort of big government, quote-unquote, compassionate conservatism that you saw during the George W.

Bush era, which is to say, lower taxes and blow out the spending.

And there's no excuse for that.

Ronald Reagan also increased spending over the course of his tenure, but he was working with the Democrat Congress.

Trump has a Republican Congress, so increasing spending seems like a waste of an opportunity.

And yet today, this morning, President Trump tweeted out, quote, at some point, and for the good of the country, I predict we will start working with the Democrats in a bipartisan fashion.

He says infrastructure would be a perfect place to start.

After having foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East, it is time to start rebuilding our country.

So first of all, that talking point has always stuck in my craw a little bit.

This idea that the spending that is preventing us from growing in this country is military spending is not true.

It's just not.

The spending that's preventing us from growing is the entitlement spending.

It's the spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

That's 66% of the federal budget.

And the idea that the defense budget is really what's quashing growth is just,

it's not actually true.

But it's the first part that matters.

Trump may now swivel to the left.

So I said yesterday that where we are with regard to President Trump,

maybe we are seeing a new leaf because the last three weeks of policy have been as conservative as any policy I have ever seen from any administration.

Incredibly, incredibly powerful.

But...

Is that the beginning of this great long-for period of conservative ascendance?

Or is this Trump signing off on his conservative agenda so he can then swivel to the left and try and pick up some votes for the midterm and re-enshrine his election efforts in 2020?

Is he going to turn to infrastructure now?

Because there are a lot of folks who are encouraging him to move to infrastructure

right off the bat, that as soon as he got in office, he should work with Democrats and spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure.

Now, to be fair to Trump, some of the plans he's been proposing are not fully the federal government coming in and funding infrastructure.

Some of them were supposed to be public-private projects.

Nonetheless, the vast majority of infrastructure problems in the United States are not federal problems.

They are state problems.

It should be on states to do it.

It should be on states to do, to fix their infrastructure.

Now, the federal government really does not have a serious place in the infrastructure business.

And I know everybody loves the Eisenhower highway system.

I got to tell you, you love it because it's there.

If there had been no Eisenhower project to build the national highway system, this sort of libertarian idea, then the states would have built highway systems and connected them.

You want to know why Route 66, I mean the route about which Nat King Cole sung, you want to know why that has become basically a barren wasteland?

It's because of the Eisenhower highway system.

People built all of their shops and stores around Route 66, and then Eisenhower built a highway system that completely bypassed Route 66.

Now, you may love the interstate highway system.

I love traveling it too.

But the reality is that we spent an awful lot of money on a highway system that was probably going to be built in a more convenient way by states that knew where the populations populations were in the first place.

Okay, and that's the most famous example of a successful infrastructure project.

Usually, when there's a massive government infrastructure project, that massive government infrastructure project ends up spending enormous amounts of money on a bunch of random nonsense.

That's what the Barack Obama stimulus package was.

It stimulated nothing.

I can remember driving through Los Angeles and seeing the big orange signs that said American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Ooh.

Sometimes they were green.

And invariably, it would would be followed by a line of cones with no one working on the road.

That was always what it was.

The road's never gotten any better, but there was a sign now, and that meant that something was happening.

The obsession with infrastructure is just an excuse for Republicans to avoid cutting spending.

And that's really what they need to be focused on right now if they want to do any good, because we are bilking future generations.

This, again, is the part of the agenda nobody wants to talk about because it's unpopular.

But guess what?

When you have power, that's the time to do something with the power, not to sit around hoping that an infrastructure project is going to save your bacon from a bad midterm election.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, Rosie O'Donnell's back at it again.

Yesterday, she was sexually harassing me.

Today, she's sexually harassing me.

No, I'm not joking.

My life has gotten very weird.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.

Glenn back.

Me too, folks.

Me too.

Ben Shapiro here for Glenn Beck, and I feel the pain.

Rosie O'Donnell has now sexually harassed me twice in two days.

And I can say honestly, it has struck me to my core.

It all began two days ago when Rosie O'Donnell tweeted out that she thought that it would be worthwhile to offer senators bribes.

She actually tweeted out that she offered senators Jeff Flake and Susan Collins $2 million each on Twitter

if they would vote against the Republican tax reform package.

This, by the way, is a federal felony under 18 U.S.

Code 201B,

which says openly that if you offer politicians bribes for votes, that you will have to pay the amount of the bribes that you offer three times that to the federal government and or 15 years, up to 15 years in a federal penitentiary.

So, Rosie broke the law.

So I tweeted out that Rosie had broken the law.

I tweeted out that if the President of the United States initiated a legal investigation into Rosie O'Donnell via Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he would immediately have his face carved into Mount Rushmore.

Human beings wouldn't even have to do it.

A lightning bolt from God would just strike Mount Rushmore and boom, Trump's face would be on there.

But Rosie O'Donnell didn't take kindly to that.

And she tweeted directly at me that I should suck her bleep.

Her bleep was a male appendage, which is weird.

So she sexually harassed me, and I said, listen, Rosie, you're already a felon.

There's no reason for you to be a homophobic sexual harasser.

Me too.

Me too.

And then she got even more angry.

And she suggested this morning, sadly, she sexually harassed me again this morning.

I don't know what Rosie O'Donnell's problem is.

But

she tweeted out, lick me too, Ben.

Now, there are a wide variety of reasons why I would never

do that.

But.

I tweeted in response, no means no, Rosie.

No means no.

Hashtag me too.

And then just for the funsies of it, I let the Twitter people know that I was being sexually harassed by Rosie O'Donnell and that this was targeted abuse.

The reason I did that is not because I want Twitter to actually throw Rosie O'Donnell off Twitter or anything like that.

It's just that Twitter's standards are applied wildly and consistently.

And Twitter, like a lot of major tech companies, will target conservatives.

for bad behavior, but they will leave the left alone with regard to bad behavior.

Now, I have a standard, which I don't like people being banned from places like Twitter for pretty much anything.

I'm pretty much a free speech absolutist when it comes to this.

If you're going to have a standard, then I think it is fair to say that abuse like suck this or lick that, that that stuff should be ruled out of bounds by Twitter and it should be equally applied.

But that was my point.

Because you know, imagine if I had said something similar in reverse to Rosie O'Donnell.

Can you imagine?

Well, first of all, it would end my career, right?

I mean, that would be the end of my career.

It would also be the end of my sanity and my decency, but

the left would respond with full outrage ire.

I would be banned from Twitter.

No question.

So we will find out whether, in fact, there's a double standard with regard to sexual harassment so long as you are an anti-Trump, rabid left, non-straight human.

If you are a conservative, however, then you can be banned from Twitter for pretty much anything.

So let's find out.

Let's find out how

accurate their standards are.

Let's see.

Let's find out.

So,

all right, meanwhile, the House is now looking at a plan requiring lawmakers to pay for their own sexual harassment settlements.

And when people say that Congress is just filled with terrible people, one of the reasons why they say that is because Congress apparently over the last 20 years has paid about $1.5 million in sexual harassment settlements of your money, of my money, of everybody's money except their own.

The House Administrative Committee announced on Thursday that it expects to advance legislation in the new year that would force lawmakers accused of harassment to reimburse taxpayers for settlements.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is working on legislation to overhaul Capitol Hill's reporting system for harassment complaints.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for more transparency toward harassment settlements and for ending the practice of putting taxpayers on the hook for members of Congress accused of misconduct.

Legislation is expected to be introduced when Congress reconvenes in early January.

This seems like a pretty easy fix and something that Congress certainly should pursue.

Otherwise, it looks like,

honestly, otherwise it just looks like they're trying to pay off their Al Franken proclivities

with your money.

Speaking of which, Al Franken bade a fond farewell to Capitol Hill on Thursday.

He grabbed life by the breasts.

And Al Franken gave a lengthy broadside against the policies of the Trump administration and called for politicians to commit themselves to honesty and public discourse.

Because if there's one man who knows honesty in public discourse, it's a guy who goes to rope lines and gropes women's butts.

As I have said about Al Franken before, I take thousands of pictures with people a year.

I just did an event down in Florida.

Hundreds of kids.

I speak on dozens of college campuses every year.

So when I take thousands of pictures with comely young women, okay, that is not really an exaggeration.

I take pictures with lots and lots of young people.

Okay, comely or not.

Never once has it occurred to me to sexually harass or abuse those young people because that's absurd.

But that's apparently what Al Franken was doing.

He was just going to events and risking everything to grab a butt.

So Franken

was,

people were wondering, like me, whether he was actually going to leave, that after Roy Moore lost his race, the Democrats ceased to have a function in shaming Al Franken.

And so instead, they decided that they would basically allow him to stick around.

There were a bunch of senators who had signaled that.

Franken himself said, I'm out.

And Franken, what he really should have done, I mean, if he were politically bright, what he would have done is he would have immediately said when these allegations came out, I'm stepping down to make myself a better man.

The president should do the same.

And it's a blot on our institutions that people like me who are willing to go and fix themselves step out, but people who are not staying.

Like, that would have been a smart political move.

Instead, Franken launched a broadside.

He lamented the degradation of truth.

Again, Al Franken lamenting the degradation of truth.

The irony is simply too rich.

He said, as I leave the Senate, I have to admit, it feels like we're losing the war for truth.

Maybe it's already lost.

If that's what happens, we have lost the ability to have the kinds of arguments that help build consensus.

Yes, nothing builds consensus quite like a lifelong comedian running for Senate, basically stealing his seat from Norm Coleman through voter fraud, and then using his seat to promulgate the most leftist agenda imaginable.

If I think Unifier, I think Al Franken.

Unifying his hands with other people's body parts.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, a lot of people very angry about the tax cuts.

Some are making very stupid arguments, and we will explain explain the stupidest of these arguments when we return.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Tax Mageddon.

The effects are just brutal.

We were told everyone would die.

And boy, the Democrats were sure right about that one.

Dying from being burdened with their additional wealth.

Okay, so I've been Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

More tax Mageddon updates.

Okay, so thanks to the Republican tax cut in Texas, New Bromfells-based Rush Enterprises is now planning to give each of its employees a $1,000 bonus after Trump signed the tax reform bill into law.

It's a commercial truck dealer.

They said all of their approximately 6,600 U.S.

employees will receive $1,000 bonus.

In Wisconsin, Associated Bank said on Thursday it would boost its minimum hourly wage to $15 and pay workers a $500 bonus when the recently passed federal tax reform is signed.

The Green Bay-based bank said it will raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour from 10, a 50% boost.

They said this would affect about 55% of its workers, about 3,000 workers or so in Idaho.

Malaluca Inc.

announced it would be the latest major business to give its workers bonuses in response to Trump's tax cuts.

Frank Vandersloot, who is indeed a Republican's owner, said in a phone interview that his 2,000 workers would get a one-time bonus of $100 for every year they have worked at the company.

On average, employees have stayed at the company for eight years, resulting in an $800 bonus.

They also have 147 employees who've worked for Vandersloot for 20 years or more.

Royal Hawaiian Heritage Jewelry in Hawaii.

The owner hopes that this is going to help her business.

She's from Kauai.

And so she has said that she is going to expand her operations and she's going to open a couple of new stores.

By the way, it's also worth noting that there are some new reports out.

And I discussed yesterday people whose taxes are going to be increased, you know, people like me in California because

of the deduction, mortgage deduction interest is mortgage interest deduction rather is going down to $750,000.

And because state and local tax deductions have now been ruled out of bounds, and people are pointing out, that may be a little exaggerated because people who are already paying a ton of tax in the state of California are getting hit by the alternative minimum tax, meaning that there is a catch-all provision in the tax code that basically prevents you from taking enough deductions to get below a 26% threshold if you earn a lot of money.

And so it's likely that I've already hit the alternative minimum tax.

Or if I haven't, then I guess I could lose money, I suppose, through this.

But the alternative minimum tax is already catching those people.

Jack Mechie is a tax associate of financial planning

firm Vest Board.

He says, there's a lot of noise about workers in California, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois facing higher taxes.

But 80% of our clients were already paying the alternative minimum tax, so they don't benefit at all from state and local deductions in the first place.

I will be honest with you.

I do not actually do my own taxes by hand.

I have an accountant who does it.

I just give them all my receipts.

So I'm not sure whether my taxes would actually go up.

I have assumed they will, but I will ask my accountant and get back to you on that.

I know everyone is fascinated with my accounting.

It's just as fascinating to you as it is to me, I would assume.

Meanwhile, Democrats and some never Trumpers, and when I say never-Trumpers, I don't use that in the derogatory sense that so many people use it.

I don't mean everybody who didn't vote for Trump, right?

I didn't vote for Trump.

People tend to group people like me into the never-Trump category, even though Never Trump no longer applies.

And Never Trump ended the day of the election.

Now I am sometimes Trump.

When he does good things, I cheer wildly.

When he does bad things, I boo.

Because that's exactly how I would treat any other politician.

And by the way, I never said during the election cycle that you shouldn't vote for Trump.

I said I couldn't because he didn't meet my minimum standards for qualification.

But I always said repeatedly over and over that if you were voting for Trump to stop Hillary, I understood your vote.

In any case, there are some actual quote-unquote never Trumpers, people who have basically decided that no matter what Trump does, it's wrong.

One of those people is Jennifer Rubin over at the Washington Post.

So Jennifer Rubin was taken to task by Charles Cook over at National Review, full disclosure and outlet for which I write.

And Charles basically pointed out that Jennifer Rubin had basically switched her positions on half of issues just to bang on Trump.

That she spent an awful lot of time just knocking Trump over stuff that she agrees with him about because she doesn't like Trump personally.

Now, that's never Trump to me.

People who do stuff like that.

And that's real never Trump because it really means never Trump.

He can never do anything right.

Well, Jennifer Rubin is back at it complaining about these tax cuts.

And how is she complaining?

Well, she's complaining because people on the lower end of the income scale are not getting that much money back.

So what she says is that 75 bucks, which is the amount that some people are getting back,

75 bucks would probably cover Trump's lunch tab at her father's club, Ivanka, Trump's lunch, but really does nothing for low-income families.

She's quoting the CBPP, which is the congressional, let's see, what does this group mean?

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And what they say is the final bill does nothing compared to the Senate bill to improve lives of 10 million children in low-income working families.

Those children will get only a token increase of up to $75 per family or no increase at all.

Many working families with children under 17 with incomes that are too low or owed much or any income tax can get part of the CTC, the child tax credit as a tax refund.

As noted, that refundable amount is limited under the current law to 15% of their earnings over $3,000.

The Senate bill lowers that threshold so that earnings over $2,500 would count count toward earning a child tax credit, translating to a CTC increase of just $75 for those families.

So then Jennifer Rubin says that $75 doesn't really do anything for people.

Well, she should probably ask people who are poor

because $75 does $75 worth of work for them.

This is creating an awful lot of blowback for people who have been middle-class and wealthy their entire life.

$75 doesn't sound like a lot of money.

To people who are making $12,000 a year, $75 is not a pittance.

It's not a tiny amount of money.

It's $75.

$75 will buy you, if you're a single person, buy you a week's worth of meals.

That's not a tiny amount of money.

It just shows the disconnect.

The left is now being forced to basically play reverse class warfare.

The left is now being forced to say that poor people don't have any value for small amounts of money, which is really silly.

Only rich people say that.

And then there's Charles Blow,

whose name is indicative of the quality of his work, writing in the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

And he says, with their tax bill, Donald Trump and the Republicans are raiding the Treasury in plain sight, throwing crumbs to the masses as the millionaires and billionaires make off with the cake.

Again,

it was not the Treasury's money, it's their money.

He says, America should be aghast, not only at the looting, but also at the brazenness.

of its execution.

He says, it seems that for as long as I can remember, Republicans have been wringing their hands about deficits, and yet, in this budget, they willingly, willfully exploded the deficit, not for public uplift or rebuilding America's infrastructure, but rather on the spurious argument that giving truckloads of money back to businesses will spark their benevolence.

Okay, well, again, each and every day, there are new stories of businesses that are not being benevolent.

They're increasing their business and or paying their workers more so that workers feel good about tax cuts, right?

And I love this idea that suddenly Democrats are wringing their hands about deficits.

Okay, I said earlier, Republicans should be wringing their hands about deficits.

Now would be the time to cut.

You just took some money out of the federal treasury.

That was our money.

Good.

Good.

But I'm not of the, I've never been a big idea, a big fan of the Laffer curve.

There's an argument about the laugher curve.

The laugher curve, for people who don't know, is this concept that was created by a guy named Art Laffer, economist who is very instrumental in the Reagan tax plan.

And his basic idea was this.

If the tax rate is zero, then the income to the government will be zero.

If the tax rate is 100, then the income to the government will be zero because no one is going to work just for the government unless they're paid, right?

If the tax rate is 100, then the income will be zero.

Somewhere in the middle is sort of the ideal tax point for increasing revenue.

And if you move the tax rate down from 100 back towards zero, then you will increase the amount of revenue in the federal treasury by increasing the size of the economy.

So the economy grows, and sure, you're now only taking in 20% of income rather than 30% of income, but the economy has has doubled.

So 20% of a doubled economy is more than 30% of a halved economy.

That's the basic notion of the Laffer curve.

It's right, but the reason that I object to using that logic is because it suggests that the quality of a tax cut should be measured on how much money is taken in additionally to the Federal Treasury.

I think that that's a fool's errand.

I'd like to starve the beast.

I'm not interested in increasing money to the Federal Treasury.

I don't like using the argument that the economy will increase and the government will take even more money in.

I don't want the government to take more money in.

If the government takes more money in, they should cut taxes again.

They should just continue cutting taxes.

But this is one of the things that is so bizarre about the left's view of deficits.

The left says that a deficit created by them spending on infrastructure is fine.

A deficit created by you keeping your own money is not fine.

Charles Blow says the tax bill will lead to an increase in the deficit of $1.5 billion over the next 10 years.

He says, when this bill leads to predicted deficits, Republicans will return to their sideline deficit rhetoric, armed with a sickle, aiming the blade at the social safety net, exacerbating the egregious imbalance of the tax bill's original sins.

That's the strategy.

Appease the rich on the front end, punish the poor on the back, feed the weak to the strong.

So what he's complaining about now is if I keep my own money, then where's the money for the social safety net going to go?

And the answer is that people should be using the money to invest in their own retirements.

This is a fundamental disconnect.

It's why Republicans need to argue that government programs do not do what they are cracked up to do.

Otherwise, you do end up in the bind that Blow is performing for you.

Blow is basically saying, every single time you cut taxes, you are taking money away from entitlements because you're going to have to cut entitlements on the back end.

What Republicans should be saying is, we want to cut entitlements so we can kill two birds with one stone.

We can restructure entitlements.

They must be restructured, by the way.

You can seize the property of every millionaire in the United States wholesale, and it will not come close to paying off the federal debt.

It will not even come close to it.

But Democrats are really upset because they figure that every time Republicans raise the deficit with tax cuts, that this will somehow lead to cuts on the other end.

First of all, it's not true because Republicans never cut anything, sadly.

Second of all, Republicans should be looking to cut, regardless of what the tax rate is.

The government should not be performing these functions.

I'm a young person.

I'm 33.

I'm never going to see a dime of my Social Security cash.

It's gone.

It's going to pay for my grandmother and other grandmothers like her.

Well, the people who have been made promises, we should keep those promises, obviously.

But for people like me,

how about this?

How about I get to keep more of my own money and invest it in the stock market?

And we restructure entitlements on a contribution basis rather than a withdrawal basis.

Because it is a giant Ponzi scheme.

This is going to have to be restructured at some point.

And this is why Republicans need to talk about restructuring separately from tax cuts.

Otherwise, Democrats are going to link the two together.

They're going to suggest that tax cuts are bad because entitlements have to be paid for.

Republicans should be saying we need to restructure entitlements, and also you should have lower taxes.

Not you should have lower taxes because of entitlement reform, but you should have lower taxes because lower taxes are better, and entitlement reform should happen because entitlement reform is better.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, Nancy Pelosi makes another bizarre literary reference.

And apparently, Democrats think that corporations don't mean it, but governments do.

And Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.

Glenn back.

This is Ben Shapiro in for Glen Beck here on the Glen Beck program.

Always.

a pleasure and honor to sit in for Glenn.

Okay, so there's this weird notion in a lot of leftist circles, a lot of people in the Democratic Party, that corporations don't mean it.

A corporation gives you a raise, it's because they're cynical and cruel and trying to buy you off.

That's the deal with corporations.

They're just terrible, terrible people.

They're all terrible.

They were good when they were poor, but now that they're getting bigger and they're growing, they're really terrible to their employees.

Now, I've worked for a fair number of companies at this point in my life.

I have run at least a couple.

I run one right now,

over at the Daily Wire.

We had a Christmas party last night.

We're pretty nice to our employees.

i'll be honest with you we have 35 40 employees who live in the city of los angeles work out here

and we're pretty nice to them give them some pretty nice christmas gifts we treat them well because we like to work with them because we want to treat our employees well and if you ask anybody who owns a business they feel the same way about their employees they feel a loyalty to their employees Their employees are helping them build a business, helping them build a lifestyle, helping them build a product.

But if you listen to Democrats, corporations are evil, evil, blood-sucking leeches on the American people.

Government, however, which literally forces you to give up your money at the point of gun, government has your best interests at heart.

So the people who are engaging in a voluntary transaction with you to build a business with you to help enrich you and your family in order to create better products for everyone, doing this all together, those people are the bad guys.

But the government that forces you to hand over your cash, those are the nice people.

And this is what Elizabeth Warren says.

She sends out a few smoke signals, and then she says this.

I want to be absolutely clear.

I am delighted when workers get more money.

I'm glad when it happens at any corporation in America.

Yay.

But let's be really clear.

If these corporations had wanted to do that, they already had plenty of profits to do it.

The idea that this is trickle-down economics at work rather than just plain old politics is just wrong.

The corporate CEOs have already told us what they're going to do with this money.

I'll give you an example.

Home Depot, right after the Senate passed the tax bill a couple of weeks ago, Home Depot CEO is executive is interviewed and said, so what are you going to do with all of this money that Home Depot has?

Because they're going to do really well on this.

Was it we're going to raise wages for our employees?

Mmm, no.

Was it we're going to hire more employees at the Home Depot stores?

Mmm, no.

Was it we're going to build more Home Depots across America?

No.

They said, what we're going to do is we're going to do stock buybacks.

Okay, so let's stop it right now.

Stock buybacks are where a company decides to increase its own stock price by buying back stock because they're investing in their own future in the company.

Okay, but the idea that corporations, they're all evil and they're manipulative and they're trying to be greedy.

The point is that in a free market, your greed, Your self-interest leads you to derive products for others.

In a government system, greed greed leads you to steal other people's money and then use it for your own nefarious purposes without any redress to the person whose money you just took.

As we continue, we're going to do Trump in Review 2017.

How'd the president do?

I'll tell you, Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck,

Glenn Beck,

love,

courage,

truth.

Glenn Beck.

Well, it's an honor to sit in for Glenn Beck here on the Glenn Beck program.

Ben Shapiro here, sitting with you on this Friday, just before Christmas.

And I hope that you do have a wonderful Merry Christmas.

Hope you've had a great holiday season.

If you're a Hanukkah celebrator, that's over for you already.

So it's time to move on to Christmas for the rest of the country.

And

I love this time of year.

As a Jew, I love the Christmas time of year.

I mean, it is just a beautiful holiday.

I heard a really good explanation the other day from my friend Andrew Clavin about somebody had asked him, why is it that all the best Christmas songs are written by Jews?

He had a really good answer.

And his answer was that if you're a Jew in the United States and you watch Christmas playing out, you're always watching it through somebody else's window.

And so there's always a feeling of sort of nostalgia about it.

Nostalgia isn't really the right word.

There's a wistfulness to all that kind of music that really hits home for the holidays.

I think there's some truth to that.

I love the Christmas season.

It's just, it's beautiful to watch.

As a Jew, I am grateful that this is a Christian country, a country that relies on a godly view of man and man's role in the world.

That's why America is great.

It's because we are good, and we are good because we have our roots in biblical morality going back to both the Old and New Testaments.

So

little Christmas cheer for you there.

Now,

let's go through President Trump's year because we're at the end of the year.

So how did it go?

How did it go?

And you know what?

I'll take your calls here.

I want to hear what your grades are for the president.

The number is 888-727-BEC.

888-727-BEC.

So I'm going to give you my grade.

First, I'm going to go through his accomplishments and his demerits because I want to be as objective about this as possible.

My model for Trump has always been good Trump, bad Trump.

In fact, I was the originator of this binary where I said there is good Trump and there's bad Trump.

He's bifurcated.

He's not always good.

He's not always bad.

When he's good, we cheer.

When he's bad, we don't.

But you have to view him that way because if you're going to be honest about your politicians rather than just following the leader, you need...

to look at what they are doing on a day-by-day basis and decide whether it's good or not.

I don't believe in politician worship because it's just another form of idol worship.

I don't believe in the MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, 4D, underwater, upside-down chess playing genius.

I don't believe everything that Trump does is well thought out or brilliant.

But I also don't believe, like some folks seem to, that everything that Trump has ever done is wrong and terrible.

And even if he does something I agree with, he's ruining it because it's Trump.

I don't believe that either.

So I want to go through his accomplishments this year, and then we'll go through the things that he has done wrong this year.

And then I'll give you my final overall grade for the president this year.

Because, hey, who knew where this was going to go on January 20th?

I mean, did anyone have a real clue?

You may have had your suspicions.

You may have been optimistic or pessimistic, but no one had any idea.

So, good Trump this year.

Number one, obviously, Justice Gorsuch, the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch, was a big move for the president.

The president made the smart move very on, or early on in his administration, of basically outsourcing his judicial picks to Federalist Society.

For folks who don't know Federalist Society, I went to Harvard Law School.

I was a member of FedSOC.

FedSOC is a libertarian/slash conservative legal organization.

It organizes conservatives and libertarians all over the country at the nation's top law schools.

And basically, Trump went to the leadership of FedSOC and he said, select for me judges.

They did.

He followed through.

Good for him.

So Justice Gorsuch sits on the Supreme Court, big win for President Trump.

Second, ISIS has largely been wiped out.

They've largely been wiped out.

Their territorial holdings, which at one point were their bragging point, right?

They used to claim that they controlled an area larger than that of the U.K.,

they've basically been reduced to nothingness.

President Trump has to do with that.

I won't give full credit to President Trump for that because he basically was following an Obama policy, but he did broaden and expand it.

He changed the rules of engagement.

And he did that without toppling Bashar Assad.

Now, there's an argument he made that he should have moved to topple Bashar Assad, one of the world's worst human beings, a man who's used chemical weapons on his own people.

But the idea that these two things were integrally related, that in order to topple ISIS and finish ISIS, you had to remove Assad, that was not true.

The soaring stock market, the unemployment rates down.

He gets some credit for that, but not all.

I want to be intellectually honest, as always, about how the economy works.

The stock market went up in Trump's first year by a significant amount, went about 12%, something like that.

In Obama's first year, it went up 35%, I think 55% actually, like 35% to 55%, something in that area.

I did not attribute rising stock markets to Obama.

I will not do the same for Trump.

Same thing with unemployment, but there's no question that the business climate is much better now because businesses don't fear that President Trump is going to come in and just destroy them the way the businesses feared that any moment now President Obama was going to issue a new regulation cracking down on how business is operated.

Cutting regulations, big accomplishment for President Trump.

He brags that he's cut 22 regulations for each new one created.

That's a big achievement for the president of the United States.

Now, he needs to maintain power in order for that to stick around because the regulators...

are going to be able to reinforce those regulations the moment he's out of office.

But that is a big accomplishment for the president.

He has helped curb Iran.

So Iran's regional power was growing.

Trump has worked very hard to put together a coalition, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, against the Iranian growth.

He has also

decertified the Iran deal.

He should pull the United States out and just reissue new sanctions against Iran.

He's decertified it, supposedly in preparation for that, but he should go further there.

He announced Jerusalem as Israel's capital, which I thought was the gutsiest, ballsiest move of the Trump administration thus far.

I'm not sure that any other Republican would have done it.

I think Ted Cruz would have.

It's one of the reasons I supported Cruz in the primaries, but I think that it's unlikely any other Republican president would have done so.

Good for Trump for doing it.

It was a power move.

It was a strong move.

It's one of the best moves he's made.

It reshapes how the Middle East operates.

He's opened public lands or he started to move to do so.

A lot of the West, a lot of the Western territories of the United States are controlled by the federal government.

That's asinine.

This is what drove the entire hubbub over Clivin Bundy and the Bundy family.

The Bundy family did,

and they got into it with the federal government because they'd been using quote-unquote public lands to graze their cattle.

They'd been doing that for generations.

The federal government fenced it off for purposes of some desert tortoise, and then they basically attempted to take the Bundy's living away from them.

The Bundy's resisted in possibly illegal fashion.

There was just a hung jury in their case.

The reason that happens is because the federal government has fenced off too much land.

If you look at Nevada, like 90% of the land is controlled by the federal government.

Trump is opening a lot of that up, or he's at least looking to do so.

He's also passed new North Korean sanctions.

Now, North Korea, a lot of people are worried deeply about North Korea firing a nuclear missile.

I don't think that's something North Korea would do simply because it wouldn't be in their interest.

The only thing the Kim family wants is to remain in power.

The minute they launch on us, we annihilate them.

So Trump has done what Trump is capable of doing, which is he has talked to China about it.

He's tried to use China to pressure North Korea, and he's passed new sanctions through the UN.

I don't think those are going to be effective, but I'm not sure Trump has a lot of other options there.

Repeal of the individual mandate.

Big win for the president.

Takes out a central plank of Obamacare.

Now we've got to take out the other plank, and this is where I think Trump is already signaling he's not going to do it, which is a problem.

You need to remove the federal regulations on the insurance companies if you want to have a free market that is going to lower costs in the individual insurance market.

That's the next step.

But he does get credit for getting rid of the individual mandate.

Really, it's Senator Tom Cotton who's responsible for that and Mitch McConnell who's able to put this in the tax bill.

Tax reform, obviously a huge win for the president.

We've been talking about it the the last couple of days.

A record number of appellate court appointees.

He has nominated 12 appellate court judges, more than any other president historically.

That's a big win for the administration, which had pledged to remake the judiciary along constitutionalist lines.

He pulled out from the Paris Accords.

Now, the Paris Accords were never formally binding.

The Paris Accords were never something that we're going to trap the United States unless we wish to be trapped.

But as a symbolic matter, it is important that the world knows that we are not going to sign off on America's domestic policy being run by foreign regulators from abroad.

President Trump's travel ban, which I think is both over-broad and under-broad.

It's a little too narrow in some ways because it doesn't include enough countries, and it's over-broad and that it includes everyone from those countries.

But the travel ban is a step in the direction of acknowledging a reality, which is there are certain countries where we have a difficult time actually

getting any sort of vetting material from them.

That travel ban was initially rolled out pretty horribly, but now it has been certified by the courts as well it should be.

And finally, he's unshackled the military and he's supported police.

So being not Hillary is his number one accomplishment.

And he passed that bar from the very beginning.

Being not Obama with regard to the police.

President Obama had a very negative perception

of the police, a perception that he really cast out into the wind and harmed a lot of police officers with.

And you see the crime rates went up dramatically in Obama's last couple of years in office, violent crime rates, at murder rates in major cities particularly.

Those crime rates went up pretty dramatically because of the so-called Ferguson effect.

The Ferguson effect is the fact that the federal government and the media have focused so harshly on police, and police said, fine, if you're going to do this, if I'm going to put my life in my hands every time I go out on the streets, I'm just not going out on the streets anymore.

Crime rates rose.

Trump has done the reverse.

He's basically said to the cops, listen, we're on your side.

We're with you.

That's a very important thing.

A lot of his appointments, a lot of his cabinet members have been good.

Some of his cabinet members have not been so good.

He's had a lot of cabinet hubbub.

And I want to talk, those are all the good things about Trump.

And that is a substantial list.

This is a consequential president.

Okay.

He has done consequential things this year.

All of the things I just mentioned are important

and good.

And frankly, I had no right to expect them.

I don't think conservatives had necessarily a right to expect them, considering that President Trump campaigned as a guy wedded to no ideology, a guy who is not wedded to traditional conservatism, a guy who went around saying openly the Republican Party is not.

the Republican Party.

It is not the Conservative Party.

It's the Republican Party.

Going around with Steve Bannon saying he was going to be a nationalist nationalist populist president.

I took him at his word.

It turns out he has governed much more like Ronalds Reagan and George W.

Bush in many ways than he has like Pat Buchanan, for example.

That's a great thing.

So all of these are major accomplishments for the president of the United States.

And as we continue, I want to talk about the other side of the coin.

What exactly has President Trump done wrong?

Because there's been a lot of media criticism.

I think some of it...

has been unjustified.

I think some of it has been justified.

And if we're going to paint a full picture of how this year went for President Trump before I give my final grade for him for the year, then we have to do bad Trump.

I just gave you all the good Trump.

Now it's time for Bad Trump when we return.

I'm Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Back.

Glenn back.

Glenn back.

Okay, so we just went through.

A lot of the great things that President Trump has done this year.

Now I want to talk about the other side because let's face it, his approval rating right now is 24% 24% underwater.

A lot of Americans don't like him.

Now, a lot of Americans weren't going to like him from the last election cycle when, you know, let's put it this way.

You weren't getting any of the good, or at least a lot of the good.

You were getting a lot of the bad.

You were getting all of Trump's personality and none of the policy.

Now that he's president, you get his personality and the policy, and the policy has been a lot better than I expected it to be, to be completely fair to the guy.

But you got his personality too.

And here's the thing.

The president of the United States basically has two roles, to do stuff and to push stuff.

These are not the same.

Doing stuff means all the things we talked about, appointing judges, cutting regulations, passing tax bills and signing them.

Pushing stuff means can you push the conservative idea forward?

Can you push the founding notions forward?

And this is where I think Trump has really failed.

I was talking to a member of the administration relatively recently, and they asked me, you know, how I thought they were doing.

And I said, do you want my real answer or my fake answer?

He said, give me your real answer.

I said, on policy, I think you guys are doing great.

On messaging, I think you guys are awful.

And the reason for that is because the president has problems sticking to a topic.

The president has an unfortunate tendency to be reactionary.

Anybody who likes him is his friend.

Anybody who dislikes him is his enemy.

And you see that on display when we get to Bad Trump now.

So again, I'm trying to be as fair-minded about this as possible.

I don't think everything Trump does is genius.

I don't think everything he does is terrible.

So let's start with, let's do bad Trump now.

I gave you all his accomplishments.

Now it's time for Bad Trump.

Here are the things he's done wrong.

Number one, Charlottesville response.

There is no way the the president of the United States should have responded to the killing of an innocent woman by white supremacists in Charlottesville, by a white supremacist after a torchlit rally by actual people running around chanting racist slogans.

There's no way that he should have said there were good people at that Friday night rally.

It's just asinine.

There's no way he should have equated the protesters against white supremacy to the actual white supremacists.

If he wants to rip Antifa, By all means, do it.

Listen, Antifa ain't a friend of mine, right?

I'm the guy who got protested at Berkeley to the extent that they needed 600 police officers.

So I have pretty good credibility when it comes to ripping on Antifa.

But that was not really the time or place to do it.

There are plenty of times to rip Antifa.

The president botched that one.

It botched it in a really bad way, and it helped polarize the country.

It also allowed Democrats to shift all discussion toward race, which was not a good move politically.

Forget the moral.

I think that it was bad that Trump, the way that Trump pulled out from the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, not because I was a huge fan of TPP, but because the way to do it would have been to renegotiate TPP.

Trump didn't really know what TPP was.

He thought that China was a member to TPP, that it was a sort of trade bloc that included China.

The entire TPP structure was created in order to cut China out.

China has maximized its trade influence in the region because we pulled out from TPP.

They've cut a bunch of deals with surrounding countries.

That's not good for U.S.

foreign interests.

Failure on Obamacare repeal.

So we tried it twice this year.

We failed both times.

We got the individual mandate repealed, but none of the regulations have been repealed and no substantial changes to Medicaid, which continues to be a need-based program funded by the federal government.

He picked Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon never should have been anywhere near the levers of power.

I'm going to talk about Bannon a little bit more in a little while.

There's a big article at Vanity Fair about Bannon.

I know Steve pretty well.

I was, of course, an editor-at-large over at Breitbart for four years.

For two of those, I was in the institutional editorial structure.

I was on a phone call with Steve, an editorial phone call, twice a day for an hour a day for two years.

So I know Steve pretty well.

Steve Bannon as part of the administration was a disaster area from the beginning.

Steve always had Steve's interest at heart.

His willingness to collude, not with the Russians, but with the alt-right, was morally despicable during the election.

And his self-aggrandizing sense of personal power was damaging to the administration

in the utmost.

I mean, his advice to Trump was just not good.

Picking Mike Flynn, terrible idea.

There are a lot of people like me warning, do not pick Mike Flynn.

The guy has a checkered past.

Picking Flynn is going to get you in trouble.

Bad move.

He never should have fired James Comey.

If he was going to fire James Comey, he should have fired him right up front.

He should have said, listen, new administration, new FBI director.

Would have been very simple.

Firing him when he did, then going on national television and saying that he did it and it relieved pressure over the Russia scandal, and then telling the Russians that, just stupid.

Most of the problems that Trump has made are problems he's made for himself.

They're not problems made by circumstance.

They're not problems made by the media.

The media can only follow on problems Trump makes for himself.

Now, the media will make up things.

The media will.

They'll create false narratives, like that the tax bill hurts poor people.

They will make things up.

But a lot of the things that the media criticized Trump on was them taking a kernel that Trump had given them and then spinning it into an entire yarn.

The overall Russian investigation botchery is really Trump's fault.

He fired Comey.

He did so by using Rod Rosenstein.

Sessions had already accused himself, and you end up with a special investigator.

Just stupid.

No border ball, right?

Lack of a border wall.

Ann Coulter has been fighting mad over this one.

She has a right to be.

This was supposedly his number one promise.

The push for a new deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in Congress.

Now, that was something that Trump said he was not going to do, and then he's basically done it.

The biggest thing is the constant barrage of nonsense,

right?

From shouting fake news at Real News, saying that all of the media are fake news, jabbering about crowdsides nonsensically at the beginning of his administration, asking why there was a civil war, telling this about General Pershing, a weeks-long crusade against the NFL.

Been fine.

You want to say that it's dumb to kneel for the anthem?

Go for it.

Weeks-long crusade against the NFL, polarizing some of the only common area we still have when there were like two guys kneeling at the time, going after LeVar Ball.

I mean, it seemed like every week there was some sort of Twitter outrage.

If someone could get to the president's phone and just unplug it, or install a dummy version of Twitter where people are giving him feedback in real time, but they're fake people.

It's all members of the administration telling him he's doing great, but the tweets never go out to the public,

his public approval rating would be up 10 points.

The endorsement of Roy Moore, the late endorsement of Roy Moore, Trump should have stayed out of this race.

He had no business in this race.

It damaged his credibility.

It made him look like he didn't care about the allegations against Roy Moore.

It was one thing to say, vote against Doug Jones.

I get it.

It was a totally another thing to campaign for Roy Moore.

Attacking his own staffers, people like Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I think Attorney General Sessions has actually done a pretty good job.

I thought he was a pretty good senator.

I think he's a pretty good Attorney general.

Attacking Rod Rosenstein, attacking the Health and Human Services Secretary, attacking Rex Tillerson, attacking members of your own administration publicly is not a smart move.

And the biggest problem, I think, in terms of actual policy is failing to staff up the federal government.

Trump has done a good job nominating appellate judges, but he has not done well in filling career posts at various agencies.

So, what do you make of it?

What's the overall?

So, here is my overall assessment.

My overall assessment is that Trump has made some serious strides.

He's made a lot of accomplishments, particularly, he's accomplished a lot, particularly in the last weeks.

The last three weeks, as I say, have been stellar for conservatives.

But the huge number of setbacks are helping cripple his own program.

It's making it difficult for him to pass things.

He loses leverage with his own senators when he attacks them.

That has not been helpful.

That's why his approval rating is so low.

So final yearly grade for the president, I give him a C plus.

That's an optimistic view because a month ago, it would have been a C minus.

I give him a C C-plus for the tax reform and the move to Jerusalem.

He's really making strides in the right direction.

If he continues that up, he could be a very consequential and, yes, a good president.

But he's going to need to shift his rhetoric to meet his action.

If he can do that, things will change.

I'm going to get your thoughts coming up on your grades for President Trump and Shapiro and for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Alrighty, so I gave you my grade for President Trump year one.

The reality show has been pretty spectacular.

And the last month, the policy has been great to match.

But my overall grade for the president is C plus.

That's an optimistic looking C plus because a lot of the good stuff was coming right at the end.

If you had told me a month ago, grade President Trump, I give him him a C-min.

If you told me to grade him the end of this month, I give him a C-plus.

He gets the tax reform package passed.

He's making a strong stand against the U.N., the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the opening of public lands.

He's gotten a lot done in the last three weeks.

It's a big Christmas rush.

So good for President Trump there.

Now let's get some of your grades.

Susan in Pennsylvania, you're on the Glenn Beck program with Ben Shapiro.

Hi, Ben.

Thank you very much.

I couldn't agree with you more.

And I think if I was to divide it up between foreign and domestic, I give Trump actually an A on the foreign stage, the return of the concept of peace through strength, that we're America, we're for freedom, and that's better.

I'm sorry.

Deal with it.

All of that.

Nikki Haley has been tremendous.

So on that front, I give him an A.

On the domestic front, I give him a C minus.

And that came up from a D minus because of the tax bill.

But just because of so much of what he's done is so easily reversible, as you were mentioning yesterday.

And because I think he hopefully maybe now is realizing, because he kept quiet during the tax bill debate

that when he speaks stupidly, he becomes political poison.

And so it's more difficult for legislators to align with him because they're thinking of how they have to justify themselves when they go back home.

I think that's exactly right, Susan.

Yeah, I totally agree with you.

And I think that this is the thing that a lot of Trump supporters should realize.

It's not when people criticize him for his rhetoric, It's not because we want him to fail.

It's because we'd like him to succeed.

Like, do better, Mr.

President.

Right?

It's coming coming from that place for me because i always want the president to succeed especially when he's pushing policies that i like so i'm with you and i obviously agree with your assessment thanks for the call i see john in louisiana go for it john

hey ben thank you uh i actually agree with you just about a hundred percent on your good trump bad trump assessment however apparently i rate some of the more substantial things he's done more heavily so i give him an overall score of an a not an a minus but an a uh Tax reform is absolutely gigantic.

It jumps off the page.

Reduced business regulations.

Look at the stock market.

The stock market is a forward-looking entity, not backwards-looking.

He gets full credit for this.

The reason I don't bump it up to an A-plus or even a solid, a higher A is his style is absolutely horrible.

I think he's his own worst enemy.

I get the Twitter thing.

He gets to go straight to the people.

He can bypass

the media.

In theory, that's fantastic.

If he could trottle back the rawness, the stupidity of his Twitters, there's got to be somebody in the administration that agrees with this and can filter out the raw stupidity.

Yeah, John, the real question is going to be whether Trump allows that to happen.

I think that's really the question.

Everybody knows in the administration, everybody knows that this is a problem.

I think Trump may be getting...

to realize that.

If he realizes that, then he's actually going to be a political force.

And, you know, the thing is that you and I agree on, I think, pretty pretty much everything that you just said.

I think that you're just suffering from a little bit of grade inflation here, but like I'm actually using the lower end of the grading spectrum for some of this stuff.

But I don't disagree with anything that you just said.

My hope is that he will bring, like, I'm giving him room for upward trajectory, upward growth.

It seems like you're giving him room to move from a 92 to a 97.

I'm giving him room to move from basically like a 78 to a 97, right?

I think there's a lot of room for growth for the president.

A lot of this is going to be reliant on the president.

And John, thanks for the call.

A lot of this is going going to be reliant on the president really

continuing to pursue conservative policy agenda items.

So some of the things he's talking about doing for 2018 include welfare reform.

This would be great.

We need to add more work requirements to welfare.

We do.

Some of the things that he's talking about doing include new military

builds up.

So I think that that would be a worthwhile thing.

But some of the stuff that he's talking about, these infrastructure plans, That ain't great.

We may have gotten the most conservative period out of the Trump administration already, right?

We may have moved beyond conservative Trump, and now he's going to go bipartisan, try to work with Democrats.

The only saving grace here, and this is the thing about the Democrats being so out of their minds with regard to Trump himself, is that what could keep Trump in the conservative box is the fact that Democrats will not work with him.

That's what could keep him in the conservative box.

It's not that Trump wants to stay there.

Trump may want to do an infrastructure plan with Chuck Schumer, but it's quite possible.

or DACA with Chuck Schumer, it's quite possible the Democrats will refuse to work with him, and Trump will end up being conservative by default.

That's something I can live with.

I just hope that he can shift the public perception of him so that the programs that he sides with, which are now largely programs I agree with, are more and more popular.

Larry in Florida, how do you assess the president, sir?

Thanks for having me on, Ben.

You know, my initial reaction is emotional, and so I went straight A because I have lived through and I would say tolerated eight years of the Obama administration, which on a daily basis made me cringe.

And this is so different from that that my initial reaction is to go with the A.

But then, you know, in being honest with myself and everybody else, I'm going back to B plus from A for style.

I'm taking points off for style for exactly what you're talking about.

And I have to say that overall, in life in general, I am so much more encouraged.

since the presidential election and since, believe it or not, since I started following you and and many of the things that you're doing you're 20 years my junior and i am so encouraged that there's somebody younger than me that actually thinks the right way so i appreciate it it's very kind of you and i think i think that you know this is an opportunity and that's why what you say you know bringing trump back down to a b plus i think that's actually important because if you want to have an upper trajectory with young people particularly one of the things to notice about the polls is that older americans are basically cool with trump It's younger Americans who are

having a problem with him because his style really clashes with sort of what what they've been taught to believe is decent and right.

And Trump does need to play within a few more boxes.

I understand that everyone thinks he won because he was playing out of the box.

There is some truth to that.

But he also won because Hillary Clinton was the most disliked candidate in American history.

I don't know the Democrats are going to repeat that feat by nominating someone remote.

Is there another human being as unlikable as Hillary Clinton?

I'm not sure.

They're going to have to dig to come up with one.

They may have to actually unearth a grave and then revivify a corpse to come up with somebody more unlikable than Hillary Clinton.

Larry, thanks so much for the call and thanks for listening.

Okay, so one of the things that I think that we are learning is that the president, with good guidance, can do a lot of damage.

And one of the people who he got rid of, and you've seen some good changes thanks to it, one of the people that he got rid of was Steve Bannon.

There's a big article at Vanity Fair today about Steve Bannon, as I say, my old boss over at Breitbart.

And in it, Steve basically rips the president up and down.

He suggests that the president is like an 11-year-old.

He suggests the president's not going to run for re-election.

And Steve talks about how he wants to run for president.

And Steve is saying this because Steve is entirely driven by his own perception of self-importance.

He thinks he's the most important person who has ever walked the earth.

Steve does not actually have a thoroughgoing ideology.

He doesn't have a serious philosophy.

You know, the fact is that Steve is really more about the perception of his own power broadly than he is about.

any sort of program.

And one of the things I've been encouraged by is the return of a programmatic element to the Trump administration in the absence of Bannon.

And Bannon was doing this whole, we're going to do something new, nationalist populism.

What's wrong with founding principle?

What was wrong with Ronald Reagan's small government conservatism?

Was there something deeply off-putting about it?

I missed that part.

Why did we need these BS words that were being trotted out?

Things like populism.

Populism is not a policy agenda.

Populism is you just shouting the word elite over and over until you get a bunch of blue-collar folks to believe you're on their side.

That's not an actual group of policy preferences.

Bernie Sanders is a populist.

Does that mean he's right?

No, actually.

And Steve Bannon's notions of nationalism, right, as opposed to patriotism.

Patriotism is the idea that you believe in America because the American creed is better than any other creed ever come up with, and the American people have been shaped by that creed.

Nationalism is just the idea that you live in the country, therefore you're better.

That's nonsense.

It's been nonsense everywhere it's been tried.

Patriotism is the belief America is better because America is better, not because we are here.

And there is a big difference there.

The reason that I bring up Bannon now is because I think that if Republicans want to win the future, if conservatives want to win the future, then they are going to need to set some moral standards.

And this has been the drawback for Trump: he's pushed a lot of policy I love, but he hasn't set moral standards yet.

Maybe it's hard for him to do so.

He's going to need to do so.

Because what you see is that when the

intestines of the party, the folks like Bannon, run the the party, what you end up with is embracing a bunch of people who end up crippling you in elections just for the temporary high of supporting them.

And I speak right now of Roy Moore.

Bannon actually suggests in this piece that George H.W.

Bush, who's been accused of grabbing a couple of women on the behind, that George W.

Bush is a pervert.

H.W.

Bush is a pervert.

I forget the fact he's a war hero.

Forget the fact that he served heroically in World War II and spent his life in public service.

He says he's a pervert, but Roy Moore is hunky-dory.

And that was Steve Bannon's perspective.

And even the people that Steve Bannon runs over at Breitbart don't believe this.

There's an article today over at CNN where Alex Marlow, a guy with whom I used to work, a guy with whom I'm friends.

Now, Alex says that even at Breitbart, they believed that Roy Moore was guilty, but they went out of their way to try to exonerate him because they were trying to make excuses for accusations against President Trump.

Hey, that is not moral behavior.

That is not moral behavior.

Conservatives only win when they are perceived as both efficient and moral.

If you are perceived as immoral, you will not win hearts and minds.

You will not win the future.

You will not win anything.

So yes, I'll take all the policy wins.

But now we need to reestablish the notion that America is a moral place with moral leadership and that the conservative movement is built around values and virtue and morality.

This is why I think that what Trump does on foreign policy resonates so much more than what he's doing on domestic policy.

Because on foreign policy, there's no question that Trump is acting in moral fashion.

There's no question that President Trump is pursuing a virtuous

moral policy abroad.

What we need is for that to be extended here at home.

We need to feel like Trump is fighting for the right things.

I mean, morally right, not just the things that we like.

If he does that, then maybe we can shift perceptions.

If not, Republicans can argue efficiency until the cows come home.

But if people believe the Democrats are the people with the better hearts and the more moral policy, then Democrats will win no matter how successful the economy is.

And remember, the economy is doing great right now, and Trump is still at 37%.

So something needs to change.

Well, as we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, another court has stepped in doing something it ought not do, exceeding its boundaries, exceeding its abilities under the Constitution.

We'll talk about it.

Ben Shapiro win for Glen Beck.

Glenn back.

Glenn back.

Ben Shapiro here for Glenn Beck.

Just an honor to join you right before the end of the year, and especially on Glenn's show.

Glenn is a personal hero of mine and a friend.

So a three-judge panel on a federal appeals court ruled Thursday against the Trump administration's efforts to delay accepting transgender recruits into the military.

So you recall that President Trump had tweeted out that the military would no longer accept transgender recruits.

And then he had said that he had issued a policy along those lines of the Defense Department.

It was unclear whether they were implementing or not.

And now judges say that the Trump administration cannot do that.

The judiciary needs to be remade.

It needs to be remolded.

One of Trump's best accomplishments is his appointment of 12 appellate court judges.

That's more than any other president in his first year ever.

That's great.

It needs to be accelerated.

The appeals courts are just egregious.

And these panel decisions that stay obvious authority that the president of the United States has.

Just absurd.

Okay, the president of the United States is the commander-in-chief.

He's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

He has the capacity to make calls like this.

There is decent logic behind it.

I would prefer you let General Mattis lay out the rationale for why transgender troops in the military breaks down social cohesion.

But does Trump have the power to do it?

Of course he does.

Just another institutional obstacle the president has had to overcome.

Okay, so we're nearing the end of the program.

It's right before Christmas.

And I think that we should dedicate ourselves this year to moving beyond politics.

You know, I talk about politics full-time.

I spend my days talking about politics and thinking about politics.

But one of the things I've been really thinking about over the last year, last couple of years, is that we are really at each other's throats over politics all the time.

And it's easy to get caught up in the gamesmanship if we got something we wanted.

We didn't get something we wanted.

In order for us to share a country, we're really going to need to rebuild our social fabric.

And that's what the holidays are for.

It's what Christmas is for.

It's what this time of year is for.

What's what we should be doing every day.

It's why it's important that we go to church together, that we go bowling together.

It's why it's important that we spend time together as family and not think about politics, that we turn off our phone, that we turn off our TV, that we spend some time thinking about how to shape our own communities, our local communities, in better ways.

Because without that social fabric, the founders believed we would crumble.

They believed that the necessity for freedom,

that that requirement for freedom could only exist among a moral and religious people, is what John Adams said.

And those moral and religious people could only fill the gap left by a non-overarching government if they're willing to act communally in ways to help each other.

That's what building a social fabric is all about.

It's something that we need to restore to the United States.

The idea that our neighbor is our neighbor and that our neighbor may need our help.

The idea that our neighbor is our neighbor, and even if we disagree, we need to cultivate a similar vision for happiness in the country, a vision built on virtue and purpose.

That can't happen if we see ourselves as atomized individuals in a cold and meaningless universe.

And when this time of year we think about God,

when we think about the purpose of our lives, when we think about what it is that we'll be doing on our deathbeds, very little of it will have to do with how we voted.

And a lot of it will have to do with how we treated our neighbors, the time that we spent with people in our community, the time we spent with family.

So let's all treasure the next week and let's come back refreshed and rejoin.

the fight in January with the notion that our neighbors are still our neighbors, our brothers are still our brothers, our sisters are still our sisters, and that together we're going to move forward in a cruel and dark world where we are maybe the only remaining light.

I'm Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.