Piers Morgan Uncensored - Ben Shapiro: On Candace Owens Exit, Israel, Trump & Baltimore Bridge

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

The UN Security Council is demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza after the US failed to veto its resolution, leaving Israel increasingly isolated on the world stage. So can - and should - Israel press on alone? To discuss this, and much more, Piers' joined by the Daily Wire's editor emeritus - and host of The Divided States of Biden on Daily Wire Plus - Ben Shapiro. Who also discusses Candance Owen's departure from the company . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're going to co-host a fundraiser for Donald Trump. Yesterday, Trump said this. You have to finish up your war. You have to finish it up. You've got to get it done. Did he mean Israel should be able to continue to try and eliminate all of a mass? Or did he mean they should bring things to an end now? And they should now move to try and find peace.

The world does not seem to have the attention span to maintain any level of support for anyone, whether you're talking about Ukraine or whether you're talking about Israel, for a prolonged period of time and a war against a terrible enemy. And so when President Trump says something like, you need to finish this up, I think that he's speaking a baseline truth there. A majority of people in Israel want to get rid of Netanyahu.

But the polls show is that Israelis would love to have another election, but they've had five elections in four years. It's always sort of weird when people talk about Israel needs a new election. They have more new elections than Taylor Swift has outfit changes during one of her concerts. I am dressed up as a Candace Owens Jew. What is your reaction to that clip? I mean, the phrase in Hebrew is that's what we would call a Khulul Hashem.

It's a desecration of God's name. Do you think he should be given airtime anymore? That sort of behavior is disgusting in any context. Frankly, I don't know an Orthodox Jew who feels differently about that, not one. Candice Owens, who's now left Daily Wire. Was she fired, or did she leave her for her own volition? As far as the free speech situation, what I will say is that no company has the obligation to literally pay anyone.

The UN Security Council is demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza after the US failed to veto his resolution, leaving Israel increasingly isolated on the world stage. President Biden's relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu has collapsed over the rising Palestinian death toll. Now, Donald Trump has warned it's time for Israel to finish up the war as it hemorrhages international support. The can and should Israel press on alone to discuss this and much more.

I'm joined by the Daily Wire's Editor Emeritus and host of the divided states of Biden on Daily Wire Plus. Ben Shapiro, Ben, great to see it. Hey, good to see it, Pierce. How are you? You know, hanging in. How are you? I'll wonder how many people ask you that question. Yeah, I don't get that too much, so I was kind of surprised by the question, honestly.

I'm going to come to some stuff that's involved you recently. Let's start with Israel. You're going to co-host a fundraiser for Donald Trump. Yesterday, Trump said this. That being said, you have to finish up your war. Finish it up. You've got to get it done. and I'm sure you'll do that. And we've got to get to peace.

You can't have this going on. And I will say, Israel has to be very careful because you're losing a lot of the world. You're losing a lot of support. But you have to finish up. You have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace. What did you make of what he said there?

There's been a bit of disagreement about what he intended to mean. Did he mean Israel should be able to continue to try and eliminate all of Hamas, whatever it takes to finish that job? Or did he mean they should bring things to an end now? They've done enough, and they should now move to try and find peace. So I actually did co-host a fundraiser with President Trump last week,

and we did briefly speak about this topic. My impression is that President Trump is saying what is certainly true here, which is that the clock has been ticking on Israel literally since October 7th, in terms of finishing up its operation. The world does not seem to have the attention span to maintain any level of support for anyone, whether you're talking about Ukraine or whether you're talking about Israel, for a prolonged period of time

and a war against a terrible enemy. And so when President Trump says something like, you need to finish this up, I think that he's speaking a baseline truth there, which is that Israel does need to hurry and finish this up. And frankly, they should have been moving faster in the first place. I think it's more of a PR point than it is an idea that Israel should stop, for example,

by not going into Rafah. I don't think that's what President Trump is saying there. Do you feel comfortable, but we talked about this war a lot? Do you feel comfortable about a full assault on Rafa? if one and a half million people remain in that vicinity, including majority women and children, because it would obviously be, in that instance, devastating in terms of civilian casualties,

and would pour even more pressure on Israel and lose them even more support. I mean, do you think this is the right strategy? Well, I think that Israel is pretty united in its belief that it is, and Israel, I think, is best positioned to adjudicate its own interests when it comes to things like you're talking, about whether it's international support or the future of the Gaza Strip, my understanding is from all of the public discussions that have been happening that there's significant discussion about

how to try to move civilians out of the way. One of the big problems has been that Egypt won't open the gate even temporarily to allow enough civilians outside of Rafa so that Israel can perform operations inside of Rafa. Apparently there are four Hamas battalions that are currently located inside of Rafa. I'm sure that if the United States or the international community could offer Israel some sort of Harry Potter spell to disappear all of the Hamas terrorists inside Rafa. I'm sure Israel would take it. The last thing Israel wants to do is maximize civilian casualties. What's been perfectly obvious is that Hamas has precisely the opposite view.

They would love to maximize civilian casualties because the increasing civilian death toll, as you pointed out, has been the single factor that's been leading to increase pressure on Israel to leave Hamas alone. What do you make of Biden really turning on Netanyahu? I mean, this decision not to veto this resolution is the latest escalation, really, in the American administration under Biden. reining back its support of Israel.

How significant is that? And what do you think about Biden doing this? I mean, obviously, I think that he's morally wrong to abstain from a resolution that seems to disconnect the hostage situation from the ceasefire. All of the versions the United States have been pushing prior suggested that in order for a ceasefire to be called for or attained, there had to be a release of the hostages.

This particular version of the UN resolution sort of separates off the two issues, doesn't mention Hamas, doesn't mention October 7th. That's the point of contention with regard to the UN security. Council resolution the United States abstained from. As far as the sort of increased pressure that Biden or Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader here, have been putting on the Netanyahu administration. Frankly, I think it's political dishonesty. I think that there are a lot of members

of the Democratic Party who are very critical of Israel's government full-scale full-scale, because they realize that a lot of the sort of liberal Jewish base in the United States that votes Democrat supports Israel, but also doesn't like Netanyahu very much. But they're ignoring the central reality in Israel, which is that there is full-scale public support for going into Rafa from right, left, and center. the current government of the state of Israel is a war cabinet, including the chief rival to Benjamin Netanyahu Benigans, who just visited the United States,

and in fact, was treated to much of the same language by the Biden administration. So to suggest that it's sort of Netanyahu's own political domestic manipulations leading to his desire to go into Rafa, Netanyahu is in fact correct when he suggests that there is broad public support for going into Rafa. And in fact, if the current war cabinet does not go into Rafa, there's a very solid chance that the government of Israel falls in their new elections.

I mean, that is true about the support. but it's also true that a majority of people in Israel want to get rid of Netanyahu. So this is a support for... But not during the actual conflict, right? What the polls show is that Israelis would love to have another election, but not right at the moment, meaning that they've had five elections in four years.

It's always sort of weird when people talk about Israel needs a new election. They have more new elections than Taylor Swift has outfit changes during one of her concerts. It's not as though there's a lack of elections. I do find it sort of strange that there's always a call for new elections in Israel, which, again, has many, many elections. I have yet to hear for a call for elections and say the West Bank or Gaza Strip

where there has not been an election since 2005. And there's a reason for that. And the reason for that is because everybody understands if there were an election in the Gaza Strip or West Bank, Kamaas would actually win. What I don't understand about Israel's strategy is how they perceive actual victory.

Yes, you can take out the 30 to 35,000 Hamas terrorists. Yeah, maybe they can do that. And maybe in the process of that, they kill tens of thousands more civilians and have to deal with the contention that that will cause worldwide. And maybe Israelis don't care about that as long as they get rid of Hamas.

So let's get to an Engay where Hamas has gone. Why does leveling Gaza and killing so many civilians, why would that give anyone in Israel any kind of comfort that that would kill off the ideology that fueled Hamas? That it wouldn't actually just lead to an increase. in that ideology, more hatred towards Israelis, more hatred towards Jewish people. I've never quite understood what the endgame looks like here for Israel that makes Israel more secure.

Well, I mean, the end game, presumably, is security, not a sort of dynamic ideological scoring among a population that right now overwhelmingly supports the October 7th attacks, and prior to October 7th, overwhelmingly supported terror attacks against the state of Israel, and overwhelmingly supported the destruction of the state of Israel. The sort of idea that more conciliation from Israel was bringing about peaceful conditions with the Palestinian authority or with Hamas has been obviously proved false by the fact that Israel literally withdrew all IDF forces from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Hamas to control. They've sent the last 20 years turning it into a giant terror base. From the Israeli perspective, my assumption is that what they are figuring is to grade Hamas's military capacity such that they cannot be an offensive threat to the state of Israel and then try to enact some sort of military control of the area sufficient to prevent.

any future threat from arising from that area. I'm sure that Israel would love to hand the area over to Egypt. Egypt says no. Egypt doesn't want any part of it. Israel would love to hand it over to Jordan. Jordan says no. Jordan doesn't want any part of it. Israel has tried to hand it over to the Saudis, to the UAE, to the United States.

To literally anyone, no one wants to run that area specifically because the population is already quite radicalized and was radicalized before October 7th. And so what you're probably going to end up with, and I said this, I think, the first time I appeared on the show, which was shortly off for October 7th in this context, what you're probably going to end up with is some form of joint military rule in the Gaza Strip in which Israel has the intelligence capacity to go in and conduct raids in terror hotbeds the same way that they do right now, for example, in the West Bank, today and Samaria, places like Janine, places like Nablus. The IDF is constantly attempting to go in and root out terror cells in these particular

areas. One of the big flaws that led to October 7th was the fact that Israel had no forces on the ground and no actual intelligence capability inside the Gaza Strip. One of the consequences of this war has been a lot of very high passions on both sides, a lot of angry disagreements. You and your company have been at the center of a very high profile one at the moment with Candice Owens. He's now left Daily Wire. Was she fired, or did she leave her for her own volition? I'm not going to speak to this topic, Pierce. At all?

At all. You can't give me any insight into why she departed? No hints, no nothing. I'm not going to speak to this. Can I ask why? I mean, you can ask. No, no, I'm not, you can ask why you don't want to say anything. Again, you can ask.

I mean, I'm only curious because I know what a staunched offender of free speech you are. And it would surprise me if it had been someone's opinion. that would make you want to part company with them. However, contentioned. Suffice to say, the only thing I will say is what I've said all along with regard to Candace or with regard to any of our other hosts. I am not in hiring and firing position with the Daily Wire. I'm a co-founder of the Daily Wire.

I'm a co-owner of the Daily Wire. I'm not actually in management. Jeremy Boring and Caleb Robinson are in management positions with regard to Candice or anyone else. And as far as the free speech situation, what I will say is that no company has the obligation to literally pay anyone. The Daily Wire is a publisher. It is not a platform.

I've never called for Candace or anyone else, for that matter, to be banned from YouTube, to be banned from X, to be banned from any platform. That's a different story, obviously, when it comes to any publisher. Any publisher gets to make decisions about what it wishes to purvey and not. I mean, I'm not going to label this,

but one more point I would make is it's been reported extensively that the reason for her departure was because her comments have been perceived by people at the Daily Wire as anti-Semitic. Again, I'm not going to comment on this, Mr. Spears.

Okay. Rabbi Shmooley, would you comment on him because Jeremy has actually commented on Rabbi Shmooley? I've avoided commenting publicly on Rabbi Shmooley because as far as I can tell, the man is an attention whore of the highest order. Is that the general position of the company on Mr. Shmooley? I mean, that's my personal position, for sure. I mean, I think that, you know, Rabbi Shmoli happens to be a person

with whom I agree. on some matters related to state Middle East policy. And I also believe that his devotion to camera and notoriety have made him do some untethered things in recent days. I mean, there's a clip I'm just going to play it, and you can comment or otherwise, but it was extraordinary to me. We've had him on this show a few times,

but I found this really quite extraordinary. Let's take a look. Firm is a day of celebration. We feel bad for Candace Owens that she lost her job. So I figure, with her image of what Jews is supposed to look like, Why not valet, at least validator. I am dressed up as a Candace Owens Jew. Now, this is not a Christian child, this is Jewish child.

But if it would be, I got my Christian blood. Mmm, spicy, delicious. I got my Jewish nose. I have filth because Jews are all filth. And more than anything else, what does 80 have? Money! I mean, what is your reaction to that clip? I mean, the phrase in Hebrew is that's what we would call a Khul Hashem.

It's a desecration of God's name. and that sort of behavior is disgusting in any context. And frankly, I don't know an Orthodox Jew who feels differently about that, not one. Do you think he should be given airtime anymore, Rabbi Shulini? I mean, I'm not going to make decisions about who should air him and who should not. What I will say is that that sort of behavior is untethered from reality and makes mockery much of the mission for people like me, which includes fighting anti-Semitism. Yeah, but I get a lot of people, actually, after his most recent appearance here,

just saying, this guy does not speak for most Jewish people like me. And they write in their droves, and they say, please stop having someone on there. I mean, what he's doing there certainly doesn't speak for literally any Jew that I've heard of or know. I mean, I can't speak to his positions on Israel again. You know, my positions on Israel speak for my positions on Israel. But that's a different story from dressing up in a Dish Sturmurmer costume to mock anti-Semitism. I think that that's quite counterproductive. and especially given the online discourse pretty negative

and pretty much every way I can think of. Yeah. Russia and what happened there was a terror attack by ISIS K. People have made some parallels. They said, look, there's a massive terror attack on the heart of Russia in Moscow. 130 people brutally murdered. Putin and the Kremlin know where these terrorists came from

in other specific area. Would it be logical, given the way that Israel responded to the Hamas attack on October the 7th for Putin to go and do the same thing that Israel is done in Gaza to the area where these terrorists came from. I mean, so first of all, Putin has done that historically many times over, whether you're talking about Chechnya or whether you're talking about other areas. And nobody seemed to bat an eyelash when it was Vladimir Putin doing that. So I'll first point that out.

Second of all, I don't see the international pressure to give ISIS K or its allies a state in the aftermath of a mass terror attack. I don't see a lot of calls for Putin to act with the war. tremendous restraint in the aftermath of that terror attack. And frankly, I think it's very unlikely that Putin is going to do anything like rooting out ISIS-K in the area in Tajikistan or wherever else these people are coming from. He seems more focused on trying to misdirect this terror attack into an attack on Ukraine, which is, I think, pretty disgusting.

Yeah, I mean, it is disgusting. It's completely untrue, obviously. But it's something that in the world of disinformation that we exist in now is gaining currency. I see it online that a lot of people, who have a bent towards Russia and Putin, they're quite happy to believe that Ukraine is behind this. I mean, the amount of misinformation on various social media outlets is extraordinary right now.

The velocity is extraordinary right now. And pretty much any conspiracy theory is capable of gaining just unbelievable legs very, very quickly. What do we do about it, Ben? I mean, the only thing you can do is try to speak facts into what appears to be a vacuum. The thing I've been encouraging people to do more and more often is go outside and touch some grass, man.

I mean, seriously, the online world is a terrible place, and then you turn it off and you go outside and you talk to normal people for five minutes, and they are much happier and actually exist in a world of reality. It's this own self-contained nether world where some of the most conspiratorial people hang out and create echo chambers for one another, and whoever can say the loudest conspiracy theory gets the most engagement. The best way to do this, I recommend to everybody. God was right. Take the seventh day off. Turn off your electronics. Get out of the house. Go to church. Do something worthwhile with your life for five minutes. You know, I got into a bit of a spat with Elon Musk because I had an interview lined up with him and he cancelled up the last minute

because I criticised him a month earlier and he found the clip on this show, actually. I criticised him for allowing Alex Jones back on the platform having originally said he wouldn't let him back on because he wouldn't let people stand on the graves of dead children and make money from it in the way that he'd been doing. Was he right to let Alex Jones back on? If you look at Alex Jones's feed on X in the last few weeks,

he's spewing endless conspiracy theories to quite a big audience. Does that not unnecessarily, unfairly, wrongly fuel the kind of toxic nature of discourse that you were talking about? Yes, again, I'll go back to the distinction that I was making earlier between platform and publisher. I wouldn't hire Alex Jones or pay him to purvey his views here at Daily Wire, even if I had the power to do so. But a platform is a different thing. I think what Elon is trying to do with X for good or ill, and I think it's come with some of both, is to broaden the scope of free speech, try to turn it into a town square, that's going to come along with an awful lot of people who are using that town square to throw feces against the wall.

What does you make of the Don Lemon Musk interview and the fallout? I mean, frankly, I thought that Don didn't do a particularly good job with that with that interview. I'll be honest with you. But with all of that said, as far as the fallout of it, again, between Elon and Don making their business decisions, that is up to them. One thing I noticed, Don Lemon can still post his show on He just doesn't have to be paid by Elon for it. What I was surprising by was that Don Lemon did that interview

exactly how I expected Don Lemon to do that interview. I was surprised that Elon Musk was surprised that Don Lemon was Don Lemon. You know, the media is a pretty adversarial place. And I think that, you know, again, I'm not going to speak to Elon's level of surprise. I will say that Don Lemon being Don Lemon is very Dun Lemon of him. I mean, nothing surprising there.

We woke up this morning to this dreadful story in Baltimore with this bridge collapsing. a lot of really bizarre, unanswered questions. You know, how did the power on this cargo ship suddenly go off, which then made it veer off course? Why was there no tugboat? Some people have been pointing out, and so on. I was also struck by the fact that a cargo ship hitting a part of a major arterial bridge

in a major American city could bring the whole bridge down. What did you make of this? You know, obviously it's a tragedy. There will be a full investigation. I'm certain of that. I hesitate to always jump to sort of, there are a bunch of conspiracies we were talking about that are floating around online.

It appears not to be a terror attack. In fact, it appears that many of the people who are on board actually called the land-based authorities, which is why the bridge wasn't more filled with cars and people when the bridge collapsed. But I'm going to wait till all the facts come in before making any sort of statement on what I think happened or what can be done to correct it.

Otherwise, I feel we're jumping the gun probably. Are you concerned about infrastructure generally in America? I've seen that again being debated today, that there's a kind of sense that there's a rotting infrastructure at the heart of America. First of all, I think that tends to be a little bit overstated because you can obviously find anecdotal situations

where there's a bridge that falls down and that's terrible. This one didn't fall down of a 200-quarter, obviously at 165,000-ton ship that ran into it. But beside that, you know, I think that the biggest problem with infrastructure tends to be state and local-based infrastructure, not federal-based infrastructure.

In other words, spending a bunch of federal money and infrastructure tends not to cure most of these. This one was under federal auspices, by the way. So we'll see if there were inherent flaws in the bridge. And if so, obviously, somebody is to blame, and presumably the Secretary of Transportation will get to blame if that's the case. You've made a very interesting documentary.

I watched it last night about fentanyl, America's silent epidemic. I was struck by the fact that more people in America get killed by fentanyl now than are killed by guns. Let's take a quick look at a clip from the film. My only child was dead. She died from fentanyl poisoning. My son died at 25.

It was fentanyl that killed my child. Fentanyl overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans, 18 to 45. The sitting president is supposed to put Americans first. We went to Kensington, a neighborhood of Philadelphia, to check out the fentanyl epidemic. This is Ground Zero for the fentanyl epidemic, the homeless epidemic. In the heart of America's towns and cities, a silent crisis leaves a trail of devastation in its wake. Joe Biden and his administration have not done anything to protect American citizens. Join me on the grounds.

I bring you the real world consequences of one of the most destructive presidencies in American. in history. One degree of separation between the Biden family and the kings of fentanyl. I thought it was a very powerful documentary, some shocking statistics in there. What is the answer to this fentanyl ground? Obviously, the poorer southern border is a massive part of the problem, but should there be more regulation, more laws, more control over fentanyl itself? So certainly there ought to be state-level laws that are passed that allow for drug dealers to be prosecuted for homicide if a drug dealer passes a drug with fentanyl laced into it to one of their victims because it is in fact fentanyl poisoning many of the people who are taking fentanyl using the term

fentanyl overdose is probably wrong for a huge number of people and overdose is when you take too much of a drug that you're actually intending to ingest in many of these cases you have somebody who's taking what they think is an adderol and it turns out that it's laced with fentanyl and a grain of fentanyl or two can kill you and so that actually is a poisoning and drug dealers ought to be prosecuted in precisely that fashion but you're right the biggest issue obviously is the poorest southern border. The first episode in this series was about the southern border. The drug cartels control the entirety of the American southern border. And right now, they are using illegal immigration as actually a misdirect to get fentanyl into the country.

What they're doing is flooding illegal immigrants into certain areas. The border patrol under Joe Biden makes it first priority to go to those areas and process the illegal immigrants who are arriving in these areas that leaves the rest of the border completely unmanned. And while the rest of the border is unmanned, that's when you see people coming in with backpacks filled with fentanyl. that fentanyl, the precursors are coming from China. It's being processed in Mexico at largely bases that are owned by Chinese nationals. And then it's being given to, is traded to the Mexican drug cartels, which are pushing it up north through the border. It really is a deadly, it is not really an epidemic as much as it is a deadly terror attack on the United States via the Mexican

drug cartels. What should Biden be doing that he's not doing? I mean, number one, he has to actually reinstate the remaining Mexico policy with regard to illegal immigration, which will allow the reconstitution of the border patrols so they can actually go. the unguarded areas. He needs to shut the border. He needs to be putting significant pressure in terms of sanctions and other mechanisms on China for shipping the precursors into Mexico in the first place. China has effectively been lying to the United States saying that they are doing things about the fentanyl overdose exposure problem, but they really are not. What they really have done is instead of just shipping pure fentanyl into Mexico, they're shipping the precursors

into Mexico. The United States should be putting economic pressure on the government of Mexico, which effectively has turned this entire state to America's South into a narco state. The drug cartels don't just run the American southern border. Effectively, they run the Mexican government at this point. And if serious pressure isn't brought to bear on the Mexican government to disconnect and fight the drug cartels, this problem is going to continue to fester. Let me ask a question that I think will appeal to fans of our lengthy relationship who remember some of our early skirmishes.

But because a drug is killing nearly 100,000 people a year in America, you're very determined to bring in all sorts of new regulations, rules, laws, and so on. Why do you not feel us strongly about the number of people being killed by guns? Well, I mean, I certainly feel horrible for people who are killed by guns. There's two main distinctions. One is that we actually have a right in the United States to keep in bare arms, whereas you do not have a right to actually ingest or distribute fentanyl. And two, is that the solutions that are proposed for preventing the distribution of fentanyl in the United States

are likely to be significantly more impactful than many of the guns. regulations that have been proposed in order to stop the so-called gun violence epidemic. There are significant other problems that are involved with the gun violence problem in the United States, ranging from, if you're talking, school shootings, mental illness, to crime problems that are responsible for the predominant amount of gun crime in America's major cities, for example. In other words, the instrument, to me when it comes to guns, is secondary consideration, especially considering legislation already on the books in many of these places. When it comes to fentanyl, there are simple things that can be done like right this moment to

actually stop this. Plus, again, you do not actually have the right to ingest or distribute fentanyl. Would you not accept, though, that if the answer to fentanyl deaths is to have less fentanyl available on the streets, would one of the answers to the gun violence epidemic in America not be to have fewer guns? No, I don't necessarily accept that. I think it depends who has the guns. I think that if the answer is fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn't have them, then you and I totally agree on this.

we have for at least a decade at this point, I believe, Pierce. 15 years, actually, Ben. 15 years. Yeah, it's been a long time. We're much older than when we began this entire rigmarole. I think you're aging better than me, just for what is worth. Well, I started off younger, to be fair to you. Let me ask you finally about the upcoming American election. Donald Trump, it seems the more crap thrown at him by the left, the more powerful he gets, and the more electable he becomes,

with even independents and Republicans that don't like him gravitating to a mindset about Trump that he's a victim of a massive witch hunt here. Do you think it can propel him to the White House, or did you see signs in the Republican primary season that there are too many disaffected Republicans actually to help him win a general election? No, actually, I think what the primary showed is that there are a lot of Democrats who are crossing over and voting in Republican primaries. I think that by polling data, 95% of Republicans are going to go vote for Donald Trump. The big problem is, Joe Biden. About 80% of Democrats say they approve of Joe Biden. He's the sitting president.

So Joe Biden has a really bad systemic problem on his hands. It's hard to see, frankly, how he can change direction, absence some sort of external considerations that change everybody's math, the economy starts to boom in such a way that people actually feel it, or all the foreign policy issues which are on fire right now, the world's on fire, all those suddenly go out and Americans change their perception of Biden. I've said before that every presidential election is a referendum on one of the two candidates, and whoever it's a referendum on loses. right now, the election is a referendum on Joe Biden. And if it's a referendum on Joe Biden come November,

Donald Trump is going to be president again. And if Trump does win, and I think your calculus is correct, if he does win, is that going to be a good or bad thing for America? I mean, you've blown hot and cold on Trump over the years, as I have, as many people have. But would it be a good or bad thing, Trump, Mark 2 in the White House? I think that compared to a second Joe Biden administration, I think that it would be an excellent thing.

I think that Donald Trump's policy is the best part of his administration the first time around. and so I would hope for more of the first three years of his policy in a second Trump administration. If you were advising him, what would you hope for less for second time around from Trump? I mean, it's always the same thing. I would hope for less of the rhetorical flourishes. I would hope for more of the unifying rhetoric, a little bit less of the freneticism. I think that what Americans really want right now is to be left alone and for there to be a feeling of stability. And it's been a very long time since we've had any of that in the United States.

Most Americans, again, just want to touch grass and go back to normal. And so back to normal, if Trump could do that, it would make him, immensely popular because the perception is that he can't, right? That he can't stop himself from being eccentric. But if he could actually get in the White House and then actually pursue Joe Biden's strategy, which is going to bed early at 5 o'clock p.m. every night, except with some good policies,

then I think Americans would be pretty happy. I think you're right. Ben Shapiro, great to have you back, my sister. Thank you very much. Thanks so much.