Ben Shapiro. He's also on Skype.
Another reason to get the app. You go on watch and you page over and you get to see Ben Shapiro. And you know Ben.
He's co-founder of The Daily Wire and The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben, welcome. Hey, thanks for having me.
Well, great to see you. First off, we've never seen anything like this. So for the people out there that says this is just like any other summer, it's just not true. How long do you expect the Kamala Harris honeymoon to last? Well, if the media have their way, it'll go all the way until the election.
I don't think that's going to happen. I think that it'll probably last through the convention and then it'll probably end. So the convention is supposed to happen in approximately three weeks. Sometime in the next week and a half, she's probably going to select her vice presidential nominee. She's going to have to start sitting down for some serious interviews post August 18th, August 19th.
And when that happens, I would expect that there will be some actual questions that are asked of her. The thing to notice about the polls right now, by the way, is that despite this magical honeymoon in which we've watched the entire media flip from Kamala Harris, not a particularly great candidate, to Kamala Harris, godlike, visionary, wondrous, amazing Obama-esque figure that that flip that's happened, she's really running slightly behind Trump still. So according to the latest national poll, she's still running within one, two points of Trump.
If they're dead even in the popular vote, that means Trump likely wins in the Electoral College because remember, he lost in the popular vote to both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but he won against Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College. So, again, I think that the sort of moment that we're in suggests more of a groundswell for Kamala than is actually taking place in the mind of voters. And this is going to be the best time of the presidential election for her because the sugar high Democrats have from getting rid of Biden is being translated over into what I think is sort of a false euphoria about her as a candidate. So Ben, I'm interested in your analysis with this because you really have three phases of Kamala Harris, the attorney general, how she did on crime and what she didn't prosecute. And then you have Kamala Harris, who became Senator Harris. So you saw Senator Harris attack the ICE, the director of ICE basically said you should be embolus compared to KKK. And then you have the Kamala Harris that ran for president, who wanted to do things like decriminalize border crossings, get rid of fracking, actually defund ICE, defund the police, as well as stop offshore drilling. And it goes on and on. And then you have the one that's been vice president for three and a half years, one of which she's got to either embrace, talked about evolving, or one of which, yes, say that is me.
Where do you think if you're in the Harris camp, where do you land? So they're putting out their first ads right now. The first ad is saying that she was a prosecutor. So they're literally running on her experience as San Francisco DA from the early 2000s. They're not even running on her as attorney general when she was the attorney general of California, because, of course, she was a very left wing attorney general in the state of California. She was the most liberal Senate in the United States Senate from in 2019. She ran incredibly wildly left candidacy in 2020 and got shellacked in the primary. She didn't even make it to her home state of California. And then as vice president, she was handed the borders are job, which we've now been told she was not handed. And the border is the worst situation that we've ever seen on the southern border. So she has to go back 20 years to the last thing that she can run on as a quote unquote, moderate.
I don't think that that dog's going to hunt just in the last two days. She's flipped on fracking. She's flipped on assault weapons, mandatory buyback. She's flipped on decriminalization of border crossings, for example, like she's flipping on all of these things in an attempt to bring herself off as a moderate.
Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, has brought out a series of ads that I think are better than anything. The RNC has yet brought out basically just plain tape of Kamala Harris. And then when people get a load of Kamala Harris, what she actually says is going to look a lot like John Kerry circa 2004 for those who have sort of an institutional memory. Kerry was labeled a flip flopper, and that was deadly to his campaign. Kamala Harris is trying to play fearless prosecutor, but in reality, she shifts her positions based on putting her finger in the wind.
Really does. If you and the thing is, that's what was one thing was clear to me. I watched her opening speech. I remember it because Donald Trump even liked it. He was a sitting president at the time. He watched her give a I'm going to be a candidate for president United States for this nomination in front of a big crowd.
And he said, this woman's pretty good. You know, she's going to be. And then she started sitting down for interviews totally unprepared.
Her reputation as a vice president was she wouldn't read her briefing papers and sit down for a briefing and she couldn't retain staff. Not a good combination just to remind people at home who are just zoning into this. Here's a little of Kamala Harris cut 24. I am prepared to get rid of the filibuster to pass a Green New Deal. There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking. So would you ban offshore drilling?
Yes. And I've again worked on that. We need to have Medicare for all. Who of us has has not had that situation where you've got to wait for approval and the doctor says, well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this. Let's eliminate all of that.
Let's move on. It's simply wrong that we have a situation where the pharmaceutical companies have been dictating prices. Affordable health care should not be a privilege. It should be a right. Yeah. She also wants her to private health insurance. So that's going to go well. So I mean, these things come back.
All she could say is, well, that's the old me. I've never seen a candidate quite like that. There might be a few policies, but you're talking about maybe two dozen, two dozen policies.
That's correct. And the problem for her is that she's still the sitting vice president of the United States. And there's this weird situation going on inside the White House where Joe Biden is still sort of pretending to be president of the United States. But everybody knows that he isn't at this point. She's putting out policy statements and having meetings with foreign leaders as though she's the acting president of the United States without the title, which means that she's stapled to his pant leg in terms of policy.
And that's not great because Americans don't actually like Joe Biden's policy. So you have the combination of her as a very flawed candidate who's been able to escape every single. I mean, she's not answered a single question thus far. She became the de facto Democratic nominee a week and a half ago. She's not sat for a single interview. She's not taken a serious question from the press.
She's done a series of rallies and then she's put out a series of written statements and ads. And of course, under those circumstances where where you have the Democratic Party trying to enthuse itself back into competition here, she's going to look good compared to the moldering corpse of the president of the United States. But that that is that comparison is not the comparison that's going to happen in November. That comparison is going to be between her and Donald Trump. Joe Biden can be anywhere on that ticket come November. And so there's a long time.
Everyone's saying it's a quick it's three months. That's true. But in reality, as we all know, most people don't actually start watching the presidential elections anyway until you get to about late August, September, October, November. And that means that there's going to be a lot of time to redefine Kamala Harris in the public mind. She is launching this campaign in the same way she did her presidential campaign. You remember when she launched that presidential campaign, it was the same sort of Obama-esque feel, this giant rally, 20,000 people in San Francisco. And the title of her campaign was Kamala Harris for the people, because the idea was that she was a prosecutor. So she was appearing, quote unquote, for the people. Right. The same way that you would say a prosecutor appears for the people.
And it completely fell on its face. Now she's trying to hijack the Obama mystique. She's she keeps saying Donald Trump's going to bring us back to the past.
I'm going to go forward. Right. She's using the actual Obama language. She ain't Obama. She is not nearly as talented as Barack Obama and everybody trying to talk themselves into this. Kamala Harris is a wondrous candidate, is forgetting about the fact we already know her. Listen to the all new Bret Baier podcast featuring common ground in-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, along with all your Bret Baier favorites like his all star panel and much more available now at Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Right. And the thing is, you know, there was a sense people wanted to turn the page because of the Iraq war and then the collapse of the economy in 2008. But there's a reason why Donald Trump's got a real shot and has been winning almost the entire time and is more popular, according to the polls he's ever been, is because people liked his four years, despite the turmoil, more than these four years. So when he says we don't want to go back, I feel like the American people go, yeah, we kind of do.
I just want you to hear and just want everyone to remember, because we do not have short term memory loss. It wasn't too long ago when the Democratic Party was worried that she was going to drag down the ticket. Listen to this is Nancy Pelosi. Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate for this president? He thinks so.
And that's what matters. And by the way, she's very politically astute. I don't think people give her enough credit.
Do you think she is the best running mate? She's the vice president of the United States. So people say to me, well, why isn't she doing this or that? I said, because she's the vice president. That's the job description.
You don't do that much. I mean, this is not the woman that this is not the next generation of Democratic leaders. And Nancy Pelosi knows it.
That's exactly right. You hear her running between the raindrops right there on that question. The one thing she won't say is Kamala Harris is absolutely the right pick because she is a charming and wondrous politician. They're not going to say that. They're trying to say that now. And I think that that varnish wears off really quickly. It's been applied quickly and it's going to wear off really, really quickly at the first sign of weather exposure. And she's had no weather exposure as of yet because then we're still in the afterglow of the media. So one of the big elements here is that the media really were uncomfortable attacking the Democrats, as always. And they had to spend three, four weeks attacking Joe Biden because otherwise they would have been complicit in propping up a candidate who obviously is mentally incompetent.
And so they couldn't be seen to be complicit in that. So they started ripping on Joe Biden. Then they got Biden out and they're sitting down right in that warm urine filled kiddie pool of Democratic media complex here.
And they're they're really enjoying themselves. They're splashing around and they're really enjoying this sort of newfound relationship they have with Kamala Harris, treating her with kid gloves. And they're going to try and carry it all the way through the election.
I just don't think that that's going to work. I think that the Kamala Harris campaign, which so far again has been a bunch of rallies, as well as white dudes for Kamala, black, queer and gay men for Kamala, white women for Kamala. That is a bad way to run a campaign. Barack Obama did it in 2012. And it worked, but it only worked for Barack Obama.
If you watch that white dudes for Harris, Zoom session slash malice struggle session that happened last night. Is that your appeal to blue collar voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin? Is Josh Gad talking about weeping openly when Hillary Clinton lost the presidency in 2016 or Josh Groban lecturing you on how traditional masculinity is really marginalizing for BIPOC and queer people? Is that going to be the pitch to men? It's pretty obvious that Kamala Harris is trying to do now. Her campaign is reliant on getting out all the single ladies.
That's that's really the campaign. Get out single women in large numbers on the basis of abortion to vote for her. And I don't think that that is going to be enough to take her over the finish line in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia or Arizona. And by the way, if they wanted to look presidential, I would not be surprised if they try to just get rid of Joe Biden wholeheartedly, whole cloth and have him say I want to retire so she can look like the president.
Air Force one making some decisions. Don't be surprised if that happens. I know you won't be. But a couple of things. The other thing in terms of real world, I really despise her comments after meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu. I'm offended that she did not sit behind him in his joint session of Congress. I'm not asking her to to endorse Benjamin Netanyahu a vote a vote in the Israeli elections. I'm asking her to stand by an ally when they're being attacked from seven different sides. So your thoughts about our comments after meeting Netanyahu?
I mean, absolutely despicable. So Amit Sehgal, who's a commentator in Israel, had a piece in The Wall Street Journal this morning talking about Kamala Harris's comments. What he said is, effectively, she handed a favor to Hamas because the entire narrative that she laid out our support for Israel is ironclad. Also, Israel is pursuing effectively war crimes. Israel is engaging in mass starvation. And I will not be silent.
That last comment, by the way, I will not be silent. The implication is that there's someone trying to silence her from pointing out that the situation in the Gaza Strip is bad. Her entire angle has been that Israel has been too terrible in the Gaza Strip, that this thing has to end with Israel making some sort of concession. She called on Israel to bring an end to the conflict by making some sort of deal with Hamas. Hamas, as we all know, is the one that refuses to make a deal and in fact is a terrorist group that is currently holding babies and five American citizens hostage. And the fact that Kamala Harris decided that that was going to be the tip of the spear. That was her first press conference as the as the presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. And it was entirely designed in order to get the pro-Hamas squad section of her party on board.
It was quite it was quite bad. I think that it has real world ramifications because the way things work in the Middle East is that if you're Hezbollah or if you're Hamas, you hold out for longer thinking that you're going to get Kamala Harris in the presidency and you're going to get a better deal when she's president of the United States. If you're Hezbollah, you get more aggressive knowing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris might shortchange Israel on the weaponry it would require in order to clear Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon to prevent them from firing rockets into northern Israel. And by the way, the holding back of weapons is much more than just JDAMS. It's very extensive and it doesn't work on doesn't work to Israel's on their behalf by exposing any more of it. It could get worse. But what Joe Biden is doing is the same thing he's doing with Ukraine, slow walking all weapon system to maximize death, even if he doesn't read, even if he doesn't. That isn't his objective.
That is the result. So now we could have a wider war. All we hear about is how we're trying to temper the response to the killing of 12 kids under 17 who are playing soccer in the Golan Heights. Let's make sure Israel doesn't overreact as opposed to condemning Hezbollah. Again, she's a day late on that. I mean, the fact is that if Donald Trump were president, everyone in Israel knows this, everyone.
We're talking about left to right. They all know that if Donald Trump were president, the situation in Israel probably wouldn't happen on October 7th. And not only that, what is happening right now certainly would not be happening because Israel would be given the weaponry that it requires in order to maintain its own security. And even the threat of that would likely push Hezbollah north of Latani River, which is about 18 miles north of the of the Lebanon-Israel border.
And you would get a negotiated solution specifically because there would be no daylight between the Trump administration and the Israelis trying to defend themselves from terror groups. And then there's already reports that Israel, excuse me, Iran is meddling in our elections through the through social media influencers. You know that their world gets dramatically tougher if Donald Trump wins almost immediately. So there's no saying the extent in which they'd go to make sure he doesn't win. Does that concern you? I mean, obviously it's very concerning. We have news, obviously, that the Iranians were attempting to send essentially an assassination squad to try and kill President Trump.
There is a reason for that. The Iranians understand that the first day that Trump gets back into office, the math changes. And that had changed under Donald Trump. The reason you had a blooming of peace in the Middle East is because Donald Trump was smart enough to throw away all of the shackles of the idiots at the State Department who suggested the centrality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the broader regional conflict.
He said, no, no, no. The actual conflict here is Iran versus pretty much everybody else. And so if you're an Iranian ally, we're going to cut you off at the knees. And if you are an enemy of Iran, then you guys have an alliance of convenience that could burgeon into something more.
If Donald Trump had been reelected in 2020, I have zero doubt that by February of 2021, the Saudis would have normalized with Israel and Iran would have been more fully contained than they are, than they were even during the Trump administration first time around. He's co-founder of The Daily Wire and the sole host of The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben, always great to talk to you. Very consequential times. Have a great day. You too.
