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Piers Morgan To Ben Shapiro: The Left’s Strategy Of ‘Screaming Abuse’ At Trump Won’t Work

   DailyWire.com
Piers Morgan and Ben Shapiro
Daily Wire

On this week’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special,” Shapiro has a conversation with Piers Morgan about his relationship with President Trump, the Democrats’ ill-conceived attacks on Trump, and the mainstream media’s inability or unwillingness to cover him in a way that’s helpful to the American people. Video and partial transcript below:

SHAPIRO: So let’s talk about your association with President Trump. You became friends with him when you were on “Celebrity Apprentice”?

MORGAN: I’d met him briefly before actually on “America’s Got Talent.” He came on as a guest one day, and I had a little chat with him, and obviously we knew all about Donald Trump and in Britain — he was this great, larger than life character. Then I go on “Celebrity Apprentice” … Day one I met [Trump], and he came up to me and went, “You’re Rupert’s guy, right? You used to work for Murdoch?” I went, “Yeah.” [Trump said], “You were like his youngest editor or something?” I said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “Ok, then you must be smart. You must be smart.” I was laughing, [thinking], “Well, I’m off to a good start. The host of the show thinks I’m smart.”

I’d also read “Art of the Deal” three times, so I began to play the game exactly how I thought Trump would play it, and began to talk to him almost like Trump, which was definitely a successful strategy. But what I remember being struck by — it’s interesting. One, that he was, over the hundreds of hours I spent with him — in that boardroom is three or four hours session, and … no one can cheat who they are for hundreds of hours. And I’m quite good at, you know, being perceptive about human beings through my journalistic training over the years. He was clearly very smart, much smarter than I think his critics give him credit for, very charming in those boardrooms — a side I do not see enough of as president.

He’s come in, he’s decided to play the whack, whack, whack president — because he’s getting whacked all the time — and almost it brings out the worst in both him and his critics, I think. If you read “Art of the Deal,” his whole strategy, to people that criticize him, is to punch them ten times as hard. That’s what Donald Trump’s DNA is about. It was very successful in real estate, it got him elected president. I would like to see more of the charming Donald Trump that I saw in the boardroom. I think it would go a long way if he just gave us more of that. So, you know, I find that a frustration as somebody who genuinely likes him, personally. But I also saw somebody very decisive, pretty solid judgment. He fired all the people I would have fired.

He was very good, though, at also creating a lot of controlled chaos. He liked people crashing together and arguing and all that kind of theater and drama — all the stuff we see play out now every day in his presidency. He definitely enjoyed that. He likes conflict, and he thrives off it. You know, Donald Trump, if you ask him, would say I’m sure, he’s at his best when he’s under fire. The problem now is that he’s two and a half years into his presidency, and every day it’s a fire. It’s a firefight, and I’m not sure the American people are being well served by this. And I don’t blame just Donald Trump — I blame everybody. The media is now predominantly a liberal media, and they just like poking the bear, and the bear likes swatting them back. But in the middle of all this — the American people — and they’re like every day just seems so dramatic, rather than actually can’t we just get some stuff done here, amid all the shrieking and the punch-ups.

SHAPIRO: I mean in terms of the interpersonal, my theory about him has always been — because I grew up in Hollywood — he’s basically a performer. Meaning that he is great with people who are in the room, and you see when he’s doing a live speech that he’s playing off the crowd in a way that a standup comedian would play off the crowd. Not like a normal politician plays off the crowd, and that means that he’s mainly appealing to the people who really are almost literally within his eyesight. Playing to the people who are out there beyond the scope of the camera, it almost doesn’t seem to occur to him that there are hundreds of millions of other people who are watching this in a way that it might have occurred to him doing “The Apprentice,” where it’s explicitly a product that is made for hundreds of millions of people to watch, and is being added in the back.

MORGAN: Also, I would say that his strengths are often his weaknesses, too. You know, the unfettered insight into the American president in real-time on Twitter is fascinating, and really riveting on occasion. But it’s also, obviously, can be very damaging and destructive as well. You know, he told me that he likes to wake up in the morning, he sees all the TV screens. And if he doesn’t like what he’s seeing, he just gets up, does a tweet, and watches it all change in real time. He changes the news agenda with his own hand, with his thumb. Boom. If I was his opponent, or if I was one of the Democrats running against him, I certainly wouldn’t run a strategy of just screaming abuse about Donald Trump. It didn’t work for Hillary Clinton, it won’t work for any of the candidates this time.

The only way you can beat Donald Trump is to play your own game against him, not the one he wants you to play. He wants to suck people into a punch-out. It’s where he feels more comfortable. You know, he will always justify his actions — good, bad, and ugly — by the number of people that attack him. He’ll say, well look at these people. You know they’re attacking me left, right, and center — Why shouldn’t I attack them? We all know that’s what he’s like. So as the media, I think, you have an option, the collective media. Do we spend all day attacking this guy hoping that he reacts? Is that really in the best interests of how we cover this presidency, given that’s what we know he’s like? And I think at the moment it’s … a lot like they’re in an abusive relationship — the media and Trump. And it’s ugly and I don’t think it works for the American people. I think too much important stuff is getting forgotten about. You know, every day the only story is Trump. Every newspaper front page, every news bulletin, every cable news show is just Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Other things are happening in the world.

Watch full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show: Sunday Special” on-demand!

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