On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the Democrats’ public relations goal during the impeachment hearing. Video and partial transcript below:
Everybody knows where this is going. The Democrats are going to vote to impeach President Trump in the House, and then the Republicans are going to vote to acquit in the Senate. It’s that simple. That’s where this is going.
[The question] is whether there is some sort of new bombshell that is dropped; and, given the witness testimony that we expect, the answer is probably not. The only other question here is whether Democrats are going to be capable of sinking President Trump’s sort of public relations stance. Are you going to see the support for impeachment rise just because there is so much bad press surrounding impeachment and because President Trump continues to insist, against pretty much all the evidence, that the phone call with Ukraine was absolutely perfect — nothing wrong with it, absolutely 100% what Abraham Lincoln would have done.
The reason that’s not a smart strategy, honestly, in terms of public relations — in terms of impeachment, it doesn’t really matter what his strategy is, what’s going to be is what’s going to be. But in terms of public relations, the reason that’s not a smart strategy is the same reason it is not a brilliant idea to go out at the beginning of your presidency and say we are going to have 5% growth every year for the rest of my tenure. The reason it’s not smart to say that is because if you come in at 4%, which is great, then everybody goes, “Oh, well you said five and you completely missed the boat.”
Well, if you say that everything with Ukraine was absolutely 100% perfect, unbelievable, and then people are like, “Well, it doesn’t look that perfect to me,” it makes them more suspicious of your entire claim. That is why it is a bad public relations strategy. As I’ve been saying from the beginning, the president is not his own best lawyer. But of course, [Wednesday] is when the public impeachment hearings begin, and all of these hearings are basically going to repeat the testimony that we saw behind closed doors. There are no real surprise witnesses here, Democrats have not approved many of the witnesses the Republicans want.
Yesterday, I talked a little bit about the witnesses that Republicans wanted. President Trump had put out a list compiled by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is currently sitting with the House Intelligence Committee — sorta been swapped in, sort of a ringer brought in to do some of the questioning because he’s good at this sort of thing — and Jordan had released a list of the witnesses that Republicans would like to see.
On that list were people like Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, because Jordan wanted to ask, “Okay, well, was there something nefarious going on in Ukraine?” And if there was something nefarious going on in Ukraine, or suspicious with Hunter Biden, Why is it illegitimate of Trump to ask the Ukrainian government to investigate all of that?
Apparently, they also wanted to bring in the whistleblower. Democrats have been quite reticent to bring forward the whistleblower. Why? Well, because they understand that there is pretty good information the whistleblower is a Democratic operative — that the whistleblower is somebody who’s a lifelong Democrat, who works from the Obama administration, who is good — or at least close, relatively speaking, with Vice President Joe Biden, who is close with James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. And because of that, the Democrats are concerned that if this person is brought forward in question, it’s going to turn out this person was coordinating with the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, that this whole thing was put together behind closed doors.
Now, that would not, in and of itself, debunk claims made about Trump and Ukraine. But it would go to motive, and Democrats understand that would be a bad public relations move for them to allow that testimony, because the first thing that would happen is that Trump would say “witch hunt,” and most Americans would say, “Yeah, kind of.” Unless the crime is serious enough that we actually believe it overcomes that, that it was not a partisan thing. It was actually just a “this is a danger to the country” thing, that’s going to be the Republican plays.
So it’s kind of weird, it’s sort of parallel. On the one side, the Republicans are going to claim, and this is really what it’s going to come down to, Senator John Kennedy finally coming around to adopting the only real defense to Trump’s activity, which is that it comes down to intent. And on the democratic side, the American people are going to have to decide Democrats’ intent.
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