On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the way the Left and Right view President Trump and the collapse of the political consensus. Video and partial transcript below:
Everybody’s very up for this impeachment thing — very exciting, it’s a historic day! So much history making! Let me just explain something: History will care, I don’t.
The reason I don’t is because it’s like going to a movie where you already know the ending. It’s the most predictable movie in the world. The Democrats are going to impeach, the Republicans are going to acquit in the Senate. It’s not going to have any massive impact on the election, everything in the world is baked into this cake — old shoes, human feces — everything is in the cake, and when it comes to 2020, the only factor that is not baked into the cake is who the Democrats will nominate. …
I realized [Wednesday] morning, I was thinking about this with regard to how people view President Trump, because really how you view the impeachment is a referendum on how you view President Trump — and, even more than President Trump, how you feel about the broader political situation in the United States. I don’t think that many people are actually looking at the charges in this case and reading the Democrats’ 659-page report, and then reading the Republicans’ 200-page response and being like, “Well, after considering all of the transcripts and all of the facts, here’s where I come down on the legal merits of this case, on the evidentiary burden — has it been met or has it not been met?” I don’t think that most Americans are thinking that way.
I think most Americans are thinking to themselves, “Is this impeachment appropriate or is this impeachment not? Are the people trying to impeach Trump politically motivated or are they motivated by just concern for the Constitution and preventing foreign countries from interfering in America’s elections?” I feel like we’ve been speaking past each other for quite a while here.
There are a couple issues on which this is a referendum on Trump, and then there are a couple issues where this is a referendum on American politics as a whole, and it’s all wrapped up together in a ball, and that’s what people’s opinions on impeachment are, but it comes down to this, I think: Do you think that President Trump is a murderer or is he a coroner? Is he a political murderer or is he a political coroner?
If you are on the Left, you look at President Trump and you say, look at this … look at this person. He lies frequently, he says things that are dishonest, he breaks every rule of the presidency, he says things out loud that should never be said, he gets on phone calls and he just jabbers to the president of Ukraine about his political opponents, he’s the kind of guy who will say or do anything, he’ll insult people on Twitter, he rips the media and then he degrades the view of people of the media because he sees them as his enemy, he calls them the enemy of the people. This is somebody who cannot be normalized!
This is why you’ve heard Democrats say and people in the media say since literally the day he was elected and really since the day he was nominated, “We cannot accept this as the new normal.” In other words, Trump murdered all of these conventions. There were all of these conventions, that the media were trustworthy and Trump murdered it — he took it out back with a pickaxe and buried it in the eye like Leon Trotsky.
That Trump has murdered civility — before this we were a republic of comedy — and you see this in the rewriting of Barack Obama’s history by the media. It has now been an accepted part of the media’s history that Barack Obama was actually a politician of comedy and unity, and spent his days trying to cut bipartisan deals, which for any of us who have a memory longer than that of the fish Dory in “Finding Nemo,” we recognize that’s a bunch of crap. But for folks on the Left, it’s like, “Well, Barack Obama, that was a man of honor and civility.” I don’t remember a lot of civility from Barack Obama, but they do.
Don’t you remember those days when there was a consensus that politics stopped at water’s edge, that you never militarize foreign policy on behalf of your own political viewpoint? And now Donald Trump has wrecked that — he’s the murderer of that political consensus. The idea that we were all in it together — and it’s true domestically, too — Trump has polarized us along domestic political lines, whereas once we were unified. It is Trump who has wrecked everything!
There’s the view of the Left, [and] the view of the media when it comes to impeachment, they say, “Well, if we don’t impeach now, then we’ve broken impeachment forever. If we don’t impeach now, then the very conventions of impeachment will have been destroyed for all time. Trump will have murdered them. It will just be another casualty of his evil.” The view of the Left is that Donald Trump is the political murderer — that he is Michael Meyers and that he is stalking Jamie Lee Curtis, and that Jamie Lee Curtis is all that is good and right with the American Republic.
Then there is the view of the people who are, I would say, probably on the middle or on the Right, and that view is that Trump is not actually a political murderer. Yes, he exacerbates a lot of the problems that the country has already been experiencing; no, he’s not militating against any of those. But Trump is much more a coroner than he is a murder, [and] his election represents the recognition by the American people that all these things were already dead.
Trump came upon the the still-warm corpse of American politics, and then he declared it dead. So Democrats, seeing a man standing over the body, are going, “Oh, that guy probably killed him, that guy’s the murderer” — and Republicans, conservatives, independents, they’re looking at Trump, they’re going, “No, that body was dead, and Trump didn’t exactly like get down on his hands and knees and perform CPR on the guy. But he ain’t a murderer, He’s the coroner, he’s the person who came along and declared all of these things dead to the media.”
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