Has America Completely Lost Its Mind? - Ben Shapiro - #845

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ben Shapiro. He's a political commentator, co-founder of the daily Wire, an author and a podcaster. Election years are always chaotic, but this one feels particularly spicy. Why is the world at fever pitch? And how much is actually going to stop after November? Expect to learn if the 2024 election is going to be a typical one, why Ben hasn't had Donald Trump on his show, Ben's experience with childhood bullying and how it changed him, what Ben wished more men realized about masculinity, his thoughts on Elon Musk, how to deal with public criticism and much more. Doesn't matter whether you believe or agree with Ben's politics or not, he is a very non-fungible human. There are not many people out there like him. And I find him very interesting. I find his background, his personal drive, his work rate, absolutely absurd. And I think there's an awful lot to take away from today. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ben Shapiro. Busy time for you at the moment. Is this more intense than typical election years? How normal is this?

**Ben Shapiro** (1:34)
This one is pretty intense. I mean, I'm personally invested in this election. I want Trump to win, obviously. I've made that very clear. I'm personally campaigning with six different Senate candidates, like going out and trying to raise money for them and get them publicity. It's a really, really important election, and so I've been taking that pretty seriously. Plus, this is a wild ride. I mean, nobody's ever seen an election in which one of the nominees completely drops because he dies on stage and is replaced within 24 hours by a completely different human being, and everybody acts like that's normal. And then within the space of eight weeks, you have one of the candidates, the subject of two separate assassination attempts. I will say it is kind of weird that Donald Trump has been subjected to more assassination attempts in the past eight weeks than Kamala Harris has to one-on-one interviews. I didn't see that one coming, but you know, it's a wild election season for sure.

**Chris Williamson** (2:20)
What do you think's driving that? Why is it so wild?

**Ben Shapiro** (2:24)
I mean, I think that part of it is just the unique circumstances of the candidates. The Democrats in a normal election cycle probably wouldn't have nominated Joe Biden in 2020, which meant that they wouldn't have had to deal with a person who was 8,000 years old in 2024 And also, Donald Trump is a wild character. I mean, the fact is that he's the first person who has run for non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland. And he's widely perceived as sort of an incumbent figure, despite the fact that he was out of power for four years. And he's Donald Trump, which means that he's eccentric and he says wild things, and you get a lot of internet memes and all that's very entertaining. One of the things that's kind of frustrating for those of us who watch politics professionally or who are very in public policy is that there's kind of the bread and circuses aspect of all these elections, and then there are the very real policy consequences of who gets elected, and that's a completely different thing that seems to get ignored in all of the hubbub about who performed better in a debate or who is jabbering about eating cats and dogs or any of that sort of thing.

**Chris Williamson** (3:20)
What's the arc that you went through from being not keen on Trump 2016, kind of keen on Trump 2020, to now...

**Ben Shapiro** (3:28)
fundraising form, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
Yeah, can you explain that to me?

**Ben Shapiro** (3:31)
Sure, so 2016 I looked at both candidates and I said, both of these people are not fit to be presidents of the United States. I'm not going to vote for Hillary Clinton, obviously. I think she's wrong on everything politically. I think that she's corrupt. I'm not voting for her. And Donald Trump, I had no idea what his policies were going to be. He seemed to take every single side of every single issue in 2016 Was he pro-free trade or anti-free trade? Was he more hawkish on foreign policy or isolationist on foreign policy? Where was he on social policy? Was he socially liberal or was he pro-life? Where was he on anything? And nobody kind of knew. And so you combine that with his various sort of eccentricities and some of the things that he said, which I really radically disapproved of. And I was just like, I'm sitting this election out. I don't like either of these people. Now, I also had the luxury of living in California, where my vote literally counts for nothing. If I'd been living in Ohio or a swing state, I assume I would have voted for Trump. 2020, I got to see what I was right about with regard to Trump and what I was wrong about with regard to Trump. I had assumed that he was gonna govern a lot more liberal than he did. He governed in ways that I thought were much better for my point of view than I thought they were going to be. Obviously he appointed Supreme Court justices that I liked. I thought that his Middle Eastern policy was excellent. I thought that his peace through strength general policy was really good. I liked his tax cuts. There are a lot of things he did that I liked. There were some things I didn't like. His spending policies, for example. But by 2020, I hadn't changed my mind about Donald Trump in terms of his character. But in terms of his policy, I changed my mind because I saw that he had done a lot of things that there was no guarantee he would. Now I had seen his record. And so, vote for him in 2020 In 2024, I didn't support Trump in the primaries. If I had been voting in the primaries, it didn't actually reach Florida because Trump cleaned up. But I would say that I had been much more likely to vote for Ron DeSantis in the primaries than Donald Trump. It became very quickly apparent that Trump was going to be the nominee. And then it was a question of Trump versus Joe Biden. And I think Joe Biden has been a horrifically bad president. And so it became clear to me that it wasn't just enough for me to actually vote for Trump or support Trump verbally, that I actually wanted to get involved in the campaign. Because I think that the consequences of Trump losing to either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris now would have been quite disastrous. So what I would say is that my feelings about Trump on sort of a personal level, haven't changed radically on him as a character.