1. Stop backing the swampiest of all swamp creatures.
2. Become more honest, and stay that way.
The Ben Shapiro "Honesty" Hustle
Has King Donald's Qatari private jet gift finally gone too far for MAGA? Don't hold your breath
Sometimes, you have to laugh at today’s headlines. Or maybe you don’t, but I do. Since laughing helps ward off the wailing and gnashing of teeth. The latter of which I try to only do behind closed doors, or at least behind the paywall, in the interest of preserving what’s left of my dignity.
And so, I broke into hearty guffaws earlier this week when reading stories about Donald Trump being poised to receive a bribe
“gift” of a $400 million 747 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar
(“royal family” being an aspirational title for the Trumps these days).
The idea, aside from personally enriching Trump, is to temporarily
replace the aging Air Force One — still a luxe private plane by anyone’s
standards — with a “flying palace” that will eventually become the
property of Trump’s presidential library, the latter of which will
doubtless include works of high scholarship like Lee Greenwood’s God Bless The USA Bible
(“the only Bible officially endorsed by Lee Greenwood and President
Trump” — still available for a cool 60 bucks), along with Trump’s long
list of “authored” titles, such as Think Big And Kick Ass In Business And Life, one or two of which, he might have even skimmed before publication.
That’s right. While you are being reduced to choosing between two dolls or owning five pencils in Trump’s tariff-ravaged economy (according to his own estimates), he needs a $400 million flying palace for all to be right with the world. And you are a “world class loser” (again, his words) if you criticize him for it. Go Populism!
It’s not that Trump’s grifterhood is particularly amusing. It’s old news, and we’ve always known he’s a two-bit hustler, going back to his days peddling Trump University (a scam so colossal it resulted in a $25 million settlement to students who were duped). Or Trump Vodka (the guy doesn’t even drink, though he’s driven plenty of us to do so). Or Trump ties (long enough to swaddle yourself like you were wearing a silky diaper, but tailored with the finest American craftsmanship, if by “American craftsmanship,” you mean “made in China”).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Trump’s a con man, and always has been. But for the purposes of this piece, I’m more interested in his cast of subordinate flimflam artists, with many articles taking note of all the blowback Trump was getting even in usually friendly quarters for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Though Trump’s bribe/gift passed muster with his ethics czar/Attorney General, Pam Bondi, which is no great surprise since ethics-wise, she doesn’t have any. For Trump wasn’t just taking fire from fake-news libs and media types — always a redundant classification in Trump’s world — but from reliable allies like Ben Shapiro, who called it “skeezy stuff.”
Shapiro’s right, of course. But news stories that breathlessly related his bold declaration nearly portrayed it as an act of integrity. Which, sorry, it isn’t. If you looked up the word “integrity,” you would not find a photo of Ben Shapiro next to it, unless it was an antonym dictionary. It’s just that the facts on the ground — the screamingly apparent corruption — sometimes become so incontrovertible, that even Trumpy fan-fiction writers like Shapiro occasionally have to acknowledge reality. Not to pick on Shapiro — there are much more extreme examples of MAGA knob polishers. See Benny Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson (no relation), and the entire Fox primetime lineup, for starters. But what the hell? Shapiro’s a smart guy, which means he knows exactly what he’s doing. So scratch what I just said. Let’s go ahead and pick on him for a while!
Shapiro, you probably know, is the founder and chief propagandist at the Daily Wire, which, even after recent cutbacks and layoffs, has made more money than the Sun King by milking MAGAbots until they moo. (Sample headline on his current podcast: “Trump’s Saudi TRIUMPH”). And yet, like any talented propagandist, Shapiro knows that the best way to push big lies is to bolster credibility by telling small truths along the way. So he’ll sometimes relate Trump’s unpardonable sins, which, of course, are always subject to later pardoning, since no sin seems to be disqualifying, and pointing out such iniquities doesn’t leave you in good standing with the cult or the cult leader, upon whom your media empire is financed.
Therefore Shapiro, who in 2016, wrote “I will never vote for Donald Trump,” by 2020, was indeed voting for Donald Trump, claiming “I wasn't really wrong about Donald Trump on character, but whatever damage he was going to do has already been done, and it's not going to help if I don't vote for him this time.” Whoops! Guess he hadn’t counted on Trump trying to overturn an election that he soundly lost, while sending his mob to invade Congress to reverse the results. Character, or lack of it, tends to keep counting long after you’ve counted it out. Which a screechy moralist like Shapiro knows, or used to know, before pretending to fall in love with Donald Trump.
At the time, Shapiro called January 6 “the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11. It was cataclysmically awful.” But by 2024, of course, a now amnesiac Shapiro — like most of the rest of the GOP — was practically a wholly-owned MAGA subsidiary. He not only voted for Trump, he co-hosted a fundraiser for him.
To illustrate Shapiro’s schizo behavior, I was prepared to delve deep into his recent oeuvre, though mercifully, Media Matters’ Jason Campbell spared me from that unenviable task by just cranking out a pretty handy one-stop-Shapiro-shopping guide. I should add that I kicked around right-wing world long enough in my former magazine-writer life to know that many old pals on the right would say something like, “Jeez, Labash’s TDS is now so acute, that he’s rewriting Media Matters press releases.” To which I’d say — as I often do to lippy commenters — Trump Derangement Syndrome is most evident when you tell obvious truths about Trump, and his supporters become deranged upon hearing the unwelcome news. And I will take truth wherever I can get it, since my old pals don’t seem to be much in the business of telling it anymore. Therefore, I will do no such thing as rewriting a Media Matters press release. Rather, I’ll reprint a large chunk of it verbatim.
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, Shapiro has thumped Trump on everything from his tariffs (“a massive tax increase on American consumers”), to Trump suggesting Ukraine started the war with Russia (“Ukraine absolutely did not start the war”), to Trump suggesting the impeachment of a federal judge (“obviously I don’t think that President Trump should be calling for the impeachment of judges based on decisions not going his way”), to saying that Trump’s “skeezy stuff” — from his free jet caper to his cryptocurrency schemes — “need to stop” (“I think if we switch the names to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, we’d all be freaking out on the right”).
So far, so good! Or good enough. To Shapiro’s partial credit, those are the closest approximations of honest admissions you’ll get from anyone in the MAGAsphere. And yet in spite of them — or perhaps because of them — Shapiro always seems to comfortably land back in Camp Trump, no matter how apparent it becomes that he’s backed a sleazy, self-dealing charlatan masquerading as a populist avenger, and not at-all-convincingly. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s an abridged chapter-and-verse sampling of Shapiro’s shilling, from Media Matters:
· After Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde urged Trump to show mercy to migrants, Shapiro said, “Jesus was not in favor of free migration across all borders.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 1/22/25]
· After Trump fired several inspectors general, Shapiro said, “These inspectors general tend to be Democratic plants very often.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 1/27/25]
· Early in the administration, Shapiro said Trump could be “the most transformative president in American public life since LBJ, maybe since FDR.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 2/12/25]
· Shapiro downplayed Trump administration cuts to national park workers, saying, “You can cut all those people by just having an automatic parking meter.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 2/19/25]
· Shapiro launched an effort to pressure Trump to pardon former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for federal charges related to George Floyd’s 2020 death. [CNN, 3/7/25]
· Shapiro wrote, “The SignalGate story basically went nowhere because the truth is that everybody has, at one point or another, included somebody in a group chat by accident and it gets very awkward.” [The Daily Wire, 4/1/25]
· When a Maryland father with protected legal status was sent to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, Shapiro said it was a “bureaucratic screw-up” but not a “human tragedy.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/1/25]
· Shapiro praised Trump’s “u-turn” on tariffs following so-called Liberation Day, saying the president showed “strength” in backtracking. [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/10/25]
· Shapiro has been supportive of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, saying, “The White House should stand by Hegseth. He was their pick. He was an out of the box pick, and he remains the right pick for secretary of defense.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/22/25]
· Shapiro said, “I’m a voter for President Trump, supporter of President Trump’s. I gave money to his campaign, fundraised for him, campaigned with him. President Trump needs to succeed on the economy because if he does not succeed on the economy, everything else goes down in flames.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/28/25]
· Shapiro defended the Trump administration after a judge noted a two-year-old U.S. citizen may have been removed from the country with “no meaningful process.” [The Daily Wire, The Ben Shapiro Show, 4/28/25]
How could a God-fearing winger with a healthy respect for our founders and the Constitution still support a guy who has now said he’s not sure if it’s his duty to uphold the Constitution (even if he swore to do so in his presidential oath, twice)? A guy who regularly defies judicial decisions including the Supreme Court’s, even though he appointed three of the justices? A guy who is brokering deals with third-world dictators to imprison those who have seen no due process? A guy who is essentially running a White House extortion racket, targeting everyone from law firms to media outfits, shaking down payments which directly benefit Trump? (The kind of Big Government power move that so-called conservatives like Shapiro used to decry before their favorite autocrat retook the reigns.)
Again, I’m not picking on Shapiro because he’s some notable exception, but because he’s become the rule in the Republican Party, now so thoroughly corrupted that it can’t even remember the once-cherished principles it’s aggressively thrown over. Under Trump’s stewardship, it’s come less to resemble a political party than a criminal syndicate or a cartoonishly corrupt pol’s vanity project/slush fund.
As Shapiro himself had to recently admit:
Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jazeera, all the rest, that's not America first. Like, please define America first in a way that says you should take sacks of cash from the Qatari royals who are behind al-Jazeera. It just isn't America first in any conceivable way. So back to the original question — is this good for President Trump? Is it good for his agenda? Is it good for draining the swamp and getting things done? The answer is, no. It isn't. It isn't. If you want President Trump to succeed, this kind of skeezy stuff needs to stop.
Aside
from Shapiro’s misguided notion about Trump not fulfilling his agenda
(Trump’s agenda is to enrich Trump, which has been a stunning success by
any measure), he makes a fair point. And yet, if Shapiro wants to
pretend that he’s still interested in anything resembling swamp
drainage, he’s going to have to do two things that are utterly foreign
to him:
1. Stop backing the swampiest of all swamp creatures.
2. Become more honest, and stay that way.
https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/the-ben-shapiro-honesty-hustle
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