Has Ben Shapiro turned on President Trump?
Ben Shapiro did not hold back on his Monday show — sharing multiple issues he has with President Trump.
Transcription (via Mediate):
And then in April, that Trump meme coin announced that the top 220 holders of the meme coin would would be invited to an intimate private dinner with President Trump at his golf club. The top 25 were invited to a VIP White House tour. According to Bloomberg News, 19 of the top 25 holders of that Trump meme coin that have registered on the website’s leaderboard have bought the coins using foreign exchanges that claim to exclude U.S. customers, which means that foreigners are buying a lot of meme coin and then getting meetings with President Trump, like VIP White House tours and all the rest.
This raises the question of influence peddling. If you basically buy a bunch of Trump meme coin and and then funnel money to organizations associated with President Trump so that you can have dinner with Trump, that doesn’t look great. Democratic senators, of course, immediately announced that they wanted an ethics probe. They sent a letter saying, quote, “This latest action raises grave ethics and legal concerns, including the severe risk that President Trump and other officials may be engaging in pay-to-play corruption by selling presidential access to individuals or entities to include foreign nationals and corporate actors with vested interest in federal action, while personally enriching the president and his family.”
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If you want President Trump’s agenda to succeed, taking jets from Qatar is not the way. Taking real estate deals from Qatar is not the way. The largest obstacle to any administration is scandal. From Watergate to Whitewater, scandal-plagued administrations have a really tough time gathering the political capital necessary to actually effectuate their agenda, and that’s why it’s unbelievably important that the Trump administration avoid scandal. That is the reason I am worried about this stuff.
Yes, I think inherently it is bad. I do not think this is good. I think if we switched the names to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, we’d all be freaking out on the Right. Let’s say if Qatar was giving Joe a $400 million jet for his use at his presidential library after his presidency, or if Hunter launched a crypto firm with the son of Antony Blinken, and then launched a series of crypto products in which mysterious strangers, including foreigners who were investing, all while that crypto firm was being regulated by Joe’s administration, we’d all have been pretty upset on the right. We might have said that it was worthy of some coverage.
Shapiro also claimed some of Trump’s actions are “skeezy stuff” and “not America first”.
Specifically, Shapiro took issue with Trump accepting a $400 million plan from Qatar and his handling of the official Trump cryptocurrency.