Ben Shapiro
Republican voters deserve to get answers.
Right now, there is only one question that matters with regard to 2024: Which candidate is the most conservative who can beat Joe Biden?
That means the American people should be asked about the policies that _actually matter_ to them most.
But instead, virtue signaling is determining how the Republican race is run.
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For example, we’re hearing lots of questions about Ukraine. By polling data, this isn’t a top issue. The base Republican voter may have some strong feelings about the war in Ukraine, but it doesn’t make the top 10 list of priorities.
Here’s the latest polling data from Gallup on American’s top issues: economy in general, 14%; high cost of living, raw inflation, 10%; federal budget deficit, 3%; lack of money, 2%; gap between rich and poor, 2%.
Then you look at the noneconomic problems: leadership, 18%; immigration, 8%; unifying the country, 6%; crime and violence, 5%. So where exactly does Ukraine land? It lands, presumably, under foreign policy, foreign aid, and focus overseas: 0%.
Yet at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, Ukraine suddenly became _the_ leading issue.
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I think this is because there has been an attempt inside the Republican Party to capture the issues that Donald Trump supposedly stood for. There’s been an attempt to intellectualize Trump.
But that attempt is vanity.
The reason Trump succeeded was because he was a giant orange pulsating middle finger to the Left. Donald Trump was reactive to a media environment and a Democrat-media complex that hate people who live in the middle of the country, particularly Rust Belt white people who only have a high school degree.
Those people particularly felt dispossessed by the political system. And Donald Trump reached out to them on a personal level.
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Ep. 1768 - Why Are Men In Crisis?
The media suddenly realizes American men are in crisis – but as usual, they ignore the reasons why; Democrats’ sacramental treatment of abortion hits fever pitch; and Europe’s economy hits the skids.
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Yet there’s this bizarre dynamic where Republicans are trying to hit on the issue set that made Donald Trump, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump, however, isn’t an issue set. He’s a person. He’s one of one.
That isn’t stopping some from attempting to cram their own intellectual viewpoints into the Trump movement. In Iowa, Tucker Carlson tried to cudgel some of the candidates into taking positions that he himself likes on Ukraine, even though — again — there are very few people who are prioritizing Ukraine as an important issue, generally.
Carlson interviewed Mike Pence, who really does not have a path to the nomination. He doesn’t have a path because Donald Trump said, untruthfully, that Mike Pence had the singular power vested in him by the Constitution to overturn the results of state certified elections. He did not have the power to do that. Ever since then, he has been considered an enemy by some parts of the MAGA world.
So Tucker asked Pence about Ukraine. And then some took Pence’s response out of context to suggest that because he cares about the war in Ukraine, he doesn’t care about American cities. That line was false. It wasn’t even accurate to Pence’s comments.
But it underscored a dynamic that’s becoming more prevalent within the Republican Party: the attempt to suggest that disagreement is motivated by animus for the country rather than actual differences.
That’s ugly.
Here’s the truth: It is dishonest to suggest that if we took the money we are using in Ukraine and poured it into Detroit, Detroit would be a blooming place filled with joy and wonder. We’ve poured trillions of dollars into poor cities in the United States over the course of the last few years. You can make the case we shouldn’t be giving aid to Ukraine, but these two things do not have to do with one another.
When did it become a conservative principle to pour money into domestic problems? That is a Democratic point. That is not a conservative or Republican point.
When you comment about politics, the easiest task is to say what people want to hear. And the hardest thing in the world is to say what people do not want to hear. I’m seeing an increasing attempt to say things that people want to hear, but present it as though you’re saying something nobody wants to hear.
None of that will win elections. Truth matters. And the American people want to hear it. They’re begging to hear it. Candidates should be judged on their ability to tell those hard truths. We can only hope our political class asks the questions of our candidates that allow us to determine who will truly be able to face down Joe Biden’s lies with truth and conservatism.
**Ben Shapiro**
Editor Emeritus,
The Daily Wire
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