The Ben Shapiro Show
Ep. 2266 - Mamdani Can't LIFT...Plus Democrats Unleash Their 2028 CONTENDER?
25 Aug 2025
Chapter 1: What does Zoran Mamdani's lifting attempt reveal about political image?
Zor Mamdani apparently cannot lift like one of those shake weights. And we now have video of it and it's pretty impressive. Democrats are starting to retell the person who they think is their front runner for 2028. And all updates from Russia, Ukraine. First, we've been rolling out a lot of new content over at Daily Wire Plus. Journey to the UFC. Dr. Jordan Peterson's answer to the call.
Michael Moles' new docu-series, The Pope and the Fuhrer. The Isabel Brown Show premiering September 8th. And now another announcement to mark a decade of the Daily Wire. We're bringing back the whole crew for a brand new show. Here's your first look at Friendly Fire. September 10th, we celebrate the 10-year anniversary of The Daily Wire. 10 years of leftist tears.
New shows, big moves, bigger targets. And first up is our newest show, Friendly Fire. We're on the show. This is it. No safe words, no moderator. My original proposal had been that Noel should be moderator. We all agree on that one. We're celebrating our first decade and kicking off the next 10 years by doing what we do best. Picking arguments, starting fights, and filming the whole thing.
This is enough small talk, I think. I got a little hungry. I hope that your wife made you that sandwich. Oh my God. I think we do need a moderator, just a programming note. September 10th on Daily Wire. Friendly Fire premieres live September 10th on Daily Wire Plus. If you're not a member yet, now would be the time. Go to dailywireplus.com, use code summer, save 40% on a new annual membership.
Well, perhaps Democrats are learning that soy is actually not an amazing nutritional base for all things. They might be learning this from Zoran Mamdani, who is, of course, the likely next mayor of New York City.
Now, Democrats have been claiming that he's the hot new thing in the Democratic Party, that Zoran Mamdani is going to lead the way to a bright new socialist future for America, starting with the most powerful financial capital on planet Earth. But if we're speaking about power, if we're speaking about socialist strongmen, Zoran Mamdani is going to be hard-pressed
no pun intended, to actually be a strong man, pun intended. Zar Mamdani yesterday showed up at the annual Men's Day Open Streets event in Brooklyn on Saturday, where a bunch of dudes were lifting, apparently. And the 33-year-old socialist, again, he's 33, which is like young in the prime of life. He tried to bench. Now, my dude, my dude.
Let me just say that if you are going to do something like this and you're a public figure, you have to know your limitations. Like, Zor Mamdani must have at some point been in a gym. I mean, maybe not, given how this video went. But if you don't know how much you can bench, this is not a great time to try it out. It's like in front of a giant crowd of people in the middle of a mayoral race.
So he shows up. And he takes a couple of 45s, like two plates, and he stacks them on the bar. So this is maybe 135 pounds total. And now let's just be clear. A decent bench for a man is his own body weight. And that's like a decent bench for a man. Zohar Mamdani, I assume, weighs more than 135 pounds. Maybe not, but I assume that he does.
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Chapter 2: How are Democrats positioning Wes Moore for the 2028 presidential race?
He does not get three. He gets two very assisted, very, very assisted bench presses at 135 pounds. So that's not great. Well, Mayor Eric Adams and ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, both of whom left, pounced on the opportunity, according to the New York Post. Mayor Adams went to the same exact event and then proceeded to just knock out a bunch of 135 pound lifts.
He then called him mom scrawny as opposed to mom Donnie. But the only thing he can lift is your taxes. Andrew Cuomo said it's easy to talk. It's hard to carry the burden. He provided no evidence of his own bench press prowess in his ex post. But, you know, I assume that Andrew Cuomo can lift a little bit. His brother, Chris Cuomo, is very big into into the lifting.
Also, Mamdani literally had to take off his designer boots to kick a stranger's soccer ball at an inflatable target. So here's the thing. I think that for the vast majority of normal men, this is very, very embarrassing.
But the left has decided that they are done with male normality, like truly done with it, that the future of the Democratic Party is apparently going to be an extraordinarily feminized party, not just because an outsized share of Democrats are now single women, but also because the kinds of men the Democratic Party wants to attract are not the kinds of men who lift heavy weights.
This is why you've seen over the course of the last several years, a spate of articles talking about how lifting, going to the gym has become Republican coded. There's no reason it should be Republican coded, except if you just mean that testosterone is Republican coded. The idea that you should stay healthy and that you should lift is Republican coded.
And that goes to why do you want a sort of weak and feminized America? Why do you? I mean, the media clearly do. There's a piece from Axios that is sort of fascinating about the supposed redefinition of identity under President Trump. And there's something very telling about it, how they see identity.
Quote, through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.
The MAGA movement's obsession with American identity and Western civilization is shaping federal policy far more than in Trump's first term, fueling a reckoning over who belongs and what history should be remembered. So first of all, why shouldn't we all be a little obsessed with American identity and Western civilization?
I thought that's what America is about, like what it means to be an American. And a huge part of that is being the apotheosis of Western civilization. And what are we supposed to represent? Non-Western civilizations, third world civilizations, other civil, like what, what is the implication?
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Chapter 3: What legal authority does President Trump have to deploy the National Guard?
I mean, I did write an entire book on this. Lions and Scavengers is legitimately about the desire by so many to tear away at the fundamental foundations of a successful civilization. And it is about tearing away traditional gender roles and the nuclear family and the meritocracy and biblical values. That is what the book is about. So not that I was prescient, but like it's all in the book.
But this does speak to the Democratic Party and the move to the left that is being fostered by, again, this sort of a feat set of liberals at places like Axios or apparently in the New York City primary. By the way, the results of this are very clear. If you get rid of things like biblical values, traditional masculinity, the nuclear family, what do you end up with?
You end up with a bunch of rootless and useless young adults. Already coming up, young American adults apparently aren't getting married. They aren't having kids. Things are not going amazing. Plus, Wes Moore, is he going to be the Democrats' 2028 nominee? And President Trump, can he send troops into Chicago? How's that going to work? Get to all of that in a minute. First,
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Chapter 4: What revelations came from Ghislaine Maxwell's testimony?
and traditional gender roles. Somehow that was white supremacy. Well, the result of that is precisely what we are seeing today. Hey, well, I do think, I do think that at some point, Democrats are going to have to steer back towards sanity because they can't do this. I mean, they can do it in fits and starts.
They can elect a Zoran Mamdani in New York, or they can elect a Brandon Johnson in Chicago, the least popular mayor in America. You can elect an AOC in a borough of Brooklyn or something. You can do those things. But on a national level, do most Americans want that? Is that a thing most Americans want? I think the answer is no.
And so it's fascinating to see as Democrats start looking for their legit 2028 candidate. Now, I know that Gavin Newsom's been making a big splash. So I asked our sponsors over at Comet, Perplexity's new web browser, I asked, what is the order of the Democratic primaries in 2028? Because it makes a very big difference in terms of who the 2028 Democratic nominee is. So if you recall, back in 2024,
Joe Biden, in an attempt to stack the primaries so he would have no real competition, he was afraid that if he allowed Iowa and New Hampshire to be first in the nation for the Democrats, he might get some sort of insurgent candidacy from Bernie Sanders again or some other left wing member of the Democratic Party. And so he stacked it. He put South Carolina first.
That, of course, was a callback to his 2020 race where he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, but then won South Carolina and basically swept the rest of the primaries. While the current order still retains South Carolina at the head of the primaries, however, the DNC is currently debating the calendar.
Strong competition is emerging among states like South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Nevada to obtain or reclaim early voting status. The DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee will determine the order. A decision is not expected until at least late 2025, possibly 2026. New Hampshire is fighting very hard to restore its long-held first in the nation status. But the bottom line is this.
The most important state for the Democratic Party primaries is South Carolina. So if I ask, comment then, what percentage of the 2024 South Carolina Democratic Party primary electorate was black in 2024? The answer was 56% of 2024 South Carolina Democratic Party primary voters were black. In 2016, by the way, that number was 61%. So how do you think Gavin Newsom is going to do with that crowd?
I mean, maybe he will do somewhat better than Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg would do, but he's not going to blow it out of the park, which means the Democrats are looking to another face. Who is that other face? That face is Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. So Wes Moore has been the person who I'm hearing a lot about from my friends in the Democratic Party.
I hear his name come up a lot that a lot of people are very hot on Wes Moore. He, of course, is the governor of Maryland. Here is George Clooney talking up Wes Moore recently with Jake Tapper on CNN. But who I think is levitating above that is Wes Moore. I think he is the guy that has handled this tragedy in Baltimore beautifully. He's two tours of duty in Afghanistan, active duty.
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Chapter 5: How is the Democratic Party responding to crime in major cities?
Absolutely. So, for example, he doesn't need to do this. Once Trump has attacked him over Baltimore, he should just stick to that. Westmore instead is attacking Trump for sending troops to D.C. That's foolish. It's unconstitutional. It's a direct violation of the 10th Amendment.
And for a party that talks about state rights, it's amazing how they're having such a big government approach in the way they're conducting public safety. Again, it is not unconstitutional for the president to send troops to Washington, D.C. That is fully in line with the Constitution of the United States. President Trump responded to Governor Wes Moore, who invited him to walk the city.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump criticized the Maryland governor's record on crime. He said if Baltimore needs assistance, he'll send in the National Guard like he did to L.A. and Washington, D.C. He also noted he had given Moore a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge, adding he might have to rethink the decision.
Governor Westmore of Maryland, he said, has asked in a rather nasty and provocative tone that I walk the streets of Maryland with him. I assume he's talking about out of control crime in Baltimore. As president, I'd much prefer he clean up this crime disaster before I go there for a walk.
He says Westmore's record on crime is a very bad one unless he fudges his figures on crime like many of the other blue states are doing. But if Westmore needs help like Gavin Newsom did in L.A., I will send in the troops, which is being done in nearby D.C., and quickly clean up the crime.
Now, again, it seems to me that the reactionary nature of our politics is leading everybody into some box canyons politically. The reality is that the president of the United States does not have the unilateral authority, again, unless he somehow declares an insurrection is taking place to simply send in the National Guard to local cities to clean up the crime. And there is a reason for that.
We do not want the federal government being in the business of enforcing local law. At that point, states cease to exist. That is a problem. If you're on the right side of the aisle, that is a problem for you. Imagine Wes Moore as president of the United States.
Imagine Joe Biden just a couple of years ago as president of the United States, sending in troops to enforce local law in places like Florida or Texas, picking which laws to enforce. You'd be upset about that. And you'd have a right to be upset about that. That is not how the Constitution was drawn. This is why I am less than enthused about the idea of now deploying troops to Chicago.
Again, there's a difference between deploying troops to L.A. to enforce immigration law, federal immigration law, and deploying troops to Washington, D.C., which is, in fact, a federal district. Now, apparently, the Pentagon is planning a military deployment in Chicago, according to the Washington Post.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of cashless bail policies on public safety?
But when it comes to signing legal documents, you want to have the entire picture as just part of it, which suits you. When we come to a stage where you have to sign documents, we would need a very clear understanding by everybody that the person who is signing is legitimate. And according to the Ukrainian Constitution, Mr. Zelensky is not at the moment.
OK, so what he's saying is, sure, we'll meet with Zelensky, but we'll call him illegitimate the whole time. And then we won't allow him to actually sign the documents on the other side, which is a wild position to take, given the fact that, again, if Russia wants a peace deal, which they clearly do not at this point, they feel they can continue to ratchet up the pressure.
If they wanted to do something, they wouldn't be doing that. OK, meanwhile. as I've said a thousand times, the biggest barrier to a next Republican administration remains the economy. So on Friday, Jerome Powell signaled that he would, in fact, likely be lowering those interest rates come September. That, of course, made investors pretty happy.
Investors were excited that finally the monetary supply would be loosened at least somewhat, that there would be an ability to get to get easier loans, that mortgage rates would go down, and all of the rest. However, the labor market continues to remain somewhat stagnant, and there is ballast to the tariff policies that President Trump has been pushing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the labor market has moved front and center for the Federal Reserve, highlighting its fragility and risks to the economy. The good news is that unemployment remains low. Employers haven't been all that interested in laying people off. The bad news is that companies haven't been all that interested in hiring either.
This precarious situation means even a relatively small increase in layoffs could lead the economy to start shutting jobs, a process that can be difficult to reverse once it starts. Worries about that possibility have come to the fore at the Fed, especially after revisions included in that July employment report showed much weaker job growth in recent months than previously thought.
So on Friday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell signaled that they were going to cut rates because of the risk of a deteriorating jobs market. He said if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment. We've already seen the pace of hiring slowing markedly. In June, the hires rate was just 3.3%, according to the Labor Department.
That was below 3.9% in February 2020. And it was much less than the 4.6% registered November 2021 when the job market was coming back from the pandemic. Companies were already adding new employees at a slower pace when President Trump came back into office. Then we were going to do deregulation and lower taxes and all the rest. It turns out the tariffs have thrown a wrench into all of that.
So the Federal Reserve is going to try to apparently jog the markets by lowering those interest rates. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken a $10 billion stake in Intel. And again, I am deeply uncomfortable with this. This is not good, laissez-faire free market policy. It is not.
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