'Lunacy': Firebrand conservative's astonishing Trump admission floors analyst

Ben Shapiro just handed his critics everything they've ever wanted — and then explained why it doesn't matter, an analyst wrote Saturday.

In a searing analysis published Friday, writer Mike Brock argued that Shapiro's recent appearance on Sam Harris' podcast amounted to the most damning self-indictment by a Trump defender in years because of what Shapiro willingly conceded.

According to Brock, Shapiro agreed with virtually every liberal critique of Trump on the record.

"He concedes Trump’s family corruption 'has surprised' him. He concedes the tariff catastrophe. He concedes the loyalists are unqualified. He concedes the reframing of January 6 is 'corrosive of American culture.' He concedes Trump’s response to political murders is 'truly terrible and I think morally egregious stuff.' He concedes Trump 'called for the arrests of governors and mayors and even called for members of Congress to be hung for sedition.' He does not contest Sam’s characterization that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He explicitly affirms it: 'I think that it was quite risky what he did between the election and January 6th, as I made clear over and over and over.'

And then Shapiro said he'd vote for him again.

"The guardrails would largely hold... his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of reality,” Shapiro insisted.

When Harris pressed Shapiro on whether any of this was disqualifying, Shapiro's response was four words: "Disqualifying in what sense?"

Brock's verdict was withering. Shapiro, he argued, has constructed an accounting framework in which an attempted coup is simply a line item to be weighed against tax policy, what Shapiro himself called a "bundle."

Brock argued that Shapiro's logic amounts to a simple calculation: take the wannabe dictator because you also get the tax cut, the conservative judges, the Israel alignment, the DEI rollback.

"The plumber fixes the toilet," Brock wrote. "The footprints on the floor are the cost of doing business."

Brock concluded the framework itself was lunatic.

"The position is lunacy, and one must understand, in the case of Mr. Shapiro, that the lunacy is also very much the point. It is not a matter of his believing what he says. It is a matter of his believing that it must be said, regardless of truth, in order to convince people, in the language of liberal discourse, why they should vote for illiberalism," Brock wrote.