The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be with you today.
We’ve got some interesting interviews. Ted Malloch, our old friend, will join us. He’s got a piece about how badly the elections turned out in the midterms, but he also is commenting in his piece. And we’ll ask him directly about Donald Trump. He doesn’t sound so convinced about Trump running, I have to tell you. We’ll get to that a minute. Also, we got a request from one of the folks last week who listened to the program. They wanted to hear again the Hal Shurtleff interview. He’s the Constitution Camp founder, and I said I’d play that again when I saw a good spot to do it. So I will do that today also.
All right, what you need to know today, Donald Trump is running for president. And so what are you supposed to think about that? Rupert Murdoch has supposedly, I haven’t seen the memo, but he supposedly sent a memo telling all of his properties, which is The Wall Street Journal and Fox News and a bunch of others, that he doesn’t want Trump.
So is that a big deal? Yeah, it’s a big deal, but I’m not sure it’s THE big deal. It would be a bigger deal if somebody said they didn’t want Trump, but Trump didn’t. Let me say it this way. If Murdoch said that about a candidate who needed exposure, it would be a problem .But Donald Trump doesn’t need exposure. He’s now been president. He’s got a record.
I actually don’t think it matters. In fact, I was on the television, on Lindell TV, I was filling in on Tamara Scott’s show, and I had John Schlafly on as a guest. And I made this point to John, and it’s this. I think that MSNBC and CNBC and CNN especially, will want Trump to run because they like the attention, they like the action, and they’ll put him on TV a lot, which is fine with him. He doesn’t need to talk to conservatives. They already know he’s there. I think that’s not a problem. So now back to this. What do I think?
I think Donald Trump has earned every right to run and frankly, to be the nominee. I don’t think that I’ve seen other people when they tell me that he’s too divisive or exhausting or all those things. He is any of those things only because he’s been created that way by the media.
Now, you can say, well, it doesn’t matter, Ed, how they did it to him. They did it to him. And that is somewhat persuasive, because it doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, dishonest, dishonorable. It just is, at this point. And therefore, what can you do? How do you unring that bell? How do you change the dynamic?That’s a fair point, but if you’re Donald Trump, you not only succeeded as president, you were outstanding. And you look at the elections and you say something was done at least unprecedentedly, meaning they at least changed the rules to run the election if they didn’t steal it. And so if you’re him, you’re saying, you know what, I got one shot. I don’t care, I don’t mind. I’m going to go. Everyone is going to say I can’t do it. They’re going to say this, that and the other thing. A bunch of people are, but they’re lining up to make it seem like Karl Rove and Paul Ryan and all these people don’t want him and out in the normal lands they’re saying, well, he must be on the right side of things.
So look, I think he’s going to run. Excuse me. I think he’s going to win. I think he’s going to win the nomination. I’m not sure he’ll win the general election. But I don’t think anyone at this point knows whether that will happen. And they don’t know whether any candidate can win. Because at this point, it looks to me like in 2024, the day of the election, you’re going to have 46% of the country be on one side and 46% on the other side. You’re going to have sophisticated get out the vote efforts, and you’re going to have targeted races in five or six places. And whoever does a better job in those five or six places will be the winner.
And I don’t think it matters if that’s DeSantis. I don’t think it matters if it’s anybody. None of it matters. I just don’t think that the candidate is going to make that big a difference. I really don’t. I think that what is happening is that the system we’re in is sort of trapped. We’re trapped in a system that’s yielding for lots of reasons that include the power of the media and big tech who want to see a close election because it gets them more attention and more ratings. We’re locked in a system that’s going to keep us closely divided. And the fact is, Trump is as good as anybody at surviving to go and go toe to toe with whomever. And if it’s Biden, fine. If it’s Kamala. Come on.
One last point. Someone asked me about who would be the vice president for anybody. And here’s what I have to tell you. When you go to run for present or vice president, you can’t have a chance of something bad coming out. You just can’t risk that something could be. So the people who will be in the pool for running for president are people that have had to run hard races and succeed and survive. So you’ve been a senator and run two or three times. You’ve been a House member, maybe you ran for governor. It’s not going to be anybody who’s a newbie. There’s going to be no Sarah Palins ever again. Meaning you’re just going to test it. So you say what’s the universe of people that Donald Trump would pick, maybe Kari Lake. She’s now been through the ringer, that’s true. But more than likely it’s some senator or some congressman. He doesn’t need anything. When he picked Pence, he was picking Pence to assure conservatives that there would be somebody that they recognized in the White House. Now they recognize Trump. And so I don’t think that they need, he doesn’t need to do any of that. But I believe Trump was impressive as usual. The people allied against him to say he’s dead have done this over and over again. The media is totally unfair. But by the way, being unfair doesn’t mean it changes anything. It’s still a big, big problem. And so we’ll see what happens.
But I also think it’s good for the country. And here’s one last comment which you need to know.
Donald Trump singlehandedly moved the Republican Party from a party that was highbrow and corporate and open to corporate positions like open borders and more immigration and big trade deals. He turned it to a fighting party that will take on China. Actually, instead of just talking. That will use tariffs, actually, instead of just talking. That will stand up against the system that is gutting our jobs, that will stand up for securing the border and actually do it. He changed the whole, the trade deals. There’s no multilateral trade deals anymore. It’s just, that’s not happening because it was a giveaway. He also changed the way we look at all these multi, these extra constitutional, extra sovereign organizations like the UN, WTO, all these places. He changed how we think about that. The Republican Party didn’t have that, at least even that diversity of opinion. You were in the minority in the Republican Party, if you were anti free trade deals or antiimmigration. Trump changed that and he’s changing that again. Another big one is the neocons dominated the Republican Party and Trump totally shattered that. So he’s definitely got a path to win. He’s definitely got a path to make a big, big difference. And it’s going to be exciting and interesting. It’s not going to be dull. Never is with Donald Trump. Alright. That’s what you need to know.
We’ll take a break. We’ll be right back. We will talk with my friend Ted Malloch. Be right back. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
