The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, Welcome, welcome. I hope everybody had a great holiday weekend. Great to be together. As always. It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report and lots to cover lots happening in the world and a busy week. A busy week. I’m on the road a little bit. I’ve got a couple of different meetings. I will not be on Capitol Hill, but I’ll be around.
But I’m looking forward to a an interview later this week. With a documentary filmmaker, the documentary is called Gotham, and it’s about the It’s, I think the subtitle is the rise and fall of New York, and it’s about the ’70s and ’80s and into the ’90s and the change of leadership and the whole approach to to policing what was going on in the city of New York. And of course, it’s a little bit personal for me, because I did grow up in, in that area. I went to high school in Jersey City in 1984 to 1988. So I was aware of it. It was a mess in New York and Jersey City too, but it’s a very cool documentary. So we’re gonna talk about that. But here’s why I wanted to. But I wanted to bring something to your attention.
You know, when I tell you the WYNK, what you need to know, it’s things that I’m seeing, things that I’m seeing that I’m hoping to be giving you some insight into so you can see how it develops. Not, not always seeing down the field, but often, often seeing down the field so you know one of the things that we’re watching with Donald Trump’s candidacy for president, is he’s rolling out these videos. He was not getting much coverage from the press, so he was rolling out these videos on topics like education. And if you noticed, I don’t know if you did, but there was education in the education portion. He actually floated an idea. To elect popularly your your principal. Or maybe maybe it was a Superintendent, but the idea that it wouldn’t even be a school board you had to vote for. You could vote for the person in charge of the school. Now, that’s a new idea. I’m not sure it’s very well utilized. Like, excuse me, I think it’s utilized at all. So I don’t know if it’s well thought out or what, but it makes you think it makes you think.
Another example of that is Donald Trump’s proposal to have a contest and he did it, he said He was gonna do it as a, as a. Sort of a. A reality TV show. Which of course, when he does something about reality TV, he knows what he’s talking about. He had 14 or 10 or 14 years. 10, 11, 12,14 years. Is that right? Maybe that’s too many. He was number one in reality TV. I often tell the story. That Donald Trump, when I met Jeff Zucker, who was running CNN at the time Zucker had originally hired Donald Trump when Zucker was running NBC to be The Apprentice. And because that show was actually originated in in London in the in the in England, and so Zucker bought the rights or NBC bought the rights and they hired Donald Trump to be The Apprentice. And Zucker said that Donald Trump was an absolute maniac, an animal about getting to be #1 he wanted everything to be right. They wanted to succeed, and they said he was driven by that and Zucker was. Just sort of. Zucker didn’t like Trump by that point, so he was sort of disparaging, but it sounded to me like somebody who’s driven to be number One knows what he’s doing.
So when Donald Trump floated the idea. Of a a reality TV show in order to decide how and where and what to make new cities, it got a ton of attention because of the idea of a reality TV show. And Trump’s background. But that idea is really sort of, again, unique, thoughtful, if you think about what a new city could be like, you could lay it out completely different than everything we’ve ever seen. It’s hard to retrofit a a big urban city into anything other than some version of itself, right? You can gentrify some buildings. You can change the flow of traffic. You can get pedestrian traffic, but generally you’re in the. The the the form is of a big urban city and you just change the edges or change the the way it looks or how it fits together. So the idea of a totally new city, again very thought provoking. It brings me to this.
The front page of Politico. I love it when I watch, I tell you, Politico is really helpful to be able to have a sense of what exactly they’re doing and what they’re seeing and what they’re worried about. So they’re writing in Politico about the idea that Donald Trump has proposed, which was again thought thought provoking.
And that was, we should bomb the cartels. We should bomb Mexico and the cartels over the fentanyl trade. In other words, the fentanyl is killing our people, literally killing them. You take a hit of fentanyl and you don’t expect. That you die. I mean, if you get Narcan, Narcan, you can quickly you can be saved, but it kills a lot of people. Probably close to 100,000 people a year. Are dying. From the hits from the hits of fentanyl and it’s coming through our border managed by the cartel. Now the the, the the ingredients are put together by the the Chinese right? The the ingredients we know are produced by the Chinese. That’s a different fight, which I think Trump is willing To have. But as to who’s bringing it into the country. It’s the cartels. And so Trump’s idea was to declare war on the cartels and to bomb them militarily. Well, of course this is thought provoking as a lot of. His stuff is and. And Politico is writing it up as it’s a terrible, terrible thing. It’s way too far.
Hold on. When I got ready for this interview with the Gotham documentary, which is a couple of days from now. They spent in the ’80s a bunch of time when the crack epidemic hit the New York City hit New York City, hit New York City’s population it it was disproportionately devastating African American communities. And so, Mayor, I’m not sure why that matters. Except Mayor Koch, when Mayor Koch was addressing this in that period, a big Democrat, he said we should have the death penalty for drug dealers and we should use it. And he went on a little riff. And my point is only that at that time, that would have been fairly controversial for a Democrat mayor and a Democrat to be so. And you know, usually the death penalty is if someone kills someone, they get the death penalty. You know, that’s the tradition. And that’s the traditional law murder would get you a a a chance of the death penalty. In this case, Koch was saying drug dealing. Should be enough. And Trump is saying fentanyl through the border should be enough. It’s kind of an again. Thought provoking, but in a tradition. When things get serious enough that you’re losing lives, then you should be willing to consider it.
And what you need to know is there are a bunch of things happening. A bunch of aspects of American life that we are so frustrated with and concerned about and worried that they’re going the wrong direction, that you’re seeing people who otherwise would not have necessarily sort of gone so far, if that’s the right phrase in order to look at some of these problems and look and. And come up with edgy solutions.
You know the the another one that I I’m I’m always surprised by is that for years, 25 years certainly since the early ’90s the conventional wisdom that tariffs the conventional wisdom was that tariffs would devastate the economy. Tariffs would devastate the economy. Donald Trump’s tariffs on China. It didn’t devastate the economy at all. In fact, Trump’s point is it raised a bunch of money cause you charge them a tariff. You get that money. Into our our coffers. But it didn’t change. And you can and and I know the purists will come back and say, well, a tariff just gets passed on to the consumer. I understand. I understand that theory. But at least in terms of showing that you understand who’s cheating and who’s not playing by the rules, pretty effective. So it’s —
But what you need to know is back to this Politico is worried about this. Politico’s worried about the fact that Republicans have embraced Trump’s idea. So it was Trump’s idea to bomb the cartels over fentanyl. And what you need to know is that it’s getting enough traction that it’s causing, it’s causing Politico and others to object to it. And to pay attention to it.
And that’s part of what I I gotta tell you, that’s one of the reasons why as things are Heading in the wrong direction in too many ways. You are seeing a real hunger for solutions that are not coming from the usual suspects and and from the usual categories, and so that’s an example. That’s a great example there, you know. In fact, I tried out the build your own cities, new cities idea, Trump’s idea on a friend of mine who’s not really into Trump but not really into politics, he loved the idea. He thought that was a great idea. He thought that was exactly the idea that that could be really great and you pick a place where you’re gonna have a new city and you go in there with a new set of rules and you figure out the regulatory rules. Ohh, here’s another example. Another example. Sorry I’m looking at my notes again.
What you need to know is when you think creatively. If you’re green, if you’re worried about carbon in the air, if you’re worried about pollution, the path forward is nuclear, and that was not something that was being talked about or understood. I don’t know, five years ago? Maybe maybe 4 – 4 or five years ago. That was during the Trump administration when he obviously was willing to drill, baby, drill and to permit everything under the sun and get out of the way of of the big oil companies and everybody else because we wanted to get energy independent and it worked. But the the reality is nuclear is not. And by the way, let me be clear, if you’re a if you’re a, if you’re an oil company, you don’t like nuclear, right? You want. You want everybody to stay on oil and gas, so it’s not exactly currying favor with all the supposed interests. But it’s the path forward. Anybody serious knows it. And guys like Brandon Weichert, who’s been on the show before and has written on China especially and on space and Weichert would tell you. If you don’t get the nuclear figured out so you can dominate in space, the Chinese are going to. The Chinese are going to be there and dominate in space. They get. They are making no qualms about it.
So what you need to know is thinking outside the normal categories at this moment in history, very valuable and it’s one of the things that Trump does. It’s one of the things that the things that Trump does well, alright. So we’re gonna. I will get to that Gotham documentary I think in a Couple of days. I’m I’m about halfway through. It’s two hours. It’s a little bit too long, to be honest. It’s hard to watch 2 hour documentaries, but it’s pretty good. A lot of Manhattan Institute folks who are really impressive are a part of that being interviewed. And I will get to that. But interesting to see Mayor Cuomo calling for the death penalty for drug dealers just like Trump is calling for the death penalty or bombing of the cartels over fentanyl. So some things old become New again and that’s what you need to know.
We’ll take a break and we’ll be right back. It’s Ed Martin here on The Pro America Report back in a moment.
