Juno News - October 28, 2020


Ep 18 ｜ Conrad Black ｜ The Case for Donald Trump


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 14 minutes

Words per Minute

161.9001

Word Count

12,122

Sentence Count

14

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

5


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.800 In being so successful in the in the real estate business in the toughest city in the world
00:00:08.080 and reviving so quickly from a real economic crisis and with such ingenuity and in becoming
00:00:15.840 an instant and for a prolonged period television star something that proverbially millions of
00:00:24.240 Americans spend their whole lives trying to do without much success in all of that
00:00:28.560 I believe that he achieved more before he became president than any previous president except
00:00:36.720 those who were president who had been instrumental in founding the country and setting up its institutions
00:00:44.400 Donald Trump is the most polarizing figure in modern American politics
00:00:48.640 his critics don't just oppose him they loathe him they despise him and they interpret his every move
00:00:54.080 as an existential threat and crisis for the country and for our civilization but those
00:01:00.000 who can get past his rough exterior and hyperbolic rhetoric see a different man a champion of the
00:01:05.920 working class a successful businessman who takes a pragmatic approach to policy and governs as a
00:01:11.360 conservative an outsider who is unafraid to do things differently and a patriot who loves the
00:01:17.280 American people and strives to serve his country and help put it back on the right track my guest today
00:01:23.520 on the season finale of the true north speaker series is lord conrad black an historian author
00:01:30.000 businessman media baron and member of the british house of lords unlike almost every other political
00:01:36.240 observer black took trump seriously from day one he recognized trump's unique ability to connect with
00:01:43.040 disaffected voters and saw how he used the power of celebrity to steamroll the opposition and pull
00:01:49.040 off the politically impossible being elected to the highest office with no prior political experience
00:01:54.480 and without kowtowing to political correctness or the dc establishment it's always a pleasure to hear
00:01:59.600 from lord black who is a prolific writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of british american and canadian
00:02:05.520 history in our interview today we focus exclusively on u.s politics and black makes the case for trump's
00:02:12.320 re-election we talk about trump's upbringing the successes he had in the business world how he
00:02:17.680 built his personal brand with an eye on politics and how he burst onto the political scene like a bull
00:02:22.640 in a china shop we also discuss the media's incessant dishonesty the over the top and politicized
00:02:28.640 covet 19 reaction the resiliency of the u.s republic plus lord black makes a bold prediction about the
00:02:36.000 upcoming election i hope you enjoy our conversation please like this video share it with your friends
00:02:41.280 and family and leave me a comment below don't forget to subscribe to true north and if you'd like to
00:02:46.320 support this podcast please visit tnc.news donate
00:03:01.680 well lord black thank you so much for joining the turn our speaker series it's such a pleasure to have
00:03:05.840 you on the show thank you for having me so i really want to get into your book donald j trump a president
00:03:13.920 like no other but before we do you recently wrote a column in the national post talking about the
00:03:19.440 coronavirus and you know in in ontario we're going back into lockdowns and and it just seems like we
00:03:25.680 don't really have good leadership on this on this topic so before we get into uh president trump can you
00:03:31.360 tell us a little bit about your thoughts on the coronavirus the the lockdowns and where we where we
00:03:36.800 are uh sort of you know coming into the fall of 2020 here it's a virus that can't be contained the
00:03:45.760 only way to eliminate it is with the vaccine and so all that can be done is to moderate
00:03:52.800 uh the potential for its communication uh and the only way to do that is to take these drastic lockdown
00:04:04.560 measures that cause terrible economic problems as well as social problems and psychological problems to
00:04:12.800 people upon whom relative isolation is imposed as well as economic hardship and uh it is not logical to do
00:04:22.000 that because we now have after having coped with this all around the world now since certainly since
00:04:29.600 march and in some places earlier than that a fair amount of information about it as well as a good
00:04:34.720 many therapeutic palliatives of it and the position we've arrived at is that we can see that using
00:04:43.360 american figures but they they would go for other certainly advanced countries anyway including this one
00:04:49.760 that uh for those under the age of 65 uh the the chances of a fatality are uh 99.997 percent against
00:05:03.680 so a very very small number of people and for those above the age of 65 the chances of avoiding a fatality
00:05:14.800 you're 94.6 percent again very good odds though obviously that does involve some danger to uh to a
00:05:23.600 significant number of people um so logically the way to cope with this given that uh the impact of the
00:05:35.440 coronavirus uh does not reduce the average life expectancy of a population it afflicts chiefly elderly people
00:05:44.800 uh now the loss of such people is no less sadness than anyone else i'm not i'm not suggesting that but
00:05:52.960 uh they are comparatively easily identifiable group and if they live autonomously they can be advised and
00:06:02.800 helped in observing uh sensible precautions to insulate them from the danger and if they're in homes where
00:06:12.000 they're under administration of other those places can be regulated properly now that was a terrible
00:06:18.400 problem at the outset we didn't know that and the fatality rates in some of those places were shocking
00:06:25.200 but we do know it now and i would suspect that if the elderly people were more vulnerable albeit 94.6 percent
00:06:34.480 of them survived were canvassed they would say for heaven's sakes don't shut down the whole country for
00:06:41.600 us and and we have to keep in mind here that um uh even even for the elderly in every age group symptoms
00:06:54.240 are zero to minimal for over 90 percent of people so the fact is all looking mournful hysterical
00:07:04.480 talk about you know a grim milestone of the united states 85 000 new cases yesterday well you know that
00:07:16.240 means uh 84 150 people uh emerge after minimal symptoms with immunity to the virus now we don't know
00:07:31.360 how long the immunity lasts but at least four months and possibly much longer so instead of it being a grim
00:07:37.840 milestone i mean the united states is a country where 8 000 people a day die well if it happens that
00:07:45.920 10 percent of them die with the coronavirus bearing in mind that 80 percent of people who are deemed to die
00:07:52.720 of the coronavirus have other problems that have contributed to their death and it's hard to figure out
00:07:58.240 which is the effective cause of the death and that the average age of a coronavirus afflicted death is in
00:08:07.120 the united states 78 which is the average actuarial life expectancy of an american 78 that we see a
00:08:16.480 completely ludicrous picture of the entire society being uh induced or coerced into a state of
00:08:28.080 social and economic and cultural stagnation for the sake of not necessarily increasing materially the
00:08:35.920 chances of of assisting that one percent who are actually vulnerable one percent of the total population
00:08:44.320 uh for from assisting them and increasing their likely survival rate so i mean it the whole thing is
00:08:52.720 nonsense and in my opinion it has been conducted in this country because of a mindless emulation
00:08:59.360 of what has been forced to some degree on the united states by the democratic opposition to the
00:09:05.760 incumbent administration because from the beginning they saw that if they could get a shutdown of the
00:09:10.480 economy they would produce a an economic depression that they could then blame on the president he had a one
00:09:18.160 election prior to the coveted outbreak everyone conceded he was going to win he had full employment
00:09:24.800 and high standing in the poll and uh and and this was a device by which his opponents have tried to
00:09:32.400 defeat him well that's you know that's how politics work but because it applies in the united states we
00:09:38.240 should not be emulating it here well there does seem to just be such a disconnect between the what we now
00:09:45.680 know about the coronavirus i mean i you know i will say the beginning it was a mysterious virus it came
00:09:50.560 from china we didn't know the origin we didn't really know any of the things about it but but now
00:09:55.200 that we know we've had you know we've been living with this thing for six seven eight months and to
00:10:00.160 still be going back into lockdowns in ontario you know like there just seems to be such a disconnect
00:10:06.320 between the reality and the facts that you lay out in your column and what we're being told by the
00:10:12.000 so-called sort of expert class that that governs us would you would you really put it all on trump
00:10:17.440 or do you think that there's anything else at play there well look it's not for me to say that there
00:10:25.760 is nothing else at play but the experts the so-called experts aren't united and they aren't consistent i
00:10:30.800 mean the famous dr fauci has been you know he's faced in all four directions on the issue of use of
00:10:36.960 the mask he started out saying you didn't need it now he's saying that there should be a national
00:10:41.120 mandate for it in confined spaces which is probably technically true but isn't constitutional you can't
00:10:48.080 tell people what they have to wear and it's sort of a flip side of these things with people in quebec
00:10:54.400 wearing uh uh clothes or or articles on themselves you know necklaces or bracelets or brooches or something
00:11:04.880 that imply what religion they are i mean these are fundamental freedoms that are involved here
00:11:12.000 unless you can make a real case for a public health uh general interest an eminent domain of the public
00:11:20.000 interest now to some degree i think you could do that about wearing masks in confined places but
00:11:25.600 but this idea of joe biden's of wearing them everywhere wearing them on the sidewalk and so
00:11:30.640 forth this is just a lot of nonsense and you know some of these things have already been thrown out
00:11:35.520 by uh federal district courts in the u.s um you know i think it's not for me to impute motives to
00:11:42.960 people and we're you know even though we're all unlicensed psychiatrists i think there's not much doubt
00:11:48.640 that the democrats screamed for a shutdown and when trump was slightly hesitant and accused him of being
00:11:54.880 anti-scientist and a kind of flatter society philistine and then when he said all right we'll have
00:12:05.200 a shutdown we'll have a quick reopening uh they went along with a shutdown and argued about the reopening
00:12:11.600 but you know meanwhile he's he's got most of the unemployed back into work and uh and and the the
00:12:19.520 fatality rate is still only a third of what it was at its worst and uh the normal period for vaccines
00:12:27.120 been accelerated by over a year and when the vaccine comes to apparently be either an american or british
00:12:33.280 vaccine or both uh but it will uh it will quickly be obviously made available to everybody uh in every
00:12:41.840 country and and that is the only answer to it in the meantime the less economic and psychological damage we do to
00:12:49.760 to our populations the better it is i i'm a great supporter of doug ford i think he's a good man and
00:12:55.600 a good premier but in this case uh i i disagree with him i'm a supporter of john tory too he's an old
00:13:03.200 friend of mine as well he's a good mayor but i think i think they've both been galled here by the
00:13:08.320 by the federal government and uh you know again i'm not one of these who is going to say that the uh the
00:13:17.040 governments that exercise the authority that they do and in these unusual circumstances are doing it
00:13:23.120 because they enjoy uh that greater authority and then they're trying to restructure society along
00:13:29.840 lines that it hasn't politically authorized there there i there may be some truth to that but i'm
00:13:35.760 not making that allegation i'm just saying it's mistaken policy i'm not even keeping those doing it
00:13:40.640 well i really want to get into your book i i just finished uh reading it and i think it's
00:13:47.280 really insightful uh the biography that you wrote on donald j trump so much of what we see from the
00:13:54.160 media so much of the sort of character that's presented to us doesn't always really reflect
00:13:59.360 reality uh during the republican convention we saw a lot of speeches really talking to trump's character
00:14:04.880 uh the kind of family man that he is the opportunities that he's given the way that he
00:14:09.520 reaches out to workers and people who you know the little guys along the way and that's not really
00:14:15.680 something that we see at all through the media your book did a great job of really uh explaining that the
00:14:22.560 sort of early years of trump so i'm hoping you can help sort of walk us through the the early years in
00:14:28.800 trump's life you know growing up his time that he spent in um at the new york military academy and
00:14:35.360 then also just sort of entering the scene um of real estate development in new york city
00:14:42.800 oh well yes i mean are you giving me an open-ended mandate to give you basically trump's
00:14:48.800 life prior to becoming president well maybe you could just tell us a little bit of the sort of
00:14:53.280 highlights of his early life prior to kind of bursting onto the political scene in 2015.
00:14:59.680 yeah okay well look his father was a wealthy developer but outer borough developer queens
00:15:05.760 and brooklyn um and and a little beyond the the five boroughs of new york city uh he wasn't active
00:15:15.680 in manhattan and um and he was a specialist in uh middle-class residential and uh donald went out um
00:15:29.520 as a young man as a high school student he would go out with one of his father's employees to collect
00:15:34.880 rent and they often had real problems collecting the rent including a few occasions when firearms were
00:15:41.120 used so he concluded that he did not want to be collecting rent in other than the highest income
00:15:48.080 buildings so he was always devoted all his life from earliest years he wanted to be a developer like his
00:15:55.680 father but he always wanted to make the socio-culturally big jump from the outer boroughs
00:16:02.640 to manhattan as you know new york city is a very large city and there is a great really the outer
00:16:09.680 boroughs are bronx brooklyn queens staten island are are you know they're quite indistinguishable from
00:16:18.960 many other cities but manhattan which is what everyone thinks of as new york it is is something
00:16:24.640 altogether different and unique in the world and um and a tremendous concentration of uh highly
00:16:32.560 influential people uh and uh because he had a knife mother discovered that he had who came from scotland
00:16:44.000 originally he had a knife i mean not a bare bladed knife uh what do you call that kind of knife where
00:16:53.520 you press something that comes open uh switchblade i guess uh but he didn't use it or he didn't threaten
00:16:59.600 use it or he just had one so this so alarmed his parents they sent him to the new york state military
00:17:05.760 academy and he he excelled there despite the regimentation and the lack of privacy with a very good
00:17:12.000 student and uh was highly regarded for his uh uh adherence to the rules and his punctuality and all
00:17:21.200 sorts of things like that and then he he had a good education he went to um fordham university and the
00:17:28.720 university of wharton where he studied uh they they had a real estate development course and he studied
00:17:36.080 that and did well there and graduated all of his holidays from early high school right through
00:17:42.320 university worked in his father's business in higher and higher positions but he knew personally
00:17:50.320 how to mix for example the uh the insecticide to keep cockroaches instead of buying at wholesale they'd make
00:17:58.480 it themselves and he knew how to do that he knew every aspect of the business how to build a building
00:18:04.640 every aspect of the construction how to finance it all of that he came in very well prepared uh
00:18:12.560 practically and academically and his father made him the chief operating officer of his company just in
00:18:19.680 his 20s and then donald lived in manhattan and again unlike millions of other new yorkers his commute was
00:18:29.920 from manhattan out to queens and not the other way around and then he he made his first splash in the
00:18:37.360 development business in new york city in manhattan in the old commodore hotel which some of your viewers
00:18:44.000 would remember next to grand central station between grand central station and the chrysler building
00:18:49.360 was insolvent but at that time the commuter trains had lost ground to other forms of the transport and
00:18:59.520 it was a somewhat depressed area in that part of manhattan just in the lower 30s and upper 20s
00:19:08.160 east side and um uh and and chrysler building was insolvent it was taken over by someone many of your
00:19:18.080 viewers would remember canadian jack can't cook and what donald did was he took over the
00:19:26.560 the commodore hotel by um putting together a plan to renovate it was in a very decrepit conditions a
00:19:36.080 huge hotel with i believe 2 000 rooms and um substantially bigger than the royal york for example
00:19:44.080 uh but but but in a very decrepit condition and he it was a tremendously intricate matter of getting the
00:19:52.640 adherence of city officials zoning authorities a financial group and and the actual owners of the
00:20:00.880 land and and the building on the land and so donald would he he made up a plan and he held a press
00:20:08.960 conference every day announcing progress you know some of the progress was more in his imagination
00:20:17.040 than than in a thing that you could really justify holding a press conference about but that's part of
00:20:22.080 how development works especially in new york it's a game to hype things you know and uh he would wave a
00:20:29.680 sheet of papers around saying i have a signed contract which he did been signed by him but not by anyone else
00:20:35.440 you think and uh but eventually there became a considerable agitation to get get this contract
00:20:43.280 awarded and get the building redeveloped because it was considered very important to the renovation of
00:20:50.080 that part that famous part of new york city between grand central station and the chryslet building
00:20:55.760 uh to get this great hotel functioning again it had been closed for years and uh he at one point he
00:21:04.160 he produced a contract uh that was so complicated that that he gave it to the city to show that he
00:21:15.440 had the financial backing he needed and it was signed by another party but it didn't actually give the
00:21:20.960 financial backing and the city's bureaucrats as he foresaw did not have the perseverance to go all the
00:21:27.280 way through it and see what it was it was about a 200 page document of legalese that didn't really pledge
00:21:33.520 anything but they said all right we'll approve this they took that back and got the financial side on
00:21:39.840 and yeah the renovation was was a huge undertaking they found dozens of squatters uh living in the
00:21:47.360 boiler rooms that rat population was so huge that even though they put in a bunch of cats and things but
00:21:55.440 the rats drove the cats out and then donald went around and collected all the stray cats from the animal
00:22:01.600 shelters in the new york city area became the man of the year and you know animal protection and he put
00:22:08.800 all these cats into the commodore hotel and and and and the felines overpowered the rodents with that
00:22:17.040 with that reinforcement you see the cat population prevailed over the rats and and uh and and and it
00:22:24.160 worked i mean it was a magnificent reconstruction he reduced the number of rooms by about 400. it's a glass
00:22:31.120 sheath building it's operated i believe by um uh one of the famous chief pritzker and and you know it's
00:22:40.000 a it's a well-regarded very profitable hotel and he made 250 million dollars on this still in his 20s
00:22:47.680 so he took off from there and he got a little carried away as everyone knows when he went into the casino
00:22:53.360 business he saw that atlantic city could attract a lot of gamblers from new york city and philadelphia
00:22:59.440 he didn't see that there would be no limit to the number of casino licenses that were given
00:23:04.560 so eventually it was what he did was well it was very successful and well launched but before long
00:23:12.400 it was an overpopulated casino town and there were too many casinos for the business but
00:23:19.120 that was that's a junk bond business everyone
00:23:21.600 and buying instruments that yield 15 percent know they're getting a high yield because of a high
00:23:28.240 risk and it may not work so you know the attempt of trump's enemies to claim that he
00:23:33.840 he did terrible things to uh to working class families whose life savings were invested in his
00:23:41.200 casinos it's just completely filled with nothing of the sort was trey we gave a modest haircut to people
00:23:47.280 like carl icon who then you know doubled down and bought more of this stuff more cheaply greater
00:23:52.880 discount to get a higher yield and then partly refinanced and in the end these sharpers who are
00:23:58.480 the only people you get in that kind of finance take care of themselves already uh and and in the end
00:24:04.480 it was a moderate success i mean he was a pioneer in casino in the casino business in new jersey and it's
00:24:11.920 still there and it's a it adds to state revenues um that was at that point he became a great impresario
00:24:19.360 and he held big prize fights there and uh uh beauty contests and things like this and he did this all
00:24:26.560 over the country and elsewhere in the world and um and this was part of his new plan which he developed
00:24:34.400 in those years uh and i should say while the casinos were going on he went to quality
00:24:41.520 building on on the model of the commodore hotel elsewhere which the trump tower is the most famous
00:24:47.360 a very distinguished building but his assets now are all quality buildings and golf courses
00:24:53.520 and and uh but but he devised this technique of becoming famous with the idea of making money off the
00:25:01.920 brand of his name and eventually as you know he was um selling trump mineral water and trump
00:25:10.080 mattresses and trump shirts and trump neckties these ones that he wears that are quite long so that
00:25:17.440 if your jacket is open there there is not a gap even in a in a full-figured man between where his tie
00:25:24.320 ends and his top of his trousers begin you see this was one of donald's secrets which is by this one
00:25:30.720 but but he just traded off his name he actually got people including here in toronto to pay
00:25:36.080 millions of millions of dollars to put his name on the top of their hotel and he didn't have to do
00:25:40.720 anything although usually he managed it as well but he didn't invest a cent and made money out of it
00:25:47.760 and his personal life became very highly publicized in new york uh and and uh especially some of the
00:25:56.880 romantic entanglements that he had and his theory was all publicity for the purposes he intended was good
00:26:04.240 publicity and that he could he could turn his name into a huge profit center which he did now some of
00:26:12.320 the aspects of that were frankly fairly cheesy like uh the trump university i mean there's no fraud
00:26:18.800 involved they they said you know you come to this it'll teach you about how to make money in real
00:26:24.400 estate and it did but he got some people to pay for the platinum program thirty four thousand dollars or
00:26:31.040 something that they could have got just by reading some you know do-it-yourself books that you could
00:26:36.320 buy for a few dollars in a bookstore so i mean donald's conduct wasn't always the most distinguished but
00:26:43.840 it wasn't it wasn't illegal uh i thought the shabbiest of it was this uh health remedy he came up with
00:26:51.840 uh which he claimed would would uh really assist people in living longer and all it all it consisted of was
00:26:59.120 uh urinalysis and some vitamin pills but if people are going to pay for that you know pt barnum was a
00:27:06.960 great and representative american said a sucker's born every minute no one ever went broke exaggerating
00:27:15.120 the intelligence of the public uh so you know there was that aspect of donald but he always had this
00:27:24.400 theory that celebrity could be translated into high political office and he did a lot of polling for
00:27:30.640 many years and he always polled very well with a large section of the public and uh his final
00:27:42.400 initiative on that side of his career was he had the idea of a certain type of reality television based on
00:27:49.520 corporate life and he spoke to someone at nbc and they went joint account on it they set it up he
00:27:57.520 starred and from day one for 14 years he was he was market leader in prime time in his slot now i never
00:28:04.320 watched one an episode of this thing but he pulled five to 25 million viewers every week for 14 years
00:28:11.920 uh and and i put it to you and to your viewers but in being so successful in the in the real estate
00:28:22.720 business in the toughest city in the world uh and reviving so quickly from a real economic crisis and
00:28:30.960 with such ingenuity and in becoming an instant and for a prolonged period television star something that
00:28:40.160 is proverbially millions of americans spend their whole lives trying to do without much success
00:28:47.360 and then in inventing this method of translating celebrity of a stylistically indifferent kind to say
00:28:55.120 the least into political popularity and then changing parties seven times in 13 years looking for the
00:29:03.680 moment to go for a nomination and then doing it being dominated by one of the major parties and
00:29:10.880 contrary to all expectations winning the election in all of that i believe that he achieved more before
00:29:18.240 he became president than any previous president except those who were president who had been
00:29:26.080 instrumental in founding the country and setting up its institutions washington jefferson and madison
00:29:33.280 and those who successfully led great armies in just wars grant and eisenhower and and uh and and so he
00:29:42.880 contrary to this presentation and portrayal of him as just a goon and a a boor and a charlatan i mean there
00:29:53.040 are those aspects to him he does he did come to the presidency as an extremely accomplished person and a very
00:30:01.920 talented person and he has been in policy terms i think an extremely successful president well it's
00:30:09.280 so interesting because from your book i i kind of learned things i just didn't really know about him
00:30:13.680 like his forays into professional wrestling and the sort of showmanship of it all but you make it seem
00:30:20.000 like it was all sort of strategic and in really connecting with a base of sort of blue-collar people
00:30:26.480 uh that that he really built his populism on top of so can you maybe talk a little bit about how
00:30:33.120 you know he he transitioned from being this sort of well-known reality tv star that was you know outspoken
00:30:40.240 and over the top but but also that he was able to connect uh with people who were forgotten by the other
00:30:46.080 parties and so how how did he turn his his life experience into this huge political uh populism and the movement
00:30:53.040 movement that we saw emerging in 2015 2016. it's a good question and and he i only know this because
00:31:03.360 i know him and he said some of this to me he saw that in the united states unlike most countries
00:31:13.760 there is not necessarily any bias against wealthy people uh no one in the history of the country was a
00:31:22.240 successful politically as franklin d roosevelt who made absolutely no attempt to pretend that he was
00:31:28.800 an ordinary working man i mean he he um uh you know he had a monocle like his cousin theodore roosevelt
00:31:38.320 he had a cigarette holder and uh he spoke in a very patrician accent and part rich new york and part
00:31:46.480 uh ivy league and uh but he was a compassionate man he he presented quite faithfully quite accurately
00:32:00.320 as an intelligent and a wealthy man who genuinely cared and not in a condescending way but with genuine
00:32:08.000 solicitude for the less advantaged people and and trump saw that he and john f kennedy and
00:32:16.160 lots of other well-known people nelson rockefeller and adlai stevenson could do this stevenson and and
00:32:24.000 and he thought that that he could go at one better because he could actually identify quite closely with
00:32:35.280 with the um with the working class he could be a kind of rich archie bunker and this isn't an act with
00:32:42.480 him that is sort of what he is and and again you go back to the socio-economic composition of new york
00:32:49.040 city all the ones i just mentioned somewhere from new york like nelson rockefeller and franklin d
00:32:54.160 roosevelt but others weren't but they but but they were from that sort of milieu uh uh ivy league
00:33:01.440 educated and wealthy people from wealthy areas you know if you remember adlai stevenson who ran for
00:33:06.960 president against general eisenhower he was a a very elegant public speaker and he was called an
00:33:13.120 egghead at the time as an intellectual rich intellectual well he had he really appealed to
00:33:22.880 the working class of america because he understood they were getting shafted he actually was quite
00:33:28.160 observant all through from when i first knew him in the late 90s all through the period until he ran for
00:33:34.800 president he was following these things closely and he did not approve of uh free trade agreements
00:33:41.040 that consisted of importing unemployment into the united states and he didn't buy the line that the
00:33:47.280 u.s had any obligation to to do that for other countries he wanted he wanted all these developing
00:33:54.400 countries to develop he was certainly uh in in favor doing things helpful to mexico and other places to
00:34:02.320 raise their standards of living but not at the expense of the american worker and so he could identify
00:34:08.560 with these people and and then as you say so you you mentioned implicitly that great steen at the
00:34:17.600 silver dome in pontiac michigan where 95 000 people paid seemed sheer the hair off the head of
00:34:24.560 dunce mcmahon head of world wrestling federation he by the way named his wife the director of the small
00:34:31.440 business administration is a kind of consolation for all that but you know it's hard to imagine a
00:34:37.600 nelson rockefeller or a member of the roosevelt or kennedy families pulling up a stunt like that you know
00:34:43.520 but but it it worked for for donald and he he had this growing constituency whose views he could
00:34:51.520 articulate and it was quite genuine because he identified with the workers he worked with them in
00:34:57.200 his father's company in his summer jobs and he has he gets on perfectly well with ordinary people like
00:35:03.840 that he just happens very wealthy man and as i said the american working class doesn't dislike rich people
00:35:12.240 it it dislikes snobs naturally most people do but if in the united states if you're if you if you're
00:35:21.440 a a an unpretentious person and do well financially people tend to admire that rather than envy it and
00:35:29.120 think well he can do it i can do it too that is you know the whole american mythos is one of
00:35:37.120 hard work and you and there's nothing you can't do you can get anywhere no matter how humbly you begin
00:35:42.800 well donald didn't begin very humbly but but he still was kind of an inspiration to these people
00:35:48.800 because he was a rich man who cared about them and was kind of one of them not in that way of a benign
00:35:58.880 respect for them like a semi-aristocratic person like roosevelt would have
00:36:06.320 but as one who was really one of them at heart but had done very well as they could do and he would
00:36:13.600 help them do it it was it was a genius insight into the american political process and the american
00:36:22.080 national psychology and he connected the two and here he is in the white days and you know he may
00:36:28.560 win or not i personally i think he probably will but whether he does or not he he's made his point it
00:36:36.000 was an astounding accomplishment absolutely so you know and and he kind of came onto the scene you
00:36:41.920 mentioned that he switched parties nine times in in the decade prior to uh coming to the republicans
00:36:48.000 and and and running but you know the republicans at that point were sort of stagnant they were they
00:36:52.960 were heading in a different direction uh jeb bush was the sort of presumed uh nominee prior to trump
00:36:59.360 sort of bursting onto the scenes and you know you you kind of wonder like as a guy who was a total
00:37:05.600 outsider he really shocked the sensibilities of so many conservatives uh he wasn't really fully on brand
00:37:11.280 with the whole you know free market free trade mantra that that conservatives republicans really
00:37:16.640 rally around and yet somehow as an outsider he just managed to push his way right in and and you you
00:37:23.680 talk about in the book how he was different than other outsiders you know people like uh ralph nader
00:37:28.400 or ross bro that were never really taken all that seriously and didn't really have a shot whereas
00:37:33.200 whereas trump found a moment um to to come on to the republican scene so maybe you can uh talk a little
00:37:39.360 bit about uh what it was like you know why he chose to to go with the republicans and how he really just
00:37:44.960 managed to to blow up the establishment and secure the nomination for president well he at one time
00:37:52.240 thought of a third party candidacy and in 2000 he won two primaries in the progressive party in the
00:37:59.680 united states uh for a great many years whenever there's a third party other than these there were
00:38:06.560 southern segregationist parties but when there was a third party running through a country they they
00:38:12.720 called themselves progressive that started with uh theodore roosevelt who was an ex-president who
00:38:19.520 decided that he should retire after two terms though he'd only won one election he succeeded
00:38:25.120 president mckinley when he was assassinated and he hand chose his successor william howard taft then
00:38:31.840 he took a dim view of how taft performed as president so ran to unseat him as the republican
00:38:39.280 nominee and and and go back as president as the republican candidate but you you know they he won the
00:38:47.520 primaries but the party elders wouldn't let him in you see so he was so irritated he ran a third party
00:38:54.480 called the progressives and the effect of it was to make the democrat woodrow wilson the president's
00:38:59.920 famous election of three president and and uh it never worked i mean in 1924 the progressives split
00:39:08.400 the democratic vote not the republicans this time the democrats and but they only got one state in
00:39:14.480 wisconsin you just can't do it and trump figured that out so he's waiting for an opportunity for the
00:39:20.880 nomination of one of the two big parties he didn't really care which one it was and um and then as the
00:39:27.760 time went by and he saw that uh when we got towards the end of the george w bush term uh the republican
00:39:37.920 nomination was not going to get you into the white house because it was such an economic catastrophe people
00:39:43.360 that you tired about the involvement in the middle east and other things and um and and he didn't want
00:39:51.760 to run against an incumbent president so when when obama was coming up to retirement and and it would be
00:39:59.840 new candidates from both parties he saw that was his chance and uh and you may recall that when he and
00:40:08.400 melania came down the escalator in june of uh 2015 to announce his candidacy for the 2016 republican
00:40:18.240 nomination it was greeted with absolutely convulsive derision everywhere in the country it's the most
00:40:24.720 hilarious thing anyone had ever heard of we're just going to be a a shambles and um and and then it
00:40:33.360 you know the problem with that theory was that he knew the voters better than the so-called experts did
00:40:42.000 i mean absolutely nobody except a couple of people saw any potential for what he was doing newt gingrich
00:40:49.440 was one who did but uh the nobody in the media did that is audible or visible and and almost nobody in
00:40:58.560 the political community but you know in the early primaries he was doing quite well so there was a
00:41:05.520 precedent for that you know jesse jackson had run quite strongly for time in the primaries and
00:41:10.000 and some others had you mentioned ross perro he you know he did run he ran as an independent and
00:41:16.800 and he took 20 million votes from george bush senior and that's how the clintons got into the white is
00:41:22.800 because the elder president bush allowed this absolute charlatan ross perro to split his party
00:41:29.760 and but this was different trump was running for the republican nomination and and there was no you know
00:41:37.200 there was no incumbent president or vice president running for that nomination so um uh he started
00:41:44.880 out in the level playing field except he was the only person uh in the history of the united states
00:41:51.600 to win the nomination of a major party without ever having held any public office elected or unelected or
00:41:58.560 or a military command except for wendell wilkie who was nominated by the republicans in 1940 for the great
00:42:05.760 honor of running against franklin d roosevelt which is impossible you couldn't beat roosevelt nobody could
00:42:11.040 be he won four straight elections as president but the um uh but trump saw his opportunity and and if
00:42:19.280 you recall he did well from the early primaries and his vote kept growing and they had this theory that
00:42:26.000 well the most of the candidates will drop off and then there'll be one anti-trump candidate and he'll win
00:42:33.040 but but but it it didn't work that way as the primaries moved around the country
00:42:38.560 trump was running equally strongly in all regions it wasn't as if he was only getting votes in the south
00:42:44.480 or the midwest or something everywhere he was doing well and uh and and it just took it it just has has
00:42:54.160 taken the uh american political establishment to now and they still haven't got there but i've had all the
00:43:00.880 time from nine from 2015 to the present to try and take on board the idea that there's an inordinate
00:43:07.680 number of americans who actually approve of this guy and and you know they think they have him now
00:43:12.960 they think they're about to throw him out next week but i i don't think they are well it's so interesting
00:43:18.400 to just reflect back on those early days you know during the republican primaries he was just so wildly
00:43:23.760 entertaining and you didn't really know whether he was serious half the time um but but eventually you
00:43:28.960 know he he just really began to speak uh to the country you know everyone would agree that
00:43:33.840 washington was totally broken everyone agrees that there's this growing sort of underclass in in
00:43:38.800 america whether you know you read uh jd vance's uh hillbilly elegy or um charles murray's coming apart
00:43:45.520 you know this this faction exists that everyone was ignoring and trump really connected with and i i think
00:43:51.440 eventually republicans kind of came around um but but but but then even after trump was elected
00:43:57.760 president in 2016 the the way that the media treated him there was no there's no self-reflection
00:44:03.040 and you write about this in your book there was no uh you know moment of pause where where journalists
00:44:08.560 and other elites in washington said okay what did we miss what did we get wrong let's try to correct
00:44:13.520 ourselves everyone just sort of doubled down on this this idea that trump was uniquely evil and that he
00:44:19.920 was going to destroy the country and that we're going to go into world war three and that he was just this
00:44:24.640 horrible horrible force for evil and and yet you know the trump presidency started to look more and
00:44:30.800 more successful um from especially from a policy perspective you know the economy was doing really
00:44:36.480 well he decimated isis uh the middle east you know feels calm and peaceful compared to to the past few
00:44:44.240 decades america's energy independent there's just so many things from a policy level um that that you could
00:44:50.320 point to and say wow this guy is is a really successful president yet he never gets any kind
00:44:54.720 of credit um or recognition from the media instead you know we went full-on uh russian collusion and
00:45:01.760 all these allegations about him uh stealing the election so lord black what is it about about trump
00:45:09.440 why why can't people accept him as the president why can't he have why couldn't he have a normal
00:45:14.960 presidency uh you know what what what is it about him that really just triggers the media i think it
00:45:21.760 is um that's not just the media remember he ran against the whole establishment as you said at the
00:45:28.560 outset um jeff bush was the favorite but as you know if you in the eight consecutive presidential terms
00:45:38.880 from 1981 to 2013 eight straight turn you had one or other member of the bush or clinton families as
00:45:50.160 president vice president or secretary of state eight terms in a row and and these families were
00:45:56.000 and and not that they were doing it cynically but in fact they were passing these great offices back
00:46:01.920 and forth between themselves and and the country got awfully tired of the bush clinton
00:46:07.920 do a lock on the on the government and and i mean they weren't bad the clintons and the bushes that's
00:46:13.600 not the issue uh but but but there was a sort of presumption and stagnation in the whole thing and
00:46:20.400 you've got in the post reagan years you've got this bipartisan establishment in washington where
00:46:27.920 the white house would change every eight years but the cadres of important people just beneath the
00:46:33.440 white house or within it but just adjacent to the president and bill were essentially the same
00:46:39.600 people for the two parties and then each party had their own but they were all chunny together and it
00:46:44.640 just became a smaller and smaller in group and and trump was running to break that up and and you know
00:46:51.360 the establishment got pretty comfortable running the country and changing the white house every eight
00:46:56.400 years but basically everything else remained the same and um and uh he particularly i mean
00:47:04.400 ran against the whole system they're against all the factions of both parties ran against the bushes as much
00:47:09.360 which is the clintons and obama and and he he he accused the national political media of conducting
00:47:17.280 a whitewash for the little in group that were just running a log rolling and back scratching
00:47:22.960 operation for themselves while the interests of a large section of the population went down the drain
00:47:29.360 and the public was very sensitive to and responsive to that argument because there was some truth to it
00:47:38.480 but from the standpoint of those who were running the gravy train he was a mortal threat to them and
00:47:44.560 they responded as people or all animals do when they're when their livelihood is threatened and and so
00:47:51.840 you know that they don't confine themselves in legitimate argument the cloth committed and they've
00:47:57.120 locked arms and and now in the last week we've seen the extraordinary spectacle of um the media sandbagging
00:48:07.120 even news corporation one of the country's biggest media companies because the new york post is steadily
00:48:13.840 exposing details of the biden family's financial daring do while joe biden was vice president now i would
00:48:21.360 give joe biden the benefit of the doubt i don't see any evidence that american policy it was
00:48:26.960 altered for corrupt reasons because of uh backhanders that the biden family were taking from various
00:48:33.840 interests in in russia china and ukraine i don't see that any evidence that foreign that american
00:48:40.480 policy was altered because of that although it has to be looked into but what did happen is that
00:48:45.440 biden lied about it he said he didn't know anything about his son's financial activities and now obviously
00:48:51.280 he knew a great deal about it and and was implicated but so you know lying to the public is not a crime
00:48:57.600 but it doesn't do wonders for your political capital but in this case the media are now desperately
00:49:03.520 trying to pretend that that is a non-issue it's an irrelevancy it it's counterbalanced by the fact
00:49:10.240 that trump had a bank account in china when he was contemplating doing business there which did not have a
00:49:15.280 large balance in which he closed two years before he was president as if that has anything to do with
00:49:20.640 with these allegations but for their part they are desperate to get rid of this guy because if he wins
00:49:27.120 again he really is going to drain the swamp and they really will be pushed out of georgetown and
00:49:33.360 replaced by other people and and uh i'm not saying that what trump would put in its place would be
00:49:39.440 a absolutely clean system but that's not the american tradition the american tradition goes back
00:49:45.200 to andrew jackson the so-called spoiled system when he came in he fired the whole top half of the civil
00:49:51.440 service which was an unheard of thing to do prior to that it had been the presidency had been held by
00:49:58.080 rich virginia plantation owners alternating with the adams family in massachusetts and they'd all run a nice
00:50:05.840 tight little shop for themselves now they founded the country and they were great men some of them very
00:50:10.560 great men but and and all of them good men but andrew jackson this populist from tennessee he was a
00:50:17.200 drummer boy in the revolution not a general or a governor and swept them all out through the bag and
00:50:23.840 baggage you know revoked the charter of the national bank and then and expanded the franchise and expanded
00:50:31.040 the country to the west and and and and and it grew you know he put his own people in and they weren't
00:50:37.520 necessarily better than the others but the system is based on the idea that that that you change you
00:50:43.200 know you just don't have the same people running the country forever and and there was an absolutely
00:50:49.680 non-violent and and smoothly assimilated example of that uh with president reagan i mean you may recall
00:50:58.640 you may be young to recall but some a lot of your viewers would recall that when he came into office
00:51:04.800 he was represented as a lunatic as well and even though he'd been the governor of a great state for
00:51:09.840 two terms he was representative as a kind of right-wing nutcase and a man of limited intelligence who had
00:51:16.160 been selling 20 miltine borax and pv advertisements and flacking for the general electric corporation and
00:51:22.880 played in a lot of grade b movies but with gore biddell not someone i would normally quote
00:51:28.480 but as he said that's a terrible injustice he's one of the greatest actors in world history who had
00:51:33.600 the misfortune to play in some great big movies but but reagan smoothed them down did what he wanted
00:51:40.720 which was to cut taxes induce a real capitalist boom and and win the cold war he knew the us could face
00:51:48.400 russia down and he and it did and and and everyone was happy and then he didn't really tear the washington
00:51:56.080 political class apart uh so so they they they indulged him they didn't bother him and and they never
00:52:03.680 really went after him in that iran country nonsense so i started up a bit about it after watergate
00:52:10.000 everybody in washington got um contaminated by the idea that you could criminalize policy differences and
00:52:19.200 that absolutely strictly judicial proceedings could be introduced to the politics we saw that this past year
00:52:25.360 the spurious impeachment of trump but um uh the the this this group that i referred to and they're
00:52:33.680 talented people and they're patriotic people most of them are probably pretty good but they're smug and
00:52:39.600 they're complacent and they haven't done such a brilliant job i mean the previous 20 years to trump
00:52:45.440 were the worst years of presidential misgovernment in american history worse than the 10 years before the
00:52:50.640 civil war and worse than the three terms between woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt that gave us
00:52:56.480 the great depression and isolationism and prohibition and uh and you know they had a terrible record they
00:53:03.840 had a economic catastrophe human uh disasters and humanitarian disasters with the millions and millions
00:53:11.840 of refugees and endless war in the middle east to no good purpose for the us uh and and trump was right to
00:53:19.840 say they're not doing a good job so that's what you've got these people and their tenacity and
00:53:25.680 fanaticism are are unable to accept that trump such an outlandish and egregious character as he is in some
00:53:32.960 ways could be for real and they're repelling the barbarian it's just raised the drawbridge and the
00:53:40.000 people will have to decide sorry by the way one thing the conduct of the media as you said has been a
00:53:46.320 disgrace and and this is dangerous because as all surveys show independent professional surveys harvard
00:53:52.880 university and so forth uh pew research center 95 of the national political media is hostile to trump
00:54:00.080 and they just make it up it's not it's not a matter of just giving more space to the opposition it's a
00:54:05.520 matter of slinging mud at the president inventing things and and and uh just malicious falsehoods and
00:54:12.160 and throwing them at him and all polls indicate that the public respect of the media is under 20
00:54:19.200 now this is a dangerous situation you cannot have a functioning democracy without a free press
00:54:24.160 you can't have anyone intervene with the free press they have to be free and and yet if the
00:54:29.680 public is so disrespectful of them the continued existence of a free press will not become or at least
00:54:35.760 will cease to be a a matter of great public urgency and and and uh what we need is a more honest and
00:54:46.640 and respectable press that re earns the respect of the country and uh and i i i my theories if trump loses
00:54:56.560 the election they will say well there it is we did it you know we the press did it because they've been
00:55:01.600 conducting the biden campaign biden is just a sideshow sitting in his basement he's a little
00:55:06.240 guy from delaware who's been around for 50 years but he couldn't lead america across the brooklyn bridge
00:55:12.160 this campaign has been has been conducted by the media on his behalf well absolutely i mean you
00:55:18.080 mentioned hunter biden's laptop and you know it seems like in some ways the cover-up is worse than the
00:55:22.640 crime because you know so many people have now been exposed to the idea that facebook and twitter are
00:55:28.560 picking and choosing what what what they deem newsworthy and and and everything else you know
00:55:34.400 they they get hidden um in in your book you talk about a lot of this sort of disconnect between the
00:55:39.840 media narrative about trump whether it be on on women you know the idea that that he's just this
00:55:44.800 horrible uh you know misogynist compared to the reality where he has all of these strong women
00:55:50.800 surrounding him not just on his campaign you know with kellyanne conway and hope hicks and um sarah
00:55:55.600 huckabee sanders and his own daughter but also throughout his career he he he gave women
00:55:59.920 opportunities to lead projects that had never been done before but but there's just so many
00:56:04.320 instances of of this whether it was um you know violence at his campaign rallies apparently you know
00:56:10.160 supposedly he was the one that was inciting it but then we learned that there were actually paid
00:56:14.320 democratic operatives um we had the whole uh russian disinformation thing that that supposedly he
00:56:20.800 was colluding with the russians and and that the the the basis of it was the steel dossier which
00:56:26.400 in and of itself turned out to be russian disinformation and now you know the media is
00:56:31.200 saying that they're not sharing the hunter biden story because it looks like it could be russian
00:56:35.840 disinformation even though there's i mean there's just so much confusion national intelligence agency
00:56:40.560 and the fbi have said that there's no evidence of that right i mean to me and you come from a media
00:56:47.200 background you you know you built all these successful newspapers it's to me the media is
00:56:51.760 gaslighting the public and the public is starting to see through it and and i think it's it's going
00:56:56.160 to back backlash or maybe it already has uh backfired on them um because people just don't really trust
00:57:02.400 the media and you just mentioned that you know you can't have a successful democracy without a media
00:57:07.840 but but what i'm seeing is sort of a partisanship divide of the media like i can't i can't trust cnn or
00:57:13.600 any of the mainstream media anymore so i'm going to go and get my news from you know ben shapiro and
00:57:18.720 the daily wire or you know go seek out the the new york post or focus exclusively on fox news because
00:57:24.320 i know what i'm going to get there but then you have this sort of increasing uh polarization so i just
00:57:30.720 just wondering you know do you think that there's any solutions or any coming back from this or are we
00:57:35.840 just sort of on this path now where we're going to continue to to be divided um and and we have these
00:57:41.360 irreconcilable differences uh no the united states is is a certainly a viable country it's it's a
00:57:48.480 rough country and there is a temptation for example amongst the british i mean technically i'm british
00:57:54.880 and indeed a member of the british parliament and the british think in large measure that the americans
00:58:00.800 are essentially somewhat similar to themselves it's another english-speaking country
00:58:06.560 and uh with institutions despite the fact that the us was created in a revolution
00:58:14.000 to throw the british out substantially based on british common law and british parliamentary
00:58:20.800 electoral traditions and therefore they're kind of our american cousins and and there is that aspect of
00:58:26.480 them and to this day there there would be substantial pockets of largely influential people in in new england
00:58:38.400 and new york and uh the northeast in particular that that would qualify as as being well acquainted with
00:58:49.200 britain and somewhat sympathetic to it and and in themselves conducting themselves in a way that
00:58:56.240 that would would justify that description that i just gave but uh the united states isn't remotely
00:59:06.720 like britain and the fact that it speaks english it dulls people into thinking that there is a similarity
00:59:13.120 between the two countries that does not really exist the ethnic composition of it as you know is not
00:59:20.720 mainly the british isles when mr churchill addressed the congress at the end of 1941
00:59:27.120 and said what kind of a people that they think we are this was part of his thing you need to portray
00:59:32.400 it as one great english-speaking people's cause you know which obviously served britain's
00:59:40.560 interests and and he as a man his mother was an american to some degree was very sincere in that but
00:59:48.000 um the the the america addressed had more people of german italian and irish descent than of british you
01:00:00.000 know english or scottish and and those three groups that i just said were in general in the world at
01:00:05.040 that time not very pro-british and roosevelt was addressing and constantly maintaining the support of
01:00:13.120 a majority of a country that was quite different to the one that churchill thought he was visiting
01:00:17.760 and that gap has become greater since the united states is it is not really a society of laws the
01:00:25.040 way britain is it's a jungle now it's a jungle built on on an idealistic basis that all who as i said earlier
01:00:36.400 work hard will succeed and there's nothing that they cannot aspire to that is true but but behind the
01:00:45.360 facade of um a sort of fair play commonwealth of the meritocratic behind the facade of america
01:00:57.280 walt disney and and norman rockwell and grandma murder it is a jungle and and
01:01:06.640 like all jungles it's run by the 700 pound cats and the 30 foot constricting snakes and and this is its
01:01:16.080 strength and its weakness that you have this tremendous competitiveness and and and this
01:01:22.080 tremendously high level of achievement in almost every field and and an unprecedentedly productive
01:01:29.040 work for it uh but you also have millions of people ground to powder for no reason and in in
01:01:38.400 in you know that america is is terribly disorganized and by canadian and british standards
01:01:45.920 violent and corrupt uh but but but so what it's their country it's a democracy and they can run it how
01:01:54.160 they want and that's what it is whether anyone else likes it or not and and it it is not a self-destructive
01:02:01.360 country it's a it's a country where it gets to the edge but it gets the leadership it needs when
01:02:09.520 and when it was literally breaking up they they produced from the west this leader who had had
01:02:18.000 one term as a congress many years before from whom little was expected and he was arguably the greatest
01:02:24.960 statesman in the history of the world mr lincoln and and he restored the union and emancipated the
01:02:30.720 slaves and and when the entire system had broken down the beginning of the 30s uh the the banks had
01:02:38.960 closed in 46 states and in the other two states withdrawals couldn't exceed ten dollars every stock
01:02:46.080 exchange and commodity exchange in the country had been closed for two weeks the whole system collapsed
01:02:52.640 and the the unemployment rate was 30 percent and there was no direct relief for them they could beg
01:02:59.600 steel or star that was the choice and on inauguration day 1933 there were machine gun nests at the
01:03:06.640 corners of the federal buildings in washington for the first time since the civil war that is the america
01:03:13.440 roosevelt took over what he was the man to restore it and he did very quickly the only thing we have to
01:03:18.960 fear is fear itself he created these workfare programs put everybody to work saving the whooping crane and
01:03:25.600 you know making national parks and building roads and you know great thing the infrastructure cheaply
01:03:33.680 for the country like the tribera bridge and the lincoln tunnel and so on and and it all worked and
01:03:40.080 you know when they get it there's a genius to the system that never lets it go completely over the edge
01:03:47.840 but sometimes it it looks like it's threatening to uh it it's not so bad though and it it'll it'll
01:03:55.120 revive it it is fundamentally an incomparably strong country but it's not everyone's cup of tea to live
01:04:01.920 there i mean you know it's got strawberries well certainly it feels like one of those trying times
01:04:08.000 in in history world history right now but i i i want to ask you you know we started the conversation
01:04:13.040 talking about coven 19 and and sort of the over the top reaction to it i know you wrote in a column
01:04:19.040 back in september 2019 that you thought that trump was going to win in a landslide just just just given
01:04:24.240 the economics and how well people were doing well you know things are just totally different now and
01:04:28.960 covet has really been uh a total curveball uh for that so i want i wonder what your what your
01:04:34.960 prediction is what what do you think is going to happen uh on the november 3rd election yeah well i i wrote
01:04:40.560 what i did then of course not being able to foresee covet uh and and my reasoning was that someone who
01:04:47.280 has as successful a term as he has had and i i believe as i mentioned that he's been the most
01:04:55.120 successful first term president in the history of the country except for lincoln roosevelt and mr nixon
01:05:01.840 and and uh uh lincoln was a long time ago in special circumstances in the civil war but
01:05:08.960 uh and he was re-elected comfortably enough but the south wasn't voting but in in the case of
01:05:15.040 roosevelt when he ran for re-election and in in 1936 and mr nixon in 1972 in both cases they won over 60
01:05:23.120 percent of the vote and i thought that and reagan got just under 60 percent in 84 and i thought trump had
01:05:29.680 been as almost as successful as the first two and as difficult uh and and would do approximately as
01:05:39.440 well and i and i think he would have except for the kobe thing but on my prediction i still think he
01:05:44.240 will win i i think it's uh i actually think he'll do a little better than he did four years ago um
01:05:52.320 the the entire democrat campaign has been really as i said earlier conducted by
01:05:57.440 an unprofessional and biased media against which as you said i think there is some backlash
01:06:02.560 and the only argument against trump are the foibles of his personality and the in my opinion false
01:06:08.560 allegations that he's managed mismanaged the covet crisis uh there have been some public relations
01:06:15.360 fiascos to be sure but in fact i think he's managed like a good executive he's advanced by 70 percent of
01:06:23.040 the time normally needed to bring in a vaccine he inherited a public health response system that
01:06:28.640 was completely decrepit any test for this virus had to be taken by appointment in a hospital and then
01:06:34.960 sent to atlanta georgia wherever the test took place for evaluation and and he revolutionized all
01:06:41.760 that in a couple of weeks and made the us the provider to the world of ventilators and everything
01:06:46.720 else that was necessary and uh he had the short shutdown and he's he's got you know 60 of the
01:06:54.640 people back at work already i mean i think he's actually done a good job other than the public
01:06:59.280 relations aspect of it there so i you know i i think that uh when it comes down to it the hostility to
01:07:06.560 him is in some measure confected by a media stonewall that the public checks and presents and i i think
01:07:16.000 people will be surprised i think there are up 10 million voters the pollsters haven't discovered
01:07:22.800 because um it is clear that most trump supporters refuse to discuss public leaders they don't want to be
01:07:32.720 hassled and um and i i you know the polls show that a majority think they're better off now than they
01:07:40.880 were four years ago and the majority think their neighbors are going to vote for trump and i i think
01:07:46.320 that the polling organizations are filled with um not completely filled but substantially filled with
01:07:53.280 democratic front polling operations like vox politico monmouth quinipiac uh and and uh polls conducted
01:08:03.760 under the auspices of the great media networks and outlets new york times washington post and and the
01:08:10.960 three uh traditional uh television networks uh that have spent the last four years trying to evict trump
01:08:19.520 from the light house so i wouldn't believe a word they publish in these subjects and that's what's
01:08:23.760 wrong with the real clear politics average uh three quarters of it are just propaganda then it's not
01:08:30.000 real numbers it's terribly hard to poll the trump voter because they don't trust the system anyway so
01:08:34.800 they don't cooperate with it and they're right not to trust them well you know it would be really
01:08:40.960 really damning for the polling industry if they got it wrong again you know uh some of the polls i've
01:08:45.760 seen frank lundson tv i know uh the other days saying if we've got this wrong we should all seek
01:08:52.400 another occupation i i said to my wife right on frank that's what you should be doing if i were
01:08:57.280 you i'd start right now but it's it's so true uh i i happen to be down in california right now and
01:09:03.120 most of my friends are sort of liberal democrats and even talking to them you know they they they are
01:09:09.040 kind of resigned to the idea that they think trump is going to win in a massive landslide and that that
01:09:13.440 the the the media and the polling company are so out of touch uh with what's happening on the ground
01:09:18.720 that that the trump is popular that biden is just deeply unpopular he's not even campaigning i mean
01:09:23.520 it's interesting we were talking about um earlier the idea that you know hillary clinton might have
01:09:28.400 lost because she took the rust belt for granted she didn't bother campaigning in states like wisconsin
01:09:34.000 um and michigan or pennsylvania i should say uh you know joe biden's not really campaigning at all he's
01:09:40.320 he's uh sitting in his basement calling a lid every day well they've signed on to the theory
01:09:46.960 yeah they've signed on to the theory that the covid thing prevents much public exposure
01:09:51.440 that's convenient to him because he he can't stand up to that he does not have
01:09:55.760 i mean there's no there's no rap on him here he's 78 years old you know and it's a
01:10:00.080 grueling punishing schedule a presidential campaign and and he he doesn't have the stamina for that but he's
01:10:06.640 he's you know he's look he's what cromwell called the decayed servitor he's a good old boy from a
01:10:12.960 little state he's been there for 10 years but but he's he's positive chef as we say in quebec you
01:10:18.240 know i mean he's just not a leader i mean the president of the u.s can lead in different ways
01:10:23.040 you can have a glamorous leader like kennedy or a very clever and meticulous leader like nixon or a great
01:10:33.200 prestigious half avuncular half military hero figure like eisenhower you know leadership comes
01:10:39.200 in many forms or or a you know a rich effective executive with some argument on gratitudes like
01:10:46.240 trump um or a cool cap like obama i think he was a terrible president but he was a pretty pretty effective
01:10:54.160 political operator but joe doesn't have that i mean he he's a guy put in there because the party elders
01:11:00.720 were afraid of a sanders nomination but they settled him with a sanders program and um and
01:11:08.080 but the interesting thing to me on this is that i understand that joe doesn't pull the crowd and and
01:11:16.720 biden is is committed to this thing we all have to go around like you know frightened uh possums or
01:11:23.840 something because of the uh of the uh virus but you know he's called that their supposed big gun obama
01:11:31.280 to campaign now like i admit that crowd behavior is different given that there's a pandemic but i
01:11:39.840 remember when president eisenhower came out for nixon in 60 or when president truman came out for
01:11:45.520 kennedy in in 60 they pulled huge crowds as as distinguished ex-presidents and uh obama i i mean
01:11:55.520 i he's speaking his his campaign stump speech in philadelphia was to about 50 cars in a parking lot
01:12:04.400 and i saw him a couple of days ago talking literally to about 12 people on the sidewalk
01:12:10.080 an ex-president i mean jimmy carter at the age of 96 could pull a bigger crowd than that and
01:12:18.000 you know where trump has tens of thousands of people waiting for hours ignoring all this
01:12:24.640 bunk about how they can't stand close together in the open air at these airports as he flies around
01:12:29.760 talking to them and uh you know i i think look i may have to eat my words candace but i think with
01:12:38.960 trump's opponents are are talking they're committing the same mistake they just double down on the
01:12:44.400 errors as you implied four years ago you know they're they think they have some kind of natural
01:12:50.800 right to rule they think that trump is an imposter and and a scoundrel and there are aspects of his
01:12:57.600 character that would justify that but not the political legitimacy of his present position or the
01:13:03.360 way he's conducted the great opposite of the olds and and uh and i think they're going to get a real
01:13:09.680 shock next week but i i think we'll all be glad to have the election over with because it has been so
01:13:15.520 contentious that that for a long time only the people can decide the system is effectively broken
01:13:21.600 down the democrats are just trying to destroy trump and you can't reach agreement with people
01:13:26.240 who don't want to reach an agreement so you've got to evoke the issue to the people to decide who they
01:13:31.520 want to govern for the next four years well thank you so much lord black for the the conversation
01:13:37.680 it's so interesting you know i could ask you a dozen more questions but hopefully you know your
01:13:42.960 your first book on trump is only really up until about halfway through his first term so hopefully
01:13:48.400 there's a volume you know it's been updated there's one up to just a few months ago oh is that right oh
01:13:53.600 well i i must have picked it so it gets you up to there but uh okay you know he's re-elected i'll do it
01:14:01.040 again well there you go well thank you so much i mean we we didn't even get to touch on uh some of
01:14:06.720 the topics uh about what's going on in canada and you know you had that great book the canadian
01:14:10.400 manifesto so maybe we'll have to to do it do another one of these and talk more about uh canada
01:14:15.760 and what's going on up there but but you know for today thank you so much for helping really understand
01:14:20.720 what's going on in u.s politics helping understand the trump phenomenon i know a lot of canadians don't
01:14:25.280 like trump but i think if you can get past his his rhetoric and and and sort of the norms that he
01:14:30.400 breaks you can really see that that there is something there there and uh hopefully this
01:14:35.200 conversation helped uh we made that a bit more so thank you so much for your time and thank you
01:14:38.960 for joining the true north speaker series not a bit not a bit thanks for thanks for having me