Rebel News Podcast - (BEST OF...) Lord Conrad Black on his book, “Donald Trump： A President Like No Other”

00:00:00.000 Hello, Rebels. Please go to the rebel.media slash shows. It's $8 a month, 80 bucks a year.

00:00:05.580 You get a discount if you type in podcast as a coupon code. All right, without further ado.

00:00:12.580 You're listening to a Rebel Media Podcast.

00:00:15.920 Tonight, a special conversation with author and historian Conrad Black

00:00:19.740 about his new book, Donald Trump, A President Like No Other. You're watching The Ezra Levant Show.

00:00:30.000 Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?

00:00:34.820 There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.

00:00:38.520 You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.

00:00:41.860 The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.

00:00:52.160 Welcome back. Well, a very exciting day today on Victoria Day.

00:00:55.360 The entire show will be dedicated to a new book on Donald Trump.

00:01:00.000 Published by Conrad Black. The book is called Donald Trump, A President Like No Other.

00:01:05.260 And joining us now in studio is Lord Black himself. Welcome to the show. Great to have you in the studio.

00:01:09.780 Thank you, Ezra. Thanks for having me over.

00:01:11.200 I'm a fan of yours. I haven't been in a long time, but I want to tell you, let me confess to you.

00:01:16.020 When I heard you had this new book out, I was nervous because you've written some very thick books of history before,

00:01:22.020 and I thought, this is going to be a slog. I was ready for a phone book.

00:01:25.700 This was a 256-page, breezy, readable, fun book. Some pages you laugh out loud. Some pages you say,

00:01:36.220 Donald Trump's a rascal. And you know what? I think you managed to be fair, but not to suck up to Trump 0.98

00:01:44.160 and not to be a gotcha critic either.

00:01:46.340 No, no, no. I tried to play it right down the middle. And the true Trump is, in fact, a very entertaining person.

00:01:53.480 So a book about him should be rather entertaining.

00:01:55.100 Yeah. You know, A President Like No Other, that's sort of an ambiguous statement.

00:01:59.260 You could say that if you were a Trump hater or a Trump lover.

00:02:01.900 Yeah.

00:02:02.060 But he's such a character.

00:02:03.960 But no one can dispute that that is true.

00:02:05.840 Yeah.

00:02:06.320 There's never been one like that, of that country anyway.

00:02:09.020 A lot of people despise him. What's interesting to me is a lot of his critics today,

00:02:14.140 10 years ago, would have been his super fans, or at least people who wanted to bask in his celebrity

00:02:19.460 and his wealth.

00:02:20.620 Well, they'd see him as fine in his place, as a sort of blowhard billionaire. But the idea that he wanted

00:02:26.640 to take over the system and kick out the people that he said had misgoverned the country for the last

00:02:31.380 15 years, obviously that offends all those who identify with the people who've been established

00:02:37.400 in office in both parties all that time.

00:02:39.500 You have an interesting and quick history of his family life, a very interesting family.

00:02:44.460 And there was always, you say it beautifully, there's always been a drop of the showboat

00:02:49.960 in the American culture, a little bit more than our Canadian culture.

00:02:53.060 Oh, considerably more. And it goes right to the start. I mean, the declaration,

00:02:56.640 of independence. It's beautifully written by Thomas Jefferson. But in the midst of it,

00:03:02.520 there's a blood libel on the native people. There is an indictment of poor old King George III that

00:03:08.180 makes him sound like someone who was on trial at Nuremberg. And he wasn't. He wasn't a terribly

00:03:13.080 competent king, but he wasn't an evil man, for heaven's sakes. And the Americans were the first 0.98

00:03:20.440 important country in the world that weren't defined by a culture unique to them. I mean,

00:03:25.460 the French spoke French, the Spanish spoke Spanish, and so forth. And the English were the,

00:03:29.380 or British were the English being country. So the Americans, as a substitute, devised the theory 0.59

00:03:34.780 that we are the first free country. Well, of course, they weren't. They had no more civil liberties

00:03:38.740 than the British or the Swiss or the Dutch or most of the Scandinavians. But that was what they 0.98

00:03:43.480 staked out. And it's worked. I mean, if it works, don't knock it.

00:03:45.980 In a way, it was a country more about the future than the past.

00:03:49.340 Exactly.

00:03:50.680 You know, the history of Trump, would you call him a swashbuckler? You use a lot of great adjectives.

00:03:57.400 Yeah, he's certainly that.

00:03:58.460 An impresario.

00:03:59.600 That too.

00:04:00.940 You know,

00:04:01.620 and at the worst, sort of a carnival guy, you know, I mean, a huckster, but P.T. Barnum,

00:04:07.840 all of that, but also a statesman. He runs the gamut. He runs, I mean, in some ways,

00:04:12.700 he's a slightly down market salesman, but in some ways, he's a great patriotic American leader.

00:04:18.860 And that's the thing. It's interesting. Right now, there's a question of black America.

00:04:24.920 Can they embrace Trump? And you've seen Kanye West and others break with the taboo and consider

00:04:31.500 Republicans. And it's funny because until very, very recently, Donald Trump was the star subject

00:04:39.540 of hundreds of rap songs, because in some ways, he embodied the audacious American dream,

00:04:45.900 get rich, live fancy. I mean, he wasn't part of the gun culture.

00:04:49.680 And he was sort of anti-establishment, which they identified with.

00:04:52.440 Well, that's, how is it possible to be a blue collar billionaire?

00:04:55.820 Because the blue collar thing, it really, it's not as if he ever worked with a blue collar on,

00:05:06.420 but the blue collar aspect and the way you mean it is a person not interested in spending all this

00:05:13.220 time going to opera committees and being on the social pages of the New York Times. He's someone

00:05:18.280 who started relatively modestly in socioeconomic terms and made a billion dollars, but still has

00:05:24.820 the sort of every man mentality and relates to the people.

00:05:28.420 You know, there's a little passage in your book about how to save money. He would mix his own

00:05:33.240 extermination poison just when he was...

00:05:36.280 For the cockroaches.

00:05:37.120 Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, that's right.

00:05:38.080 Don't leave your viewers under any illusion of what he was trying to exterminate.

00:05:42.320 Like he would just, he got his hands dirty in...

00:05:45.120 No, but his father said, look, we don't have to go and buy this stuff. We can make it ourselves.

00:05:50.100 And that's what he did.

00:05:51.640 There's famous...

00:05:52.460 I mean, we have to get rid of the roaches. We got to have roaches in our buildings,

00:05:55.220 but we can make our own, you know, the insecticide, whatever.

00:06:00.220 Yeah. But what told him, what was interesting to me is that other people, especially those,

00:06:05.420 he didn't come from, he came from some wealth.

00:06:08.580 Yeah. Oh, you know, his father was a wealthy man.

00:06:10.200 And the idea that he would literally get his hands dirty was something that many people

00:06:14.360 would find either off-putting or too grubby.

00:06:17.140 His father was a wealthy man, but he didn't start as a wealthy man. And they didn't, they

00:06:23.560 weren't the wealthy New York that the world knows. They weren't Manhattan. They were Brooklyn

00:06:28.640 and Queens. They had a very comfortable house. And his father had two Cadillac limousines licensed,

00:06:34.400 New York State license, F1 and F2, FT1 and FT2.

00:06:38.440 Fred, Fred, Fred.

00:06:38.700 Fred, Fred, Fred, Fred.

00:06:39.340 And so they clearly weren't poor, but, but, and he went to Fordham university and to Horton

00:06:45.440 University of Pennsylvania. So, and then prior to that, he, he matriculated from a New York

00:06:50.680 state military academy. So it absolutely was not a rags to riches story, but it was never

00:06:55.900 the, the socioeconomic top. His father was never socially prominent.

00:07:00.760 He went, he went to the construction sites, his famous pictures of Trump with a hard hat in

00:07:05.240 the site. Now, any boss could, could come through, but I think, I think he dealt with enough

00:07:10.620 frontline people, grassroots people to keep that sensibility.

00:07:14.080 Ezra on his holidays, even in high school, he would work for his father on construction

00:07:18.480 sites, not in the office, on construction sites. Donald knows how to build a building and he knows

00:07:23.280 every phase of it. And then, and including, he went to Horton because it was the only business school

00:07:28.380 that, that had a specialty course in real estate, including construction, the only one. And, and,

00:07:34.800 and so he, he saw it from absolutely the most basic position working with his father's work

00:07:39.680 crews right up through university.

00:07:41.280 You know, Charles Murray, the great American scholar, wrote about

00:07:46.860 coming apart, which one was, and how the white working class has been disconnected

00:07:53.000 from the fancy Manhattan, LA cultural capitals. And, and he developed a quiz called, how thick is

00:08:00.980 your bubble? And there's questions in it that are sort of startling. Like, have you ever been on a

00:08:07.280 factory floor? Have you ever worked at a job with physical labor that you come home and your body is

00:08:13.480 sore? Like questions like that, that remind liberals, maybe you don't know, maybe you're leftist,

00:08:19.260 but you don't know the working class. I found, and I think of Donald Trump and I, we've got some

00:08:24.660 video clips of Trump over the years. I'd like to play one for you.

00:08:27.520 Just before you do, if I may say one thing, I know Charles Murray and he was here in Toronto

00:08:31.660 several months ago and there was a dinner for him, quite a large dinner that I went to. And

00:08:36.520 they invited questions after he'd spoken. So I asked him, and this was very shortly after Trump was

00:08:42.500 inaugurated. And I asked him if it were not the case that if he succeeded in what he was trying to do,

00:08:48.780 it would possibly reverse the trend he was describing. He said, absolutely. If he succeeds,

00:08:53.820 it will reverse it because he is not out of touch.

00:08:56.620 And there's a respect that he respects working men and women.

00:09:00.520 Absolutely.

00:09:01.060 In a way that traditional liberals would put them like in a glass case at a museum

00:09:06.540 and wouldn't want to touch them for fear they had mixed the rat poison.

00:09:10.400 They would profess sympathy for them as a group, but not wish to associate with them as individuals.

00:09:14.560 Exactly. And there's one little clip, and I use it from time to time on my shows. It was at a rally,

00:09:19.720 I think it was in West Virginia, which is about something that's almost as dirty in the mind of

00:09:25.000 the fancy set as an exterminator's pesticide, and that is coal. It's just a very simple moment,

00:09:31.360 but let me show you a quick clip I'd like to talk about. Here's Donald Trump talking about coal.

00:09:35.440 But the miners don't want to leave anyway. Is that right? You want to stay here. You want to open

00:09:40.560 the mines. We're going to open the mines. I see over here, Trump digs coal. Look at that. Trump

00:09:47.760 digs coal. That's true. That's true. I do. You know, what a contrast between Hillary Clinton, 1.00

00:09:55.220 who in one of her debates said there's going to be a lot of coal miners out of work. Barack Obama,

00:10:00.720 the same thing. They say they're for the working class, the working poor, but only if it's,

00:10:05.940 I don't know, the kind of aesthetically fashionable jobs. Trump digs coal. That's a shocking thing to

00:10:12.600 say in today's environmental era. But he always said beautiful, clean coal. But you'll recall

00:10:18.700 President Obama, when he was running for the office and in the primaries eight, nine years ago,

00:10:24.420 running against Hillary Clinton, when she won in Pennsylvania, he made those disparaging remarks

00:10:30.400 about blue collar Pennsylvanians who took out their frustrations in their lives with guns and

00:10:38.020 religion. I mean, I think that is much closer. Clingers cling to their Bibles. That was a phrase. 1.00

00:10:42.340 Yeah, but I mean, that's much closer to the disparagement those people feel. They might,

00:10:47.320 in their minds, think we want to better their lot. They're not living well and we want to help

00:10:51.220 them. And they might be sincere in that, but they don't identify with them. They think they're idiots.

00:10:54.940 You know, one of the things that, so I found that Trump digs coal comment interesting for two 1.00

00:10:59.320 reasons. First of all, it's one thing to even say you're with a coal miner because that's an obsolete

00:11:05.900 old school, that's dirty, that's blue collar white man stuff. That's not coding in Silicon Valley. So 0.67

00:11:14.740 it's uncool to begin with. But then Trump actually meant it and he pulled the United States out of

00:11:21.760 the Paris global warming agreement. Which was the dumbest treaty in history, 0.91

00:11:28.600 rivaled only by the Iran nuclear treaty. I think everyone knows the Paris global warming treaty is 0.96

00:11:33.920 sort of a sham, but it's like the emperor has no clothes. Oh, you can't say that. Or it's the third.

00:11:40.180 Trump pulled America out and the sky didn't fall. Sky didn't fall. And meanwhile, the countries left

00:11:45.500 behind who were advanced countries are now having intense discussions amongst themselves about what they

00:11:51.340 are going to do, about the hundred billion dollars a year that China and India, the world's greatest

00:11:56.920 polluters, fast growing economies, are expecting from them. I want to ask you about this plain

00:12:02.860 spokenness. And there's a few quotes from your book I want to give. There's so much to cover. I tell

00:12:07.880 you, it was hard for me to find excerpts from the book because so many things were, I want to tell you,

00:12:13.240 let me pick one from random. And thank you for your kindness. Oh, you know what? I was,

00:12:20.680 I won't lie to you, I was nervous when I got this book. I thought this is going to be heavy duty.

00:12:25.020 I love every page. Let me read something. I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it.

00:12:31.000 A lot of people say, ah, Trump, he's insulting. He has rude nicknames. He's, you know, he uses words

00:12:38.420 like he calls country shitholes and stuff. I want to read a paragraph.

00:12:42.980 By the way, I think it was house and not.

00:12:44.860 That's right.

00:12:45.520 Which is slightly less insulting.

00:12:46.460 That's right. Yeah, you're right. One of the things he's so good at, I think is a Manhattan

00:12:52.740 thing, is nicknames. You give people a nickname and it sticks, they're doomed.

00:12:56.220 Well, he's got that New York tough guy stuff.

00:12:58.400 Yeah. I mean, okay. Let me read from the book.

00:13:02.960 Instead of leaking research and gossip about rivals, Trump just trotted rumors out directly,

00:13:08.300 no matter how frivolous. Thus, as time went by to establish that Senator Lindsey Graham had given

00:13:12.660 his private cell phone number to Trump, he gave it to a crowd of thousands and he repeated spurious

00:13:18.680 stories about Senator Ted Cruz's father having had an association with Harvey Oswald. And you go on

00:13:26.280 and give more examples. But I think the key is your first point there. Every politician does that,

00:13:34.900 but they just leak those insults or accusations or wild gossip through surrogates. They plant 0.80

00:13:40.980 stories here and there. Trump just comes out and says it. Right. And it's shocking, but at the same

00:13:46.620 time, it's absolutely refreshing and honest. Well, I'm not always altogether honest, but I agree,

00:13:52.600 it's refreshingly candid. You know, and you're perfectly right. I mean, Franklin D. Roosevelt was

00:14:00.620 always above the fray, but he had, he had some of his entourage who were specialists in absolutely

00:14:06.520 harpooning the opponents, you say, but his, his fingerprints were never on it. But, you know,

00:14:11.580 Trump's not like that. I want to play a clip from a debate. It's, I'm laughing when I, I shouldn't

00:14:17.100 laugh. No, no, no. He tries to get people to laugh and he's good at it. Well, and that's the thing,

00:14:21.900 because he said, you're laughing out of shock because he says something you're not supposed to,

00:14:26.000 but then you're laughing because if there's a grain of truth to it, it's going to stick.

00:14:29.840 And, uh, when he low energy Jeb, it sticks because you think, yeah, he's sort of low energy. Let me

00:14:35.960 play a clip. Here's him versus Hillary Clinton. And he's saying something you should never say.

00:14:41.560 Take a look. She doesn't have the look. She doesn't have the stamina. I said, she doesn't have the 1.00

00:14:47.300 stamina and I don't believe she does have the stamina to be president of this country. You need 0.92

00:14:53.940 tremendous stamina. Hillary has experience, but it's bad experience. We have been saying Hillary

00:15:01.600 Clinton has no stamina and she was just 10 feet away from him. And she was smiling that rictus grin, 0.98

00:15:08.080 but you know what? I think it clicked. And there were some health scares for Hillary Clinton on the

00:15:12.220 camera. She fainted on camera, you know, going after the, uh, it's nine 11 Memorial day. Yeah. And,

00:15:19.640 and, uh, so there was, and she said she'd had pneumonia for a few days. So there was a problem.

00:15:24.920 And, you know, we see later in some of the, uh, access to information documents that came out,

00:15:29.600 how often she was napping. She was taking naps every day, sleeping. I mean, and I don't know if

00:15:34.600 that's something more serious, but Trump just put out there what the under news that you just sort of

00:15:42.160 murmurs. He just, and he does that on Twitter in a way. And the other side of it is he does have

00:15:47.280 superhuman stamina. He almost never sleeps. He works all the time. Even people who don't like

00:15:52.800 him at all admit that he is astonishingly, uh, persevering and strong physically. Yeah.

00:15:58.700 Well, it is quite something. It's hard to believe. I think he's actually a year older than Hillary

00:16:02.800 Clinton. If, uh, I think more than a year. He's just about to turn 72 or just as, and I think she's

00:16:11.240 just coming up to 70. I, and he looks more vigorous than she does. I, um, I want to say something else

00:16:18.300 because again, until you put this in words, one of the things I value, I mean, I followed Donald

00:16:23.500 Trump closely as so many, as the whole world does. Sure. And I think I've followed him closely

00:16:27.960 because I'm a journalist and I sense things. But one of the things I like the best about your book

00:16:33.040 is you crystallized my hunch into a, he's, oh, that's right. I didn't see it that way. Let me

00:16:37.960 quote something that I really found valuable. Um, Trump has learned something about how to gain

00:16:44.480 and hold the respect that is naturally available to the chief of state and the country has somewhat

00:16:48.700 got used to him. I think you're right there. And here's the key. There are markedly fewer

00:16:53.440 malapropisms. There have been no bungled foreign initiatives, fewer indiscretions. His economic

00:16:59.900 program is working and his enemies are largely a tired coalition of character assassinate assassins

00:17:05.360 and hacks. But let me come back to that first point. Markedly fewer malapropisms, no,

00:17:10.840 fewer indiscretions. Everyone tries to hang. Trump is so mouthy. He's so lippy. But when you think

00:17:17.360 about it, other than the blunt list, he hasn't screwed it up. And you would think a guy who's

00:17:25.620 always tweeting and shooting from the hip would blow it up. He hasn't blown it up.

00:17:28.760 Yeah. But early on, there were some tweets that were ill considered, but there are very few of

00:17:33.920 them now. And, and look, I, this may be just neat, but my impression is when you see him now,

00:17:39.660 he has both hands in the podium. You see the seal of office on the podium and he looks and sounds like

00:17:46.020 a president. I mean, he's very fluent and he speaks with authority and, and, uh, and not in that

00:17:53.360 somewhat boastful manner that he used to have. I mean, when the question was raised about the Nobel

00:17:57.440 prize, he said, look, that's a nice thought, but it's premature. What I want is a victory for

00:18:02.120 everybody, for the whole world, not a prize for me. Now that was a very intelligent presidential

00:18:06.300 thing to say. And he might not have said that two years ago. And by the way, there's no chance

00:18:10.060 he's going to get that. That's determined by a small committee of the Norwegian parliament.

00:18:13.180 Give it to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama just for getting elected and getting up.

00:18:17.800 Well, it's a political gift. Yeah. But the, the presidents they should have given it to,

00:18:22.000 President Truman, President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, President Nixon, they didn't give it to them.

00:18:26.160 President Reagan. You started, the very first thing in your book is you dedicate it to the

00:18:30.880 presidents you've known. You list them. LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush. Maybe I'm

00:18:37.880 missing one in there. Clinton, Bill Clinton. The fact is I, I knew Jimmy Carter and I, and I knew

00:18:45.500 George W. Bush, but I, I, I must say I didn't, I didn't want to say this, but I didn't particularly

00:18:51.460 respect them as presidents. As men, yes, but not as presidents. Whereas the others I did admire

00:18:55.980 them. How did you get to know and meet Trump? Because I want to ask you a little bit about him.

00:19:00.580 Well, um, because we own the Chicago, my associates and I own the Chicago Sun-Times and it had a low

00:19:07.800 rise building in downtown Chicago. It was clearly a prime site to develop. And, um, it had been owned

00:19:15.460 by Marshall Field, the department store, uh, company and, and person. And, and so he had a low

00:19:21.760 rise sort of almost, uh, you know, with escalators rather than elevators. It was almost like a

00:19:26.500 department store. So the Trump organization's bid was the best bid. And that's how I got to know him.

00:19:33.400 And all my American directors said, oh, you know, hang onto your wallet. This man's a scoundrel and so 0.97

00:19:38.120 on. But he came in exactly on time, exactly on budget, built a very much admired building, 98 stories, 0.94

00:19:45.500 uh, had the place full six months before it opened. He was the best partner I ever had.

00:19:50.140 And then, and then we stayed friendly after that. We were neighbors in both New York and Palm Beach.

00:19:54.220 And, uh, he was very loyal to me and my, uh, legal difficulties have volunteered to come and give

00:20:00.140 testimony for me. And, and, uh, so we, you know, we're friends. I haven't seen him lately and I

00:20:05.820 obviously don't bother him in his prison position, but, but we, you know, we were friends before.

00:20:10.220 I have a theory I would like to test, uh, on you. My theory about Trump and why he gets away

00:20:16.200 with not malapropisms, but his bluntness, the, the shithouse comment, for example,

00:20:21.400 or his criticism. Here's my theory. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who, for example, um, I don't know if

00:20:27.840 you remember that clip when she laughed before the camera was on about, we came, we saw, we killed

00:20:33.020 Muammar Gaddafi. So there was a public Hillary and a private Hillary. There was the Hillary that,

00:20:37.680 that acted very, uh, presidential. And then there was the brutal Hillary behind the scenes. 1.00

00:20:44.120 The one who gave this, this secret speech to the South American bankers about open borders and

00:20:50.240 everything while denying it all. Yeah. The one who would give speeches and take the big dough from

00:20:55.520 wall street and then demon. My theory is that Donald Trump is absolutely the same in private,

00:21:02.200 in public, absolutely the same level of audacity, profanity, uh, brutality, humor. And, and that's

00:21:12.300 my theory. Tell me, tell me if that's right. No, I got what you see is what you get. I agree with

00:21:16.000 you. It's like anything else, like, like all of us in our jobs, we get better at it as we hold it

00:21:21.240 longer and work at it. And he, you know, he's seeming a more like a president than he did the

00:21:26.580 day he started. But, but you're absolutely right. The, the Donald Trump one knows is the one one sees

00:21:31.680 what, what you, what is surprising to people who know him are these portrayals of him as a horrible, 0.99

00:21:37.920 evil man. I mean, he isn't that at all. I mean, he's a, he's a tough businessman, but, but he is a,

00:21:44.380 you know, a hard driving, uh, man whose, whose objectives are reasonable and commendable.

00:21:51.660 Your second last paragraph in the whole book. I'm not going to give it away. There's so many great,

00:21:55.760 I don't want to give it away, but this, I think you nail it. With president Trump,

00:22:00.300 no setback is admitted or accepted. He's defiant. For him, rebuffs are really victories,

00:22:06.560 victories, disguised victories, moral victories, or the preludes to victories. Hyperbole,

00:22:12.400 truthful and otherwise, is his common parlance. He speaks for the people. He has been a very

00:22:17.260 successful man and he's repeatedly outwitted his opponents, which is why he's attacked with such

00:22:22.060 snobbery. You don't hear snobbery used against a billionaire, as in the snobs attack a billionaire.

00:22:27.700 Normally it's the other way around. Envy and the spite and spitefulness. But America is reversing

00:22:32.160 its decline and wrenching itself loose from the habits of lassitude, elitist decay. That's a mix

00:22:37.700 of things there. Because normally snobs don't hate a billionaire. They want to be a billionaire. 1.00

00:22:41.680 How much of it's jealousy?

00:22:45.160 It's hard to be precise about that. I think, I think there is, there was condescension to him

00:22:50.400 before as a Bulgarian. Once he was elected president, the envy became a tremendous encrustation

00:22:58.820 on the minds of a great many wealthy people who had thought of him as a culturally inferior person,

00:23:05.080 even though he was, in terms of his wealth, a parallel to themselves. But now that he is the

00:23:11.240 43rd direct successor to General George Washington as president, I think the envy is the size of what

00:23:18.900 used to be called Mount McKinley. I believe President Obama changed his name to some native name.

00:23:25.540 I like the fact that no setback is admitted. And if it's a defeat, it's just a victory in disguise.

00:23:32.000 He's never defeated. He would just fight on.

00:23:37.280 You saw that in the Obamacare repeal thing. He just fought on. And he did get the mandate,

00:23:43.800 the coercive part of it canceled in his tax bill. So, you know, he just, he just never gives up.

00:23:50.340 I, I was worried. I mean, I learned from your book, I guess I should have known, but I didn't

00:23:55.220 know it, that he really seriously considered Ross Perot's reform party as a, as an option. He

00:24:01.800 considered the Democrats. So he's, he's always been an outsider. My fear when he won, as I thought,

00:24:07.820 geez, he doesn't have deep roots in Washington. He's, all these insiders are going to run circles

00:24:13.360 around him. And I felt like that's how his first six months sort of was until he put his own people

00:24:18.340 around him. But also Israel, the, you know, he had attacked the whole system, both parties and all 0.98

00:24:24.900 factions, both parties, including the Republican leaders in the Congress and most of the Republican

00:24:30.020 senators and congressmen. And, and so for the first six months, they just sat in their hands. They

00:24:34.640 didn't do anything to put his program through, but you see all the never Trumpers are leaving.

00:24:39.100 About 30 of them are not running again. Ryan's going Corker, Flake, and so forth.

00:24:43.340 And he, they're in lockstep behind him now trying to get his program through. So he's, he's,

00:24:48.960 you know, it's, it was a war on the whole system. He won the nomination, then he won the election.

00:24:53.620 Now he's won over the congressional Republicans. You take it in stages.

00:24:57.800 We're talking with Conrad Black. The book is called Donald J. Trump, A President Like No Other

00:25:01.660 by Regnery. It's available online. We'll have the link for Amazon underneath this video.

00:25:06.200 Um, I, I think one of the reasons Trump may be successful, you allude to it, uh, being in real

00:25:13.980 estate in New York city, you're not working with, uh, you know, Swiss, um, you know, bankers.

00:25:21.940 That's right. It's not, it's not angels. It's not an industry dominated by angels. Let me just read

00:25:26.300 a line. I'd like you to expand on this. Donald Trump is not a blundering reactionary, but a battle

00:25:30.720 hardened veteran of very difficult businesses, full of unethical people. And he's no Eagle Scout

00:25:36.540 himself. He is a very tough and almost demiurgically energetic man. I got to look that word up.

00:25:42.800 His personality is so startling and at times garish that there's a large section of the population

00:25:47.080 that will not warm to him. That's right. But if his persistence brings continued success,

00:25:51.780 he will accede to this board of majority. I think the reason he can stare down Kim Jong-un,

00:25:57.660 oh, that's still, that's still in progress. The reason he can stare down the U.N. on the climate

00:26:02.200 BS, the reason he may succeed with Iran is because he's used to dealing with some of the toughest guys,

00:26:08.260 including the mob, which was in the construction business and the casino business. Cutth, I think

00:26:14.320 he's the first, well, not the first, he's the biggest bruiser in that office since maybe

00:26:19.420 Teddy Kennedy, uh, Teddy Roosevelt. What do you think? He's a, he's a, oh yeah.

00:26:24.260 You saw when that guy charged onto his platform in one of the Ohio cities, I forget the date.

00:26:30.960 It would be assassinated. Yeah. Yeah. Not the law, not Cleveland or Cincinnati, but one of those other

00:26:35.680 Ohio cities. Uh, his first reaction wasn't sort of timorous. It was, it was a hardening of his

00:26:44.540 fists and turning towards this person and security. Is he physically a big man? He looks like. Yes.

00:26:49.060 Yes. And, and, and solid. And the, and the, and, and well, his doctors have advised him to lose some

00:26:54.920 weight. He's quite muscular. He plays golf all the time. He's, he's, he's, yeah, he's a strong man.

00:26:59.140 Um, and, and, and he does, to use his word, have the stamina. Uh, some of the, I think you're,

00:27:08.160 you're probably right. You mentioned Theodore Roosevelt because he was a rancher and a man and an

00:27:13.940 explorer and a person who required a great deal of himself physically. So some others were very

00:27:19.540 strong in other ways. I mean, Franklin, because he lost the use of his legs, you know, he had bigger

00:27:24.920 biceps than Jack Dempsey and massive chest because his upper body did everything, you see? And that's,

00:27:30.160 that's one of his crutches is how he propelled himself around. But, but, but he is, Donald Trump

00:27:36.620 certainly is, uh, uh, uh, you know, he's, he's, he's a can do, let's get it done.

00:27:42.640 But he's also used to dealing with bad dudes. And I think, I think that the John Careys of the world

00:27:48.080 who say, well, but article 42 of the UN treaty, and Trump has no time for that. He, he knows BS

00:27:54.740 when he sees it and he sees a con man in Kim Jong-un's approach to the world. So it's not just

00:27:58.700 the physical. It's a straight, it's a straight correlation of forces. So he's the president of the

00:28:02.000 U S and he knows the power of the United States. He's not afraid to threaten to use it. And let us

00:28:07.440 face facts, uh, uh, Barack Obama didn't think that way. I mean, he had his qualities, but,

00:28:12.940 but the idea of approaching different countries with, uh, diverging motives to those of the U S

00:28:19.260 interests and saying, in effect, look here, I, I, you know, I'm, I represent and I'm the commander

00:28:24.720 in chief of the greatest military power in the world. And I won't stand for this. That was not

00:28:28.420 how we operate. But Donald will do that. I remember when Barack Obama was photographed

00:28:32.660 holding a book, I think it was by Freed Zakaria called the post American president, post American.

00:28:40.140 That is the exact opposite of Trump's slogan, make America great again. Post American world. 0.98

00:28:45.860 I remember when Obama was asked at his first NATO meeting, do you believe in American exceptionalism?

00:28:51.480 And he said, yeah, the same way the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I don't know if

00:28:54.380 you remember that. Yeah, I did. The exact opposite. And he wouldn't wear the American flag.

00:28:57.640 The exact opposite of Trump. Maybe you wouldn't have had Trump if he didn't have Obama first.

00:29:03.080 Yeah. And, and George W. George W., you know, really brought on the economic crisis. And,

00:29:08.160 and even though they were Clinton's measures, the housing bubble, but he, you know, he sat

00:29:12.460 there for eight years until it blew up and, and he, he was rather indiscriminate in his use of

00:29:17.320 military force. And then you add to that Obama's flatlining the economy and his passivity and,

00:29:22.860 frankly, weakness in foreign policy, the self-dissolving red line and that kind of thing.

00:29:29.320 And, and the Americans just couldn't take it anymore. But the key metric, in my opinion,

00:29:34.580 was GDP growth per capita went from four and a half percent with Reagan, 3.9 with Clinton,

00:29:40.880 two with George W., one percent with Obama. Americans will not settle for that. They won't stand for it.

00:29:46.760 Yeah. Yeah. You know, the decline. And again, this is something we talked a little bit about

00:29:52.060 Charles Murray. The fancy class can handle the decline or they don't see the decline.

00:29:57.040 Well, they're not in decline.

00:29:58.860 You know, I want to, you've been very generous with your time today. I want to,

00:30:02.300 I want to talk a little bit about something that purist, pure conservatives, libertarians

00:30:09.920 would have criticized before. And that is Trump's an economic nationalist, not just a,

00:30:16.880 so he threatens to upset the pure libertarian globalism on economics and a Milton Friedman

00:30:24.660 type and all the think tank conservatives would be opposed to it. I'm going to show you a clip.

00:30:29.940 I think this is fascinating. This is from the Oprah Winfrey show in 1988. So what's that? 30 years ago.

00:30:36.660 And back then, the economic challenger to America was Japan, not China. But I think if you swap China

00:30:44.040 in, you could play this tape today and it would be Trump in 2018. There's also a reference to Kuwait.

00:30:50.360 Trump has similar thoughts about OPEC today. Here, without further ado, here's a clip from Trump

00:30:54.360 on Oprah 30 years ago.

00:30:56.500 I took out a full page ad in major U.S. newspapers last year criticizing U.S. foreign policy. What would

00:31:01.960 you do differently, Donald?

00:31:03.120 I'd make our allies. Forgetting about the enemies. The enemies you can't talk to.

00:31:06.520 So easily. I'd make our allies pay their fair share. We're a debtor nation. Something's going

00:31:11.220 to happen over the next number of years with this country because you can't keep going on losing 200

00:31:14.980 billion. And yet we let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets and everything. 0.99

00:31:19.880 It's not free trade. If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about

00:31:24.300 it, OPEC. Just forget about it. It's almost impossible. They don't have laws against it.

00:31:27.800 They just make it impossible. They come over here. They sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell

00:31:32.520 out of our companies. And hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people. I mean, you can

00:31:36.940 respect somebody that's beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this

00:31:40.260 country. Kuwait, they live like kings. The poorest person in Kuwait, they live like kings. And yet

00:31:45.280 they're not paying. We make it possible for them to sell their oil. Why aren't they paying us 25%

00:31:50.340 of what they're making? It's a joke. Isn't that interesting? That kind of talk,

00:31:58.700 market, free market peers was, oh, that's terrible. You're going to throw the world back

00:32:01.720 in a recession. I note that America is booming. Unemployment is low. It's at record lows for

00:32:08.740 blacks and Hispanics. And women.

00:32:11.960 Industry, companies are reshoring. Apple repatriated a quarter of a trillion dollars.

00:32:17.520 Manufacturing is coming back. And he actually hasn't, other than his new squabble with China,

00:32:23.680 he actually hasn't done anything other than use a bully pulpit yet.

00:32:27.520 Deregulated to encourage investment and change the psychology. I mean, half of economics

00:32:32.620 is psychology, and he's changed that. The soft point is workforce participation is at 62.8%. That

00:32:42.220 should be a bit higher. But you should remember on his trade thing, he's all for trade. What he

00:32:48.040 doesn't like are trade imbalances. He wants the United States to export more rather than the others

00:32:54.180 to export less to the U.S., as long as it's fair trade. I mean, let's just look in one sentence at

00:33:00.740 Mexico. That is, a trade surplus with the U.S. of $65 billion. They were facilitating the entry into the

00:33:07.040 United States of half a million completely unskilled people. They may be good people, but unskilled people

00:33:12.540 illegally every year. And they were enticing American factories away to, you know, just inside the

00:33:19.500 Mexican border. And then encouraged them to export back into the U.S., creating unemployment in the 0.81

00:33:25.720 United States. And encouraged them to retain their profits in Mexico so they didn't pay taxes in the

00:33:30.440 U.S. Now, you don't blame the Mexicans for doing what they can. But the United States doesn't have to put up

00:33:35.920 with that. It's 20 times as powerful a country as Mexico, and that's not fair trade.

00:33:40.180 It's interesting. I mean, on Twitter, you can search individual people, how many times they've

00:33:48.100 used the word China, Iran. I went through every single tweet Donald Trump's ever written on China.

00:33:53.520 Boy, he's written a lot. And there were, I'm talking about tweets five years ago when

00:33:58.200 he was not really in, be careful, I'm on the campaign mode.

00:34:01.400 Though he did say to the New York Times some months ago, when I asked him this directly,

00:34:07.880 he said, yes, the fact is I've gone gently on China on the economic side, because the number

00:34:13.060 one crisis at the moment is North Korea, and we need them there. And this is nothing but the truth. 1.00

00:34:18.660 Well, you're right. But he's also not afraid to call them out when they, for example, they broke

00:34:23.660 the North Korean embargo. Boy, he came down on it. So that's that same bluntness that we saw

00:34:29.420 against Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. In a tweet, he'll call out Little Rocket Man in

00:34:35.000 North Korea. In a tweet, he'll say, I've had it with giving money to the Palestinians.

00:34:38.420 In a tweet.

00:34:39.220 Yeah.

00:34:39.620 He'll say what everyone knew was true.

00:34:40.960 You fired the Secretary of State in a tweet.

00:34:42.480 Yeah.

00:34:45.720 On China, to stand up for industries that no one would care about. Again, these are the

00:34:51.360 blue-collar folks, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio.

00:34:54.120 And they're just supposed to roll over and yield to the forces of history.

00:34:57.220 States haven't voted Republican in a generation. I don't think the Democrats have got it yet.

00:35:02.160 I think they're still pandering to the coastal elites in Hollywood and Manhattan.

00:35:07.920 I think...

00:35:08.220 There are a few of them who still think they can destroy the Trump administration.

00:35:12.560 And there are some who think this is their opportunity to get ahead of the future and

00:35:19.140 take the Democratic Party far to the left. You know, the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders

00:35:23.560 left. But I think the great sort of center of that party is very confused right now.

00:35:28.820 We're almost out of time, and I appreciate you spending it with us. I've really enjoyed

00:35:32.400 this. I'm... I loved this book. I loved it.

00:35:35.420 Thank you.

00:35:35.720 Thank you, guys.

00:35:36.380 I mean, I knew I'd like it, but I didn't think it would... It's the best book I've read.

00:35:42.000 I mean, Jordan Peterson's book, I'm a super fan of that.

00:35:44.240 Yeah, yeah.

00:35:44.440 It's a very, very different book.

00:35:45.520 Jordan's wonderful. That's a different style.

00:35:46.560 Like, this... It made it come... And you know what? To see all the sniping attacks on Trump

00:35:53.200 cataloged, and you're, oh, yeah, that one. Oh, yeah, that one. And they each... They're

00:35:57.700 like a fruit fly. They have a very short life. And you almost forgot, until I saw them cataloged

00:36:03.480 there, just the muck that's been thrown in the guy.

00:36:05.780 Well, remember the Charlottesville business. I mean, nobody remembers it. In theory, the argument

00:36:10.180 was that he was going soft on the Ku Klux Klan of the Nazis. I mean, this is nonsense.

00:36:15.900 No one can believe such rubbish. 0.96

00:36:17.260 Well, and maybe that's the reason why the media has fallen in the polls in terms of people's 0.97

00:36:22.880 trust for it. But the media doesn't know that. So they think they're the arbiters of whether

00:36:26.360 or not Trump is...

00:36:27.220 What really frustrates them is that he's used the social media to it with them. I mean,

00:36:32.280 he issues a tweet, 45 million people get it at once. And their research, the president's

00:36:37.720 research is that those people send it on within 10 minutes to at least 45 million more. So

00:36:43.080 90 million people are in almost direct touch with the president in 10 minutes.

00:36:46.900 Well, let me ask you about that. I'm going to move away from your book now. I'd love it.

00:36:50.560 And I recommend it. The book is called A President Like No Other. You can get it on Amazon.

00:36:55.160 We'll have a link below. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube helped win Brexit. I don't think the social

00:37:03.360 media titans figure that out. Trump won that way. Certainly not the fancy. I mean, New York Times

00:37:11.240 two weeks in advance was saying 92% chance Hillary's going to win. And I think shortly after Trump won,

00:37:17.600 when the people said, what went wrong? They said social media, they started to crack down.

00:37:22.180 They deleted 30,000 Facebook pages from Marine Le Pen in France. We see Silicon Valley really

00:37:27.960 tightening up, mainly on conservatives. I haven't seen any liberal taken down for...

00:37:33.180 Well, Google's starting to take the heat for being a left-wing operation.

00:37:36.800 Well, and Mark Zuckerberg, when he testified at Congress...

00:37:39.340 They gave him a pretty good roasting.

00:37:41.100 But they didn't do anything other than they roasted.

00:37:42.840 Not so far.

00:37:44.400 So here's my question to you. Donald Trump wins because he goes around the media, direct to the

00:37:49.280 people. But if he doesn't... We mentioned briefly Teddy Roosevelt. Will Donald Trump take on this

00:37:59.740 oligopoly, these extremely powerful people, as powerful in our day as J.D. Rockefeller...

00:38:05.600 Bezos is the one he's focused on at Amazon. Look, I don't know. I mean, remember this, Ezra. You've got to

00:38:12.320 respect the First Amendment. I mean, people have the right to say what they want, mean less. And no one's

00:38:17.260 going to tamper with that. But I think what he will not hesitate to do is focus the irritation of

00:38:25.480 his followers and himself on them. And even now, you know, every week, as you know, he goes out into

00:38:30.580 the middle of the country to Oklahoma or Arkansas or Iowa or something. He was in Michigan last week,

00:38:34.940 I think, but rural Michigan. But they pack out the local stadium and that big stadium. And he

00:38:41.020 harangues his supporters for about 90 minutes, but it's all over national television. And then he,

00:38:47.600 at some point, he points at the press box and says, they are the authors of these lies. And people

00:38:52.860 shake their fists. So he'll do that. But if you mean actually try and legislate against political

00:39:00.200 opponents in business, I don't think that would work in the United States.

00:39:03.360 Well, what about the...

00:39:04.660 And it shouldn't work.

00:39:05.500 I love the First Amendment. I wish we had it in Canada. I think it's our greatest flaw

00:39:08.820 as a country in Canada not having it. I'm talking about, and maybe I'm getting too technical

00:39:14.120 here, but it would be like a telephone company listening to your conversation saying, oh, we're

00:39:20.620 going to shut you off now because you're saying things on our telephone we don't like. So they're

00:39:25.520 no longer a platform, they're a publisher. What happens when Facebook, YouTube, Google...

00:39:29.780 Well, he would act against that.

00:39:30.940 Well, I feel like that's where we're going. It sounds like maybe you don't see this as

00:39:35.360 grave a threat as I do.

00:39:36.940 The truth is I don't follow it as much as you probably do. But I think if it is happening,

00:39:40.840 I would see it as grave a thought as you described. But if that is what they're doing,

00:39:47.500 public opinion would support him if he did that.

00:39:50.280 I think that's the gravest threat to his reelection. There's one more.

00:39:53.280 The president's ability to mobilize public opinion, any president, if he knows what he's

00:39:57.140 doing, is very great.

00:39:58.280 Yeah. I have one last question because I know our time is up.

00:40:00.940 I've said before, and I'd like your reaction to this. I've said, if Donald Trump builds

00:40:04.760 the wall, no matter what, he'll be reelected. If he does not build the wall, no matter what,

00:40:10.820 he will not be reelected. What do you think of that? I think the wall is essential to his

00:40:14.800 credibility, to his base, to the economic part of his platform, the security part of his

00:40:19.720 platform, and his war against the fancy opinion set. What do you think?

00:40:23.820 I agree with one slight modification. It doesn't actually have to be physically a wall. He has

00:40:30.000 to create the border. And if, because of the chicanery in the Congress, he can't get the wall 1.00

00:40:37.220 done, if he deploys military and paramilitary units to make sure that the illegal entries are

00:40:46.380 reduced to practically none. He'll fulfill his promise, saying he's doing that as he continues

00:40:52.360 to work to build the wall. But I think I'd flip the coin also in this way. He is going to go after

00:41:01.680 the Democrats as the party of open borders. Let anyone come in. Let them vote, even if they're

00:41:07.120 not citizens. And it is, as they claim, improper to allow census takers to ask people if they are,

00:41:12.480 in fact, citizens, which is just incomprehensible to me. He's going to hang that around their neck

00:41:16.840 like a toilet seat, and he's going to kill them. But if he abandoned the immigration issue, I agree, 1.00

00:41:21.000 he would go down. But he's not going to do that.

00:41:22.860 I hope you're right. Well, listen, I've enjoyed this. Time has flown. I've got about 300 more

00:41:26.800 questions we're going to have to save for another day. I love the book. I wouldn't say that if I

00:41:30.840 didn't love it. I would have said I liked it. But I love it. It's, I think it's the, every Trump

00:41:37.740 supporter needs to read it because it's an antidote to so much of the poison out there. And it's

00:41:42.400 not, it's not a love letter. No, it's not a whitewash at all. It's fair. Yeah. It's a good, 0.73

00:41:46.020 and you're a good faith critic. Yeah. I mean, look, Donald can get on anyone's nerves,

00:41:49.900 including mine. But, you know, there he is. Well, I really enjoyed the book, folks. It's called

00:41:54.260 A President Like No Other. Donald Trump. The author is Conrad Black, who spent the last

00:41:57.880 nearly an hour with me. I've enjoyed it. You can get it on amazon.ca or .com. We'll have the links

00:42:03.600 below. And we'll be back with our regular format tomorrow. Thank you so much.

00:42:08.900 Good to see you. Thank you, Ezra. Congratulations. Thank you so much. All right. That's our show

00:42:12.620 for today. Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at the Rebel World Headquarters, good night

00:42:17.060 and keep fighting for freedom.

Rebel News Podcast - July 26, 2019

(BEST OF...) Lord Conrad Black on his book, “Donald Trump： A President Like No Other”

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript