(BEST OF...) Lord Conrad Black on his book, “Donald Trump： A President Like No Other”
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Summary
A special episode with author and historian Conrad Black about his new book, Donald Trump: A President Like No Other. Join us in studio for a conversation about Trump, the man behind the man, the president, the show, and everything in between.
Transcript
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Hello, Rebels. Please go to the rebel.media slash shows. It's $8 a month, 80 bucks a year.
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You get a discount if you type in podcast as a coupon code. All right, without further ado.
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Tonight, a special conversation with author and historian Conrad Black
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about his new book, Donald Trump, A President Like No Other. You're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
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You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
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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.
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Welcome back. Well, a very exciting day today on Victoria Day.
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The entire show will be dedicated to a new book on Donald Trump.
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Published by Conrad Black. The book is called Donald Trump, A President Like No Other.
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And joining us now in studio is Lord Black himself. Welcome to the show. Great to have you in the studio.
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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.
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When I heard you had this new book out, I was nervous because you've written some very thick books of history before,
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and I thought, this is going to be a slog. I was ready for a phone book.
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This was a 256-page, breezy, readable, fun book. Some pages you laugh out loud. Some pages you say,
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Donald Trump's a rascal. And you know what? I think you managed to be fair, but not to suck up to Trump
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No, no, no. I tried to play it right down the middle. And the true Trump is, in fact, a very entertaining person.
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So a book about him should be rather entertaining.
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Yeah. You know, A President Like No Other, that's sort of an ambiguous statement.
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You could say that if you were a Trump hater or a Trump lover.
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There's never been one like that, of that country anyway.
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A lot of people despise him. What's interesting to me is a lot of his critics today,
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10 years ago, would have been his super fans, or at least people who wanted to bask in his celebrity
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Well, they'd see him as fine in his place, as a sort of blowhard billionaire. But the idea that he wanted
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to take over the system and kick out the people that he said had misgoverned the country for the last
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15 years, obviously that offends all those who identify with the people who've been established
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You have an interesting and quick history of his family life, a very interesting family.
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And there was always, you say it beautifully, there's always been a drop of the showboat
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in the American culture, a little bit more than our Canadian culture.
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Oh, considerably more. And it goes right to the start. I mean, the declaration,
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of independence. It's beautifully written by Thomas Jefferson. But in the midst of it,
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there's a blood libel on the native people. There is an indictment of poor old King George III that
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makes him sound like someone who was on trial at Nuremberg. And he wasn't. He wasn't a terribly
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competent king, but he wasn't an evil man, for heaven's sakes. And the Americans were the first
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important country in the world that weren't defined by a culture unique to them. I mean,
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the French spoke French, the Spanish spoke Spanish, and so forth. And the English were the,
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or British were the English being country. So the Americans, as a substitute, devised the theory
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that we are the first free country. Well, of course, they weren't. They had no more civil liberties
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than the British or the Swiss or the Dutch or most of the Scandinavians. But that was what they
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staked out. And it's worked. I mean, if it works, don't knock it.
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In a way, it was a country more about the future than the past.
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You know, the history of Trump, would you call him a swashbuckler? You use a lot of great adjectives.
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and at the worst, sort of a carnival guy, you know, I mean, a huckster, but P.T. Barnum,
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all of that, but also a statesman. He runs the gamut. He runs, I mean, in some ways,
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he's a slightly down market salesman, but in some ways, he's a great patriotic American leader.
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And that's the thing. It's interesting. Right now, there's a question of black America.
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Can they embrace Trump? And you've seen Kanye West and others break with the taboo and consider
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Republicans. And it's funny because until very, very recently, Donald Trump was the star subject
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of hundreds of rap songs, because in some ways, he embodied the audacious American dream,
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get rich, live fancy. I mean, he wasn't part of the gun culture.
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And he was sort of anti-establishment, which they identified with.
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Well, that's, how is it possible to be a blue collar billionaire?
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Because the blue collar thing, it really, it's not as if he ever worked with a blue collar on,
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but the blue collar aspect and the way you mean it is a person not interested in spending all this
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time going to opera committees and being on the social pages of the New York Times. He's someone
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who started relatively modestly in socioeconomic terms and made a billion dollars, but still has
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the sort of every man mentality and relates to the people.
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You know, there's a little passage in your book about how to save money. He would mix his own
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Don't leave your viewers under any illusion of what he was trying to exterminate.
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Like he would just, he got his hands dirty in...
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No, but his father said, look, we don't have to go and buy this stuff. We can make it ourselves.
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I mean, we have to get rid of the roaches. We got to have roaches in our buildings,
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but we can make our own, you know, the insecticide, whatever.
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Yeah. But what told him, what was interesting to me is that other people, especially those,
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Yeah. Oh, you know, his father was a wealthy man.
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And the idea that he would literally get his hands dirty was something that many people
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His father was a wealthy man, but he didn't start as a wealthy man. And they didn't, they
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weren't the wealthy New York that the world knows. They weren't Manhattan. They were Brooklyn
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and Queens. They had a very comfortable house. And his father had two Cadillac limousines licensed,
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New York State license, F1 and F2, FT1 and FT2.
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And so they clearly weren't poor, but, but, and he went to Fordham university and to Horton
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University of Pennsylvania. So, and then prior to that, he, he matriculated from a New York
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state military academy. So it absolutely was not a rags to riches story, but it was never
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the, the socioeconomic top. His father was never socially prominent.
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He went, he went to the construction sites, his famous pictures of Trump with a hard hat in
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the site. Now, any boss could, could come through, but I think, I think he dealt with enough
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frontline people, grassroots people to keep that sensibility.
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Ezra on his holidays, even in high school, he would work for his father on construction
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sites, not in the office, on construction sites. Donald knows how to build a building and he knows
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every phase of it. And then, and including, he went to Horton because it was the only business school
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that, that had a specialty course in real estate, including construction, the only one. And, and,
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and so he, he saw it from absolutely the most basic position working with his father's work
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You know, Charles Murray, the great American scholar, wrote about
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coming apart, which one was, and how the white working class has been disconnected
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from the fancy Manhattan, LA cultural capitals. And, and he developed a quiz called, how thick is
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your bubble? And there's questions in it that are sort of startling. Like, have you ever been on a
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factory floor? Have you ever worked at a job with physical labor that you come home and your body is
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sore? Like questions like that, that remind liberals, maybe you don't know, maybe you're leftist,
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but you don't know the working class. I found, and I think of Donald Trump and I, we've got some
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video clips of Trump over the years. I'd like to play one for you.
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Just before you do, if I may say one thing, I know Charles Murray and he was here in Toronto
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several months ago and there was a dinner for him, quite a large dinner that I went to. And
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they invited questions after he'd spoken. So I asked him, and this was very shortly after Trump was
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inaugurated. And I asked him if it were not the case that if he succeeded in what he was trying to do,
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it would possibly reverse the trend he was describing. He said, absolutely. If he succeeds,
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it will reverse it because he is not out of touch.
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And there's a respect that he respects working men and women.
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In a way that traditional liberals would put them like in a glass case at a museum
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and wouldn't want to touch them for fear they had mixed the rat poison.
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They would profess sympathy for them as a group, but not wish to associate with them as individuals.
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Exactly. And there's one little clip, and I use it from time to time on my shows. It was at a rally,
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I think it was in West Virginia, which is about something that's almost as dirty in the mind of
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the fancy set as an exterminator's pesticide, and that is coal. It's just a very simple moment,
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but let me show you a quick clip I'd like to talk about. Here's Donald Trump talking about coal.
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But the miners don't want to leave anyway. Is that right? You want to stay here. You want to open
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the mines. We're going to open the mines. I see over here, Trump digs coal. Look at that. Trump
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digs coal. That's true. That's true. I do. You know, what a contrast between Hillary Clinton,
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who in one of her debates said there's going to be a lot of coal miners out of work. Barack Obama,
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the same thing. They say they're for the working class, the working poor, but only if it's,
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I don't know, the kind of aesthetically fashionable jobs. Trump digs coal. That's a shocking thing to
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say in today's environmental era. But he always said beautiful, clean coal. But you'll recall
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President Obama, when he was running for the office and in the primaries eight, nine years ago,
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running against Hillary Clinton, when she won in Pennsylvania, he made those disparaging remarks
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about blue collar Pennsylvanians who took out their frustrations in their lives with guns and
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religion. I mean, I think that is much closer. Clingers cling to their Bibles. That was a phrase.
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Yeah, but I mean, that's much closer to the disparagement those people feel. They might,
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in their minds, think we want to better their lot. They're not living well and we want to help
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them. And they might be sincere in that, but they don't identify with them. They think they're idiots.
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You know, one of the things that, so I found that Trump digs coal comment interesting for two
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reasons. First of all, it's one thing to even say you're with a coal miner because that's an obsolete
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old school, that's dirty, that's blue collar white man stuff. That's not coding in Silicon Valley. So
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it's uncool to begin with. But then Trump actually meant it and he pulled the United States out of
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the Paris global warming agreement. Which was the dumbest treaty in history,
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rivaled only by the Iran nuclear treaty. I think everyone knows the Paris global warming treaty is
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sort of a sham, but it's like the emperor has no clothes. Oh, you can't say that. Or it's the third.
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Trump pulled America out and the sky didn't fall. Sky didn't fall. And meanwhile, the countries left
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behind who were advanced countries are now having intense discussions amongst themselves about what they
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are going to do, about the hundred billion dollars a year that China and India, the world's greatest
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polluters, fast growing economies, are expecting from them. I want to ask you about this plain
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spokenness. And there's a few quotes from your book I want to give. There's so much to cover. I tell
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you, it was hard for me to find excerpts from the book because so many things were, I want to tell you,
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let me pick one from random. And thank you for your kindness. Oh, you know what? I was,
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I won't lie to you, I was nervous when I got this book. I thought this is going to be heavy duty.
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I love every page. Let me read something. I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it.
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A lot of people say, ah, Trump, he's insulting. He has rude nicknames. He's, you know, he uses words
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like he calls country shitholes and stuff. I want to read a paragraph.
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That's right. Yeah, you're right. One of the things he's so good at, I think is a Manhattan
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thing, is nicknames. You give people a nickname and it sticks, they're doomed.
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Instead of leaking research and gossip about rivals, Trump just trotted rumors out directly,
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no matter how frivolous. Thus, as time went by to establish that Senator Lindsey Graham had given
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his private cell phone number to Trump, he gave it to a crowd of thousands and he repeated spurious
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stories about Senator Ted Cruz's father having had an association with Harvey Oswald. And you go on
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and give more examples. But I think the key is your first point there. Every politician does that,
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but they just leak those insults or accusations or wild gossip through surrogates. They plant
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stories here and there. Trump just comes out and says it. Right. And it's shocking, but at the same
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time, it's absolutely refreshing and honest. Well, I'm not always altogether honest, but I agree,
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it's refreshingly candid. You know, and you're perfectly right. I mean, Franklin D. Roosevelt was
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always above the fray, but he had, he had some of his entourage who were specialists in absolutely
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harpooning the opponents, you say, but his, his fingerprints were never on it. But, you know,
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Trump's not like that. I want to play a clip from a debate. It's, I'm laughing when I, I shouldn't
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laugh. No, no, no. He tries to get people to laugh and he's good at it. Well, and that's the thing,
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because he said, you're laughing out of shock because he says something you're not supposed to,
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but then you're laughing because if there's a grain of truth to it, it's going to stick.
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And, uh, when he low energy Jeb, it sticks because you think, yeah, he's sort of low energy. Let me
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play a clip. Here's him versus Hillary Clinton. And he's saying something you should never say.
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Take a look. She doesn't have the look. She doesn't have the stamina. I said, she doesn't have the
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stamina and I don't believe she does have the stamina to be president of this country. You need
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tremendous stamina. Hillary has experience, but it's bad experience. We have been saying Hillary
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Clinton has no stamina and she was just 10 feet away from him. And she was smiling that rictus grin,
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but you know what? I think it clicked. And there were some health scares for Hillary Clinton on the
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camera. She fainted on camera, you know, going after the, uh, it's nine 11 Memorial day. Yeah. And,
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and, uh, so there was, and she said she'd had pneumonia for a few days. So there was a problem.
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And, you know, we see later in some of the, uh, access to information documents that came out,
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how often she was napping. She was taking naps every day, sleeping. I mean, and I don't know if
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that's something more serious, but Trump just put out there what the under news that you just sort of
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murmurs. He just, and he does that on Twitter in a way. And the other side of it is he does have
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superhuman stamina. He almost never sleeps. He works all the time. Even people who don't like
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him at all admit that he is astonishingly, uh, persevering and strong physically. Yeah.
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Well, it is quite something. It's hard to believe. I think he's actually a year older than Hillary
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Clinton. If, uh, I think more than a year. He's just about to turn 72 or just as, and I think she's
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just coming up to 70. I, and he looks more vigorous than she does. I, um, I want to say something else
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because again, until you put this in words, one of the things I value, I mean, I followed Donald
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Trump closely as so many, as the whole world does. Sure. And I think I've followed him closely
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because I'm a journalist and I sense things. But one of the things I like the best about your book
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is you crystallized my hunch into a, he's, oh, that's right. I didn't see it that way. Let me
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quote something that I really found valuable. Um, Trump has learned something about how to gain
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and hold the respect that is naturally available to the chief of state and the country has somewhat
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got used to him. I think you're right there. And here's the key. There are markedly fewer
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malapropisms. There have been no bungled foreign initiatives, fewer indiscretions. His economic
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program is working and his enemies are largely a tired coalition of character assassinate assassins
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and hacks. But let me come back to that first point. Markedly fewer malapropisms, no,
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fewer indiscretions. Everyone tries to hang. Trump is so mouthy. He's so lippy. But when you think
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about it, other than the blunt list, he hasn't screwed it up. And you would think a guy who's
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always tweeting and shooting from the hip would blow it up. He hasn't blown it up.
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Yeah. But early on, there were some tweets that were ill considered, but there are very few of
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them now. And, and look, I, this may be just neat, but my impression is when you see him now,
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he has both hands in the podium. You see the seal of office on the podium and he looks and sounds like
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a president. I mean, he's very fluent and he speaks with authority and, and, uh, and not in that
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somewhat boastful manner that he used to have. I mean, when the question was raised about the Nobel
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prize, he said, look, that's a nice thought, but it's premature. What I want is a victory for
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everybody, for the whole world, not a prize for me. Now that was a very intelligent presidential
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thing to say. And he might not have said that two years ago. And by the way, there's no chance
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he's going to get that. That's determined by a small committee of the Norwegian parliament.
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Give it to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama just for getting elected and getting up.
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Well, it's a political gift. Yeah. But the, the presidents they should have given it to,
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President Truman, President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, President Nixon, they didn't give it to them.
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President Reagan. You started, the very first thing in your book is you dedicate it to the
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presidents you've known. You list them. LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush. Maybe I'm
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missing one in there. Clinton, Bill Clinton. The fact is I, I knew Jimmy Carter and I, and I knew
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George W. Bush, but I, I, I must say I didn't, I didn't want to say this, but I didn't particularly
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respect them as presidents. As men, yes, but not as presidents. Whereas the others I did admire
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them. How did you get to know and meet Trump? Because I want to ask you a little bit about him.
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Well, um, because we own the Chicago, my associates and I own the Chicago Sun-Times and it had a low
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rise building in downtown Chicago. It was clearly a prime site to develop. And, um, it had been owned
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by Marshall Field, the department store, uh, company and, and person. And, and so he had a low
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rise sort of almost, uh, you know, with escalators rather than elevators. It was almost like a
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department store. So the Trump organization's bid was the best bid. And that's how I got to know him.
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And all my American directors said, oh, you know, hang onto your wallet. This man's a scoundrel and so
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on. But he came in exactly on time, exactly on budget, built a very much admired building, 98 stories,
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uh, had the place full six months before it opened. He was the best partner I ever had.
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And then, and then we stayed friendly after that. We were neighbors in both New York and Palm Beach.
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And, uh, he was very loyal to me and my, uh, legal difficulties have volunteered to come and give
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testimony for me. And, and, uh, so we, you know, we're friends. I haven't seen him lately and I
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obviously don't bother him in his prison position, but, but we, you know, we were friends before.
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I have a theory I would like to test, uh, on you. My theory about Trump and why he gets away
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with not malapropisms, but his bluntness, the, the shithouse comment, for example,
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or his criticism. Here's my theory. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who, for example, um, I don't know if
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you remember that clip when she laughed before the camera was on about, we came, we saw, we killed
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Muammar Gaddafi. So there was a public Hillary and a private Hillary. There was the Hillary that,
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that acted very, uh, presidential. And then there was the brutal Hillary behind the scenes.
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The one who gave this, this secret speech to the South American bankers about open borders and
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everything while denying it all. Yeah. The one who would give speeches and take the big dough from
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wall street and then demon. My theory is that Donald Trump is absolutely the same in private,
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in public, absolutely the same level of audacity, profanity, uh, brutality, humor. And, and that's
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my theory. Tell me, tell me if that's right. No, I got what you see is what you get. I agree with
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you. It's like anything else, like, like all of us in our jobs, we get better at it as we hold it
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longer and work at it. And he, you know, he's seeming a more like a president than he did the
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day he started. But, but you're absolutely right. The, the Donald Trump one knows is the one one sees
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what, what you, what is surprising to people who know him are these portrayals of him as a horrible,
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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,
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you know, a hard driving, uh, man whose, whose objectives are reasonable and commendable.
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Your second last paragraph in the whole book. I'm not going to give it away. There's so many great,
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I don't want to give it away, but this, I think you nail it. With president Trump,
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no setback is admitted or accepted. He's defiant. For him, rebuffs are really victories,
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victories, disguised victories, moral victories, or the preludes to victories. Hyperbole,
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truthful and otherwise, is his common parlance. He speaks for the people. He has been a very
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successful man and he's repeatedly outwitted his opponents, which is why he's attacked with such
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snobbery. You don't hear snobbery used against a billionaire, as in the snobs attack a billionaire.
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Normally it's the other way around. Envy and the spite and spitefulness. But America is reversing
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its decline and wrenching itself loose from the habits of lassitude, elitist decay. That's a mix
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of things there. Because normally snobs don't hate a billionaire. They want to be a billionaire.
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It's hard to be precise about that. I think, I think there is, there was condescension to him
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before as a Bulgarian. Once he was elected president, the envy became a tremendous encrustation
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on the minds of a great many wealthy people who had thought of him as a culturally inferior person,
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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.
00:23:37.280
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
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.
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.
00:29:58.860
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
00:30:56.500
I took out a full page ad in major U.S. newspapers last year criticizing U.S. foreign policy. What would
00:31:03.120
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.
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
00:32:11.960
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
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.
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.
00:34:45.720
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.
00:35:08.220
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
00:35:36.380
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.
00:35:46.560
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.
00:36:17.260
Well, and maybe that's the reason why the media has fallen in the polls in terms of people's
00:36:22.880
trust for it. But the media doesn't know that. So they think they're the arbiters of whether
00:36:27.220
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...
00:37:41.100
But they didn't do anything other than they roasted.
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.
00:39:05.500
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...
00:39:30.940
Well, I feel like that's where we're going. It sounds like maybe you don't see this as
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
00:39:58.280
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
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,
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,
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