The Candice Malcolm Show - Ep 18 ｜ Conrad Black ｜ The Case for Donald Trump

00:00:00.720 In being so successful in the in the real estate business in the toughest city in the world

00:00:08.000 and reviving so quickly from a real economic crisis and with such ingenuity and in becoming

00:00:15.760 an instant and for a prolonged period television star something that proverbially millions of

00:00:24.160 Americans spend their whole lives trying to do without much success in all of that 1.00

00:00:28.480 I believe that he achieved more before he became president than any previous president except

00:00:36.640 those who were president who had been instrumental in founding the country and setting up its institutions

00:00:44.320 Donald Trump is the most polarizing figure in modern American politics

00:00:48.560 his critics don't just oppose him they loathe him they despise him and they interpret his every move

00:00:54.000 as an existential threat and crisis for the country and for our civilization but those who can get 1.00

00:01:00.320 past his rough exterior and hyperbolic rhetoric see a different man a champion of the working class

00:01:06.960 a successful businessman who takes a pragmatic approach to policy and governs as a conservative

00:01:12.480 an outsider who is unafraid to do things differently and a patriot who loves the American people and

00:01:18.560 strives to serve his country and help put it back on the right track my guest today on the season finale

00:01:24.480 of the true north speaker series is lord conrad black an historian author businessman media baron and

00:01:31.920 member of the british house of lords unlike almost every other political observer black took trump

00:01:38.400 seriously from day one he recognized trump's unique ability to connect with disaffected voters and saw how he

00:01:45.200 used the power of celebrity to steamroll the opposition and pull off the politically impossible

00:01:50.960 being elected to the highest office with no prior political experience and without kowtowing to political

00:01:56.080 correctness or the dc establishment it's always a pleasure to hear from lord black who is a prolific

00:02:01.360 writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of british american and canadian history in our interview today we

00:02:07.760 focus exclusively on u.s politics and black makes the case for trump's re-election we talk about trump's

00:02:14.240 upbringing the successes he had in the business world how he built his personal brand with an eye

00:02:19.280 on politics and how he burst onto the political scene like a bull in a china shop we also discussed

00:02:24.240 the media's incessant dishonesty the over the top and politicized covet 19 reaction the resiliency of the

00:02:31.280 u.s republic plus lord black makes a bold prediction about the upcoming election i hope you enjoy our

00:02:37.840 conversation please like this video share it with your friends and family and leave me a comment below

00:02:43.920 don't forget to subscribe to true north and if you'd like to support this podcast please visit tnc dot

00:02:49.360 news slash donate

00:03:01.600 well lord black thank you so much for joining the turn our speaker series it's such a pleasure to have

00:03:05.760 you on the show thank you for having me so i really want to get into your book donald j uh trump a

00:03:13.520 president like no other but before we do you you recently wrote a column in the national post talking

00:03:18.880 about the coronavirus and you know in in ontario we're going back into lockdowns and and it just

00:03:25.120 seems like we don't really have good leadership on this on this topic so before we get into uh president

00:03:30.080 trump can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts on the coronavirus the the lockdowns

00:03:35.600 and where we where we are uh sort of you know coming into the fall of 2020 here

00:03:42.400 it's a virus that can't be contained the only way to eliminate it is with the vaccine

00:03:48.640 and so all that can be done is to moderate the potential for its communication uh and the only

00:04:01.040 way to do that is to take these drastic lockdown measures that cause terrible economic problems as

00:04:08.800 well as social problems and psychological problems to people upon whom relative isolation is imposed as

00:04:16.800 well as economic hardship and uh it is not logical to do that because we now have after having coped

00:04:25.760 with this all around the world now since certainly since march and in some places earlier than that

00:04:32.160 a fair amount of information about it as well as a good many therapeutic palliative summit and the

00:04:39.280 position we've arrived at is that we can see that using american figures but they they would go for

00:04:45.440 other certainly advanced countries anyway including this one that uh for those under the age of 65

00:04:54.320 uh the the chances of a fatality are uh 99.997 percent against so a very very small number of people

00:05:06.560 uh and for those above the age of 65 the chances of avoiding a fatality are 94.6 percent again very good

00:05:18.480 odds though obviously that does involve some danger to uh to a significant number of people um so logically the

00:05:28.160 way to cope with this given that uh uh the impact of the coronavirus uh does not reduce the average life

00:05:39.600 expectancy of a population it afflicts chiefly elderly people uh and now the loss of such people is no less

00:05:48.400 sadness than anyone else i'm not i'm not suggesting that but uh they are comparatively

00:05:56.480 easily identifiable group and if they live autonomously they can be advised and helped in observing

00:06:06.320 sensible precautions to insulate them from the danger and if they're in homes where they're under

00:06:12.560 administration of others those places can be regulated properly now that was a terrible problem at

00:06:18.720 the outset we didn't know that and the fatality rates in some of those places were shocking but we do know

00:06:25.920 it now and i would suspect that if the elderly people were more vulnerable albeit 94.6 percent of them

00:06:34.640 survive were canvas they would say for heaven's sakes don't shut down the whole country for us and and we have to

00:06:45.120 keep in mind here that um uh even even for the elderly in every age group symptoms are zero to minimal

00:06:56.720 for over 90 percent of people so the fact is all looking mournful hysterical talk about you know a grim

00:07:07.360 milestone of the in the united states 85 000 new cases yesterday well you know that means uh eighty

00:07:17.680 four thousand 150 people uh emerge after minimal symptoms with immunity to the virus now we don't know

00:07:31.280 how long the immunity lasts but at least four months and possibly much longer so instead of it being a grim

00:07:37.760 milestone i mean the united states is a country where 8 000 people a day die well if it happens that

00:07:45.840 10 percent of them die with the coronavirus bearing in mind that 80 percent of people who are deemed to

00:07:52.320 die of the coronavirus have other problems that have contributed to the death and it's hard to figure out

00:07:58.160 which is the effective cause of the death and that the average age of a coronavirus afflicted death is

00:08:06.880 in the united states 78 which is the average actuarial life expectancy of an american 78 that we see a

00:08:16.400 completely ludicrous picture of the entire society being uh induced or coerced into a state of social and

00:08:28.640 economic and cultural stagnation for the sake of not necessarily increasing materially the chances of

00:08:37.200 of assisting that one percent who are actually vulnerable one percent of the total population

00:08:44.240 uh from assisting them and increasing their likely survival rate so i mean it the whole thing is nonsense and

00:08:53.280 in my opinion it has been conducted in this country because of a mindless emulation of what has been

00:09:00.080 forced to some degree on the united states by the democratic opposition to the incumbent administration

00:09:07.040 because from the beginning they saw that if they could get a shutdown of the economy they would produce

00:09:12.480 a an economic depression that they could then blame on the president he had a one election prior to the

00:09:19.920 covid outbreak everyone conceded he was going to win he had full employment and high standing in the

00:09:26.240 poll and uh and and this was a device by which his opponents have tried to defeat him well that's

00:09:34.240 you know that's how politics work but because it applies in the united states we should not be emulating

00:09:39.120 it here well there does seem to just be such a disconnect between the what we now know about the

00:09:46.240 coronavirus i mean you know i will say the beginning it was a mysterious virus it came from china we

00:09:51.120 didn't know the origin we didn't really know any of the things about it but but now that we know we've

00:09:55.920 had you know we've had we've been living with this thing for six seven eight months and to still be

00:10:00.560 going back into lockdowns in ontario you know like there just seems to be such a disconnect between

00:10:06.560 the reality and the facts that you lay out in your column and what we're being told by the so-called

00:10:12.640 sort of expert class that that governs us would you would you really put it all on trump or do

00:10:17.760 you think that there's anything else at play there

00:10:22.960 well look it's not for me to say that there is nothing else at play but the experts the so-called

00:10:28.320 experts aren't united and they aren't consistent i mean the famous dr fauci has been you know he's

00:10:34.240 faced in all four directions on the issue of use of the mask he started out saying you didn't need it

00:10:39.120 now he's saying that there should be a national mandate for it in confined spaces which is probably

00:10:44.720 technically true but isn't constitutional you can't tell people what they have to wear and it's sort of

00:10:50.880 a flip side of these things with people in quebec wearing uh uh clothes or or articles on themselves

00:11:01.840 necklaces or bracelets or brooches or something that imply what religion they are i mean

00:11:06.720 you these are fundamental freedoms that are involved here unless you can make a real case for

00:11:14.480 a public health uh general interest an eminent domain of the public interest now to some degree i think

00:11:21.680 you could do that about wearing masks in confined places but but this idea of joe biden's of wearing them

00:11:28.720 everywhere wearing them on the sidewalk and so forth this is just a lot of nonsense and

00:11:32.480 you know some of these things have already been thrown out by uh federal district courts in the us

00:11:38.560 um you know i think it's not for me to impute motives to people and we're you know even though we're all

00:11:45.200 unlicensed psychiatrists i think there's not much doubt that the democrats screamed for a shutdown

00:11:51.840 and and when trump was slightly hesitant and accused him of being anti-scientist and a kind of

00:11:57.440 uh flatter society uh philistine and then when he said all right we'll have a shutdown we'll have a quick reopening

00:12:07.920 uh they went along with a shutdown and argued about the reopening but you know meanwhile he's he's got

00:12:13.440 most of the unemployed back into work and uh and and the the fatality rate is still only a third of what it was at its worst

00:12:23.440 uh and uh the normal period for vaccines been accelerated by over a year and when the vaccine

00:12:30.000 comes to apparently be either an american or british vaccine or both uh but it will um it will quickly

00:12:37.840 be obviously made available to everybody uh in every country and and that is the only answer to it in the

00:12:44.560 meantime the less economic and psychological damage we do to to our populations the better it is i i i'm a

00:12:53.040 great supporter of doug ford i think he's a good man and a good premier but in this case uh i i disagree

00:12:59.600 with him i i'm a supporter of john tory too he's an old friend of mine as well he's a good mayor but i

00:13:05.120 think i think they've both been galled here by the by the federal government and uh you know again i'm not

00:13:12.960 one of these who is going to say that the uh the governments that exercise the authority that they do

00:13:20.080 and i'm in these unusual circumstances are doing it because they enjoy uh that greater authority and

00:13:26.480 then they're trying to restructure society along lines that it hasn't politically authorized that

00:13:32.560 there there i there may be some truth to that but i'm not making that allegation i'm just saying it's

00:13:37.840 mistaken policy i'm not achieving motives to anyone well i really want to get into your book i i just

00:13:44.240 finished uh reading it and i think it's really insightful uh the biography that you wrote on

00:13:50.560 donald j trump so much of what we see from the media so much of the sort of character that's

00:13:56.480 presented to us doesn't always really reflect reality uh during the republican convention we saw

00:14:02.320 a lot of speeches really talking to trump's character uh the kind of family man that he is

00:14:07.360 the opportunities that he's given the way that he reaches out to workers and people who you

00:14:12.640 know the little guys along the way and that's not really something that we see at all through the

00:14:17.840 media your book did a great job of really uh explaining that the sort of early years of trump

00:14:23.920 so i'm hoping you can help sort of walk us through the the early years in trump's life you know growing

00:14:30.240 up his time that he spent in um at the new york military academy and then also just sort of entering

00:14:36.800 the scene um of real estate development in new york city oh well yes i mean are you giving me an

00:14:45.120 open-ended mandate to give you basically trump's life prior to becoming president well maybe you

00:14:51.360 could just tell us a little bit of the sort of highlights of his early life prior to kind of

00:14:56.080 bursting onto the political scene in 2015 yeah okay well look his father was a wealthy developer but

00:15:03.440 outer borough developer queens and brooklyn um and and a little beyond the the five boroughs

00:15:13.040 of new york city uh he wasn't active in manhattan and um and he was a specialist in uh middle class

00:15:22.320 residential and uh donald went out um as a young man as a high school student he would go out with one

00:15:32.640 of his father's employees to collect rent and they often had real problems collecting the rent including

00:15:38.720 a few occasions when firearms were used so he concluded that he did not want to be collecting

00:15:45.120 rent in other than the highest income buildings so he was always devoted all his life from earliest years

00:15:53.680 he wanted to be a developer like his father but he always wanted to make the socio-culturally

00:16:00.640 big jump from the outer boroughs to manhattan as you know new york city is a very large city and there

00:16:07.120 is a great really the outer boroughs are bronx brooklyn queens staten island are are you know they're

00:16:16.960 they're quite indistinguishable from many other cities but manhattan which is what everyone thinks of

00:16:22.000 as new york it is is something altogether different and unique in the world and um and a tremendous

00:16:30.400 concentration of highly influential people uh and uh because he had a knife mother discovered that he had

00:16:42.800 who came from scotland originally he had a knife i mean not a bare bladed knife uh what do you call

00:16:51.760 that kind of knife where you press it and it comes open uh switchblade i guess uh but he didn't use it

00:16:58.720 or he didn't threaten using it he just had one so this so alarmed his parents they sent him to the

00:17:04.160 new york state military academy and he excelled there despite the regimentation and the lack of

00:17:10.560 privacy with a very good student and uh was highly regarded for his uh uh adherence to the rules and

00:17:19.680 his punctuality and all sorts of things like that and then he he had a good education he went to um

00:17:26.160 fordham university and the university of horton where he studied uh they had a real estate development

00:17:34.640 course and he studied that and did well there and graduated all of his holidays from early high

00:17:41.280 school right through university worked in his father's business in higher and higher positions but

00:17:47.760 he knew personally uh how to mix for example the uh the insecticide to keep cockroaches instead of

00:17:56.800 buying at wholesale they'd make it themselves and he knew how to do that he knew every aspect of the

00:18:02.640 business how to build a building every aspect of the construction how to finance it all of that he came in

00:18:10.240 very well prepared uh practically and academically and his father made him the

00:18:16.480 chief operating officer of his company just in his 20s and then

00:18:22.960 donald lived in manhattan and again unlike millions of other new yorkers his commute was

00:18:29.840 from manhattan out to queens and not the other way around and then he he made his first splash in the

00:18:37.280 development business in new york city in manhattan in the old commodore hotel which some of your

00:18:43.520 viewers would remember next to grand central station between grand central station and the chrysler

00:18:48.880 building but at that time the commuter trains had lost ground to other forms of the transport and

00:18:59.440 it was a somewhat depressed area in that part of manhattan just in the lower 30s and upper 20s

00:19:06.240 east side uh east side and um uh and and chrysler building was insolvent it was taken over by someone

00:19:17.120 many of your viewers would remember canadian jack kent cook and what donald did was he took over the

00:19:25.040 the the commodore hotel by um putting together a plan to renovate it was in a very decrepit

00:19:35.280 conditions a huge hotel with with i believe two thousand rooms and um substantially bigger than the

00:19:43.040 royal york for example uh but but in a very decrepit condition and he it was a tremendously intricate

00:19:51.040 matter of getting the adherence of city officials zoning authorities a financial group and and the

00:19:59.120 actual owners of the land and and the building on the land and so donald would he he made up a plan

00:20:07.840 and he held a press conference every day announcing progress you know some of the progress was more in

00:20:15.360 his imagination than than in a language you could really justify building a press conference about

00:20:20.880 but that's part of how development works especially in new york it's a game to hide things you know

00:20:27.120 and uh he would wave a sheet of papers around saying i have a signed contract which he did been signed by

00:20:34.080 him but not by anyone else you think and uh but eventually there became a considerable agitation to get

00:20:42.160 get this contract awarded and get the building redeveloped because it was considered

00:20:47.760 very important to the renovation of that part that famous part of new york city between grand central

00:20:53.360 station and the chryslet building uh to to get this great hotel functioning again it had been closed for

00:20:59.520 years and uh he at one point he produced a contract uh that was so complicated that

00:21:12.080 that he gave it to the city to show that he had the financial backing he needed and it was signed by

00:21:18.720 another party but it didn't actually give the financial backing and the cities and bureaucrats as

00:21:23.600 he foresaw did not have the perseverance to go all the way through it and see what it was it was about a

00:21:29.600 200 page document of legalese that didn't really pledge anything but they said all right we'll approve this

00:21:35.760 they took that back and got the financial side and yeah the renovation was was a huge undertaking they

00:21:43.520 found dozens of squatters uh living in the boiler rooms that rat population was so huge that even

00:21:51.600 though they put in a bunch of cats and things but the the rats drove the cats out and then donald went

00:21:58.480 around and collected all the stray cats from the animal shelters in the new york city area became

00:22:04.000 the man of the year and you know animal protection and he put all these cats into the commodore

00:22:11.120 hotel and and and and the felines overpowered the rodent with that with that reinforcement you see

00:22:18.960 the cat population prevailed over the rats and and uh and and it and it worked i mean it was a

00:22:25.120 magnificent reconstruction he reduced the number of rooms by about 400. it's a glass sheath building

00:22:31.760 thing it's operated i believe by um uh one of the famous chief pritzker and and and you know it's a

00:22:40.160 it's a well-regarded very profitable hotel and he made 250 million dollars on this still in his 20s

00:22:47.600 so he took off from there and he got a little carried away as everyone knows when he went into the casino

00:22:53.200 business he saw that atlantic city could attract a lot of gamblers from new york city and philadelphia

00:22:59.360 he didn't see that there would be no limit to the number of casino licenses that were given

00:23:04.480 so eventually it was what he did was well it was very successful and well launched but before long

00:23:12.320 it was an overpopulated casino town and there were too many casinos for the business but

00:23:19.040 that was that's a junk bond business everyone buying instruments that yield 15 know they're getting

00:23:26.800 a high yield because of a high risk and it may not work so you know the attempt of trump's enemies to

00:23:32.400 claim that he he did terrible things to uh to working class families whose life savings were invested

00:23:40.800 in his casinos is just complete foolishness nothing of the sort was trey we gave a modest haircut to

00:23:46.880 people like carl icon who then you know doubled down and bought more of this stuff more cheaply greater

00:23:52.800 discount to get a higher yield and then partly refinanced and in the end these sharpers who are

00:23:58.400 the only people you get in that kind of finance take care of themselves already uh and and in the

00:24:04.080 end it was a moderate success i mean he was a pioneer in casino in the casino business in new jersey and

00:24:11.600 it's still there and it's a it adds to state revenues um that was at that point he became a great

00:24:18.400 impresario and he held big prize fights there and uh uh beauty contests and things like this and he

00:24:25.680 did this all over the country and elsewhere in the world and um and this was part of his new plan which

00:24:33.520 he developed in those years uh and i should say while the casinos were going on he went to quality building

00:24:42.640 on on the model of the commodore hotel elsewhere which the trump tower is the most famous a very

00:24:47.680 distinguished building but his assets now were all quality buildings and golf courses and and uh but

00:24:55.040 but he devised this technique of becoming famous with the idea of making money off the brand of his name

00:25:02.800 and eventually as you know he was um selling trump mineral water and trump mattresses and trump shirts and

00:25:12.160 trump neckties ones that he wears that are quite long so that if your jacket is open there there is

00:25:20.320 not a gap even in a in a full-figured man between where his tie ends and his top of his trousers begin

00:25:26.640 you see this was one of donald's secrets which is by this one uh but but he just traded off his name

00:25:32.800 he actually got people including here in toronto to pay millions of dollars to put his name on the top of

00:25:39.200 their hotel and he didn't have to do anything although usually he managed it as well but he

00:25:44.400 didn't invest a cent and made money out of it and his personal life became very highly publicized in new

00:25:52.880 york uh and and uh especially some of the romantic entanglements that he had and his theory was all

00:26:00.960 publicity for the purposes he intended was good publicity and that he could he could turn his name

00:26:09.120 into a huge profit center which he did now some of the aspects of that were frankly fairly cheesy like

00:26:16.080 the trump university i mean there's no fraud involved they they they said you know you come to this it'll

00:26:22.400 teach you about how to make money in real estate and it did but he got some people to pay for the

00:26:27.440 platinum program thirty four thousand dollars for something that they could have got just by reading

00:26:33.680 some you know do-it-yourself books that you could buy for a few dollars in a bookstore so i mean

00:26:39.680 donald's conduct wasn't always the most distinguished but it wasn't it wasn't illegal uh i thought the

00:26:47.520 shabbiest of it was this uh health remedy he came up with uh which he claimed would would uh really assist

00:26:55.760 people and living longer and all it all consisted of was uh urinalysis and some vitamin pills but if

00:27:02.960 people are going to pay for that you know pt barnum was a great and representative american said

00:27:10.080 a sucker's born every minute no one ever went broke exaggerating the intelligence of the public

00:27:16.960 uh so you know there was that aspect of donald but he always had this theory that celebrity could be 0.97

00:27:26.080 translated into high political office and he did a lot of polling for many years and he always polled

00:27:32.720 very well with a large section of the public and uh his final initiative on that side of his career

00:27:44.480 was he had the idea of a certain type of reality television based on corporate life and he spoke

00:27:52.320 to someone at nbc and they went joint account on it they set it up he starred and from day one for

00:27:59.440 14 years he was he was market leader in prime time in his slot now i never watched one an episode of

00:28:05.360 this thing but he pulled five to 25 million viewers every week for 14 years and and i put it to you and

00:28:14.560 to your viewers but in being so successful in the in the real estate business in the toughest city in the world

00:28:24.720 uh and reviving so quickly from a real economic crisis and with such ingenuity and in becoming an

00:28:34.400 instant and for a prolonged period television star something that is proverbially millions of americans

00:28:43.120 spend their whole lives trying to do without much success um and then in inventing this method of

00:28:49.760 translating celebrity of a stylistically indifferent kind to say the least into political popularity

00:28:58.400 and then changing parties seven times in 13 years looking for the moment to go for a nomination

00:29:06.080 and then doing it being dominated by one of the major parties and contrary to all expectations winning

00:29:12.880 the election in all of that i believe that he achieved more before he became president than any previous

00:29:21.280 president except those who were president who had been instrumental in founding the country and setting up

00:29:29.120 its institutions washington jefferson and madison and those who successfully led great armies in just wars

00:29:37.840 grant and eisenhower and and uh and uh and and so he he contrary to this presentation and portrayal of

00:29:47.360 him as just a goon and a a boor and a charlatan i mean there are those aspects to him he does he did come

00:29:57.440 to the presidency as an extremely accomplished person and a very talented person and he has been in policy

00:30:05.280 turns i think an extremely successful president well it's so interesting because from your book i i i

00:30:11.440 kind of learned things i just didn't really know about him like his forays into professional wrestling

00:30:16.960 and the sort of showmanship of it all but you make it seem like it was all sort of strategic and in really

00:30:22.720 connecting with a base of sort of blue-collar people uh that that he really built his populism

00:30:29.120 on top of so can you maybe talk a little bit about how you know he he transitioned from being this sort

00:30:35.920 of well-known reality tv star that was you know outspoken and over the top but but also that he was

00:30:42.640 able to connect uh with people who were forgotten by the other parties and so how how did he turn his

00:30:48.480 his life experience into this huge political uh populism and the movement that we saw emerging in 2015 2016.

00:30:56.080 it's a good question and and he i only know this because i know him and he's said some of this to me

00:31:06.080 he saw that in the united states unlike most countries there is not necessarily any bias against wealthy

00:31:17.760 people uh no one in the history of the country was as successful politically as franklin d roosevelt who made

00:31:25.520 absolutely no attempt to pretend that he was an ordinary working man i mean he he um

00:31:34.320 uh you know he had a monocle like his cousin theodore rodeville he had a cigarette holder

00:31:40.480 and uh he spoke in a very patrician accent and part rich new york and part ivy league and uh

00:31:50.560 uh but he was a compassionate man he he presented quite faithfully quite accurately

00:32:00.240 as an intelligent and a wealthy man who genuinely cared and not in a condescending way but with genuine

00:32:07.920 solicitude for the less advantaged people and and trump saw that he and john f kennedy and lots of other

00:32:17.200 wealthy people nelson rockefeller and adlai stevenson could do this stevenson and and and he thought that

00:32:25.440 that he could go at one better because he could actually identify quite closely with

00:32:35.200 with the um with the working class he could be a kind of rich archie bunker and this isn't an act with 0.75

00:32:42.480 him that is sort of what he is and again you go back to the socioeconomic composition of new york city

00:32:50.000 all the ones i just mentioned somewhere from new york like nelson rockefeller and franklin d roosevelt

00:32:54.720 but others weren't but they but but they were from that sort of milieu uh uh ivy league educated and

00:33:02.080 wealthy people from wealthy areas you know if you remember adlai stevenson who ran for president against

00:33:07.600 general eisenhower he was a very elegant public speaker and he was called an egghead at the time

00:33:13.920 he's an intellectual rich intellectual well he had he really appealed to the working class of america

00:33:24.640 because he understood they were getting shafted he actually was quite observant all through from when

00:33:31.040 i first knew him in the late 90s all through the period until he ran for president he was following these

00:33:36.720 things closely and he did not approve of uh free trade agreements that consisted of

00:33:42.880 importing unemployment into the united states and he didn't buy the line that the u.s had any obligation

00:33:49.760 to to do that for other countries he wanted he wanted all these developing countries to develop he was

00:33:56.000 certainly uh in in favor doing things helpful to mexico and other places to raise their standards of living

00:34:03.840 but not at the expense of the american worker and so he could identify with these people and and then

00:34:11.280 as you say so you i you mentioned implicitly that great scene of the silver dome in pontiac michigan

00:34:19.360 where 95 000 people paid seemed sheer the hair off the head of dean's mcmahon head of world wrestling

00:34:26.560 federation who he by the way named his wife the director of the small business administration as a kind of

00:34:33.120 consolation for all that but you know it's hard to imagine a nelson rockefeller or a member of the

00:34:39.600 roosevelt or kennedy families pulling off a stunt like that you know but but it it worked for for

00:34:46.320 donald and he he had this growing constituency whose views he could articulate and it was quite genuine

00:34:53.200 because he identified with the workers he'd worked with them in his father's company in his summer

00:34:59.280 job and he has he gets on perfectly well with ordinary people like that he just happens very wealthy man

00:35:07.840 and as i said the american working class doesn't dislike rich people it it dislikes snobbs naturally most

00:35:15.200 people do but if in the united states if you're if you if you're a an unpretentious person and do well

00:35:26.000 financially people tend to admire that rather than envy it and think well he can do it i can do it too

00:35:31.200 that is you know the whole american mythos is one of um hard work and you and there's nothing you

00:35:39.440 can't do you can get anywhere no matter how humbly you begin well donald didn't begin very humbly but

00:35:45.440 but he still was kind of an inspiration to these people because he was a rich man who cared about them

00:35:51.520 and was kind of one of them not in that way of a benign respect for them like a semi-aristocratic

00:36:03.360 person like roosevelt would have uh but as one who was really one of them at heart but had done very

00:36:11.600 well as they could do and he would help them do it it was it was a genius insight into the american

00:36:19.600 political process and the american national psychology and he connected the two and here

00:36:25.360 he is in the white is and you know he may win or not i personally i think he probably will but whether

00:36:32.320 he does or not he he's made his point it was an astounding accomplishment absolutely so you know

00:36:40.000 and and he kind of came onto the scene you mentioned that he switched parties nine times in in the decade

00:36:44.880 prior to uh coming to the republicans and and and running but you know the republicans at that point

00:36:51.440 were sort of stagnant they were they were heading in a different direction uh jeb bush was the sort of

00:36:56.160 presumed uh nominee prior to trump sort of bursting onto the scenes and you know you you kind of wonder

00:37:03.680 like as a guy who was a total outsider he really shocked the sensibilities of so many conservatives uh he

00:37:09.840 wasn't really fully on brand with the whole you know free market free trade mantra that that that

00:37:15.120 conservatives and republicans really rally around and yet somehow as an outsider he just managed to

00:37:21.200 push his way right in and and you you talk about in the book how he was different than other outsiders

00:37:26.240 you know people like uh ralph nader or ross bro that were never really taken all that seriously and

00:37:31.440 didn't really have a shot whereas whereas trump found a moment um to to come on to the republican scene so

00:37:37.200 maybe you can uh talk a little bit about uh what it was like you know why he chose to to go with the

00:37:43.360 republicans and how he really just managed to to blow up the establishment and secure the the nomination

00:37:48.560 for president well he at one time thought of a third party candidacy and in 2000 he won two primaries in

00:37:57.280 the progressive party in the united states uh for a great many years whenever there's a third party other

00:38:04.560 than these there were southern segregationist parties but when there was a third party running through

00:38:10.960 a country they they called themselves progressive that started with theodore roosevelt who was an ex

00:38:18.400 president who decided that he should retire after two terms though he'd only won one election he

00:38:24.480 succeeded president mckinley when he was assassinated and he hand chose his successor william howard taft then

00:38:31.760 he took a dim view of how taft had performed as president so ran to unseat him as the republican

00:38:39.200 nominee and and and and go back as president as the republican candidate but you they you know they

00:38:46.880 he won the primaries but the party elders wouldn't let him in you see so he was so irritated he ran a

00:38:53.760 third party called the progressives and the effect of it was to make the democrat woodrow wilson the

00:38:59.360 president's famous election of three presidents and and uh it never worked i mean in 1924 the

00:39:07.280 progressives split the democratic vote not the republicans this time the democrats and but they

00:39:13.120 only got one state in wisconsin you just can't do it and trump figured that out so he's waiting for an

00:39:19.760 opportunity for the nomination of one of the two big parties he didn't really care which one it was and

00:39:25.360 um and then as the time went by and he saw that uh when we get towards the end of the george w bush term

00:39:35.760 uh the republican nomination was not going to get you into the white house because it was such an

00:39:41.520 economic catastrophe people that you tired about the involvement in the middle east and other things and

00:39:49.120 um and and and he didn't want to run against an incumbent president so when when obama was coming up to

00:39:56.480 retirement and and it would be new candidates from both parties he saw that was his chance and uh and

00:40:05.920 you may recall that when he and melania came down the escalator in june of uh 2015 to announce his

00:40:15.680 candidacy for the 2016 republican nomination it was greeted with absolutely convulsive derision

00:40:23.040 everywhere in the country it's the most hilarious thing anyone had ever heard of we're just going to

00:40:27.760 be a a shambles and um and and then you know actually the problem with that theory was that he knew the

00:40:38.960 voters better than the so-called experts did i mean absolutely nobody except a couple of people saw any

00:40:47.040 potential for what he was doing newt gingrich was one who did but uh the nobody in the media did that

00:40:54.640 that is audible or visible and and almost nobody in the political community but you know in the early

00:41:02.320 primaries he was doing quite well so there was a precedent for that jesse jackson had run quite

00:41:08.000 strongly for time in the primaries and and some others said you mentioned ross perro he you know

00:41:13.600 he did run he ran as an independent and and he took 20 million votes from george bush senior and that's

00:41:20.880 how the clintons got into the white is because the elder president bush allowed this absolute charlatan

00:41:27.760 ross perro to split his party and but this was different trump was running for the republican nomination

00:41:34.240 and and there was no you know there was no incumbent president or vice president running for that

00:41:40.240 nomination so um uh he started out in a level playing field except he was the only person

00:41:48.560 uh in the history of the united states to win the nomination of a major party without ever having held

00:41:55.680 any public office elected or unelected or or a military command except for wendell wilkie who was nominated by the

00:42:03.360 republicans in 1940 for the great honor of running against franklin d roosevelt which is impossible you

00:42:09.520 couldn't beat roosevelt nobody could be he won four straight elections as president but the um uh but

00:42:16.960 trump saw his opportunity and and if you recall he he did well from the early primaries and his vote kept

00:42:23.040 growing and they had this theory that well the most of the candidates will drop off and then there'll be

00:42:29.920 one anti-trump candidate and he'll win but but it didn't work that way as the primaries moved around

00:42:37.040 the country trump was running equally strongly in all regions it wasn't as if he was only getting votes in

00:42:43.840 the south or the midwest or something everywhere he was doing well and uh and and it just took it it just

00:42:53.280 has has has taken the uh american political establishment to now and they still haven't

00:42:59.520 got there but i've had all the time from nine from 2015 to the present to try and take on board the

00:43:06.160 idea that there's an inordinate number of americans who actually approve of this guy and and you know

00:43:11.680 they think they have him now they think they're about to throw him out next week but i i don't think they

00:43:16.000 are well it's so interesting to just reflect back on those early days you know during the republican

00:43:21.760 primaries he was just so wildly entertaining and you didn't really know whether he was serious half

00:43:26.480 the time um but but eventually you know he he just really began to speak uh to the country you know

00:43:32.640 everyone would agree that washington was totally broken everyone agrees that there's this growing

00:43:37.200 sort of underclass in in america whether you know you read uh jd vance's uh hillbilly elegy or um

00:43:43.840 charles murray's coming apart you know this this faction exists that everyone was ignoring

00:43:48.640 and trump really connected with and i i think eventually republicans kind of came around

00:43:53.840 um but but but but then even after trump was elected president in 2016 the the way that the

00:44:00.240 media treated him there was no there's no self-reflection and you write about this in your

00:44:03.920 book there was no uh you know moment of pause where where journalists and and other elites in

00:44:09.360 washington said okay what did we miss what did we get wrong let's try to correct ourselves

00:44:14.080 everyone just sort of doubled down on this this idea that trump was uniquely evil and that he was

00:44:20.000 going to destroy the country and that we're going to go into world war three and that he was just this

00:44:24.560 horrible horrible force for evil and and yet you know the trump presidency started to look more and more

00:44:30.960 successful um from a especially from a policy perspective you know the economy was doing really well

00:44:36.560 he decimated isis uh the middle east you know feels calm and peaceful compared to to the past few

00:44:44.160 decades america's energy independent there's just so many things from a policy level um that that you

00:44:49.840 could point to and say wow this guy is is a really successful president yet he never gets any kind of

00:44:54.800 credit um or recognition from the media instead you know we went full-on uh russian collusion and all

00:45:01.840 these allegations about him uh stealing the election so lord black what is it about about trump why why

00:45:09.840 can't people accept him as the president why can't he have why couldn't he have a normal presidency uh you

00:45:16.320 know what what what is it about him that really just triggers the media i think it is um it's not just

00:45:23.280 the media remember he ran against the whole establishment as you said at the outset um jeff bush was the

00:45:31.600 favorite but as you know if you in the eight consecutive presidential terms from 1981 to

00:45:43.760 2013 eight straight turn you had one or other member of the bush or clinton families as president

00:45:50.560 vice president or secretary of state eight terms in a row and and these families were and and not that

00:45:56.720 they were doing it cynically but in fact they were passing these great offices back and forth between

00:46:02.640 themselves and and the country got awfully tired of the bush clinton do a lock on the on the government 0.99

00:46:09.840 and and i mean they weren't bad the clintons and the bushes that's not the issue uh but but but there was

00:46:17.200 a sort of presumption and stagnation in the whole thing and you've got in the post reagan years you've got this

00:46:24.720 bipartisan establishment in washington where the white house would change every eight years but the

00:46:30.720 cadres of important people just beneath the white house or within it but just adjacent to the president

00:46:36.960 and bill were essentially the same people for the two parties and then each party had their own but they

00:46:42.640 were all chunny together and it just became a smaller and smaller in group and and trump was running to

00:46:49.520 break that up and and you know the establishment got pretty comfortable running the country and

00:46:54.800 changing the white house every eight years but basically everything else remained the same and um

00:47:00.880 and uh he particularly i mean he ran against the whole system they're against all the factions of

00:47:07.040 both parties he ran against the bushes as much as the clintons and obama and and he he he accused the

00:47:14.960 national political media conducting a whitewash for the little in group that were just running a log

00:47:21.280 rolling and back scratching operation for themselves while the interests of a large section of the

00:47:26.640 population went down the drain and the public was very sensitive to and responsive to that argument

00:47:35.920 because there was some truth to it but from the standpoint of those who were running the gravy train

00:47:41.520 he was a mortal threat to them and they responded as people or all animals do when they're when their

00:47:48.800 livelihood is threatened and and and so you know that they don't confine themselves in legitimate

00:47:54.720 argument the cloth committed and they've locked arms and and now in the last week we've seen the

00:48:01.120 extraordinary spectacle of um the media sandbagging even news corporation one of the country's biggest media

00:48:10.080 companies because the new york post is steadily exposing details of the biden family's financial daring

00:48:18.080 do while joe biden was vice president now i would give joe biden the benefit of the doubt i don't see

00:48:24.160 any evidence that american policy it was altered for corrupt reasons because of uh backhanders that the

00:48:31.040 biden family were taking from various interests in in russia china and ukraine i don't see that

00:48:38.080 any evidence that foreign that american policy was altered because of that although it has to be

00:48:42.800 looked into but what did happen is that biden lied about it he said he didn't know anything about his

00:48:48.160 son's financial activities it's now obviously knew a great deal about it and and was implicated but so

00:48:55.200 you know lying to the public is not a crime but it doesn't do wonders for your political capital but

00:49:00.640 in this case the media are now desperately trying to pretend that that is a non-issue it's an

00:49:06.720 irrelevancy it it's counterbalanced by the fact that trump had a bank account in china when he was

00:49:12.400 contemplating doing business there which did not have a large balance in which he closed two years

00:49:17.120 before he was president as if that has anything to do with with these allegations but for their part

00:49:23.360 they are desperate to get rid of this guy because if he wins again he really is going to drain the swamp

00:49:30.160 and they really will be pushed out of georgetown and replaced by other people and and uh i'm not

00:49:37.120 saying that what trump would put in its place would be a absolutely clean system but that's not the

00:49:42.880 american tradition the american tradition goes back to andrew jackson the so-called spoiled system when

00:49:48.720 he came in he fired the whole top half of the civil service which was an unheard of thing to do prior to

00:49:54.160 that it had been the presidency had been held by rich virginia plantation owners alternating with the

00:50:01.920 adams family in massachusetts and they'd all run a nice tight little shop for themselves now they founded

00:50:07.920 the country and they were great men some of them very great men but and and all of them good men but

00:50:14.080 andrew jackson this populist from tennessee he was a drummer boy in the revolution not a general or a

00:50:19.680 governor and swept them all out through the bag and baggage you know revoked the charter of the national

00:50:26.960 bank and then and expanded the franchise and expanded the country to the west and and and and it grew

00:50:35.120 you know he put his own people in and they weren't necessarily better than the others but the system is

00:50:40.640 based on the idea that that that you change you know you just don't have the same people running

00:50:45.680 the country forever and and there was an absolutely non-violent and and smoothly assimilated example of

00:50:55.120 that with president reagan i mean you may recall you may be young to recall but some a lot of your

00:51:01.040 viewers would recall that when he came into office he was represented as a lunatic as well and even though

00:51:07.840 he'd been the governor of a great state for two terms he was representative as a kind of right-wing

00:51:13.200 nutcase and a man of limited intelligence who had been selling 20 mule team borax and pv advertisements

00:51:19.840 and flacking for the general electric corporation and played in a lot of grade b movies although gore

00:51:25.760 vidale not someone i would normally quote as he said that's a terrible injustice he's one of the greatest

00:51:32.000 actors in world history who had the misfortune to play in some great big movies but but reagan smoothed

00:51:38.480 them down did what he wanted which was to cut taxes induce a real capitalist boom and and win the cold

00:51:46.240 war he knew the u.s could face russia down and he and it did and and and everyone was happy and then he

00:51:53.360 didn't really tear the washington political class apart uh so so they they they indulged him they

00:52:01.280 didn't bother him and and they never really went after him in that iran country nonsense so i started

00:52:06.960 up a bit about it after watergate everybody in washington got um contaminated by the idea that you

00:52:16.320 could criminalize policy differences and that absolutely strictly judicial proceedings could be

00:52:22.080 introduced into politics we saw that this past year of the spurious impeachment of of of trump but um

00:52:29.360 uh the the this this group that i referred to and they're talented people and they're patriotic

00:52:35.600 people most of them are probably pretty good but they're smug and they're complacent and they

00:52:40.560 haven't done such a brilliant job i mean the the previous 20 years to trump were the worst years of

00:52:46.400 presidential misgovernment in american history worse than the 10 years before the civil war and

00:52:51.840 worse than the three terms between woodrow wilson and franklin roosevelt that gave us the great

00:52:56.800 depression and isolationism and prohibition and uh and you know they had a terrible record they had

00:53:03.920 an economic catastrophe human uh disasters and humanitarian disasters with the millions and

00:53:11.360 millions of refugees and endless war in the middle east to no good purpose for the u.s uh and and 0.99

00:53:18.160 and trump was right to say they're not doing a good job so that's what you've got these people and

00:53:24.400 their tenacity and fanaticism are are unable to accept that trump such an outlandish and egregious

00:53:31.600 character as he is in some ways could be for real and they they're repelling the barbarian it's just

00:53:37.840 raised the drawbridge and the people will have to decide sorry by the way one thing the conduct of the

00:53:44.960 the media as you said has been a disgrace and and this is dangerous because as all surveys show

00:53:50.960 independent professional surveys harvard university and so forth uh pew research center 95 percent of

00:53:57.680 the national political media is hostile to trump and they just make it up it's not it's not a matter of

00:54:03.280 just giving more space to the opposition it's a matter of slinging mud at the president inventing things

00:54:08.480 and and and uh just malicious falsehoods and and throwing them at him and all polls indicate that

00:54:15.840 the public respect of the media is under 20 percent now this is a dangerous situation you cannot have

00:54:21.600 a functioning democracy without a free press you can't have anyone intervene with the free press they

00:54:26.400 have to be free and and yet if the public is so disrespectful of them the continued existence of a free

00:54:33.120 press will not become or at least will feast to be a a matter of great public urgency and and and

00:54:41.040 and uh what we need is a more honest and and respectable press that re earns the respect of the country

00:54:52.880 and uh and i i i my theories if trump loses the election they will say well there it is we did it

00:54:59.440 you know we the press did it because they've been conducting the biden campaign biden is just a

00:55:04.240 sideshow sitting in his face he's a little guy from delaware has been around for 50 years but he

00:55:09.520 couldn't lead america across the brooklyn bridge this campaign has been has been conducted by the media

00:55:14.800 on his behalf well absolutely i mean you mentioned hunter biden's laptop and you know it seems like in

00:55:21.120 some ways the cover-up is worse than the crime because you know so many people have now been exposed

00:55:25.920 to the idea that facebook and twitter are picking and choosing what what what they deem

00:55:31.600 newsworthy and and and everything else you know they get hidden um in in your book you talk about

00:55:37.920 a lot of this sort of disconnect between the media narrative about trump whether it be on on women you

00:55:42.960 know the idea that that he's just this horrible uh you know misogynist compared to the reality where

00:55:48.880 he has all of these strong women surrounding him not just on his campaign you know with Kellyanne Conway and

00:55:53.840 Hope Hicks and um Sarah Huckabee Sanders and his own daughter but also throughout his career he he

00:55:59.200 he gave women opportunities to to lead projects that that had never been done before but but there's

00:56:03.680 just so many instances of of this whether it was um you know violence at his campaign rallies apparently

00:56:09.600 uh you know supposedly he was the one that was inciting it but then we learned that there were

00:56:13.680 actually paid democratic operatives um we had the whole uh russian disinformation thing that that

00:56:20.080 supposedly he was colluding with the russians and and that the the basis of it was the steel dossier

00:56:25.760 which in and of itself turned out to be russian disinformation and now you know the media is

00:56:31.120 saying that they're not sharing the hunter biden story because it looks like it could be russian

00:56:35.760 disinformation even though there's i mean there's just so much confusion national intelligence agency

00:56:40.480 and the fbi have said that there's no evidence of that right i mean to me and you come from a media

00:56:47.120 background you you know you built all these successful newspapers to me the media is gaslighting

00:56:52.320 the public and the public is starting to see through it and and i think it's it's going to back

00:56:56.560 backlash or maybe it already has uh backfired on them um because people just don't really trust the

00:57:02.480 media and you just mentioned that you know you can't have a successful democracy without a media

00:57:07.760 but but what i'm seeing is is sort of a partisanship divide of the media like i can't i can't trust

00:57:12.560 cnn or any of the mainstream media anymore so i'm going to go and get my news from you know ben

00:57:18.080 shapiro and the daily wire or you know go seek out the the new york post or focus exclusively on fox

00:57:23.840 news because i know what i'm going to get there but then you have this sort of increasing uh polarization

00:57:29.760 so i just wondering you know do you think that there's any solutions or any coming back from this or

00:57:35.360 are we just sort of on this path now where we're going to continue to to be divided um and and we have

00:57:41.120 these irreconcilable differences uh no the united states is is a certainly a viable country it's it's

00:57:48.240 a rough country and there is a temptation for example amongst the british i mean technically

00:57:54.240 i'm british and indeed a member of the british parliament and the british think in large measure

00:57:59.600 that the americans are essentially somewhat similar to themselves it's another english-speaking country

00:58:06.480 and uh with institutions despite the fact that the us was created in a revolution

00:58:13.920 to throat the british head substantially based on british common law and british parliamentary

00:58:20.720 electoral traditions and therefore they're kind of our american cousins and and there is that aspect of

00:58:26.400 them and to this day there there would be substantial pockets of largely influential people in in new england and new york and

00:58:42.240 the northeast in particular that that would qualify as as being well acquainted with britain and somewhat

00:58:50.160 sympathetic to it and and in themselves conducting themselves in a way that that would justify that

00:58:58.480 description that i just gave but uh the united states isn't remotely like britain and the fact

00:59:08.160 that it speaks english it dulls people into thinking that there is a similarity between the two countries that

00:59:14.240 does not really exist the ethnic composition of it as you know is not mainly the british isles

00:59:22.800 when mr churchill addressed the congress at the end of 1941 and said what kind of a people that they

00:59:29.440 think we are this was part of his thing you need to portray it as one great english-speaking people's

00:59:36.640 cause you know which obviously served britain's interest and and he as a man his mother was an american

00:59:44.560 to some degree was very sincere in that but um

00:59:51.840 the america dressed had more people of german italian and irish

00:59:58.000 descent than of british you know english or scottish and and those three groups that i just said were in general in the world at that time not

01:00:06.160 very pro-british and

01:00:08.560 roosevelt was addressing and constantly maintaining the support of a majority of a country that was quite

01:00:15.120 different to the one that churchill thought he was visiting and that gap has become greater since the

01:00:20.240 united states is

01:00:22.480 it is not really a society of laws the way britain is it's a jungle now it's a jungle built on on an

01:00:30.240 idealistic basis that all who as i said earlier work hard will succeed and there's nothing that they

01:00:39.920 cannot aspire to that is true but but behind the facade of um a sort of fair play commonwealth of the

01:00:52.080 meritocratic behind the facade of america walt disney and and uh norman rockwell and grandma murder

01:01:03.680 it is a jungle and and uh like all jungles it's run by the 700 pound cats and the 30 foot constricting

01:01:13.360 snakes and and this is its strength and its weakness that you have this tremendous competitiveness

01:01:20.880 and and and this tremendously high level of achievement in almost every field and and an

01:01:27.120 unprecedentedly productive work for it uh but you also have millions of people ground to powder for no

01:01:35.200 reason and in in in you know that america is is terribly disorganized and by canadian and british standards

01:01:45.840 violent and corrupt uh but but but so what it's their country it's a democracy and they can run it how

01:01:54.080 they want and that's what it is whether anyone else likes it or not and and it it is not a self-destructive

01:02:01.200 country it's a country it's a it's a country where it gets to the edge but it gets the leadership it

01:02:08.480 needs when when it was literally breaking up they they produced from the west this leader who had had

01:02:17.840 one term as a congress many years before from whom little was expected and he was arguably the greatest

01:02:24.880 statesman in the history of the world mr lincoln and and he restored the union and emancipated the slaves

01:02:31.200 and and when the entire system had broken down the beginning of the 30s the banks had closed in 46

01:02:40.160 states and in the other two states withdrawals couldn't exceed ten dollars every stock exchange

01:02:46.480 and commodity exchange in the country had been closed for two weeks the whole system collapsed

01:02:52.480 and the the unemployment rate was 30 percent and there was no direct relief for them they could beg

01:02:59.440 steel or star that was the choice and on inauguration day 1933 there were machine gun nests corners of

01:03:07.600 the federal buildings in washington for the first time since the civil war that is the america roosevelt

01:03:13.920 took over but he was the man to restore it and he did very quickly the only thing we have to fear is fear

01:03:19.600 itself he created these workfare programs put everybody to work saving the looping crane and you know

01:03:25.760 making national parks and building roads and you know great thing the infrastructure cheaply for the country

01:03:34.240 like the triber bridge and the lincoln tunnel and so on and and it all worked and you know when

01:03:41.520 they get it there's a genius to the system that never lets it go completely over the edge

01:03:47.760 but sometimes it it looks like it's threatening to uh it's not so bad though and it it'll it'll it'll revive

01:03:56.480 it's it is fundamentally an incomparably strong country but it's not everyone's cup of tea to

01:04:01.600 live there i mean you know it's got its drawbacks well certainly it feels like one of those trying

01:04:07.360 times in in history world history right now but i i i want to ask you you know we started the

01:04:12.320 conversation talking about kobe 19 and and sort of the over-the-top reaction to it i know you wrote

01:04:18.320 in a column back in september 2019 that you thought that trump was going to win in a landslide just just

01:04:23.680 just given the economics and how well people were doing well you know things just totally different

01:04:28.240 now and covet has really been uh a total curveball uh for that so i want i wonder what your what your

01:04:34.880 prediction is what what do you think is going to happen uh on the november 3rd election yeah well i i

01:04:40.240 wrote what i did then of course not being able to foresee covet uh and and my reasoning was that

01:04:46.720 someone who has as successful a term as he has had and i i believe as i mentioned that he's been the

01:04:54.880 most successful first term president in the history of the country except for lincoln roosevelt and mr

01:05:00.720 nixon and and uh uh lincoln was a long time ago in special circumstances in the civil war but

01:05:09.520 and he was re-elected comfortably enough but the south wasn't voting but in in the case of

01:05:14.960 roosevelt when he ran free election and in in 1936 and mr nixon in 1972 in both cases they won over 60

01:05:23.360 of the vote and i thought that and then reagan got just under 60 percent in 84 and i thought trump had

01:05:29.520 been as almost as successful as the first two and as uh and and would do approximately as well

01:05:40.080 and i and i think he would have except for the kobe thing but on my prediction i still think he will

01:05:44.320 win i i think it's uh i actually think he'll do a little better than he did four years ago um

01:05:50.480 um the the entire democrat campaign has been really as i said earlier conducted by

01:05:57.280 an unprofessional and biased media against which as you said i think there is some backlash

01:06:02.400 and the only argument against trump are the foibles of his personality and the in my opinion false

01:06:08.480 allegations that he's mismanaged mismanaged the covet crisis uh there have been some public relations

01:06:15.280 fiascos to be sure but in fact i think he's managed like a good executive

01:06:20.240 he's advanced by 70 percent of the time normally needed to bring in a vaccine he inherited a public

01:06:27.200 health response system that was completely decrepit any test for this virus had to be taken by

01:06:33.200 appointment in a hospital and then sent to atlanta georgia wherever the test took place for evaluation

01:06:39.600 and and he revolutionized all that in a couple of weeks and made the u.s the provider to the world of

01:06:45.520 ventilators and everything else that was necessary and uh he had the short shutdown and he's he's got

01:06:53.120 you know 60 of the people back at work already i mean i think he's actually done a good job other than

01:06:58.720 the public relations aspect of it there so i you know i i think that uh when it comes down to it the

01:07:04.800 the hostility to him is in some measure confected by a media stonewall that the public

01:07:13.600 checks and presents and i i think people will be surprised i think there are up 10 million voters the

01:07:20.320 pollsters haven't discovered because um it is clear that most trump supporters refuse to discuss public

01:07:30.480 greeners they don't want to be hassled and um and i you know the polls show that a majority

01:07:39.280 think they're better off now than they were four years ago and the majority think their neighbors

01:07:43.520 are going to vote for trump and i i i think that the polling organizations are filled with um not

01:07:50.960 completely filled but substantially filled with democratic front polling operations like vox politico

01:07:58.000 monmouth quinnipiac uh and and uh polls conducted under the auspices of the great media networks and

01:08:06.720 outlets new york times washington post and and the three uh traditional uh television networks uh

01:08:16.720 that have spent the last four years trying to evict trump from the white house so i wouldn't believe

01:08:21.120 a word they publish in these subjects and that's what's wrong with the real clear politics average

01:08:26.400 uh three quarters of it are just propaganda and it's not real numbers it's terribly hard to pull the

01:08:32.000 trump voter because they don't trust the system anyway so they don't cooperate with it and they're

01:08:36.320 right not to trust them well you know it would be really really damning for the polling industry if

01:08:42.400 they got it wrong again you know uh some of the polls i've seen i saw frank lundson tv who i know

01:08:47.840 uh the other days saying if we've got this wrong we should all seek another occupation i i said to

01:08:54.160 my wife right on frank that's what you should be doing if i were you i'd start right now but it's

01:09:00.080 so true uh i i happen to be down in california right now and most of my friends are sort of liberal

01:09:04.560 democrats and even talking to them you know they they they are kind of resigned to the idea that they

01:09:10.240 think trump is going to win in a massive landslide and that that the the the media and the polling

01:09:15.200 companies are so out of touch uh with what's happening on the ground that that the trump

01:09:19.600 is popular that biden is just deeply unpopular he's not even campaigning i mean it's interesting

01:09:23.920 we were talking about um earlier the idea that you know hillary clinton might have lost because she

01:09:29.040 took the rust belt for granted she didn't bother campaigning in states like wisconsin um and michigan 0.96

01:09:34.880 or pennsylvania i should say uh you know joe biden's not really campaigning at all he's he's uh

01:09:40.960 sitting in his basement calling a lid every day well they've signed on to the theory that

01:09:46.800 yeah they've signed on to the theory that the covid thing prevents much public exposure

01:09:51.360 that's convenient to him because he he can't stand up to that he does not have

01:09:55.680 i mean there's no there's no rap on him here he's 78 years old you know and it's a grueling

01:10:00.640 punishing schedule a presidential campaign and and he doesn't have the stamina for that but he's he's you

01:10:06.960 know he's look he's what cromwell called a decayed servitor he's a good old boy from a little state

01:10:13.440 he's been there for 10 years but but he's he's positive chef as we say in quebec you know i mean

01:10:18.720 he's just not a leader i mean the president of the u.s can lead in different ways you can have a

01:10:24.720 glamorous leader like kennedy or a very clever and meticulous leader like nixon or a great prestigious

01:10:34.240 half a vuncular half military hero figure like eisenhower you know leadership comes in many forms

01:10:40.080 or or a you know a rich effective executive with some art on gratitudes like trump um or a cool cap

01:10:49.600 like obama i think he was a terrible president but he was a pretty pretty effective political operator

01:10:55.680 but joe doesn't have that i mean he's a guy put in there because the party elders were afraid of a

01:11:01.440 sanders nomination but they saddled him with a sanders program and um and but the interesting thing

01:11:09.040 to me on this is that i understand that joe doesn't pull the crowd and and biden is is committed to this

01:11:18.240 thing we all have to go around like you know frightened uh possums or something because of the uh

01:11:25.680 of the virus but you know he's called that their supposed big gun obama to campaign now like i i

01:11:33.680 admit that crowd behavior is different given that there's a pandemic but i remember when president

01:11:40.960 eisenhower came out for nixon in 60 or when president truman came out for kennedy in in 60 they pulled huge

01:11:49.520 crowds as as distinguished ex-presidents and uh obama i i mean i he's speaking his his campaign stump

01:11:59.120 speech in philadelphia was to about 50 cars in a parking lot and i saw him a couple of days ago

01:12:06.640 talking literally to about 12 people on the sidewalk an ex-president i mean jimmy carter at the age of 96

01:12:14.640 could pull a bigger crowd than that and you know where trump has tens of thousands of people waiting

01:12:22.160 for hours ignoring all the funk about how they can't stand close together in the open air at these

01:12:28.160 airports as he flies around talking to them and uh you know i i think look i may have to eat my words

01:12:36.640 candace but i think the trump opponents are are talking they're committing the same mistake they just

01:12:43.280 double down on the errors as you implied four years ago you know they're they think they have 0.96

01:12:49.680 some kind of natural right to rule they think that trump is an imposter and and a scoundrel and

01:12:56.160 there are aspects of his character that would justify that but not the political legitimacy of his

01:13:01.920 present position or the way he's conducted the great office of the old and and uh and i think they're

01:13:08.160 going to get a real shock next week but i think we'll all be glad to have the election over with

01:13:14.320 because it has been so contentious that for a long time only the people can decide the system is

01:13:20.400 effectively broken down the democrats are just trying to destroy trump and you can't reach agreement

01:13:25.680 with people who don't want to reach an agreement so you've got to evoke the issue to the people to

01:13:30.720 decide who they want to govern for the next four years well thank you so much lord black for the

01:13:36.800 the conversation it's so interesting you know i could ask you a dozen more questions but hopefully

01:13:42.000 you know your your first book on trump is only really up until about halfway through his first

01:13:47.600 term so hopefully there's a volume you know it's been updated there's one up to just a few months ago

01:13:52.720 oh is that right oh well i i must have picked up it's right now and it has another page so it gets

01:13:57.360 you up to there but uh okay you know if he's re-elected i'll do it again well there you go well

01:14:03.120 thank you so much i you know we didn't even get to touch on uh some of the topics uh about what's

01:14:07.920 going on in canada and you know you had that great book the canadian manifesto so maybe we'll have to

01:14:12.080 to do it do another one of these and talk more about uh canada and what's going on up there but

01:14:17.120 but you know for today thank you so much for helping really understand what's going on in us

01:14:21.600 politics helping understand the trump phenomenon i know a lot of canadians don't like trump but i think

01:14:26.240 if you can get past his his rhetoric and and and sort of the norms that he breaks you can really see

01:14:31.840 that that there is something there there and uh hopefully this conversation helped uh we made

01:14:36.640 that a bit more so thank you so much for your time and thank you for joining the true north speaker

01:14:40.080 your series not a bit not a bit not a bit thanks for thanks for having me

The Candice Malcolm Show - October 28, 2020

Ep 18 ｜ Conrad Black ｜ The Case for Donald Trump

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