The Glenn Beck Program - August 19, 2025


Best of the Program ｜ Guests： Sen. Eric Schmitt & Melanie Phillips ｜ 8⧸19⧸25


Episode Stats


Length

44 minutes

Words per minute

163.59749

Word count

7,270

Sentence count

519

Harmful content

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Sen. Eric Schmidt (D-Missouri) joins Glenn Beck to discuss his takeaways from the Trump/Zelensky summit, and to talk about his new book, "The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:14.860 There's a lot to take away from the summit that happened at the White House yesterday.
00:00:19.400 And in fact, on tomorrow's podcast, I'm going to explain what I believe is the real definition
00:00:25.660 that I saw on display at the White House yesterday of America First.
00:00:31.220 But there were two things that I came away with that I haven't heard anybody talk about.
00:00:35.680 And maybe it's because of personal experience with presidents in the past.
00:00:39.120 But the two takeaways that I had from yesterday's summit with Trump and Zelensky and the other
00:00:44.600 EU leaders that are really important.
00:00:47.040 Also, Eric Schmidt, he's senator from Missouri.
00:00:49.360 He takes us back and gives us a glance at some of the really important court cases that
00:00:57.800 he as AG filed against Biden and the fights that he had trying to keep rights alive.
00:01:06.420 And he's written a new book out and it really outlines what we have to do to make sure we
00:01:14.800 don't lose the republic.
00:01:16.120 Also, Melanie Phillips, she's a columnist from the Times of London.
00:01:21.440 She watched yesterday the summit at the White House.
00:01:24.980 As somebody from England, what did she take away?
00:01:29.140 Fascinating to hear.
00:01:30.340 All on today's podcast.
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00:02:45.020 Hello, America.
00:02:46.220 You know we've been fighting every single day.
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00:02:53.380 trying to feed you.
00:02:54.340 We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it.
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00:03:29.180 Now let's get to work.
00:03:35.260 You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:03:42.800 Well, let's say hello to one of America's best senators, Eric Schmidt.
00:03:47.160 Hello, Eric.
00:03:47.680 How are you, sir?
00:03:48.740 Senator.
00:03:49.180 I'm great, Glenn.
00:03:49.840 How are you doing, my friend?
00:03:51.920 I am really good.
00:03:53.040 I'm really good.
00:03:53.900 Excited for your new book.
00:03:54.960 I haven't had a chance to read it.
00:03:56.060 I'm sorry.
00:03:56.920 But I want to talk to you about it.
00:03:58.780 Last line of defense.
00:03:59.660 How to beat the court and left.
00:04:01.060 Beat the left in court.
00:04:02.780 Because that is truly, you have it right, the last line of defense.
00:04:07.920 Their last line of defense and our last line of defense.
00:04:11.300 Which is why I've been saying for a while the AGs are so really so important.
00:04:16.120 Before we get there, can I ask you about the thing that's trending in the news today.
00:04:20.920 Is Trump trying to eliminate mail-in ballots?
00:04:23.900 Can he do that legally?
00:04:27.720 Because I thought all voting was done by the state.
00:04:31.780 Can he eliminate mail-in ballots?
00:04:34.680 Well, I want to see kind of what the specifics of the proposal are.
00:04:37.700 But yeah, typically elections are run by the states.
00:04:43.640 And the Democrats would try to federalize elections before.
00:04:49.100 I think what he's talking about is providing leadership on getting, you know, with states.
00:04:55.280 But this is, and he referenced, I heard the clip before I came on, that Jimmy Carter talked about.
00:05:00.860 There was a Carter-Baker commission about 20 years ago that came out with 10 things you can do to secure the elections.
00:05:06.820 This was not partisan then.
00:05:08.280 This was really kind of a bipartisan effort of what are the things that, you know, rationally or reasonably you can do to protect elections.
00:05:14.040 One was to severely limit the ability to have mail-in ballots.
00:05:18.760 In fact, in Missouri, in order to do that, you have to sign an affidavit.
00:05:22.740 Typically, it's somebody with disabilities.
00:05:24.660 It's only a caregiver or a parent or, you know, a son or a sibling or a daughter can even help with that.
00:05:31.680 So it's very restricted.
00:05:32.860 I think what President Trump's getting at, and I actually talk about it in the book, The Last Line of Defense, it's a chapter, because we took on Mark Elias in Missouri during COVID times.
00:05:41.200 He tried to upend these laws across the country that protected the integrity of elections.
00:05:46.160 And he was successful in certain places.
00:05:48.500 Think of Pennsylvania.
00:05:49.800 Think of Georgia.
00:05:51.020 And what they did was they just mailed out, Glenn, ballots to everybody, everybody across the state.
00:05:57.460 Then they had drop boxes.
00:05:59.460 That's the real problem with mail-in balloting is there's no real verification that that's actually a person.
00:06:04.240 They do ballot harvesting, illegal immigrants vote. 1.00
00:06:07.080 You saw that kind of in the lead up to the 2024 election.
00:06:10.160 The RNC this time was very well prepared for that.
00:06:12.880 It went to court ahead of time to beat it back, whereas in 2020, a lot of people were caught flat-footed.
00:06:18.400 And I know we're going to talk about the book in detail, and I wasn't planning on, you know, talking about the book in that way.
00:06:22.620 But we do talk about that.
00:06:23.900 The left was hell-bent on using this pandemic as a reason to undermine all the election integrity laws we had in 2020.
00:06:31.740 And in some places, they were successful, and it certainly affected the election.
00:06:36.120 So it's good to do it in the states like you did.
00:06:38.960 You took on Mark Elias, and I didn't know this was in the book.
00:06:42.400 I'm so glad to hear that it is in the book.
00:06:44.800 You took him on.
00:06:46.640 You battled that in Missouri.
00:06:49.120 You held the line.
00:06:50.080 But what we're going to have is what we already have.
00:06:54.080 I mean, look at what Gavin Newsom is doing right now, the three people that just died in Florida.
00:06:59.960 This is one of the worst stories I have heard.
00:07:04.560 And Gavin Newsom is like, hey, Donald Trump's administration let him in.
00:07:09.120 Well, no, wait a minute.
00:07:10.040 Hang on just a second.
00:07:10.980 They had already said by 2019 that this guy needed to be removed.
00:07:15.760 It was Joe Biden that let him.
00:07:17.320 But none of that matters.
00:07:18.660 Why would you give him a truck driving license?
00:07:22.500 Why would you give him a commercial license?
00:07:24.380 The guy can't even speak English.
00:07:26.860 And what we're getting to is this country that is split in two.
00:07:30.540 We've got states that are using common sense and the law and the other states that are just going into crazy town.
00:07:38.560 Yeah, no, but here, let me, I guess, offer.
00:07:42.840 Yes.
00:07:43.160 And this is the problem with mass migration, illegal immigration, mass migration, what it does to communities.
00:07:49.880 The Democrats made a bet.
00:07:51.700 They made a bet that if they open up the borders and you bring 20 million people in here, that they would have political control.
00:07:58.840 They would win elections.
00:07:59.840 They would eliminate the filibuster in the Senate.
00:08:02.620 They would pack the Supreme Court.
00:08:04.100 They would add D.C. as a state.
00:08:05.960 They would federalize elections.
00:08:08.120 They would do all the things that they did in one fell swoop to aggregate power and exercise it ruthlessly.
00:08:13.700 Here's the good news, though, that in 2024, in November, I think the fever broke.
00:08:19.460 We lived through this fever dream of sort of the woke left.
00:08:22.600 And it's hard to, you know, I think people forget how to, what a grip the woke left had on this country.
00:08:27.960 And it's honestly, Glenn, it's one of the reasons why I wrote the book Last Mind Defense that's available on Amazon now is because during those dark days, President Trump was out of office, right?
00:08:37.280 His allies were out of power.
00:08:38.400 It kind of fell, and you talked to some of the Republican AGs, it sort of fell to this relatively unknown group of people.
00:08:44.980 I happen to be one of them that fought back.
00:08:47.840 And so you've got to remember, take the DeLorean back in time here.
00:08:51.220 This was a time of lockdowns, compulsory COVID shots, deliberately open borders, DEI struggle sessions, ESG requirements in a censorship enterprise so vast that the Biden administration created.
00:09:05.900 It's the biggest affront to the First Amendment in American history.
00:09:08.180 So what I decided to do in that moment, I mean, I didn't think that was going to be my role, but my role ended up being trying to hold the line until the Calvary came, and the Calvary came in November.
00:09:17.300 So we fought vaccine mandate to the Supreme Court.
00:09:19.660 We won.
00:09:20.200 We fought the student loan debt forgiveness scam at the Supreme Court.
00:09:22.580 We won.
00:09:23.220 We brought the Missouri versus Biden censorship case, and we exposed this vast censorship enterprise.
00:09:27.780 And so what the book does, it's kind of a behind-the-scenes look, Lynn, which you'll appreciate, your audience will appreciate.
00:09:33.140 What was it like to take the deposition of Anthony Fauci?
00:09:35.960 What was it like?
00:09:36.840 What did we learn from Elvis Chan, who was the FBI guy in Northern California who was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story?
00:09:43.140 What did CISA have to do?
00:09:44.500 This agency dedicated to cybersecurity infrastructure.
00:09:47.580 Why were they involved with silencing Americans? 0.90
00:09:50.100 Why were they involved in the election integrity project meant to silence Americans and affect the 2020 election?
00:09:55.980 All these things that were going on, this landscape that I saw in that role, we fought back and we won, and that's the playbook.
00:10:03.380 That's the blueprint moving forward, and the key element of all of this is courage.
00:10:07.680 You have to be willing to stand in that arena and fight back when all the slings and arrows are coming at you.
00:10:12.260 I'll tell you, when I sued 50-plus school districts in Missouri for their mask mandates, that kitchen was hot.
00:10:19.040 There were reporters interviewing me with masks on in their cars because they weren't allowed in their studios.
00:10:25.900 And they're interviewing me and saying, why are you trying to kill the kids, basically?
00:10:29.720 And I was saying, look, there's no science behind this.
00:10:32.020 No kids are dying from COVID.
00:10:34.000 Kids are twice as likely to die from a dog attack in COVID.
00:10:38.360 And these adults who should know better are abusing their power, and somebody had to stand up to them.
00:10:43.860 And so that's really what this book is about.
00:10:45.860 It's, hey, in the darkest times, you need courage.
00:10:48.540 Now we're on the other side of it.
00:10:50.100 We have to continue to fight and win because they're coming for our freedoms and our liberties.
00:10:53.880 They're just out of power.
00:10:54.940 But we have to kind of maintain this hold on the high ground, and I think we can do it.
00:10:59.780 We're talking to Senator Eric Schmidt about his new book, The Last Line of Defense.
00:11:03.880 It's out today.
00:11:04.720 I urge you to get it.
00:11:06.320 I think Senator Schmidt, Eric, if I may call you that, has been on the front lines and is one of the most important leaders
00:11:17.020 and voices when it comes to how to fight the left and how to do it legally,
00:11:22.440 how to make sure we're keeping them in check by using the law.
00:11:28.980 Frederick Douglass once said that the Constitution was the greatest affront to liberty,
00:11:35.480 and it was a slave document until he was urged to read, and somebody came up to him and said,
00:11:43.620 hey, would you read this book about it, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery?
00:11:47.980 He did, and he completely flipped and said, no, this is the greatest freedom document
00:11:52.660 because the laws can be used to set people free, and that's what we have to understand
00:12:00.200 is that the laws, when we actually know them, learn them, and apply them, we can set people free again,
00:12:10.280 and we have to have smart, brave people actually doing those things.
00:12:16.560 One of the things on the mask mandates, you fought it in Missouri, but it doesn't feel to me
00:12:22.760 that we've really learned our lesson from that, and it's scary.
00:12:27.040 These vaccine mandates and everything else, it doesn't feel like that's never going to happen again.
00:12:33.060 That feels like that could happen again in a heartbeat.
00:12:36.580 That's right, because the playbook that they had was you have an emergency, real or imagined,
00:12:41.520 created, aggregate power, other people, the othering of your fellow brothers and sisters,
00:12:49.200 and then you silenced dissent.
00:12:50.600 They were executing that.
00:12:51.780 COVID was a bit of a trial run.
00:12:53.540 They couldn't believe their luck that the left could move something like this,
00:12:57.740 and it's interesting because you and I, I think, first met in person in Utah,
00:13:02.500 and this was in 2021, and RFK, actually, RFK Jr. was actually there, too.
00:13:09.160 I don't know if you remember this.
00:13:09.920 And he had a conversation, and I recount this in the book.
00:13:15.000 He reminded me of something that I hadn't read or even thought of in years.
00:13:19.080 It was something called the Milgram Experiment.
00:13:21.420 So in the 1950s at Yale, they did this experiment where people would come in.
00:13:25.540 There was a guy in a white coat and a clipboard, and you'd come in,
00:13:28.480 and there was somebody paid on the other side of the wall, so this wasn't actually being hurt.
00:13:32.500 But when the person on the other side of the wall gave a wrong answer,
00:13:35.340 the guy in the white coat would instruct the participant of the experiment to turn up the pain gauge, right?
00:13:41.720 And so he would do it, and then another wrong answer, they'd ask him to crank it up,
00:13:46.000 crank it up more, crank it up more, even if they were told that somebody might die on the other side.
00:13:51.500 If I remember right, they kept cranking it up, and the screams of pain eventually stopped,
00:14:02.160 and there was no sound that the other person that was cranking could hear.
00:14:07.280 And the doctor would say, he didn't answer, meaning, you know, like, the guy could be dead.
00:14:12.460 He didn't answer, crank it up again, give him another shock.
00:14:15.420 And they would still do it.
00:14:17.000 They might have killed the guy in their mind.
00:14:21.020 And that haunted me.
00:14:22.860 That story haunted me during COVID and gave me strength because what I knew was, you know,
00:14:28.480 you had Fauci on TV and this just acceptance of that kind of authority in many ways.
00:14:34.360 You need courageous people who are going to stand up and say, no, you're wrong.
00:14:39.040 Actually, these five-year-olds shouldn't be forced to wear masks all day long.
00:14:42.440 People shouldn't, you know, the guy who's working overtime to feed his family shouldn't lose his job
00:14:47.380 if he chooses not to get a COVID shot.
00:14:49.680 But they were trying to lead people along here, down this really dangerous path of petty totalitarianism.
00:14:56.720 And so I think it's easy for us to kind of forget about that, Glenn.
00:15:00.060 Like, you know, I think in some ways, you know, watching Tiger King was fun,
00:15:04.240 and the last dance with Michael Jordan.
00:15:06.740 You know, I played Uno a lot more with my kids in the early days.
00:15:10.360 But that became a terrible experiment.
00:15:12.800 A terrible experiment.
00:15:13.960 And so really what the last line of defense was, what did we do in those moments?
00:15:17.540 What did we do?
00:15:18.220 And I chose to stand up and fight back.
00:15:21.300 And I wasn't the only one.
00:15:23.620 But I think those lessons learned, you know, there's a Czech writer, Milan Kadir,
00:15:30.340 once said something like, you know, the struggle against power is man's struggle of memory versus forgetting.
00:15:37.400 And we can't forget that stuff.
00:15:39.920 And, you know, think about what they were trying to do with President Trump, with lawfare.
00:15:42.960 So I think for a long time, conservatives viewed the courts as a place where they didn't want to play.
00:15:48.440 And, you know, there are so many people telling us the Constitution is a living document.
00:15:54.800 And, you know, the left kind of controlled the courts.
00:16:00.200 That's changing.
00:16:01.780 And thanks to President Trump, we actually have real judges who believe in law and order and what the law is, not what they want it to be.
00:16:08.460 And so we can be in that arena.
00:16:09.780 We can fight back and we can win.
00:16:11.200 And I think those important lessons as we fight to hold on to this constitutional republic.
00:16:15.100 And, you know, as you were citing history and Ben Franklin walks out of the convention and says, what do you have?
00:16:21.080 He says, a republic if you can keep it.
00:16:22.880 So we have to be willing to fight on all fronts.
00:16:25.880 This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:16:29.000 To hear the rest of this interview, check out the full podcast.
00:16:32.980 More coming up.
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00:17:53.860 Now back to the podcast.
00:17:55.880 This is the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:18:00.100 From the Times of London, a columnist there, Melanie Phillips.
00:18:03.300 Hello, Melanie.
00:18:03.860 How are you?
00:18:05.920 Hello.
00:18:06.320 I'm very well, thank you.
00:18:08.260 Very nice to be speaking to you again.
00:18:11.180 Yeah, thank you, Melanie.
00:18:13.300 I'm a big fan of yours, and I want to get into the liberal mindset here in a second.
00:18:16.720 But I wanted to first touch on, if you had any thoughts,
00:18:19.280 I don't know if you had a chance to really sit down or even had a chance to really process it yet,
00:18:23.940 of what's happened just over the weekend with President Trump meeting with Putin
00:18:28.840 and then calling all of the world leaders to the White House.
00:18:32.780 I've never seen that happen before.
00:18:35.180 What was the real message or the impression that you took away from all of this?
00:18:39.460 Well, it was very comical to see all of these leaders who really can't stand President Trump
00:18:45.420 all lined up like schoolchildren with a headmaster.
00:18:49.320 I thought it was really amazing because, you know, he is the most consequential politician
00:18:54.220 of our lifetime and in the world today.
00:18:56.600 And they have no option but to try and manage this presidency and get on with him.
00:19:05.040 But they were there for, you know, a particular reason.
00:19:08.380 They wanted to support President Zelensky, support his cause to the president
00:19:16.740 and to plead his cause, really, that President Trump should not rule Zelensky over
00:19:25.420 and basically hand him over, as they would see it, to surrender to President Putin.
00:19:33.080 And I think, I don't know whether those leaders had any particular influence.
00:19:37.320 I suspect very little.
00:19:39.380 But something has changed in President Trump's attitude, I think.
00:19:43.880 I think he's a bit chafened.
00:19:45.800 I mean, it seemed to me he was a little bit down after he had his meeting in Anchorage with Putin.
00:19:53.200 He was not in Bullion.
00:19:55.020 He didn't have a press conference.
00:19:57.180 And I thought, you know, here he is coming up against the dead end of his President Trump's world view,
00:20:03.960 which is basically that every world leader is capable of being either threatened or bribed to do the deal.
00:20:14.000 And there are some leaders who cannot, who will not do that.
00:20:17.220 And there are some leaders of whom President Trump, I think, is going to find, is finding it very, very difficult.
00:20:22.180 And I think that was better than one.
00:20:24.120 And so in that mood, we saw, when he met the world leaders and President Zelensky, we saw a bit of movement.
00:20:33.380 It may not amount to very much, but in a kind of mood music, first of all, you know,
00:20:38.060 there was a great sort of show of amity, obviously very different from the last time President Zelensky was in the White House,
00:20:44.120 which is disastrous.
00:20:45.600 So all sides were off their best behavior and all was kind of sweetness and light.
00:20:50.660 But the more consequential thing was that President Trump said, you know,
00:20:55.520 understand that the Europeans want to defend Europe against Putin.
00:21:01.280 And if push comes to shove, America will help them do it.
00:21:05.940 Now, that's a very big change from President Trump's previous position.
00:21:10.540 It may not amount to very much in the short or medium term, but nevertheless, it was a change of mood music.
00:21:18.080 Now, we'll see how President Putin responds to what's being offered.
00:21:22.020 I would have thought that President Putin would not be very keen on NATO stroke, the Europeans being involved in the military defense of Ukraine at all.
00:21:38.840 He made it very clear that he won't put up with that.
00:21:41.900 So I would be surprised if he were to actually, you know, be enthusiastic about this kind of deal.
00:21:47.840 But we'll see. It's obviously a high-stakes poker game, isn't it?
00:21:53.960 Yeah, it really is.
00:21:55.200 So it's weird that you would say this because I didn't catch the downbeat, but you may be right on that.
00:22:03.160 Did you – is it just American wishful thinking in a way that –
00:22:08.840 I've never seen a president or really any world leader like this call for a meeting like this and get everybody to sit around the desk exactly like, you know, a principal calling, you know, the teachers in and having a sit-down with all of them.
00:22:27.480 I've never seen that.
00:22:28.620 And the image that I came away with is that America is leading again, but not in the way where we are, you know, threatening bombs and everything else.
00:22:44.560 But we're just – we're being the facilitator in a way of making this happen and bringing people together that I don't think would have ever come together, you know, for anybody else.
00:22:55.840 I just don't think it would have happened.
00:22:56.960 Is that wishful thinking on the American side?
00:23:01.340 On my side?
00:23:02.140 That's absolutely right.
00:23:03.840 No, I think that's absolutely right.
00:23:05.620 I don't abide to it.
00:23:06.640 It's certainly unprecedented.
00:23:07.880 None of us has ever seen anything like that before.
00:23:10.280 But I think it's a testimony to President Trump's power.
00:23:16.520 And as I say, you know, he's the most consequential politician in the world today.
00:23:22.040 And people feel they have to – you know, foreign leaders who don't like him, even – feel they have to dance to his tune.
00:23:31.300 They're all working out ways in which to manage him, mainly through slashery.
00:23:36.320 Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, I think, is particularly adept at this.
00:23:43.820 He seems to have made a friend of President Trump in the sense that President Trump has said warm things about him.
00:23:48.800 He seems to take a bit of a shine to him.
00:23:50.900 He found a way – I think Keir Starmer found a way of, you know, getting treated on a personal level.
00:23:56.360 All that amounts to, in the end, you know, probably not more than a hill of beans.
00:24:02.660 But it doesn't really impress me very much that all these world leaders are dancing attendants upon him.
00:24:12.740 I mean, it's interesting.
00:24:14.400 I found it quite comical in a way.
00:24:17.240 But the more important thing is, you know, what is President Trump going to do about President Putin and his attempt to destroy the integrity of Ukraine?
00:24:30.180 Does President Trump now believe that it is in America's interests for President Putin to be pushed back?
00:24:39.520 Or does he still think that it's nothing to do with America, and if Europe wants to do this, well, that's Europe's affair, and it can jolly well get on with it?
00:24:48.140 It seems as if there's been a bit of a change, but I don't know.
00:24:51.460 It would be a very big change.
00:24:53.440 But this is the question of, you know, when Putin basically turns around and says to President Trump, you know, you can go and shove your peace deal, as he may do.
00:25:05.180 What is President Trump going to do then?
00:25:06.800 That's what matters to me, not this spectacle of all these pathetic Prime Ministers and Presidents.
00:25:15.860 You know, it's funny that you would say this, because I read this slightly different in that I think President Trump was changing the systems that had been set up since World War II.
00:25:31.140 And when he was saying, you know, NATO, you know, I don't know if NATO really matters anymore, and, you know, you can do whatever you want.
00:25:37.940 We're not going to be involved.
00:25:39.220 I think that was to tell Europe, we're not paying the bill anymore, and we're not going to be the first to rush in and be the world's policeman anymore.
00:25:50.120 You've got to carry your own bags.
00:25:52.060 And when they started to carry their own bags, I think that's – he was doing that to get them to carry some of the weight in their own bags.
00:26:01.240 And he does believe in a world order that, you know, that we help each other out on our allies.
00:26:07.100 So I think it's not as much of a change as it's a completion of strategy.
00:26:12.520 Do you see any reason in that?
00:26:15.960 I think we're entirely right that he was trying to gee up the reculcitrant Europeans to stop just riding on America's coattails. 1.00
00:26:28.860 And I think he's entirely right to do that.
00:26:30.520 I think, you know, for decades, the Europeans have just relied upon America being there to support them militarily and in the defense of the free world without feeling that they have to step up to the plate themselves.
00:26:47.040 And I think I personally entirely agree with him.
00:26:50.200 That's entirely wrong.
00:26:52.560 But, obviously, you know much more about American politics and culture than I do.
00:26:57.220 But it seemed to me that when he became – when he was elected, re-elected as president, he was surrounded, as he still is, by a number of people who I would call real isolationists.
00:27:12.300 Yes.
00:27:12.860 Who really do believe that what goes on in Europe is of no concern to America.
00:27:18.120 It's not in America's interest to get involved.
00:27:19.960 The last thing they want is to expend blood and treasure on anywhere in Europe because it has nothing to do with them.
00:27:24.960 And this troubled me because I think that this kind of isolationism in America has a long tail, a long historical tail.
00:27:37.080 And I think that, you know, yes, America has got to put its own interests first.
00:27:42.240 But it is in America's interests to refrain Putin.
00:27:47.440 To put his mother way, if Putin were to take over Ukraine, I'm absolutely certain that he would see that as the gateway to make further incursions into the old Soviet Union empire.
00:28:08.360 Because this man, Putin, believes that he's a kind of reincarnation of Peter the Great.
00:28:14.540 He believes in the restoration of the old Russian empire.
00:28:18.960 And if America, if America's isolationists really do believe, if they really do believe that if that were to happen, a resurgent Russian empire run by a man like Putin and the Communist Party would be of no, would not put America in greater danger than it now is.
00:28:43.820 They must be living in now cooking land.
00:28:46.140 And that's what I think President Trump was kind of leaning towards in his earlier weeks or months.
00:28:52.780 I will tell you, I will tell you, Mellie, I'm going to give a monologue here in just a minute if I have time today about America first.
00:29:01.780 And it's exactly on this.
00:29:03.520 I think that's a misreading of what Donald Trump was moving towards.
00:29:09.780 I think you're right, he is surrounded by isolationists, but I think he was going for something different because he does believe America needs to play a leadership role.
00:29:22.260 And that, you know, that means you're actually engaged in things.
00:29:25.720 You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck.
00:29:27.700 To hear more of this interview and others, download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts.
00:29:32.420 I want to give you the two things that I think are the two messages that we should take from all of this.
00:29:48.380 America is truly once again in charge.
00:29:53.000 That's number one.
00:29:56.160 We are leading the world.
00:29:57.840 And we're not leading the world through military force.
00:30:01.300 We're not leading the world through just words and projection of power.
00:30:09.580 We're leading the world because Donald Trump is actually going places and leading the world.
00:30:15.100 You know, when you look at, he's been saying here over the last couple of days, you know, I stopped six wars.
00:30:27.180 Well, yes and no, I guess you could say, you know, we could quibble over were these wars or were these just flare-ups.
00:30:39.880 But I don't know anybody who has done more for world peace as a president in just the last couple of months, in a two-month period.
00:30:50.680 I don't know of a president who has done more for world peace than Donald Trump.
00:30:56.460 Name anyone who is close.
00:30:58.840 If they're lucky, they'll solve one thing.
00:31:02.720 He has gone in six different times now.
00:31:05.820 And not all of them are, you know, we're all having our fingers crossed that the Middle East and Iran is at least peaceful for a little while.
00:31:16.840 Same thing with Ukraine and Russia.
00:31:20.200 It's not done yet, but hopefully when it is done, it will last a while.
00:31:25.620 It's not going to be a forever peace.
00:31:28.700 But look at what he did.
00:31:30.080 He stopped Pakistan and India from having a nuclear war.
00:31:37.340 He is bringing peace to the world like I've never seen before.
00:31:43.300 And again, as I said, maybe for the first time in my lifetime, America is the global leader.
00:31:50.120 And I think I say that because, well, I mean, Ronald Reagan was the global leader in the 1980s.
00:32:01.340 That's the last time that I think that would even be close.
00:32:05.560 But Ronald Reagan still had his detractors and they never came to the table.
00:32:11.940 You know, Ronald Reagan, his power came from just the political prowess that he had here in America and his just strength of will that he just wouldn't give up.
00:32:27.540 And then he also had Margaret Thatcher and the Pope on his side.
00:32:30.440 This president really has not had anybody on his side, nobody on his side.
00:32:36.620 But you'll notice they're no longer taking him on and calling him a thug, a clown, a dictator, or anything else.
00:32:42.900 They're not calling him any of those things.
00:32:45.860 At least the world leaders, the European leaders, are no longer saying those things.
00:32:49.960 They're taking him seriously because he's actually getting things done.
00:32:55.360 So, A, America is in the leadership role.
00:32:59.000 Now, why is that one worth really standing back and admiring for a minute?
00:33:11.280 Because every president, every president has tried to reverse that.
00:33:17.380 Every president has been working on this new global coalition.
00:33:22.680 You notice he's not talking about, that's what you hear from every president.
00:33:26.660 We have a global coalition.
00:33:28.980 We're cobbling together all these states of the willing, all of these people who are coming together and they're willing to stand together.
00:33:37.960 Well, that's happening.
00:33:39.320 But Donald Trump is not setting out to get a global coalition.
00:33:45.040 He's leading the world.
00:33:47.880 And a coalition is forming around him.
00:33:50.980 And he's really not part of the coalition.
00:33:53.880 He's leading the coalition.
00:33:55.760 He's saying, we're not going to do this.
00:33:58.300 We're not doing this ourself.
00:33:59.540 But let me show you how it can be done.
00:34:01.900 Now, you guys go and do it.
00:34:03.460 We're not providing the arms.
00:34:06.040 We're selling ammunition.
00:34:08.300 We're selling arms to the Europeans. 0.97
00:34:10.360 They want to do it.
00:34:11.440 They can do it.
00:34:12.220 So, again, it's a different kind of leadership.
00:34:17.440 We are not the ones paying for it.
00:34:20.340 We're not the ones carrying all the weight on our shoulders.
00:34:24.140 He's saying, look, I can get this done, but then it's your job to do it.
00:34:29.220 It's not ours.
00:34:29.960 It's yours.
00:34:31.360 That is unlike anything I have ever seen before.
00:34:35.760 Okay?
00:34:35.920 So, while he is building coalitions, he's leading them.
00:34:41.080 He's not just another one of the coalition.
00:34:44.660 That's true leadership, especially in a time when the whole world has said for a long time now,
00:34:52.700 and many of us believed, the era of America's leadership is over.
00:34:58.980 Is it?
00:35:00.360 Because it sure doesn't look like it to me now.
00:35:02.740 And that has been done in six months.
00:35:09.260 Finally, a guy who knows how to wield the power of the United States without being a bully.
00:35:19.160 Now, the second thing, and I don't think anybody really understands this.
00:35:27.420 I was in, during the, was it 2007, 2008 election, I went to the White House because I was called on the carpet by George W. Bush
00:35:44.340 because I was not happy with the war and the way it was going.
00:35:48.200 And I had made some comment about, I don't remember even what it was, but I made some comment on the air that, you know,
00:35:57.260 hey, left, you want to impeach him?
00:35:59.700 Here's the thing you impeach him on because this is actually impeachable.
00:36:04.140 And that didn't sit well with the Bush administration.
00:36:07.540 They didn't like that.
00:36:08.740 And I get a call on the way home from the studios, and it's the White House.
00:36:12.780 And this is the first time the White House had ever called me without me reaching out first.
00:36:17.940 And I get a call, and it's a 202 number, and I'm like, it's 1414.
00:36:25.340 202, I can't remember, 458 or something, 1414.
00:36:28.280 And I remember 202, that's Washington, D.C., and 1414, I remember, that's the number of the White House.
00:36:35.780 And I look at it for a while, and I'm like, I think that's the White House.
00:36:39.880 And I pick it up.
00:36:41.300 Mr. Beck, yes?
00:36:43.820 The president would like to see you in the Oval tomorrow morning at 10.
00:36:47.240 Now, I'm on the air at 10 o'clock in the morning.
00:36:50.220 Do you think you could make that?
00:36:52.800 I didn't even know what to say.
00:36:54.460 I literally held the phone away from my head, and I looked at the phone.
00:36:58.580 I'm driving.
00:36:59.480 And I look at the phone, and I look at the road, and I don't even know what to say.
00:37:03.940 And I just, you know, I said, well, hang on, let me check.
00:37:08.380 Let me check.
00:37:09.900 And I put the phone back up next to my ear, and I'm like, okay, looks good.
00:37:13.840 Yeah, I can be there.
00:37:15.000 Hang up the phone.
00:37:16.540 It was freaky.
00:37:18.760 I get there, and the first thing the president says, I sit in the chair, in the Zelensky chair,
00:37:27.440 and the first thing the president says to me is, and laced with profanity,
00:37:33.940 you know, a lot of people think they know how they can be the effing president.
00:37:37.640 Well, they have no effing idea how to be the effing president.
00:37:40.240 And I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be the longest hour of my life.
00:37:44.940 And he read me the riot act.
00:37:47.100 After that was all over, and he had that out of his system, we stood up at the end,
00:37:55.140 and it was the day that Barack Obama had said that if he were president,
00:38:01.900 he would just fly our planes over the border into Pakistan, and he would just bomb Pakistan. 0.98
00:38:07.940 Well, this is at the point where Pakistan is kind of helping us.
00:38:14.040 They're not our friends.
00:38:15.620 They're more frenemies, but they're kind of helping us at this point.
00:38:20.420 And he says, Barack Obama says, you know, and if he would have done that,
00:38:24.860 the whole coalition of the willing, all of that crap would have gone right out the window.
00:38:29.640 And so I said to the president as I'm walking out, and he's standing by the Resolute desk,
00:38:36.360 and I said, Mr. President, I said, I don't know if you heard this, but today, Barack Obama,
00:38:42.920 and he said, oh, I heard that.
00:38:45.260 Don't worry about that.
00:38:46.360 Don't worry about that.
00:38:47.280 And I said, okay.
00:38:48.700 And he said, trust me, Glenn, whoever comes into this office, no matter what party they're in,
00:38:54.160 they're going to sit behind this desk, and they're going to realize,
00:38:57.640 because they're going to be advised by exactly the same people that have been advising me
00:39:02.720 that they really have no choice, this is what they have to do.
00:39:09.040 And he said, have a good day.
00:39:10.660 And I'm like, holy cow.
00:39:12.400 I walked out, and do you remember me calling you after that, Stu?
00:39:16.400 Yes.
00:39:17.520 And I was freaked out.
00:39:19.380 I was like, this is not good.
00:39:22.000 The president isn't really the president.
00:39:24.480 The president is just listening to all these advisors who were advising the last president,
00:39:30.760 and the president before that, and it's all State Department stuff,
00:39:34.200 and they're just executing a long plan.
00:39:38.160 What difference does it make who we have in the office, if that's true?
00:39:41.640 Remember that?
00:39:42.300 One specific part of that that you didn't mention was, because he was very angry at you,
00:39:46.880 but that part of the conversation was meant to make you feel good, right?
00:39:51.880 It wasn't like an angry thing.
00:39:54.400 It was a, hey, it's okay, calm down.
00:39:58.080 All the decisions will remain the same.
00:40:00.220 And it's like, that didn't calm you down much.
00:40:03.720 No, it made it worse.
00:40:05.100 Yes.
00:40:05.280 And so, why do I bring this story up, which I've told before?
00:40:11.280 Why do I bring this story up?
00:40:13.240 I bring this story up because when Donald Trump sat at the table and said,
00:40:19.640 just going to get old Vlad on the phone, and he stands up, walks out of the room with all the world leaders,
00:40:27.440 and he just picks up the phone and calls Vladimir Putin and says,
00:40:31.340 hey, I just want to keep you up to speed with what's going on.
00:40:33.380 He didn't ask for permission.
00:40:35.560 He didn't have anybody whispering in his ear.
00:40:38.100 He's leading the State Department.
00:40:41.080 He's leading the world.
00:40:42.840 He's keeping his own counsel.
00:40:45.720 That hasn't been done by a president in I don't know how long.
00:40:50.880 And it's why we're once again the leaders of the world.
00:40:54.340 Because these advisors, all of these doctors and professors and, you know, people who have been in the State Department their whole life
00:41:05.680 and know better than everybody, Donald Trump has said to them, shut up.
00:41:09.720 I've seen your record.
00:41:11.280 It doesn't work.
00:41:12.660 We've been doing it for 100 years.
00:41:14.680 We're losing credibility.
00:41:16.440 We're losing money.
00:41:17.300 We're losing power and influence.
00:41:20.440 I don't want to hear it.
00:41:22.440 This is the direction we're going.
00:41:24.300 And he didn't have the juice to be able to fire all of those people last time.
00:41:30.720 And he put the wrong people in position.
00:41:33.460 Now at the State Department is Rubio.
00:41:35.740 And I got to tell you, Rubio is one of the last guys I would have picked.
00:41:40.000 I would have thought Rubio was a big globalist.
00:41:43.800 Look at who Rubio has turned out to be.
00:41:48.220 So the two things that are happening are really based on one thing.
00:41:55.320 And that is the president of the United States is in charge of his administration.
00:42:02.000 The president of the United States keeps his own counsel.
00:42:05.640 The president of the United States listens to his own gut for the first time that I have seen since Ronald Reagan.
00:42:13.540 And Ronald Reagan did it in one place, and that was the Soviet Union.
00:42:18.840 He knew the difference between good and evil, and he called it, and he didn't care what anybody said.
00:42:24.980 Donald Trump is doing this in example after example after example.
00:42:29.760 He's keeping his own counsel, and he is telling his people, this is what I'm going to do.
00:42:37.140 Find the constitutional way to do it, because this is what has to be done.
00:42:43.420 And he's not taking no for an answer.
00:42:46.180 And he's not kowtowing to the people who have been there forever.
00:42:51.400 Oh, Mr. President, you have to listen to this man.
00:42:54.140 He's not listening to him.
00:42:55.340 If it doesn't make sense to him, he's not listening to him.
00:43:00.140 And he is not waiting for permission from anyone.
00:43:07.360 That's the takeaway from this last four days.
00:43:11.780 America is leading because we actually have a leader who knows who he is,
00:43:20.060 knows what he wants to do, and is not going to take no for an answer, unless it's unconstitutional.
00:43:30.280 He gets it done.
00:43:35.020 That in six months?
00:43:37.500 That's a remarkable development.
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00:44:25.900 Thank you.