The Great America Show - “TAKING BACK TRUMP’S AMERICA” AUTHOR PETER NAVARRO TALKS ABOUT HOW TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS LOST THE WHITE HOUSE IN 2020

00:00:00.000 Hello, everybody. I'm Lou Dobbs. This is The Great America Show, and welcome to the show.

00:00:05.220 Great to have you with us. A lot going on today. You'll be pleased to know that the latest polls

00:00:10.680 support what we've been saying here on The Great America Show throughout the past year.

00:00:15.900 Gallup's poll on trust in our government has fallen steeply. Less than half of all Americans

00:00:22.500 trust our courts, only 47%, and that's an all-time low. Their trust in the executive branch

00:00:30.520 dropping to 43%, just 3% above its all-time low. And what some may find surprising is that trust

00:00:39.620 in our legislative branch is the lowest. Only 38% of Americans trust Congress and the Senate.

00:00:46.940 And that means, in my opinion, Americans are realizing the hard truth about our federal

00:00:53.100 government. It is incompetent. It is corrupt. And we're living in a nation divided. The worst it's

00:01:00.920 been since at least the Vietnam era. And some say, and I'm not sure I can argue strenuously,

00:01:08.560 since the Civil War. Democrats and Republicans have an incredibly wide difference of opinion

00:01:14.820 about trust in the executive branch. And it's informative about just how wide and deep the

00:01:21.440 political divide is in our country. An astounding 86% of Democrats trust the executive branch,

00:01:30.500 and only 7% of Republicans trust this president and the various departments of the executive branch.

00:01:38.580 That is the widest partisan gap on trust in the executive in more than two decades.

00:01:44.820 And it's a brutal time we live in politically. There's no doubt the country's divide is centered

00:01:50.840 on the White House and its occupant. That Republican 7% trust in the Biden executive

00:01:57.900 has to be by far the lowest in the history of the polling for either party. And it's clear that

00:02:05.180 partisan rancor has turned to outright contempt of the White House and departments of the executive

00:02:11.300 that include what we call here the deep state, the politically corrupt permanent bureaucracy

00:02:17.600 that has targeted President Trump for more than six years, and conservatives for more than 10 years.

00:02:25.140 Their political persecution of Trump and his aides and his supporters has now entered the seventh year.

00:02:31.820 And the corruption of the Marxist Dems is palpable throughout every corner of our federal

00:02:37.260 government. Our guest today is one of those who's been targeted by the Marxist Dems,

00:02:42.400 in particular, the Stalinist January 6 Committee, and the politically corrupt DOJ and FBI.

00:02:50.820 Joining us today is Peter Navarro, former assistant to President Trump, and the author of the terrific

00:02:56.980 new book entitled Taking Back Trump's America, Why We Lost the White House and How We'll Win It Back.

00:03:04.100 Peter, great to have you with us here on The Great America Show. Your book is terrific.

00:03:09.300 You name names. It's colorful. It's informative. And I recommend it to everyone, folks. And I recommend

00:03:15.840 it highly. It is a timely book. And let's start, Peter, with your title. What happened? Why did such a

00:03:22.880 historic, successful president lose the White House?

00:03:28.520 Lou, first of all, great to be with you, my brother. And you know,

00:03:32.620 I've been a longtime admirer. We go back decades on the China issue. Look, the old Ronald Reagan saw

00:03:43.260 that personnel is policy, meaning that if you put the wrong people in a White House,

00:03:50.640 a president will not get the policies he deserves. In the Trump White House, we did not learn from that

00:04:00.580 Reagan warning. And we had bad personnel, not only making bad policy, but also creating the kind of

00:04:10.600 bad politics and strategic failures, which led over the course of 2020 to an election, in my judgment,

00:04:20.080 which should have been a landslide, but was close enough to steal. Now, the problem, Lou,

00:04:24.600 and it goes back, as I describe in Taking Back Trump's America, to the original sin. On November 9,

00:04:31.820 2016, the day after the election, Trump's elected, a decision is made to let the rhinos in under the

00:04:42.280 tent. The Bush-Cheney Republicans, the Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan Republicans, thinking that if they would be

00:04:50.660 loyal, not just to the president, but to his agenda, thinking that we had a vast deep state bureaucracy

00:04:58.280 that needed to get staffed, and we needed their help. It was a massive, massive miscalculation. And

00:05:06.360 for the better part of the next four years, I, as the tip of the spear, for much of what Trump was

00:05:13.640 trying to do on the economy and border, would have to fight these bastards every single day. And whether

00:05:21.280 it was Tillerson, as the Secretary of State, Jim Mattis at Defense, or Gary Cohn, as the National

00:05:32.000 Council Director, or Steve Mnuchin, as Treasury Secretary, later Kudlow. I mean, these people,

00:05:39.680 look, they did not belong in the Trump White House, because they were not loyal, either to him or his

00:05:46.340 agenda. And there's a great story, Lou, if I can tell it real quick. In 2017, in the Roosevelt Room,

00:05:55.060 I'm sure you've been there. It's in the West Wing. It's the iconic Roosevelt Room. The boss calls us all

00:06:00.740 in, because he's really angry that his trade agenda isn't being implemented. And he calls like...

00:06:08.360 Do you remember what month it is?

00:06:10.920 Yeah, I think it was March or April. It's in the Taking Back, Trump's America book kind of

00:06:16.020 full bore. But we go in there, and he's got the... He's got, you know, Sonny Perdue. He's got

00:06:23.280 Tillerson, Mattis. Cohn's in there as the National Economic Council Director. He's got Mnuchin.

00:06:30.860 He goes around the table, right? I'm sitting across, and he goes around the table,

00:06:34.540 ask people, what's going on here? And by the time he gets through, Lou, he realizes there's only two

00:06:41.780 people in that room who supported his trade agenda. It was him and me. And I watch, you know,

00:06:47.880 I mean, you've seen this before. His eyebrows go up, kind of looks around. There's that epiphany,

00:06:53.820 Lou. And we were able to move a little faster after that, because he understood the headwinds

00:07:01.280 inside his own house. But, Lou, that never should have happened. And then fast forward for 2020,

00:07:08.300 you've got these people in the White House. Mnuchin and Kudlow are killing our China policy.

00:07:17.360 They're killing our Make America Great, Bring Home the Manufacturing Policies. You've got Kushner

00:07:22.580 running the worst election in 2020. It just never should have happened, Lou. And that's what the

00:07:29.680 first part of Taking Back Trump's America is about. Yeah. Like I say, it's a great book. I love the

00:07:37.640 battle. I want to share with the audience some of your assessments of some of those folks,

00:07:47.280 because it's really quite something to go through. And I will. Let me start with Alex Azar,

00:07:58.820 the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Always punctilious. Is that a compliment or is that a

00:08:06.040 shot? What is that? Punctual is a compliment. Punctilious, prissy, just a damn fool. He loved going out

00:08:17.000 on TV during the pandemic and making himself look good. But it was always at the expense of Trump.

00:08:24.980 And, you know, one of the things, like Ben Carson, like I love that dude. But why do you put him

00:08:31.440 at HUD? Why do you put him at the house in Irvington? I mean, it just was crazy. If he had been at

00:08:38.440 the Health and Human Services Department when the pandemic hit, instead of Alex Azar, who screwed up

00:08:45.160 everything he touched, we would have had a lot better outcome. Same thing with Jeff Sessions. I don't know

00:08:50.220 how you feel about Jeff. I know the boss doesn't like Jeff at all now, but he was a good man

00:08:55.680 in the wrong place. They put him in the Justice Department. He got eaten alive because he didn't

00:09:02.220 have the horsepower upstairs to deal with those people. I mean, they just, I mean, it was like

00:09:09.480 sending a rube to a carnival. You know, the money was going to get lost. But if you may, if they'd just

00:09:15.920 have been put him at Homeland Security in charge of the board, he would have been on for four years

00:09:21.900 and people would have loved him. These were the kinds of personnel mistakes, Lou, that got made

00:09:26.120 every frigging day.

00:09:28.120 So how did it happen that he ends up with this bizarre cabinet? I know part of the reason is

00:09:35.200 Chris Christie. They had a falling out, the president and Chris Christie, who's his chair,

00:09:40.900 by the way, who should never have been the chair of a transition committee or anything else.

00:09:44.600 But there it was. What happened? How did they get there?

00:09:48.660 Yeah, look, you know this, Lou, I was only three people who would survive all the way from

00:09:55.580 the campaign to the end. So I was there like the day after. Yeah, I was fighting in the worm. I used

00:10:02.520 to come over to your show and during the campaign and get on your show and talk about the races and

00:10:07.520 stuff like that. I'm there, like the day after the election, Priebus comes with this hench lady,

00:10:13.720 Katie Walsh. They literally set their tables up in the middle of the war room, right? It's like

00:10:21.340 a dog pissing on their turf, establish their territory. The next thing they do is there's

00:10:27.940 this great guy featured taking back Trump's America, Martin Silverstein, who was supposed to be

00:10:33.700 the guy in charge of hiring people for the bureaucracy. And we had over 100 beautiful resumes

00:10:41.700 of high powered people that were ready to go loyal to Trump. And then Priebus and Walsh just threw that

00:10:49.560 stuff literally in the trash. Well, wait a minute. Where's our friend Steve Bannon in the middle of

00:10:57.420 this? Yeah, you know, it puzzles me. The one I blame the most for this, because he was kind of like

00:11:05.220 he considered himself the DJT Whisperer's Kushner. I can track a lot of the bad personnel decisions

00:11:11.780 back to Jared, right? He'd sit around and his resumes come in and, you know, Rex, I mean, look, Rex,

00:11:18.760 I don't know if you remember the old thing with what I used to call Agassi, you know, like a haircut and

00:11:24.360 a forehand, right? It's like that was Tillerson. He had this mane of hair and this baritone voice.

00:11:29.980 But, you know, the first time I ever met him, he's like, hey, you just don't understand the

00:11:35.720 global supply chain. And it's like, Rex, you don't understand the Trump administration. Yeah,

00:11:42.120 these are the kinds of fights I have. Yeah, I did. By the way, by the way, just let me interject

00:11:46.640 here a minute, Peter, for the audience to be sure. Peter does understand the international

00:11:53.080 supply chain. No matter what, Rex Tillerson did not understand.

00:11:56.980 Yes, indeed. So, I mean, look, again, like, it was the original sin of the administration. And Steve,

00:12:07.640 look, Steve and I, we found ourselves quickly surrounded inside the White House. I talk about

00:12:16.100 in Taking Back Trump's America, how, like, they literally demoted me. Yeah, I was, I don't know if

00:12:21.200 you know this, but I was supposed to be the National League of Gamma Council director. That was,

00:12:26.000 like, they gave me that job. And then they took it back and gave it to Gary Cohn. And not only that,

00:12:33.600 they demoted me from an assistant to the president to a deputy. And, you know, I've never been rank

00:12:40.140 conscious, Lou, but what that meant as a practical matter is I no longer had walk-in access to the

00:12:46.060 Oval or the staff meetings. So the first, I mean, I'm telling you, the first four months of that

00:12:52.040 administration, there's a great story in Taking Back Trump's America, how the boss kind of finally

00:12:57.780 realizes that his trade policy is going into the toilet. And he bellows, like, where's my Peter,

00:13:04.780 right? Next thing I know, I'm running, literally sprinting over to the Oval after I got to get a call

00:13:12.740 from Madeline. I walk into the room and, you know, all of a sudden, everybody's there, right? It's,

00:13:18.900 it's Priebus, it's Don McGann, the White House Legal Council, and Gary Cohn. 30 seconds in,

00:13:27.040 I'm in a shouting match with Gary Cohn. And look, you and I know, Lou, that that guy didn't,

00:13:34.980 he's smarter, he's not as smart as he thinks he is, and he didn't have a leg to stand on

00:13:39.320 talking about trade, right? And I destroyed him that day. But, but he, so the audience understands,

00:13:46.940 Gary Cohn is a product of Wall Street, and Wall Street, China is their, how will I put this, 0.95

00:13:54.180 their, their ultimate fantasy. And Donald Trump and Peter Navarro were messing with their fantasy,

00:14:03.680 because they were going to take care of balanced trade, and assure that there would be an

00:14:09.020 equitable trade flow between the two countries for the first time.

00:14:14.000 Yeah, it, that day was, was, you know, after, after that day, they finally, I finally got unleashed.

00:14:20.560 All the, I, you know, the first, during the transition, Lou, I worked on about a dozen executive

00:14:26.600 orders. If we had simply signed all of those on the first day of the administration, we would have

00:14:31.460 changed history, and, and changed trade policy forever. When I, when he called me over to the

00:14:38.800 Oval that day, I was able to at least get, get a few of those going, and we were moving. But it was

00:14:44.780 always these, I was fighting people, they would derail, disrupt, and deter the thing. The funny thing

00:14:51.020 about Reince, right? I mean, Reince, one of the biggest mistakes, Reince, he didn't view it as a

00:14:56.820 mistake. It's like, he front-loaded Obamacare. We didn't run on Obamacare. He gets in there,

00:15:04.100 and he, Paul Ryan and him convinced the boss that somehow we'd be better off just repealing

00:15:09.260 Obamacare, getting that out of the way first, before we did anything else. And previous,

00:15:13.960 I kind of, can I just say that? He didn't want to do the trade stuff, right? And he got his head

00:15:18.480 handed to him. And that, you know, we lost that in a hundred days, we lost a lot of momentum.

00:15:23.100 I mean, it was just, these were rookie mistakes, but it's understandable in the sense that it's a

00:15:29.520 hard job to do, and the learning curve is steep, and, you know, it's like. But it wasn't, it wasn't

00:15:35.420 a mistake either. I mean, it wasn't just a mistake. It was a plot. It was a plot to undercut his trade

00:15:41.940 policy, to not even get it moving. Reince Priebus and Paul Ryan were, in point of fact, they might,

00:15:49.780 if they could have gotten the same pay, they would have been Democrats. And, and Ryan is a

00:15:55.380 complete idiot. He had a, he had a reputation as being a wonk on the budget. That man can't balance

00:16:01.240 his checkbook. It is ridiculous what they thought of him and what he thought of Trump. He was a

00:16:08.180 problem from Jump Street. He was ignorant. He was disloyal, and he was a major problem. But luckily,

00:16:14.980 the people spoke, and he was, he went away. Let me ask you this, because it's really important.

00:16:23.400 You and Kudlow, I know, banged heads over America First policies. I talked to Larry on, on the air,

00:16:32.880 it's at some point early on, and he started talking about free trade. And I said, Larry,

00:16:39.960 the President of the United States is not a free trader. He is, for balanced trade, for fair trade,

00:16:47.720 he is insisting on balanced trade, and the entire world needs to pay attention to it. Why are you

00:16:53.720 calling him a free trader? And he said, because I'm a free trader, effectively. That was his answer.

00:17:00.100 And it's crazy. And he and Mnuchin were open about it.

00:17:04.060 Well, look, I mean, here's the problem. There's, there's loyalty to a president and loyalty to a

00:17:11.940 president agenda. In the end, both Kudlow and Mnuchin were say yes, do no kind of guys, right?

00:17:20.700 In the Oval, they'd be sycophants. They'd let the boss think they were going to do what he wanted them

00:17:28.580 to do. And then as soon as they got out of that office, I was fighting them tooth and nail.

00:17:34.680 There's a story that doesn't appear in the Taking Back Trump's America book. It's fascinating where

00:17:39.480 me and Lighthizer were sitting at a meeting with the trade team, which included...

00:17:45.380 Let me, I'm sorry, let me interject real quickly. Robert Lighthizer, the trade representative

00:17:51.040 in charge, in charge of trade policy for the president. Yes. And, and, and, and we're sitting

00:17:58.720 there with Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, you know, both these guys, the

00:18:04.320 Wall Street guys, me and Lighthizer. And the boss the day before had instructed Lighthizer

00:18:10.200 to put out a public statement related to being tough on China, right? And Mnuchin comes

00:18:20.840 in that morning and looks us in the eye and says, the president doesn't want Lighthizer

00:18:26.520 to send that out. Okay. And Lighthizer took him at his word. I've been telling, I was telling

00:18:33.240 Lighthizer for months, like Mnuchin's lying to you. He's just lying to you about everything,

00:18:39.420 Bob. You got to like face reality. So Bob, I dragged Bob down to the Oval after that meeting

00:18:46.920 to verify what Mnuchin said. And sure enough, he was lying. And that's the kind of crap we had to

00:18:55.400 do. And Kudlow, Kudlow would say yes to President Trump in the Oval Office, and then he would go

00:19:02.920 outside the Oval and use his National Economic Council people to countermand everything he was

00:19:09.840 told to do. And he was always insistent that, oh, I'm tough on China. But everything he actually did 0.81

00:19:16.780 undermines it. Yeah, I see him, you know, he's making his money on Fox. And it's like the Fox

00:19:22.860 wing, the Ryan wing, you know, they love the globalist wing. They love him. It's the never

00:19:27.620 Trump wing. And it's just so much BS. And it's just disgusts me every time I see that. Because,

00:19:34.440 you know, if I could wave a magic wand, Lou, it's like if simply Mnuchin, Kushner, and Kudlow

00:19:40.980 had never darkened the door of the White House, I think the boss would still be there. That's how

00:19:45.920 much damage those guys did. Well, I'm going to make a projection. I'm going to say that you're

00:19:52.600 going to be back in the White House because President Trump is going to be back in the White

00:19:56.520 House in 2024. In 2025, he'll be back in the White House. He'll take the thing in the election.

00:20:04.440 of 2024. What job are you going to have? How many jobs do you want?

00:20:10.240 Well, let me let me let me tell you the secret of my success, Lou. OK, because I was with the boss

00:20:16.580 for five years. OK, I never wanted to be there. OK, as soon as you want to be there, you start making

00:20:26.960 accommodations to stay there. And I don't do that. If he needs me, I'm there. But I'm not asking.

00:20:35.920 I think that's a wonderful philosophy about everything. As a matter of fact, I share that

00:20:42.380 in large measure. The fact of the matter is, you were a warrior for this president's agenda,

00:20:49.700 for the country's agenda. And I want to salute you because you were staying. I, as you know,

00:20:55.040 I know more about what you have. I put it another way. I have a greater sense than most folks about

00:21:02.240 what you had to contend with in that in that battleground of a White House. And fortunately,

00:21:10.660 the president's ideas and yours survived and gave this country a real opportunity to the greatest

00:21:18.800 prosperity of any first term president in our country's modern history. I mean, we just

00:21:25.620 focusing on balanced trade, focusing on fair trade and responsible relationships and everything,

00:21:35.500 but always with America first. That was a victory that you should and I know you are extremely proud

00:21:44.260 of. And the president certainly set the tone for this century by taking those issues on. It's just

00:21:52.480 give me what you would say is and we're going to have to wrap up here in just a couple of minutes. We

00:21:59.360 always give our guests the last word. Give us your sense of where the where the boss, as you call him,

00:22:07.260 is headed and what his plans will be and the agenda that you think will prevail in both the midterm

00:22:13.460 election and 2024. Lou, there's no question in my mind, although he hasn't told me this, that he's running

00:22:21.320 in 2024. In order for him to run successfully, the first thing that has to happen, and he knows this,

00:22:30.040 is to take back the House from Nancy Pelosi to put an end to the weaponization unconstitutionally of 1.00

00:22:37.460 their investigatory power. So watch him do what he's been doing. He's gone to two a day rallies now

00:22:44.640 to make sure that we command that majority. And then when the wind is in, got to make sure that

00:22:53.060 we have Trump Republicans in charge of both the House and the Senate, not the likes of Mitch McConnell

00:22:58.860 and Kevin McCarthy. That's got to happen. Going forward, I think we're facing the most critical

00:23:08.120 crisis in economics since the 1970s. First thing he's got to do is restore strategic energy dominance

00:23:15.880 to contain energy and food prices and secure our southern border. And then follow through on the MAGA

00:23:24.820 agenda, bringing home our manufacturing base and supply chains. I think if you stabilize the economy,

00:23:32.700 you begin to stabilize the out of control crime rate, and then you begin to take that one

00:23:37.700 on directly. You've got to clean up an FBI, which, if you think about it, has been going after

00:23:46.340 President Trump since he was a candidate in 2016. It's now in the seventh year, the political

00:23:54.780 persecution of Donald Trump. Yes. Yeah. Well, coup d'etats, right? A failed preemptive coup in the

00:24:03.340 2016 election, a successful coup in the 2020 election, and now another attempt at a preemptive

00:24:10.780 coup by the FBI with their raids in Mar-a-Lago. So I see a path ahead that begins within less than 30

00:24:21.940 days of taking back the House. So your viewers and listeners, I suggest they get involved in a race 0.99

00:24:29.200 that's going to make a difference, whether it's Joe Kent in Washington or Zach Nunn in Iowa or Caroline

00:24:36.960 Leavitt in New Hampshire or Bo Hines in North Carolina. Find a toss-up race that'll flip a seat

00:24:43.860 to the Republicans, and you'll be doing what you need to help out Donald John Trump.

00:24:49.720 All right. Well, a man who's been helping out President Donald Trump for quite some time and

00:24:57.200 giving it his all and still doing so. Peter, thanks for all you've done for the country,

00:25:03.440 for all of us, and what I know you'll be doing for the country in the years ahead.

00:25:11.680 Peter, thanks so much. We appreciate it, and God bless you.

00:25:15.540 You're a patriot, sir, and it's always an honor to be with you, Lou. You take care of yourself.

00:25:21.820 Thanks, everybody, for being with us today. Here tomorrow, we'll have Mike Lindell as our guest.

00:25:26.960 Please join us for that tomorrow on The Great America Show. Until then,

00:25:31.620 God bless you, and may God bless America.

The Great America Show - October 19, 2022

“TAKING BACK TRUMP’S AMERICA” AUTHOR PETER NAVARRO TALKS ABOUT HOW TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICANS LOST THE WHITE HOUSE IN 2020

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