Trump wants to bring jobs back to America. He wants to cut trillions of dollars out of the GDP, the deficit, the debt, Social Security, Medicare, and the federal government to pay for it all. He also wants no tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year.
00:12:49.980I think this is significant because Lindsey Graham is now, for the first time in his career, facing a true, viable challenge in the Republican primary in South Carolina.
00:13:00.800A businessman named Mark Lynch has stepped forward.
00:13:04.020He's put $5 million of his own money into his campaign to get it jump-started.
00:13:09.920It's an uphill fight in South Carolina.
00:13:12.200It wouldn't be an uphill fight if the primary was closed to Republicans only, but because it is an open primary in which anyone of any party, or no party at all, can vote in the Republican Party.
00:13:26.720The fear is that liberals and Democrats and others who realize that the Democrat nominee has little chance to win in a general election will cross over into the Republican Party to try to save Lindsey Graham.
00:13:41.680There will be a move in the legislature where Republicans do have power to try to close the primary, but it's not clear whether Governor Henry McMaster, one of President Trump's earliest and most loyal supporters, would sign such legislation.
00:13:59.220Before we go, I want to go back to the doge thing, but before we go to that, you bring up such a good point.
00:14:03.160The other day, Donald Trump taking to Twitter to go after Thomas Massey.
00:14:07.480Whatever his beef is with Thomas Massey, Thomas Massey is a small fish in a big pond.
00:14:47.440What about these senators who are actually the real problem?
00:14:51.860Well, I don't think that the president is particularly close to Lisa Murkowski, and she's only there in Alaska because they have ranked choice voting,
00:14:59.940which is this completely convoluted system in which the candidate who gets the most votes is not elected to the U.S. Senate.
00:15:31.420Among the president's most important appointments, she supported them.
00:15:36.800I have to assume with Lindsey Graham, this is a case of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
00:15:43.120I have little doubt that if Lindsey Graham was no longer a U.S. senator, Donald Trump wouldn't return his phone calls.
00:15:48.780It's probably true, but the problem, Roger, that I take such issue with that is that we can't continue to support people who only screw us 50 percent of the time.
00:15:57.340And it's the same thing why Susan Collins got the pass last time, right, because she voted for Kavanaugh.
00:16:01.720It was a political choice on her part because she knew she was committing political suicide.
00:16:05.780But when a push comes to shove, when it comes time to major legislation, she's nowhere to be found.
00:16:34.780So you could defeat her in a primary, in which case you'll get an all out leftist Democrat who votes with us zero percent of the time.
00:16:42.260I think it was Ronald Reagan who said, I'd rather have part of the loaf than none of the loaf.
00:16:47.920It is a harsh reality about the way Maine, once one of the most Republican states in the country, 1936, Al Clinton only carried two states, Vermont and Maine, now a reliably blue state.
00:17:07.620I've got some news for you that you might find appalling about Doge and where Elon Musk, some of his latest uncoverings on where he just found three hundred and twelve million dollars.
00:17:17.020You're not going to expect where I'm about to tell you.
00:17:19.600We're coming right back with Roger Stone, host of the Stone Zone each and every night.
00:21:18.540I want to talk about the economy a little bit.
00:21:20.240Now, neither are you or I are economists, but we're common sense people, and we do a little bit of reading.
00:21:25.720The Democrats want to talk about the economy and that tariffs are ruining this economy.
00:21:30.240The truth of the matter is, Roger, what's also taking effect on the stock market and the economy right now is the fact that Doge and Elon Musk and Scott Besson and Howard Lutnick want to cut a trillion dollars out of the GDP.
00:21:42.760They want to cut a trillion dollars of spending.
00:21:44.700That's massive, Roger, because for years they talked about Social Security and cutting Social Security and changing the retirement age and cutting Medicare and cutting Medicaid.
00:21:54.240Well, I'm under the impression that there is so much government fraud, Roger, that's ripe inside the government right now that we may not even have to touch these entitlements if we can get to the bottom of how much fraud and abuse is going on in the government.
00:22:08.060Look, I agree with you. The president has been talking recently about balancing the federal budget.
00:22:13.480We have not had a balanced federal budget since Dwight Eisenhower was president, and I think the president is very serious about this.
00:22:20.340Now, normally you would say, well, that's not possible, but it is possible.
00:22:25.400First of all, you have Robert Reich. You remember him?
00:22:28.080He was the labor secretary under Bill Clinton.
00:22:31.320I actually went to high school with him, John Jay High School, Katona, New York.
00:22:34.700He was a smart ass then. He's a smart ass now. Frankly, I've had it up to here with Robert Reich.
00:22:40.880But Reich was on X the other night saying that the that the supply side oriented tax cuts had caused the inflation and the deep debt that we have, which, of course, is nonsense.
00:22:53.280It doesn't matter which candidate, which president cut taxes across the board, whether it was John Kennedy, whether it was Ronald Reagan or whether it was Donald Trump.
00:23:02.800In every case, federal revenues went up after an across the board tax got knocked down.
00:23:08.680That means that the deficits and the inflation are caused by spending too much.
00:23:16.200We don't have a problem that the working people of this country are taxed too little.
00:23:20.800That's not the problem. So I do think, as the president said and is the secretary of the Treasury said, we're going to go through a period of dislocation here.
00:23:31.300The question, of course, is two points. One, Donald Trump doesn't have to run for reelection and doesn't have any plans to do so.
00:23:37.060Obviously, the Constitution is pretty clear.
00:23:39.840Somebody should tell Steve Bannon this.
00:23:42.300A person can only be elected president for two terms.
00:23:45.680They don't have to be two consecutive terms, but there is a two term limit.
00:23:49.440In fact, the Constitution also says that if a person serves more than two years of somebody else's term, as, for example, Lyndon Johnson filling more than three years of John Kennedy's term, they're not eligible to run for more than one other term.
00:24:08.900So LBJ could have run in 1968, but could not have run again in 1972.
00:24:15.480In any event, the president, I think, is free from the pressures of being a potential candidate for president again.
00:24:24.660And as for the midterms, what matters is not what the stock market is doing today, not what the economy is doing today.
00:24:31.920What will matter is what the economy is doing a year and a half from now.
00:24:36.600And frankly, I think, given the president's commitment to energy independence and bringing down energy prices, I think his commitment to deeply cutting federal spending in the form of waste, fraud and corruption and renewal of the Trump tax cuts.
00:24:52.760I think there's a strong chance that you could have a boom economy by the time we get to the midterms.
00:24:58.820And, Roger, for the Marxist Dems or the Democrats who want to watch the show and who watch every night, and there's a lot of them who do.
00:25:06.460The fact of the matter is, is I'm not going to sit here and defend Trump through a recession or go after Biden for having a recession.
00:25:12.800The fact of the matter is that there's two different reasons for it.
00:25:15.580Biden's was self-made and self-created by offshoring jobs, by cutting drilling here in America.
00:25:22.460There's a plethora of things and reasons why Joe Biden had this economy going through the floor.
00:25:27.360Now, President Trump says, whether you were classified as a recession or a correction, whatever you want to call it, there's a means to an end, Roger.
00:25:36.260The last time the United States had a trade surplus, which means our exports exceed our imports, which means we're putting out more than we're giving in, was 1975.
00:25:45.580That's 50 years, Roger, was the last time we did something like that, which means the United States is reliant on every other country for everything we bring into this country, whether it be 85 percent of our pharmaceuticals, whether it be our PPE during the China virus, whether it be our car parts, whether it be textiles.
00:26:02.160It's everything because America is not as innovative as it was once before.
00:26:06.840And it's because of people like Joe Biden and Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton, who offshored all of our jobs over the last 25, 30 years.
00:26:15.040And now it's up to someone to bring them back.
00:26:17.280So this is a fight with a means to the end.
00:26:19.420If we have to go through a tumultuous times for six months to a year, Wall Street can wait.
00:26:24.760It's time for Main Street to start making money, Roger.
00:26:27.800That small guy who owns the cigar shop, the small guy who owns the pizzeria, our buddy Steve Martorano who owns a restaurant down by you in Fort Lauderdale, the greatest Italian restaurant in my opinion.
00:26:37.060It's time for these people to recuperate some of the money they've lost from inflation.
00:26:42.400Well, first of all, I think Cafe Europa in Fort Lauderdale could be the greatest Italian restaurant.
00:26:46.620Well, I think Martorano is a close second.
00:26:52.360There used to be a place called Macaluso's in Miami Beach that was right up there, sadly, no longer with us.
00:26:58.240I went to the Miami Beach branch of Rao's the other night, and I must tell you, it was excellent.
00:27:04.120Not that I love Italian food, but I'm kind of like Sinatra.
00:27:07.140There's a few places for dinner every night, Italian, Italian, or Italian.
00:27:11.540I agree with you, but that was the whole point of the last election.
00:27:17.340Donald Trump has changed the face of the Republican Party.
00:27:20.480We're no longer the party of Wall Street, no longer the party of the financial elites, no longer the party of the country club, no longer certainly the party of the billionaires.
00:27:30.980So we are now, as you have had historically, remade the party in the image of its leader.
00:27:39.560We are the party of the middle class, we're the party of working families, and that's who Trump is going to stand up for.
00:27:47.200The tariffs, I think, are frankly a cudgel that he's using to get better trade deals.
00:27:55.120And although everybody screams at the beginning, you've seen country after country after country fold and make a better deal with us.
00:28:02.860To Donald Trump, a good trade deal is a deal in which both trading partners benefit.
00:28:09.020Not a trade deal in which it's one-sided, and our trading partners have the only benefit.
00:28:14.880And slowly but surely, the threat of tariffs is working to bring our trading partners to the table and get them to make a better deal.
00:28:29.660We've got some economic indicators for you when we return after President Trump's first month in office on how he's doing, how inflation's looking.
00:28:37.920And there's some countries now who are already folding with the tariffs.
00:28:40.920Tariffs haven't even gotten into effect until April 1st.
00:28:43.280And there's countries already saying, we're waving the white flag.
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00:29:54.080Folks, we're back with the great Roger Stone, host of the Stone Zone.
00:29:56.740Catch him each and every night, StoneZone.com, WABC.com, or on your radio dial for the Stone Zone, 8 p.m. Eastern time.
00:30:03.440Roger, some economic indicators out today that inflation is not growing at a rate that the Marxist Dems would have liked to see it continue to climb at.
00:30:13.480Finally, we have some good news on the economy and really the number one issue for many Americans, the cost of living.
00:30:18.940So we just learned that consumer prices in February increased by 2.8% year over year, 0.2% month over month.
00:30:26.780Both of these figures were a step in the right direction and both were better than expected.
00:30:33.200So this is definitely very encouraging to see because it's going to, I think, relieve some fears that inflation was perhaps re-accelerating because this actually breaks a streak of four straight months where I think you could see it on the chart all the way to the right where the inflation rate was going in the wrong direction, right?
00:31:06.640First of all, we also had job numbers just the other day, and the job numbers are also sharply up.
00:31:12.860Look, it's going to take some time to recover from the massive spending and printing of money under Joe Biden.
00:31:20.560And we still have an out-of-control Federal Reserve that just prints money like there's no tomorrow.
00:31:27.380But clearly, this is one of the – this is actually a more important – those two indicators, job creation and cost of living, more important indicators than the stock market.
00:31:38.940The stock market is, as you know, is extremely volatile.
00:31:42.920It can go up or down very quickly on the basis of any kind of news.
00:31:47.440I don't think it's the best indicator of the health of the economy on any one given day.
00:31:53.220The president is not concerned about the stock market sell-off.
00:31:56.140So, frankly, I'm not concerned either.
00:31:58.600Yeah, Donald Trump bought a Tesla yesterday.
00:32:12.360I won't be satisfied, Roger, with job numbers until we start seeing negative job numbers from inside the federal government.
00:32:19.260But the Democrats, they wanted both ways, Rogers.
00:32:21.360They want to tell us one day that Donald Trump's doing too much on the border or too much to the economy, and then he's not doing enough.
00:32:27.400Now, Hakeem Jeffries, who I'll use your saying, if he had one IQ point lower, you'd have to water him like a plant, telling him that Donald Trump is not – doesn't care about the border, doesn't care about fixing things like that.
00:32:41.260Look, what we've seen from the Trump administration over the last several weeks is just a flood of unprecedented extremism and a parade of horribles that continue to be unleashed on the American people.
00:32:52.680While at the same time, the Trump administration is not focused on solving the problems of everyday Americans, we're continuing to make sure that we focus on trying to make life better for everyday Americans.
00:33:09.140Fundamentally, that's why we were sent to Washington, D.C.
00:33:12.380We have to drive down the high cost of living.
00:33:18.000We have to protect our dreamers and farm workers and families.
00:33:22.100These are the things that matter as opposed to creating crisis-like moments when we should be coming together and demonstrating leadership for the free world.
00:33:33.160As you know, now all of a sudden, Hakeem Jeffries cares about the farmers, Roger.