00:02:02.440You are now entering the Stone Zone on what will be the second day after the apocalyptic midterm elections.
00:02:11.160The intrigue is great in Washington, D.C., but Vice President Jantz charted his own course just when he released an extensive statement on social media in which he essentially said that we lost yesterday because we lost focus on the reasons we got elected.
00:02:28.480Those being end the war, focus on the cost of inflation, put America first and change our relationship with Israel.
00:02:35.400This is interesting in the sense that rather than be criticized, Trump essentially agreed in a subsequent interview with his vice president and Donald Trump Jr. reposted this appearingly attempt at independence.
00:02:53.580My sources always told me that within the president's inner circles, that it was only Vice President Vance and former ODNI director Tulsi Gabbard who argued against the incursion into Iran, a midnight hammer.
00:03:13.680So I'm not sure we ever should have gone in, not sure this was ever winnable, at least not with these tactics.
00:03:18.700But then you have the neocons who are saying, well, the mistake was not going in.
00:03:22.420The mistake was the ceasefire. The ceasefire ended up just giving an abdurate enemy who was never really interested about negotiations time to retool and replenish and get ready with the ongoing assault.
00:03:37.480And despite the fact that Trump's attacks have destroyed their Navy, their army and much of their ground force and a lot of their of their military machinery, they still managed to get off both drones and missile attacks on their on their on their Arab neighbors, I should say.
00:03:55.120So Vance is clearly, this is playing very, very well as Vance, in essence, declares his independence. This tells me more and more that he probably will be a candidate in 2020. He's making a bid to put together the old Trump coalition.
00:04:09.060I think it becomes abundantly clear, actually in a detailed story, that Trump's inside political team, James Blair, Chris LaSavita Sr., Tony Fabrizio, had looked at extensive damage through gas prices largely and food prices that the war was going to do before it was launched.
00:04:26.200So this was all tested. It's not like they did not know. There is a famous New York Times story
00:04:31.500by Maggie Haberman, which essentially Netanyahu himself comes in the Situation Room, visits the
00:04:37.420Situation Room in the White House. No precedence to that. He's with the president's top. Even at
00:04:43.080the end of that meeting, Marco Rubio, formerly known at least as a neocon, says this is a crazy
00:04:48.660plan, Mr. President. Trump yet decides to go forward. So there can be a lot of recommend,
00:04:54.060And there's no question that the doubt for Susie Wiles, who I think has run an incredibly smooth operation, she's not the decision maker in these things. Donald Trump makes his own decisions. He's his own man. Your job as his chief of staff, and she's the first woman chief of staff in history, is to make all options available to your boss and let him choose them. She's done a phenomenal job of that.
00:05:18.780You could argue that the 400 or whatever in the end could have spent differently, but it would not have made any difference.
00:05:24.940So there is no evidence that their money was poorly spent, none whatsoever.
00:05:30.680But the important point I think that JT makes is Republican turnout, which we always feared here would be too low, that that was our challenge to get our people out.
00:05:40.100Actually, a Republican turnout around the country was quite good.
00:05:42.940It was rough in a few places, but it wasn't a disaster anywhere.
00:05:46.060So we did a good job of shoring that up.
00:05:48.360What we didn't know was half of those people were voting against us.
00:05:51.840Those are protest votes over, you know, $4 plus, whatever it may be, a dollar a gallon gas and rising from the fact that they can't find a place to live at a reasonable cost.
00:06:02.500And when they try to get a loan, the interest rate is just a backbreaker.
00:06:07.300Now, I would argue that Trump proved in his first year and in his first term that he knows how to build a boom economy.
00:06:14.180At the end of Trump's first term, the economy was indeed red hot, and we were on our way to do that.
00:06:20.800He gave us the largest tax cut in history.
00:06:23.320He gave us the end of the tax on retirement, the end of the tax on tips, the 88% of Social Security recipients who no longer pay taxes.
00:06:31.580Along with that comes a huge amount of regulatory cut.
00:06:34.640He was bringing billions of dollars back into the country thanks to changing the tax laws to be invested here and create jobs here.
00:06:41.440This war clearly, I would say, sidelined his administration in much of the way that COVID-19 forced him at the end of his first term his signature accomplishment, which was the economy.
00:06:52.880But the question now is clear. The president dealt with this, by the way, in a stunning announcement, even though some who did not wish him well inaccurately reported that Trump himself had approved the use of nuclear weapons the week of the election.
00:07:09.640But late in the week, and when people couple this with the online reports that seem to come out of the military, urging people to save water and canned goods and batteries and get ready for a period in which we may not have electricity or other utilities, which added to this scare narrative, another version was that Trump had Netanyahu permission to nuke Iran.
00:07:30.940This was disinformation. Tucker Carlson, who's a friend of mine, was a source of it. Alex Jones kind of echoed it. I chastised him on his show. It was the main reason I went back to the show, because I thought this was disinformation that was just serving the president. I spoke to the president. He never approved anything of the kind.
00:07:49.520So it was an interesting mix going into the election.
00:07:55.640I don't think the other names that are coming up are interesting because you can't replace somebody with nobody.
00:08:02.480Susie Wiles, the first woman chief of staff in the country.
00:08:05.440But among those being mentioned are Jay Clayton, the former Southern District of New York U.S. attorney who ran the SEC with a very good record in Trump's first term, who has just been appointed the head of ODNI to replace the temporary director Bill Pulte, who gave sleepless nights to the deep state.
00:08:26.780So he is among those rumored in the running to be White House Chief of Staff, also former Congressman Lee Zeldin.
00:08:34.300Now, Zeldin's an interesting choice because I would argue that while Clayton is a good man, very close to Boris Epstein, one of the president's top advisors, he doesn't have a political aspect of it.
00:08:45.580Part of his job is understanding politics.
00:08:47.900Lee Zeldin, the former congressman from New York who ran a valiant, very strong race with not many resources against the worst governor in the country, Kathy Hochul, who just managed to purchase the governorship for another term, is also one of those that is reported to be under consideration.
00:09:06.720There's also a move for Sergio Gore, former head of the office of White House personnel, but shipped off to be the ambassador to India. I think that's mostly generated by Sergio Gore in terms of his name being in the mix.
00:09:21.000But I point out that there's no evidence that the president has decided to dismiss Susie Wiles, and he may yet surprise him.
00:09:28.380Wiles has a very interesting trajectory.0.94
00:09:32.540She came out of Jacksonville in that political milieu in 2016.
00:09:48.020She could have worked for either Bush or Marco Rubio.
00:09:51.560She chose to work for Reagan, pardon me, for Trump.
00:09:54.720She was airdropped into Ron DeSantis' campaign in 2018.
00:09:58.440Now, there's a DeSantis boomlet going on here that has to be addressed.
00:10:01.500All of a sudden, people are saying, oh, the guy who should lead us in the future is Ron DeSantis.
00:10:05.400Let me point out, Ron DeSantis remains embroiled in a major scandal, which has not been publicly widely circulated.
00:10:11.920But it's very clear that Ron DeSantis and his wife, Casey DeSantis, who many thought would succeed him as governor, kind of like Lerlene Wallace followed George Wallace as a placeholder, also giving him the leverage to raise the money for another presidential campaign.
00:10:26.180That got shattered when Ron and Casey's Hope Foundation essentially diverted a million dollars in Medicare fines inside the Medicare system to their dark money political committee and used it against a constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana, among other things.
00:10:43.840of taxpayer money. They avoided indictment by returning the money. That's interesting.
00:10:50.920This was a subject of both House hearings in the Florida House of Representatives where much of
00:10:56.460this was revealed. But additionally, it was widely reported in the media. When he was first asked
00:11:05.220about it, DeSantis didn't understand. But what they did specifically was take $10 million that
00:11:10.440had been earmarked for the poor, the elderly, and the handicapped. It was a fine for a company that
00:11:14.980had been caught overcharging, and they moved it to a dark money political account. James Uthmeyer,
00:11:20.140who was then DeSantis the Chief of Staff, now just been re-elected to the Attorney General's
00:11:24.560office, to which DeSantis appointed him. He won very narrowly. He approved the transfer of the
00:11:29.660money. So did Ashley Moody, who was then the Attorney General, now in the U.S. Senate. So
00:11:34.400this is a major scandal. Now, the money was returned, but they didn't return it from their
00:11:39.040own pocket from whence the money had gone. They returned it from Florida state taxpayers. There
00:11:43.360was an Orange County jury, grand jury, a state grand jury, headed by a Democrat prosecutor
00:11:48.340investigating this. For some reason, that grand jury decided not to call, not to publish an
00:11:52.820indictment, but to publish what they call a public information, which kind of proves everything I
00:11:57.560just said to you is true. That's very, very curious as to why the prosecutor chose that route,
00:12:02.960because the DeSantis would be, and Uthmeyer and Moody, would be potentially subject to prosecution.
00:12:10.720DeSantis also held back, refusing to do a radio ad, a television ad, or appear in person with Byron Donalds until the very end.
00:12:18.940He finally was to do an appearance together, but he would make no media.
00:12:22.380And his election night appeal was for people to vote Republican.
00:12:28.900I would say that Byron Donalds emerges as the big winner of the night.
00:12:32.560He holds on in a very rough race. But in the end, it is the panhandle. The most conservative white, formerly, you know, Alabama-like hardline racist part of the state, if there is one, came in very strongly for the black republic.
00:12:46.360Maybe we can put all of that racial stuff behind us.
00:12:49.080In the end, Byron Donald owes nothing to DeSantis now, could use his power to appoint a state's attorney, any state's attorney, to essentially be a special prosecutor to look at this entire Hope Foundation scandal, which was widely revealed in the state legislature, and then it appears that some were pressured to drop it.
00:13:06.140Let's remember, Ron DeSantis was the candidate of Rupert Murdoch.
00:13:09.300Murdoch paid DeSantis millions of dollars to HarperCollins' publishing company for a book that probably didn't sell 10,000 copies.
00:13:23.440J.D. Vance, I think, just made a very smart move.
00:13:26.800There's these reports that Marco Rubio is on the verge of resigning to launch a campaign for president.
00:13:33.460We'll talk about that on the other side.
00:13:35.320But I think people, Democrats, Republicans would be wise to focus first on 2027, then focus on 2028.
00:13:44.200because the big state, the deep state has got their orange revolution planned and they're going
00:13:49.140to move forward with it. We'll talk about more of that later in the Stone Zone. I'm Roger Stone.
00:13:53.420Thanks for joining us on the second day after the abysmal crash of the Trump coalition. Can
00:13:59.940Trump pull it back together? I believe that he can. Where are the mistakes made? I think J.D.
00:14:03.660Vance has just laid it out, but Trump is now on a different course. We have to see what happens.
00:14:08.280But I'm optimistic. This did surprise me in his depth, but the pollsters weren't wrong. The pollsters were right. Trump's pollsters were right. As we now know in this New York Times company, they knew this was coming, but literally there was nothing they can do about it. It had to do with anger over fuel prices and food prices and the cost of living and the rising inflation.
00:14:28.980Look, if Trump got really kind of screwed over by the Federal Reserve, he should have gotten a deeper interest rate cut in the first year of his term, but that was held back by Jerome Tulate Powell.
00:14:38.920But he knows, as he proved in his first term, he knows how to build a boom economy, as he proved in his first year he did, but he can't do so with this war, and I think he's gotten the message loud and clear.
00:14:48.800I'm Roger Stone, listening to Stone Zone. Don't go away. We'll be right back.
00:14:52.440The Stone Zone. Entertaining and informative.
00:21:27.940Why do people take an immediate dislike to Ted Cruz?
00:21:31.120The answer is, well, they're only saving time.
00:21:33.600He has no charm whatsoever. I think it was my old friend who observed that every guy goes to the Senate thinking he's there are a lot of smart guys in the Senate.
00:21:45.240But Ted Cruz goes to the Senate thinking he's the only smart guy in the Senate.
00:21:49.940And that is a truth. When he ran the last time, he entered a last minute alliance with John Kasich and Jeb Bush in a stop Trump move.
00:22:00.360So any idea that he is a conservative is false.
00:22:04.460He was essentially hired originally to be the brain for George W. Bush.
00:22:09.340George W. Bush, not the smartest guy you ever met.
00:22:12.220So all that no person left behind, all that Iraq war, all of the Bush policies on both peace and war, that's all fashioned by Ted Cruz, who's an old fashioned neocon.
00:22:26.300He got very upset when Trump exposed the fact, but this is documentable, that his father, known popularly as Angel Cruz, who is a reverend, was indeed an associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, identified in the Warren Commission report and by eyewitnesses on the ground with Oswald.
00:22:49.520prior to the Kennedy assassination, where Oswald is purposely arrested on the street,
00:22:55.980handing out pro-Castro leaflets, purposely sparking a confrontation that the police
00:23:01.860asked Oswald. This is to sheep dip Oswald. And Judith Very Baker, who was a girlfriend,
00:23:12.220mistress of Lee Harvey Oswald, knew him intimately, knew the entire group. Everybody
00:23:17.540knew Angel Cruz. Now, does that mean that he was in on the assassination of Kennedy? That's
00:23:22.560not what we're saying. I believe that Oswald was being played, that he was what he said
00:23:27.700he was, a patsy. He thought he was being sent to Dallas to prevent the assassination of
00:23:32.700John F. Kennedy. They didn't realize that he was being presented to the blame. And the
00:23:37.840National Enquirer correctly reported Ted Cruz's father there. And the guy fell apart. But Trump
00:23:45.440crushed him in the primaries. He had a
00:23:47.700brief run there in Indiana. But in the end,
00:25:28.640All of Trump's, pardon me, all of President Nixon's advisers in the National Apparatus,
00:25:34.880the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they were all opposed.
00:25:38.260Yet Nixon orders the airlift of these supplies. He sends another $100,000 in bandages, food, and other supplies by ship immediately. But he airlifts these supplies. Golda Meir says that Nixon saved Israel.
00:25:54.520Now, Nixon can be heard making a number of what could be construed as anti-Semitic comments in the Watergate tapes.
00:26:03.580But as Golda Meir says, it's deeds, not words that matter.
00:29:38.260and it was Trump who decided to endorse him on the recommendation of my friend Matt Gaetz.
00:29:47.840Matt didn't particularly have any love for Ron DeSantis,
00:29:54.740but he despised the agriculture commissioner who had embarrassed him,
00:29:59.500Adam Putnam, pardon me, that's his name, who had embarrassed him, later went to Congress.
00:30:04.980Putnam had the support of every Republican county chairman, every Republican state legislator, every member of the state Senate and the state House, all of the Republican congressmen, with the exception of Matt Gaetz.
00:30:17.300And Gaetz basically sold Trump on DeSantis.
00:30:20.520Trump didn't know that Ron DeSantis did not endorse him in 2016.
00:30:23.680Even after Trump had been nominated, Ron continued to say that he didn't endorse Trump.
00:30:28.940Trump, he says, and I quote, just because we're both on the Republican ticket does not mean I
00:30:34.360support Donald Trump. In the end, DeSantis' congressional district bigger than DeSantis
00:30:39.640did himself. But that endorsement showed Trump's, at his absolute peak, the candidacy of DeSantis
00:30:46.800took like a rocket ship. He pulled ahead of the Agriculture Commissioner, Adam Pasner,
00:30:54.540at the time said it was like a volcano. It was like an earthquake. It was like a nuclear attack.
00:31:01.680So, and what's interesting, of course, is that that puts DeSantis as the nominee for governor,
00:31:08.020but he's ill-suited for a campaign for governor. He had wanted to run for the U.S. Senate. In fact,
00:31:13.140when Marco Rubio announced that he's going to retire, and then he pulled that retirement back
00:31:18.220and ran again, Iran had already announced for the seat his focus on foreign policy and defense
00:31:24.040issues where he was pretty much of a neo. He didn't support Trump, but he did see his opening
00:31:29.160when Trump was besieged with the Russian collusion hoax. So immediately Ron DeSantis emerged as a
00:31:35.240tough former Navy JAG defending Trump on Russia. That's Trump's first and only impression of Ron,
00:31:41.400which is positive. He doesn't know that Ron wouldn't endorse him, wouldn't stand with him
00:31:45.600in the breach. So he agrees to make Ron DeSantis. And then in the general election, DeSantis had
00:31:52.880been a media phenomenon. He had no ground campaign. Trump called in Susie Wiles. Susie
00:31:57.700Wiles mounted a rescue effort to build Ron DeSantis' campaign. He was running against
00:32:03.440Andrew Gillum, who was an extraordinarily talented candidate. And Gillum would later
00:32:12.320run into his own scandals. But he was the mayor of Tallahassee, and he was quite charismatic,
00:32:20.220and he knew state issues backwards and forward.
00:32:22.960Ron was not even really learning on the fly.
00:32:28.120Matt Gaetz supplied much of that because he'd been in the legislature.
00:32:31.780Of course, as soon as Gaetz ran into accusations, DeSantis had him.
00:32:37.100So he owes his governorship to Donald Trump, and here's why.
00:32:41.220Trump has to change his schedule twice in 2018 to return to Florida
00:32:45.960and do yet another event for Ron DeSantis.
00:32:48.640Only because of that does DeSantis in the end get dragged over the finish line by Trump by 25,000 out of 8.9 million votes cast over Mayor Gillum in a very close race.
00:33:05.240Now, there's no question that with four years, he manages to get reelected strongly, but he owes his governorship to Donald Trump.
00:33:13.320That's why when I tried to tell Trump that DeSantis was going to challenge him, and believe me, he was incredulous.
00:33:20.180But like I say, Rupert Murdoch and other neocons were pushing him, and his wife was really pushing.
00:33:25.800He was easily able to fund a campaign because the governor extorts the utilities, the casinos, the agricultural companies, the insurance companies.
00:33:34.920It gave big time. They got a lot back in return as well.
00:33:40.940Now, those proposing him as a candidate need to be aware of this Hope Foundation scandal, which I think is a huge problem.
00:33:49.500It's very clear that he and his wife and their attorney general move Medicare funds from the state fund into a dark money political account that they control.
00:33:59.680And they use the money for political games to campaign against the state constitutional amendments.
00:34:10.440And, of course, he wouldn't do much for Byron Donalds.
00:34:12.940Donalds, by the way, has the power to appoint any state's attorney to be, in essence, a special prosecutor.
00:34:18.980Look at this whole Hope Foundation question and see whether there was indeed the violations of law that seemed to me and the state legislature's investigation.
00:34:30.080I'm Roger Stone. You're listening to Stone Zone. Don't go away because we'll be right back.
00:34:33.980The Stone Zone, entertaining and informative
00:34:59.800People forget he's actually a brilliant, brilliant political analyst.
00:35:02.680Now, get in the zone. It's the Stone Zone. Here's Roger Stone.
00:35:08.840Back in the Stone Zone, there's a coup that has been completely unveiled inside the Pentagon
00:35:16.420where a small group of bureaucrats and other officers are planning to lay the groundwork for an impeachment of Pete Hegseth,
00:35:23.920saying that he had broken various rules when all he really did was un-DEI our military and prepare them to fight again.
00:35:32.680The traitorous anti-Trump congressman Thomas Massey told CNN he plans to trigger a vote to impeach Hegseth when Congress returns for its short period before passing on to the new Congress, the so-called gathering that comes shortly.
00:35:49.520The Republicans will have a very short period of time, which they still have a majority in both houses, to get some things done, such as approving judicial appointments and so on.
00:35:59.580But clearly Hegseth is targeted for early impeachment, which is they will hand this over.
00:36:06.300This is part of the same problem you have is that those who did the the Russian collusion never face punishment.
00:36:12.880So you're going to have a whole tsunami of lawfare.
00:36:15.760Also, some discussion about Hegseth being appointed to the open Tennessee Senate seat.
00:37:27.960The New York Times, all the news is fit to print embellished with a left-wing tint.
00:37:34.140Some good reporters there have it on the money, others not so much.
00:37:38.240But we're in day two of this post-election apocalypse.
00:37:43.280Whether Trump is going to make changes is unclear.
00:37:45.700Whether Pete Hegseth is going to be fired, I think, is false.
00:37:51.680The president was high on Hegseth the last time I talked to him, but I think some are claiming that Hegseth told the president that this was a four to six weeks attack in Iran that would destroy them.
00:38:01.520Then he supported the subsequent extensions of, I would say, increases in the attacks on Iran, the escalations.
00:38:11.500Then he supported the ceasefire, which the neocons are arguing now was a mistake, and that he should take the blame for miscommunicating the real times involved in this in-depth.
00:38:22.580I think J.D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard and probably Joe Kent and others were making these arguments at the time.
00:38:29.520So the question is, how do they go forward, not to go back? And recriminations here are not a good thing.
00:38:35.360Trump is going to have to govern through the use of executive order, and a lot of vetoes are coming up.
00:38:40.520And how combative he is in the incursions in these investigations remains to be seen.
00:38:45.220He still has enormous executive power.
00:38:47.500He still has a Justice Department that operates on the rule of law.
00:38:51.400But he's hamstrung by these left-wing tyrannical judges in many jurisdictions
00:38:56.240who thwart common sense and the will of the people, holding back a lot of his agenda.
00:39:01.420But I think it's clear to him he has to end the war.
00:39:06.160He has to bring down the cost of food and fuel.
00:39:08.920Well, if he does that, given the fact he's closed our borders and they remain closed and he's cut our taxes, he can still go down as a truly great president.
00:39:37.680Anyway, thanks for joining us in the Stone Zone. A lot of political news. It's hard to pick the stories for today and kind of bring you on the inside of what's going on in a chaotic Washington, D.C. and in the rungs of the national media and in the national parties. It's hard to stay off the cell phone as you hear the latest. I'm Roger Stone. You're in the Stone Zone. Till tomorrow and Godspeed.