The StoneZONE with Roger Stone


Rod Martin ｜ 06-05-25


Episode Stats

Hate Speech Sentences

11


Summary

Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, shares his thoughts on the latest ruling by an International Trade Court ruling that the President has no authority to negotiate trade deals with other countries. He also explains why he thinks the ruling is a travesty.


Transcript

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00:00:30.000 The Stone Zone.
00:00:32.140 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:00:35.980 Welcome back into The Stone Zone.
00:00:39.420 Substack, substack.com, is a place where writers and thinkers, right, left, and center, can express their views.
00:00:49.420 Views that the mainstream media is disinterested in because, well, they're not politically correct.
00:00:55.640 Or they may be offbeat.
00:00:57.520 Or they may be off the official fake news narrative.
00:01:02.500 Among the liveliest takes there is Rod Martin.
00:01:08.780 Rod D. Martin has the Rod D. Martin Report.
00:01:13.780 The Martin Report.
00:01:14.480 I urge you to check it out.
00:01:15.800 And the man himself joins us now.
00:01:18.460 Rod Martin.
00:01:20.560 Great to be here.
00:01:21.780 Thank you.
00:01:22.280 So I should tell folks, you are an entrepreneur, a founder and CEO of Martin Capital, an investor, a futurist, one of the guys that helped start PayPal.
00:01:32.460 You're a staunch anti-communist.
00:01:34.560 What I love is the fact that you're also a thinker.
00:01:37.340 And the Rod Martin Report on Substack is a fountain of ideas and free expression.
00:01:44.080 So I want to jump right into it because these court rulings are coming so fast you could get whiplash if you try to pay attention.
00:01:52.700 But yesterday we were told this incredibly obscure international trade court, which, frankly, I've never heard of before in Manhattan,
00:02:03.240 had suddenly ruled that President Donald Trump didn't have the authority to go out and negotiate trade deals with other countries.
00:02:10.800 Now, just hours ago, a new federal appeals court has overruled that.
00:02:18.880 You just wrote a great hot take on this.
00:02:21.620 Rod, give us your take.
00:02:24.540 Well, it's completely absurd.
00:02:26.980 It's a true travesty.
00:02:28.600 And I give you about 1,800 words of analysis on RodMartin.org.
00:02:33.160 And on exactly that came out about half an hour ago, the appeals court stayed the ruling for now.
00:02:43.240 So the Trump administration will have an opportunity to appeal this.
00:02:48.320 They seem to be going straight to the Supreme Court.
00:02:51.100 Maybe they go to the appeals court first.
00:02:52.840 But in the meantime, the tariffs continued.
00:02:56.220 That's what the president has.
00:02:58.600 The problem here is the grounds on which they overruled him.
00:03:03.980 They actually applied very strictly non-delegation doctrine, which all good conservatives would support.
00:03:11.620 We don't believe that Congress should have the right to delegate legislative authority to administrative agencies, the executive branch generally.
00:03:20.780 But that's not really the situation here.
00:03:23.580 This is a foreign policy issue, not a legislative issue.
00:03:28.140 Congress has clearly acted in repeated acts going back to 1930 to permit and enable the president to use tariffs as a tool in the conduct of American foreign policy.
00:03:44.420 And this has never been meaningfully challenged.
00:03:47.320 This court, yeah, I think those people had never heard of.
00:03:51.820 It was started in 1980, but it's the successor to the old U.S. Customs Court, which was established in 1890.
00:04:00.060 And in all of that time, none of these activist Democrats have ever seen fit to question when Barack Obama imposed tariffs,
00:04:09.620 or Joe Biden maintained presidentially imposed tariffs, or Jimmy Carter, or Lyndon Johnson, or R.C.R.
00:04:18.000 It's a complete political circus.
00:04:21.980 It is shameful, and it simply isn't the law.
00:04:25.420 Yeah, it's, as you say, it's madness.
00:04:28.080 But we saw the same thing surrounding the question of whether the president had the authority to deport illegal immigrant gang members with criminal records, in many cases,
00:04:39.780 who are very clear danger to those around them and to the country.
00:04:44.100 We actually had a court rule that the president had no such authority, which, of course, he does.
00:04:49.240 The Supreme Court ultimately stepped in.
00:04:51.980 I'm hopeful that they will do so again.
00:04:54.320 Now, one of the things I like about the stuff you put up at rodmartin.org, and that you also have at Substack,
00:05:02.980 is the fact that you've actually read the art of the deal.
00:05:07.080 So you actually understand our 45th and our 47th president.
00:05:13.440 That in itself, I think, is one of the reasons why your observations are so on the money.
00:05:20.420 Give me your overall take on the president's tariff strategy, because I've said on this show and elsewhere,
00:05:28.780 I actually don't believe that Donald Trump loves tariffs.
00:05:31.420 I think he'd love to have no tariffs.
00:05:32.980 He'd like to have an even playing field with no tariffs between any countries,
00:05:36.680 or we could sell whatever we wanted in their country and vice versa.
00:05:39.800 But that's not what we have.
00:05:41.840 People say, oh, you're against free trade.
00:05:44.340 Well, we want fair trade, and the trade hasn't been fair.
00:05:47.660 So the president uses tariffs as a cudgel, and frankly, based on what I've seen, so far it appears to be working.
00:05:56.780 But I'm more interested in your take.
00:05:59.220 You're absolutely singing my song.
00:06:02.000 And this is again and again on Fox Business and other fora, because it's just plain as day.
00:06:09.360 Donald Trump has made his position clear.
00:06:11.900 I would say, possibly, most clearly, at the 2018 EG7 meeting, where he just stood up and he told them,
00:06:22.060 look, I'm a working guy.
00:06:24.660 Obviously, the right outcome is to have no trade barriers whatsoever.
00:06:29.600 That's going to be prosperity for everybody.
00:06:32.300 But you guys won't play ball.
00:06:34.180 And they wouldn't, and they didn't.
00:06:37.320 And so now we get the reciprocal tariffs just to jerk their chains.
00:06:42.640 The fact that everybody misses, and I don't understand why, is that America is the largest consumer market in the world.
00:06:51.940 Everybody who exports has to sell to us.
00:06:55.960 And, by the way, a lot of these countries are heavily dependent on the export sector of their economy.
00:07:02.400 Germany, 48% of their economy.
00:07:05.420 China, more than 20% of their economy.
00:07:08.780 And some of that gets trans-shipped through Vietnam and different places.
00:07:12.860 Doesn't matter.
00:07:14.120 You know, the bottom line is, without the U.S. market, China goes into a depression.
00:07:18.680 And so would Germany.
00:07:20.240 And so would much of the world.
00:07:22.060 They need us more than we need them.
00:07:24.220 So, of course, Donald Trump understands that.
00:07:26.660 That's sort of his new state.
00:07:28.440 And you mentioned the art of the deal.
00:07:30.220 I would also like to single out what I think is actually going to be the double.
00:07:35.320 It's 1997, the art of the comeback, which is just extraordinary, particularly in the last chapter,
00:07:43.760 which goes on at length about his political views.
00:07:48.280 And it reads just like a campaign statement from 2016 or 2024.
00:07:54.880 It's extraordinary how consistent this man is in overtime,
00:07:58.800 hoping at picking up a pro-life position along the way.
00:08:01.960 But otherwise, he's as consistent as the day is long.
00:08:06.500 And the people who have done the homework and won't do the reading always get him wrong,
00:08:12.380 always misunderstand him.
00:08:13.860 And they're not going to get any better.
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00:08:46.180 Yeah, I completely agree.
00:08:47.400 I would also point out his book, The America We Deserve,
00:08:50.320 in which he actually foresees the rising threat of Islamic terrorism.
00:08:55.540 And he actually predicts the attack on America on 9-11, an extraordinary book.
00:09:02.220 I agree with you.
00:09:03.240 The only issue, frankly, on which he's really changed is,
00:09:06.380 I think with the birth of his son, Barron, he became pro-life.
00:09:11.320 I think that gave him a new appreciation.
00:09:14.120 But beyond that, if you go back and look at the speech he gave in New Hampshire in 1988,
00:09:20.860 when he spoke to the Plymouth, New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce,
00:09:24.720 and many people said, oh, is he running for president?
00:09:27.080 Is he going to New Hampshire because he's running for president?
00:09:29.040 No, he's going to New Hampshire to get exposure for his ideas.
00:09:31.920 He talked about the folly of the trade deal.
00:09:34.740 So this is pre-NAFTA, but he said, we're getting killed in these trade deals.
00:09:39.900 We send social workers.
00:09:41.820 They send killers.
00:09:43.160 They send their best and brightest.
00:09:45.020 We send bureaucrats.
00:09:46.420 We're getting rolled.
00:09:48.380 And why are we continuing to pay a disproportionate amount for the protection of Europe?
00:09:54.020 Why are our NATO allies not paying their fair share for their own protection?
00:10:01.320 I remember this like it was yesterday.
00:10:02.680 He said, look, I understood that after World War II, they were devastated.
00:10:07.720 They were destroyed.
00:10:08.640 They were broke.
00:10:09.480 We were still relatively prosperous.
00:10:12.000 And the Marshall Plan was necessary and so on.
00:10:16.040 But now, with our economy in trouble, why are they not paying their fair share?
00:10:22.100 This was 1988, of course, in 2017, he made our NATO allies pony up.
00:10:29.680 Every one of them was behind in their payments and every one of them was forced to cough up millions and millions of dollars.
00:10:37.140 Rod, you wrote this and I loved it.
00:10:38.800 Speaking of Trump's use and maneuvering for tariffs, you said, this is like Reagan's zero option all over again.
00:10:49.480 Reagan deployed a large number of nuclear weapons to Europe to counter the Soviets' similar deployment while proposing that all such weapons should be banned.
00:10:59.320 Everyone laughed until 1987 when he achieved exactly that.
00:11:04.880 But speaking of Reagan, who you and I agree is one of the 20th century's greatest presidents, he also used market power, specifically a huge arms race coupled with collapsing the price of energy from which Russian derived the cash it needed to continue to compete.
00:11:21.460 And he bankrupted the Soviet Union.
00:11:24.540 Trump, remember this lesson.
00:11:26.500 And now you say China is learning us.
00:11:29.420 Talk to us about China.
00:11:31.160 China, you were talking about how Trump is checkmating China.
00:11:36.560 Expand on that, if you would.
00:11:39.320 Well, you're exactly right.
00:11:40.500 This is Reagan's zero option strategy from what became the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.
00:11:51.460 When Reagan put it out there, everybody called him crazy on both sides of the aisle.
00:11:58.200 But he was right.
00:11:59.700 You know, putting pressure on the Soviets by deploying nuclear missiles, both the cruise missiles and the Pershing 2, put the Russians in a position where they absolutely had tons of reason to actually abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons.
00:12:17.920 It's the only time it's ever happened.
00:12:20.160 And Trump was highly successful.
00:12:21.880 And it was just because Reagan was a visionary and willing to go for the deal that these days Trump would go for.
00:12:28.600 But most of our political class doesn't have the creativity to even imagine, and they're horrified by the concept.
00:12:35.640 Same thing with using the Saudi alliance to collapse the price of the oil.
00:12:40.860 And that's where we just saw the trip to the Middle East where we're buttressing those alliances.
00:12:48.940 We've got to bring Israel into an alliance with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf states.
00:12:54.660 And that's already started the Abraham Accords.
00:12:57.220 But in the process, we're isolating China.
00:13:00.500 And Donald Trump understands perfectly, clearly what the Beltway class has not, that China is a geopolitical threat.
00:13:09.780 It's a regime run by a communist party that routinely threatens to nuke American cities, to invade an American ally in Taiwan.
00:13:22.220 This is not Germany.
00:13:23.720 This is not Japan.
00:13:25.420 This is not a friend.
00:13:27.400 This is, at best, a frenemy.
00:13:28.900 And we have to decouple from them sufficiently that we're not dependent on them for strategic supply and also enough that their economy is sufficiently depressed that they can't afford military interventions and an invasion of Taiwan or potentially Siberia or whatever they might attempt.
00:13:51.260 Donald Trump gets it.
00:13:52.360 Everybody before him failed in this regard, starting with Bill Clinton, letting China into the WTO, letting China have most favored nation status, and actually taking tons of Chinese campaign cash in the 96th election.
00:14:08.340 And that's the genesis of our allowance of these people.
00:14:14.720 No, you're absolutely right.
00:14:16.200 I often say that Richard Nixon gets a bum rap.
00:14:18.960 People say that Nixon, because he restored economic relations with the Chinese, is responsible for the threat that China poses today.
00:14:27.940 But people don't recognize that at the time that Nixon went to China, China was a dirt-poor, agrarian society.
00:14:35.860 Most homes did not have indoor plumbing.
00:14:39.160 The rural areas didn't even have electricity.
00:14:42.080 The country had no technological capabilities.
00:14:45.980 They had a military capability, but it was antiquated.
00:14:48.940 It wasn't until the Clintons gave them most favored nation trading status, and frankly, Bill Clinton sold them in the Loral scandal, sold them our missile-targeting technology in return for millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions.
00:15:08.660 These are the things that made China the danger that it is today.
00:15:12.620 There was no way for Richard Milhouse Nixon to see that 30 years later, after he played the Russians off against the Chinese and vice versa to secure a strategic arms limitation agreement,
00:15:25.640 on which the Russians were going cold until Nixon announced that he was going to visit Beijing, and then suddenly they wanted to make a deal.
00:15:33.840 There's no way Nixon could see that China would emerge as the threat that they have become.
00:15:39.320 Folks, if you're just tuning in, this is The Stone Zone.
00:15:44.240 We're talking to Rod Martin.
00:15:46.420 You can find his great stuff at rodmartin.org.
00:15:50.320 Don't go away, because we'll be right back with a bit more with Rod Martin, talking about the politics of the day.
00:15:58.180 Right now, we're focused on China, but I want to ask him when we come back about Russia,
00:16:02.920 and about Vladimir Putin and the quest for peace in the Ukraine-Russian war.
00:16:10.940 Again, you're in The Stone Zone.
00:16:12.640 I'm Roger Stone.
00:16:13.820 He's Rod Martin of The Rod Martin Report, and we'll be right back.
00:16:18.400 We'll be right back.