Roger Stone explains why President Trump's poll numbers are actually on the right track, and why he's better than Joe Biden in the polls. He also explains why he thinks Ron DeSantis is going to be the next Governor of Florida.
00:07:32.900Few people remember this, but 67 Republican County chairmen in Florida had endorsed the Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam for governor.
00:07:42.340It was only the tweeted endorsement of Donald Trump that catapulted DeSantis ahead in the nomination contest for governor.
00:07:51.520And then the president had to come to Florida three times in the last two weeks of 2018 to literally drag Governor DeSantis over the finish line.
00:08:02.860Don't look for gratitude or loyalty in politics, folks.
00:08:06.140If you want that, well, as Harry Truman said, get yourself a dog.
00:08:10.680This is Roger Stone, and you're in the Stone Zone, and we'll be right back.
00:08:14.760This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
00:08:54.340It's your podcast for market insights, money tips, and real talk on the economy.
00:08:58.620Download and subscribe at BeBullish.com.
00:09:09.340And we're back in the Stone Zone here on the Red Apple Audio Network.
00:09:30.080You know, when my wife and I attended the wedding for Donald and Melania Trump at the Bethesda-by-the-Sea Church in Palm Beach,
00:09:38.760we were seated in the same pew as MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews and his wife.
00:09:46.000It's amazing the number of times Chris Matthews called me to beg me to get President Trump to speak on his then CNBC TV show.
00:09:55.880But only last week, this unhinged talking head solicited an assassination attempt against President Trump on air.
00:10:05.360Who's going to take a shot back at this guy, raved Matthews while fuming about Trump.
00:10:10.960Radical left-wing media has a history of calling for violence and, unfortunately, sometimes getting results.
00:10:17.520Remember that it was a Democrat who shot up Congressman Steve Scalise in a field full of Republicans after drinking the Democrat media Kool-Aid.
00:10:27.340Another crazed gunman attacked a Christian group, the Family Research Council, after the far left Southern Poverty Law Center put them on a hate watch list.
00:10:38.000Who can forget when Senator Rand Paul was assaulted in his front yard by a radical leftist neighbor?
00:10:46.260Of course, we've already seen multiple attempts on the life of President Trump, in part because the radical left media consistently calls him a fascist, a racist,
00:10:56.280and every other word they can think of to incite violence.
00:10:59.760But Chris Matthews sure didn't think that Donald Trump was a racist when he was attending his wedding
00:11:05.560and while he was drinking champagne at the fabulous reception afterwards at Mar-a-Lago.
00:11:11.580The Department of Justice, Kash Patel's FBI and the Secret Service should pay some attention to Chris Matthews
00:11:18.280and anyone else who wants to, quote unquote, take a shot at the president.
00:11:23.780Congressman Robert Garcia said it's time to bring weapons to the Capitol.
00:11:29.720I think it's time for the FBI under Kash Patel to pay the congressman a visit and see what he thought about that.
00:11:37.760Speaking of violence, Congressman Dan Crenshaw has been caught vowing to kill Tucker Carlson.
00:11:46.440After an interview with JGB News, a British network, Crenshaw was asked if he'd ever met Tucker Carlson.
00:11:54.980And in a hot mic moment, Crenshaw replied,
00:11:58.320If I ever meet Tucker Carlson, I will effing kill him.
00:12:35.780He's hawkish on Ukraine's border, but indifferent to the security of our own borders.
00:12:41.760Tucker has continued to hammer Crenshaw and said in December that Dan Crenshaw is obviously not emotionally prepared to lead anything.
00:12:51.100My good friend Tucker Carlson was absolutely right.
00:12:56.100Steve Bannon, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee in right outside Washington, D.C., made headlines the other day by calling for President Trump to run again for president in 2028.
00:13:43.820You know, that is world class trolling because, well, Steve Bannon is well aware of the fact that the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution states no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.
00:13:56.560By the way, it also says that if any person fulfills more than two years of a term to which another person was elected, such as when Lyndon Johnson succeeded John F. Kennedy, they, too, are only allowed to run for one more term.
00:14:14.300In that same event, Bannon gave the gesture that some have called a Roman salute.
00:14:19.960That's the same gesture that Richard Spencer made in 2016, providing the left's most effective ammunition, the propaganda war.
00:14:31.520That's why I always do Richard Nixon's double fisted V for victory stance after my speeches.
00:14:38.520There can be no mistakes about what that's all about.
00:14:42.400NASA, incredibly, the National Security Administration, Authority, pardon me, we've now learned that intelligence officers maintain a chat room to discuss polygamy, transgender surgeries, as new unearthed internal documents reveal.
00:15:02.340One of my favorite writers, Chris Ruffo and Hannah Grossman cultivated and published sources within the National Security Agency, the one current employee and one former employee who have provided these chat logs from the NSA's interlink messaging program.
00:15:20.680These chat logs dating back two years are lurid.
00:15:25.240They're featuring wide-ranging discussions of kink, of sex, castration, and far worse.
00:15:34.620One employee wrote to co-workers about being involved in a nine-member polycule, a polyamorous group with metas with benefit connections.
00:15:48.180In response to the shocking and disgusting news, a NSA press official has released a statement that says all NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission-related material on the interlink is usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.
00:16:08.660You know, I will not be wasting my breath.
00:16:19.340It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
00:16:28.000The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena, whose face is marred dust and sweat and blood, who thrives valiantly, but who errs and comes up short again and again.
00:16:43.460Because without effort, there is no victory.
00:16:49.520The hat is off to those who strive to do the deeds, who know the great enthusiasm, who spends himself in a worthy cause.
00:16:58.820Who with the best knows in the end, the triumph of high achievement and who with the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
00:17:22.820So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
00:17:33.240Now, that quote came from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, one of our greatest presidents, but was uncovered by my mentor, Richard Milhouse Nixon.
00:18:30.800And you're in the stone zone here at the Red Apple Audio Network.
00:18:35.440Joining me now is a political strategist and analyst who I respect perhaps more than, well, just about any in the United States.
00:18:46.820Arnie Steinberg now lives out on our left coast.
00:18:50.400But the architect in 1970 of Jim Buckley's epic third-party election as U.S. senator from the state of New York, only one other third-party candidate,
00:19:03.980Harry F. Byrd, Jr., of Virginia, won that year.
00:19:08.460But Jim Buckley was elected over both the Republican and the Democrat, running as the candidate of the conservative party in one of the most important U.S. Senate races of 1970.
00:19:18.620Arnie's had many extraordinary successes since then, but that one, since I worked on it myself as a young man, still stands out as the gold standard.
00:19:34.120So, you are a keen observer, particularly of California politics, but as well as national politics.
00:19:42.560I want to ask you off the bat, given the impact of Governor Gavin Newsom's mishandling of the fires and the essential, I would say, deterioration of the quality of life in California,
00:20:04.780I guess if you adopt the Atlas-shrug-Anne-Rand approach, which is that Atlas is going to shrug and things will become so awful,
00:20:12.640some people wonder whether that's the only way for a reversal of the decline that's become even more precipitous.
00:20:19.080I think part of the problem is that beyond politics, you have the media here, the school boards are theoretically nonpartisan.
00:20:27.900When you go to vote for school board, party doesn't appear.
00:20:31.220Same with city councils, same with county boards or supervisors, but they're all sort of democratic, leftist, progressive, the institutions of higher learning.
00:20:40.180The school boards are so awful that the LA Unified School District and one of the ones in Orange County now are under litigation for their sort of indoctrination, pro-Hamas kind of indoctrination.
00:20:51.460So you have all of these institutions together, and then you have the Democratic Party grooming elected officials at the lower level.
00:20:59.800So they run for school board, then they run for city council, then they run for county supervisor, then they run for statewide office.
00:21:05.780So it's tough to reverse that kind of a situation.
00:21:10.940President Trump received 6 million votes to Kamala Harris's 9.2 million votes.
00:21:17.060I think that kind of illustrates the point.
00:21:21.960That's a dramatic improvement over the eight years prior.
00:21:25.420Yeah, no, it's an extraordinary showing by the president in an overwhelmingly blue state.
00:21:30.500Now Governor Newsom is begging Congress for $40 billion to help California recover from the fires.
00:21:37.360Considering California's history and current leadership, how much of that money do you actually think would go towards helping anybody, and how much would be wasted or, perhaps even worse, stolen?
00:21:48.120You know, I'm reminded of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing the fact that so much of illness and health is related to obesity, to smoking, to drug addiction, and bad nutrition.
00:22:01.340And so much of California's problems are ingrown.
00:22:04.300They're related to the way state and local governments govern.
00:22:07.800And so with respect to what you say, it's not so much a lack of confidence, which would be justified, that the money would be spent effectively and efficaciously.
00:22:17.240It's a matter of whether the same policies will continue.
00:22:21.600You know, I myself built a home in what's called the coastal zone.
00:22:24.900I'm actually 15 minutes from the coast, but their jurisdiction was extended inland in some areas.
00:22:30.280And the reason why my house survived several fires is that I didn't obey the coastal commission, and I cleared all the overgrowth there.
00:22:38.300So that's just, you know, one instance.
00:22:40.920So I don't think there's a great deal of confidence that that's going to happen, and the macro major state government policies with respect to the environment, with respect to water, all those.
00:22:55.080And then you add to that the incompetence of Mayor Bass and the city council.
00:22:59.500Our fire chief that she just fired and her two colleagues in the fire department that are ranking, they're making $400,000 here.
00:23:13.320When I look at the Democrat Party and I try to look at their bench, they don't seem to have much of a bench.
00:23:19.840Do you think Gavin Newsom will actually be a viable contender for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2028 in wake of his epic failures?
00:23:35.040You know, I mean, every so often he vetoes some extreme progressive legislation.
00:23:39.780I think he was just refusing to sign or vetoing legislation where this law enforcement would not cooperate with respect to immigration there.
00:23:48.940So, you know, this is a guy who has nine lives.
00:24:00.840Yeah, you know, when I was involved in the recall against him, and I told Larry Elder, a dear friend, when he decided the last minute to run, you know, you'll probably win way ahead of everybody else to succeed.
00:24:14.560The question is whether the recall will succeed.
00:24:17.380But the most effective television commercial was a fellow about 50 years old saying, you know, Gavin Newsom reminds me of that guy in high school who stole your girlfriend for you.
00:24:28.620And after he was done with her, he left her.
00:24:30.260The thing I didn't understand about that recall is that Gavin Newsom beat the recall in every single county, including counties that had voted to secede from California.
00:24:43.080How likely is it we had an honest count?
00:24:45.200Well, I think part of the challenge is that the burden of proof is on those voting for the recall.
00:24:55.920People tend to be hesitant to vote for a recall, and that's why if they get out of the ballot, which is very rare, it's even more rare for them to succeed.
00:25:04.180I myself directed a recall against Howard Miller.
00:25:07.440Your older listeners would remember Howard Miller was on the advocates debating Bill Rusher of National Review, and Howard was the president of the L.A. School Board.
00:25:14.800And at that time, L.A. School Board elections were citywide, and the electorate of L.A. City is larger than, you know, some small city.
00:25:24.520And that recall succeeded, but it was very, very difficult.
00:25:29.040So I think, you know, voters tend to be risk-averse, and so they tend to say, why are you spending money on recall?
00:27:26.520But with Donald Trump, all of the conventional rules seem to be canceled.
00:27:31.220After all, before Donald Trump, every president we had had been a governor, a senator, a congressman or a general.
00:27:37.720He's really the first business person we've had as president.
00:27:41.440Now, I realize that in politics, a week is a lifetime.
00:27:45.120But how do you see the midterms shaping up, recognizing that it's very early?
00:27:51.080I think that President Trump has really made a strategic calculation, and we're going to find out in the midterms if it works.
00:28:02.260He's basically said, I'm going to go for broke.
00:28:04.820I've got a narrow majority in the House, very narrow, not a real big majority in the Senate.
00:28:10.020And I'm going to try to do as much as I possibly can, full speed ahead, regardless of the implications for the midterm.
00:28:17.440And if he loses the midterms, he's going to try to put in and cement as much as possible that's irreversible.
00:28:25.180On the other hand, what he's hoping is that it's going to pay dividends.
00:28:27.980And what we don't know is whether what's good for the medium term and the long term, medium term meaning a few years down the line and long term even five or ten years down the line or decades,
00:28:39.240whether that will survive over the next couple of years there.
00:28:43.380And that's what we have to hope is that people recognize that President Trump has put together some some benchmarks.
00:28:51.180He's set very high standards for himself, and I don't think he can do all of those things by the midterm, whether it's no tax on tips or no tax on overtime or a drastic cut in the inflation rate.
00:29:05.700So I think what he's going to have to do is find a skillful way to sort of lower some expectations that are unrealistically high.
00:29:14.900It's kind of like that old adage, Roger, you and I know when we're training advancement, you always say, you know, for a political event, get a room that that could hold fewer people than you expect.
00:29:27.900And I think the president has to calibrate in such a way so that if he is successful, which he probably will be, that he's viewed as successful because perception and not reality is what counts in politics.
00:29:39.240The left would have us believe, I said this earlier in the show, that the president's poll numbers are collapsing when, in fact, the most liberal poll, the one from the Center of American Political Studies at Harvard, the so-called Harvard-Harris poll, shows President Trump doing substantially better in this period in his administration than Joe Biden was doing at the beginning of his.
00:30:03.880What have you noticed in the most recent polls?
00:30:06.620Well, I've been looking and I see different things.
00:30:09.640I think it depends on the way the questions are phrased.
00:30:12.020It's clear that to me, the most important measurement is measuring Donald Trump against his first term.
00:30:18.260And now, given the fact that Donald Trump is one of those people who has the public feel very, very strongly for him or get him, you love him or you hate him among so many people there.
00:30:28.800So given the fact that he has a certain hard negative that's never going to change there, I think the numbers look quite good for him.
00:30:35.600But it's interesting how the left loved executive power as long as Barack Obama or Joe Biden or even Bill Clinton was in the White House.
00:30:45.880Now, they argue against the basic tenets of executive power.
00:30:51.300I saw Andrew Weissman, perhaps the most corrupt prosecutor in federal history, saying the other day that the president had no authority to fire management or even any agent at the FBI.
00:31:02.860When, of course, he does, they're all members of the executive branch.
00:31:07.360But in view of the conservative view of executive power, or I should say, in light of past court decisions, where do you see this issue ending up?
00:31:20.120The traditional conservative view has been mixed increasingly on foreign policy.
00:31:27.260It's conservatives, not liberals, that have felt that the war powers have to be strictly enforced, that we should have limits on how quickly and when we can use the military.
00:31:37.220Originally, it was, you know, the George McGovern types, the very liberals there.
00:31:41.480And conservatives have basically thought that government ought to be limited, but they have come into what I think the current Supreme Court may rule, which is when you look at all these so-called, quote, independent agencies, whether it's the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on there, that, as Scalia had hinted years ago without much support, that these are part of the executive branch.
00:32:07.880And the United States Constitution invested the executive authority with the president, solely with the president.
00:32:15.240So when Congress passes legislation that, in effect, establishes a, quote, independent commission, that it's an oxymoron.
00:32:24.360It cannot be independent of the executive branch and be part of it.
00:32:30.120And so that is what gets the root of this.
00:32:32.180And I think that President Trump, more than any other Trump, is basically saying we can't have this hybrid.
00:32:37.240How can I be CEO of a company, that is to say CEO of the United States of America, and my executive team is – some of them are forced upon me because they were appointed to a fixed term, and I'm told I can't end their term when they come in.
00:32:53.800Or they can do anything that they want there, and I can't fire them.
00:32:58.580On yesterday's show, we talked about the intention of Elon Musk and his DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is busy rooting out not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars in waste, fraud, and corruption.
00:33:16.080And their intention, and their intention, to go to Fort Knox and inspect our supply of gold, the largest supply in the country, the bullion reserve there, which is supposedly the underpinnings of our wealth.
00:33:33.460Now, the dollar is no longer tied to gold.
00:33:38.820I'm kind of wondering if this is going to be like Geraldo Rivera going to Al Capone's safe, only to pop it open and reveal that the gold is gone or has somehow been depleted.
00:33:53.620Well, it's probably more worthwhile for him to do that than to try to inspect the supply of condoms that the U.S. Agency for International Development was giving to Hamas there.
00:34:02.820But, you know, it reminds me of the movie Goldfinger and James Bond.
00:34:09.260I think while this is somewhat theatrical and comedic, it also really emphasizes to the American people that we cannot take things on face.
00:34:17.060Just like we say you ought to have an auditor, audit corporations, the federal government, and maybe the gold supply at Fort Knox needs an audit.
00:34:24.500So, Goldfinger, my all-time favorite James Bond movie, that's because Sean Connery is wearing this incredible gray nailhead three-piece suit with a solid black tie.
00:34:50.820When it comes to America first, tell people what that means to you.
00:34:57.360Well, I think what America means to me, I think as someone who was involved as a very young person in Young Americans for Freedom, they had this statement.
00:35:09.140And it basically ended with that foreign policy should be judged by does it serve the just interest of the United States.
00:35:15.320So it really has to do with what is the self-interest of the United States.
00:35:18.700And you think about, Anne Rand talked about self-interest, and I remember talking to Nathaniel Brandon, who passed away many years ago, her colleague.
00:35:26.720And the question is, if somebody wants to give charity, and that's what he or she wants to do, then it is in his or her self-interest to give charity.
00:35:36.400When we have the Agency for International Development, to what extent is it a charitable organization?
00:35:41.400Is that a function of us internationally?
00:35:43.460Why are we having an Agency for International Development?
00:35:46.540Or should it, for example, serve the just interest of the United States?
00:35:50.160So what it does in its mission is to complement or implement what the foreign policy or national security policy is of the United States, or right now, of President Donald Trump.
00:36:01.180On the other hand, there's a difference between America first and doing nothing.
00:36:08.760The caricature is a whole bunch of endless wars.
00:36:13.380What we have to decide is how do you define self-interest?
00:36:17.120And self-interest may mean at times an alliance.
00:36:20.320It may mean at times some kind of security policy or whatever.
00:36:24.440What it doesn't mean is that we simply bow down to the rest of the world at some massive philanthropic institution and sacrifice our own self-interest for the good of others there.
00:36:36.920So it's sort of a macro approach to what Anne Rand said, is does the United States exist for the United States, or is it simply a free-for-all for everybody to get foreign aid, for everybody to get our soldiers whenever they need them for national security or whatever?
00:36:52.640And I think that's what President Trump is trying to do.
00:36:55.660Seems to me it means that we take care of homeless veterans here in the United States before we ship another billion dollars to Ukraine.