It’s not surprising the chief strategist’s answer to the charge could have come right out of my book. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon said.10 I wish he would have added, “because I’m not a socialist.” That’s the key difference between the nationalism I have been speaking and writing about for more than two decades and Hitler’s version. Socialism is a philosophy of brute force as the answer to all questions, economic or social. It’s the socialists on the left who want to run society like a dictator, not Trump.
We can deal with the left yelling “racist!” and “dictator!” for four years. We’re used to it. Let’s be honest, we’ve all somewhat enjoyed them melting down like spoiled children since election night last November. The real danger to the Trump administration comes from within the Republican Party. And right from the beginning, there has been conflict between the true representatives of the people and the party insiders within the Trump administration.11
Even Politico recognized what all of you who comprise the Savage Nation already knew. The battle lines are not drawn between Republicans and Democrats anymore. They are drawn between the Washington insiders and their connected special interests and everybody else. Within Trump’s administration, the insiders are led by Rinso Priebus and those representing the people by the generals and other conservative appointees. With the conservative insiders go our hopes for a Trump administration that remains true to the ideas that got him elected.
REPUBLICAN TRADE TRAITORS
During the presidential campaign, Trump made frequent mention of Bill Clinton signing NAFTA. Obviously, he wanted to remind Middle America it was the Democratic nominee’s husband who had put them out of work. And don’t forget she was for TPP until Trump began rising in the polls opposing it. She called it “the gold standard” of trade deals.12 Do you remember that? Then she flip-flopped and said she doesn’t support it.13
But let’s also not forget who gave birth to this disaster. The first version of the treaty was signed by Republican president George H. W. Bush in December 1992. It then passed Congress with overwhelming Republican support and Clinton signed the final, modified version.14 Republicans voted in favor of this sellout deal, 132–43. Democrats voted in favor, 156–102.15
It was Republicans who stood with Obama to sell us out again in 2015, when chief sellout Mitch McConnell helped ram fast-track trade promotion authority (TPA) for Obama through the Senate over the objections of Democrats led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. That’s how bad McConnell is. Reid and Pelosi were actually fighting on our side, albeit for the wrong reasons.16
The Republicans in Congress are so in the pocket of special interests that they were willing to give Obama enormous power in negotiating trade. TPA allowed him to send trade deals to Congress for an up or down vote and prohibited filibusters in the Senate, among other expanded powers. It was supposed to be the precursor to Obama ramming the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress, even though it was dominated by Republicans.
If you think TPP has gone away for good just because Trump signed the executive order, think again. Most of the same Republican trade traitors who gave Obama fast-track authority are still in Congress. Lame duck George H. W. Bush didn’t get to sign the final version of NAFTA, but a president of the opposing party did so the year after he left office. That’s just a little too coincidental for comfort.
I’m not saying Trump will go back on his promise to renegotiate NAFTA or rescind his executive order on TPP. But he will be under tremendous pressure from his own party, which supported Obama against the Democrats on TPP. Republicans in Congress may try to make superficial changes to TPP and get it signed under a different name. Rinso will be in the White House, whispering lies into Trump’s ear about how it’s different than it was before. If conservatives aren’t there to counter Rinso, they just might be successful.
Trying to trick Trump into signing a repackaged TPP may not work, but the RINOs have other tools at their disposal. Before Trump even took office, they vowed to oppose any tariffs he proposes as incentives for businesses to keep jobs in the United States.17 That’s tantamount to opposing renegotiating the deals at all. How can Trump negotiate if his threats have no teeth?
It’s just like what Trump said of the Iran deal. The Iranians knew Obama wasn’t going to walk away from the negotiating table, so they made no real concessions. Why should they have? They knew they could get their money back along with anything else they wanted and, unlike Obama, they negotiated purely in their own country’s interests. Then they started violating the treaty before the ink was dry because they knew Obama’s history at enforcing “red lines.”
If Canada, Mexico, and the Asian signatories to TPP know Trump can’t impose tariffs on them, he will be in an impossible negotiating position. In a perfect world, I’d love no tariffs on anything. But if we’re ever going to level the playing field on international trade, our trade partners have to believe the threat of tariffs is real. We may even have to levy one or two to send the message that we’re serious. Otherwise, we’ll accomplish nothing on trade.
Not every Republican who supports these disastrous trade deals is a sellout per se. Some of them believe such deals are good for America. Contrary to what they might think, I understand their point of view. In the cozy confines of the classroom or the think tank, NAFTA and TPP work just fine.
Unfortunately, the real world is not a classroom or a think tank. A lot of these Republicans have never walked to their second job through the slush. They’ve never ridden a city bus to work. They don’t know what it’s like to try to put food on the table under “free trade.”
Trump’s economic adviser Stephen Moore used to be one of them. He’s a brilliant economist who went right from the university to the think tank. He’s supported deals like NAFTA and TPP all his life, until he went out campaigning for Trump. Meeting real Americans trying to make a living in corporate-owned America changed his mind.18 It’s a credit to him that his mind was open to change.
But when he told the Republicans in Congress they were no longer Reagan’s party, but Trump’s populist party, they didn’t want to hear it.19 They’re still cashing too many corporate donation checks or too attached to their textbooks. They may need the same tough medicine as our trade partners. Let a few of them get thrown out in primaries during the next election and you’ll soon see the rest get on board, if they want to stay in Washington.
Ronald Reagan did the nation a great service thirty-five years ago. After five decades of almost exclusively Democratic governance, the country had become far too socialist. We needed a man like Reagan to come in and set industry and business loose from the shackles that academic socialists had put on them. We still need Trump to undo some of what Obama has put back in place.
But this is 2017, not 1981. Reagan is dead and we now need to undo some of the damage academic conservatives have done to our country. By treating the economy like it exists in a classroom instead of the real world, they’ve put millions out of work and rendered millions more underemployed. By being too purist in their free-market ideology, they actually helped socialists like Obama, who promised the unemployed government help while they were down.
It’s no accident a lot of the people who voted for Obama four years ago voted for Trump in 2012. They don’t care about ideology. They care about what works. And for them, NAFTA hasn’t worked. Neither would TPP have worked. They’re smart enough to know it and motivated enough to punish elected officials who won’t face reality.
A WALL OR A FENCE OR A VIRTUAL WALL?
If I had to pick one campaign promise Donald Trump made that he absolutely, positively must keep, it’s building the wall on our southern border. That is the promise that started the whole Trump movement. As important as trade is, his enormous crowds didn’t chant, “Fix our trade!” at his rallies. They chanted, “Build that wall!” That was the rallying point for Trump supporters in every state. The people of Iowa may be dif
ferent from the people of Texas in many ways, but they have one thing in common: They’re all Americans.
Without a border, there is no America.
We’ve had Republicans campaign on securing the border for thirty years, but when they get into office, suddenly there are more important things to do. That’s because when they’re campaigning, they’re trying to please us, but once they’re in, they’re trying to please lobbyists.
I’m not as concerned about lobbyists with Trump as I am about who he has running his departments. On the campaign trail, he stuck to his guns on building the wall, even when people within his campaign wavered. He was emphatic. He said he would build the wall and he would get Mexico to pay for it. End of story.
Or was it?
Now he has Rick Perry running the Department of Commerce20 and Perry doesn’t seem so sure his boss is really going to build a wall. Even last summer, while saying he supported Trump for president, he said the wall wasn’t really going to happen. “It’s a wall, but it’s a technological wall; it’s a digital wall,” he said.21
I thought the glasses were supposed to make him look smarter. I have news for Perry: Saying you support Trump but the wall isn’t going to happen cancels out any effect the glasses might have. Will he fall into line now that he’s running one of the federal departments he said four years ago he’d eliminate as president? We’ll see.
If you think you can at least count on Perry’s fellow Texans in Congress, think again. The Texas Tribune polled22 the thirty-eight members of Congress from Texas in December, more than 70 percent of whom are Republican. Almost none of them supported the wall Trump promised to build. Republican representative Pete Sessions said Trump’s promise was just “an analogy.”23
Senator John Cornyn said he’d support about seven hundred miles of fence in urban areas, per the 2006 Secure Fence Act, but then started talking about “eyes in the sky” and “boots on the ground.”24
I have news for you, Senator. The people have heard this before. We have boots on the ground and eyes in the sky already. They’re not working. We were promised a wall. Not eyes, not boots, not a fence, not a virtual wall. We were promised a wall and you’d better support Trump on building it or there will be even more surprises at the next midterm election than there were last November.
Ten of the twenty-five Republican House representatives from Texas didn’t even respond to the survey. That says it all for them. When they’re asked to comment on the single, most important issue of the presidential campaign and they don’t even respond, you know what they’re going to do when the time comes to vote.
Most of the rest were wishy-washy at best. They said they’d support a wall in some places, a fence in others, and electronic security in other places. In other words, they gave themselves room to bail out when the time comes to vote and the heat is on.
The closest we got to a full endorsement of Trump’s wall by a Texas Republican came from Representative Mike McCaul. In a December 2, 2016, op-ed25 for Fox News, he said, “We are going to build the wall. Period.” But when asked by the Texas Tribune if that meant he supported a contiguous wall along the entire border, his spokeswoman declined to comment.26 It doesn’t say he didn’t respond because he was too busy. He declined to comment. Why?
So, out of thirty-six House representatives and two senators from Texas, we have one “maybe” on supporting Trump’s wall. And this is the most conservative border state in the union. What do you think you’d find if you surveyed Republicans in liberal New Mexico? Would it be any different in Arizona?
Don’t think the academics won’t weigh in against Trump on this. A wall on the border is going to require some private landowners to sell their land to the government. The government may even have to force their hands with eminent domain.27 That will give Republicans another excuse to weasel out of keeping their promises to the people. “We must defend the sanctity of private property,” they’ll say.
That’s another pedantic trope that sounds great in the think tank. But you tell me how much sanctity that private property will retain when Mexican drug gangs or Islamic terrorists decide to walk over the unprotected border and set up camp on it. What are the think tankers going to do for those ranchers when the next El Chapo decides their ranches might make a good entry point for his drug exports?
This is why I was so concerned the minute Rinso Priebus was made chief of staff. Do you see the connection? You have a Congress riddled with RINO Republicans and a chief of staff fresh off running the RINO RNC. You have Mr. Wall’s-Never-Gonna-Happen Rick Perry running Commerce. All around him, Trump has people in his own party ready to stab him and us in the back when the Democrats put the heat on over building the wall.
Against all of that, you have loyalists in the administration and Trump himself. It reminds me of the three hundred Spartans, defending the pass against thousands of Persians during the Battle of Thermopylae 2,500 years ago. Can they hold on against the onslaught? Or will the enemy overwhelm them?
The Greeks prevailed, against all odds, in their ancient battle. But they didn’t have to worry about traitors in their own ranks. Trump does. That’s why we must stand by Trump. I will be there, day in and day out, speaking out on my show, The Savage Nation, against the RINOs. I’ll need you to stand with me. Without a border, we don’t have a nation. It may be up to us to make sure we do.
SAVAGE SOLUTIONS
Fund research by global warming skeptics.
Promote conservative conservationism over progressive environmentalism.
Exercise caution and care in repealing environmental regulations.
Restore real science at the NIH, CDC, and FDA.
CHAPTER NINE
TRUMP’S WAR TO RESTORE REAL SCIENCE
President Trump appointed the CEO of ExxonMobil to be secretary of state. He has enormous power.
Rex Tillerson is an Eagle Scout. It’s very important you understand why that’s important. It means he’s been in touch with the earth. He knows something more about the earth than the average doctrinaire knee-jerk conservative who rarely steps outside his own comfort zone, whether the radio studio or a bulletproof house, without bodyguards.
So Tillerson has done his share of investigating the earth. He is probably a warmist to some extent. And you’re going to hear more about this from the Trump administration. I can guarantee you. The meetings between Al Gore and Ivanka Trump and the appointment of Tillerson almost guarantee what’s coming. It may shock many of you, but Trump is going to come out and say, “Yeah, there is warming, but…”
I believe they may play it both ways. They’ll whipsaw you. They’ll say, just as ExxonMobil did, “Yes, there is some evidence of man-made global warming, but we don’t believe in carbon credits.”
Now, having told you what I believe may be coming from the administration, I’m going to give you scientific evidence on some of these issues and prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt that there’s almost nothing we can do to stop the warming trend the liberals are always talking about, because there is no warming trend.
In fact, there may be a cooling trend. But I don’t want to scare people with that.
I want to talk about all the evidence against the conclusions presented by the great Ph.D. scientist Leo DiCaprio in Trump Tower in December 2016. I have to assume that between portraying playboys, drug dealers, murderers, and all-around bad boys, Leo DiCaprio somehow earned a doctorate along the way, given the pronouncements we hear him making. While flying on his private planes and sailing on his yacht,1 he became an expert on global warming.
Leo should spend an afternoon on dry land, reading some of the actual science. He can start with my book Government Zero, in which I wrote extensively about independent research, notably the Vostok ice core samples. Those samples are evidence that must be included in any and all discussions about so-called man-made global warming.
The samples were obtained by drilling down into the ice above Lake Vostok in Antarctica to a depth of ten tho
usand feet. French and Russian scientists obtained deep core samples allowing them to look at, among other things, the history of temperature and carbon dioxide over the past 420,000 years.
I won’t rehash all the information I provided in the other book, but let me give you the highlights. These samples prove, for one, that CO2 is not causing global warming. They suggest precisely the opposite, because they show that increases in CO2 in the past always occurred after average global temperatures rose.
They also show that hundreds of thousands of years ago, both global temperatures and CO2 levels were much higher than they are today.
I don’t think I have to try too hard to prove to most readers of this book that global warming is a hoax fabricated for political and monetary ends. But I do want you to know the science backs up that claim 100 percent. You may have doubts because all you’ve heard for the past eight years is “the science is settled” and that virtually every climate scientist agrees.
Being a scientist myself, just writing the words “the science is settled” galls me. One thing every real scientist knows is nothing is ever settled. If that were true, we’d never have heard of Albert Einstein. Newtonian physics would have simply been “settled science.”
Let me let you in on a little secret. Most of these “climate scientists” are frauds. Climate science is a discipline fabricated completely for political reasons. I know this because back when I was doing real science in rain forests all over the world, almost nobody referred to themselves as “climate scientists.” The people who cared about the environment were conservationists, like me, not environmentalists.
Trump's War Page 14
