Debating the Merits of Donald Trump
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We’re going to do something here in the podcast. One of my favorite things to do, honestly, is to debate. I do. I love to debate. And I’m going to be honest with you, one of the things I miss most in regards to my career on media radio podcasting is I do miss having the daily drive time program. I’ve for years I had a morning daytime drive program for three hours at an afternoon.
drive time program. And one of the things I liked about it is the callers. The weekend radio show, I used to take holes, but it’s not really worth it because it’s picked up and it’s played at different times over the course of day. Obviously, it’s not something you do via a podcast, but the daily interaction that I used to have on those radio programs was great. I enjoyed it thoroughly. And one of the rules that we had on the rules that we had on our program.
I remember the morning so Markowski in the morning. Also my afternoon show, Chris Markowski show was people who disagree with whatever point that I was making, whatever trying to get was trying to get across. They go first. I again, I drives me nuts programs that does with the sycophants there, and you’re basically playing to crowds. I can’t stand that. I don’t care. I can’t stand the facts. Wait, the media has become.
here in this country, left media got right me and again, you know, I have, he’s got to be preaching the same song and playing the same thing again and again, I want to put a gun to my head. I love a great debate. The rules were though, rules were it was that if you’re going to call up and you’re going to debate, you’re going to disagree with me. The conversation had to be civil, it had to be Socratic in nature. You couldn’t just start making things up out of thin air and most certainly,
once you start going after someone personally, it’s over. It’s over because you have just taken any sort of debate and you’ve brought it down to here. You’ve lowered the level of discourse and it’s very difficult to get that discourse up again. I would say you never argue or debate with idiots. Why? They’ve got way too much experience at being an idiot and they’re just gonna drag you down to their level. There’s no.
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point in it at all. With that being said, I had a great email from one of our listeners out there challenging some of the statements that I’ve made over the past several months when talking about the former president of the United States, Donald Trump. Now, again, we get a lot of new listeners here all the time. I always like to, you know, put things into perspective, voted for Trump twice.
Voted for Trump twice. He wasn’t my first choice back in 2016. He wasn’t my second choice in 2016. I’ve always been a bit of a libertarian and a Zeran Paul guy. That was the guy that I wanted from the get-go. With that being said, it doesn’t matter who’s president. I am going to go after the president, elephant, donkey.
not a member of either party, basically challenging them and what they’re going to do. And over the years, I have given a lot of credit and kudos to Donald Trump on a myriad of things, but other things, not so much. And this great, great email. I mean, this is what I like to see. And I respond to all of these. I do. This one was lengthening. So I said, this would be great for the show. And I want to.
go through the various different points that this individual made. And he started off by saying that I said that Trump mandated people to take the vaccine or force people to take the vaccine. Neither one of those are true. He made the option available to people to have the choice by instrumenting Operation Warp Speed. This gentleman, he just said he didn’t take the vaccine, but giving people a choice is what’s
important, let the people decide. And he said, keep in addition, he wasn’t working in the lab himself. I get that. If he wouldn’t have started it, the media would have criticized him for not getting a vaccine to the people and called him a murder. Listen, I had no problem with him trying to find a vaccination for this. And no, the White House didn’t come down with any sort of declaration on high that everybody has to take the vaccine.
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However, to say that it was actually a true choice, where I can just say no to drugs, I can just say no to, I’m not gonna have a drink tonight or I’m not gonna eat this and it’s okay. Depending on where you live in this country, they made life extraordinarily difficult unless you were carrying around that Vax card. You had to carry it around with you.
I kids, going to college. This was the choice that you had to make. It’s either you were vaccinated. This was my son was in college at the time. Either you were vaccinated or they were saying that you had to go and get tested every single day. What about the various different school districts out there and the mandates that they put on which led to military things? I can go through a myriad of things where
Again, people worn down already with all of the nonsense and all the ridiculous shutdowns that were taking place. And then all of a sudden they’re like, yeah, you don’t have to take it. But if you don’t, hey, the people that have lost their jobs because they refused to take the vaccine. I, it was funny. Year, I don’t know how to be 21. I wrote a Dave Matthews concert.
Dave Matthews band concert here at Jones Beach. And going in, I had my vax card with me. Yeah, yeah, I had to show your vax card if you wanted to go to the concert. My buddy didn’t have his vax. It’s just how stupid these regulations were. He wasn’t vaccinated. And I’m like, pass back my vax card to him. I was ridiculous. It was like passing back an ID when I was a kid at some point in time. So.
No, no, yeah, there wasn’t. But guess what? Many states acted in Draconian measures when it comes to this. And a lot of these measures were also pushed by the executive branch of government. Like, make no bones about it. OK, the FDA, CDC. OK, under what branch of government do they fall?
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Executive. That’s the executive branch of government. You know, putting something out like this that was most certainly pushed through, most certainly pushed through. And again, you know, things can go back in time if I could do it again. I wouldn’t take it. I’ve explained the health issues that I’ve had.
more than likely due to this vaccine. But again, water under the bridge, can’t do anything about it now. You’re gonna do something like this, you’re gonna roll something out like this nationally. You can’t leave it up to these individual states to put these measures forcing this upon people. You can’t do that. But anyway, okay. Next point. I call Trump a coward for not going to the debates. Yep.
Yep, I think the phrase I use was chicken poop. My mother got upset with me because I go chicken. But anyway, yeah, I called him a coward for not going to the baits. And he said, I sincerely don’t believe that you believe that. Yeah, I do. And it’s just my nature. I mean, again, everybody’s different out there. I’m one that you never walk away from a challenge.
You never walk away from something like this, because guess what? It’s going to be a little bit easier path. I want to remind everybody how critical and rightfully so, how critical was Donald Trump, his campaign, the Republican party going after Joe Biden, because Joe Biden refused to go on the campaign. Again, that was calculated.
It was calculated that Joe Biden wasn’t gonna go out campaigning because he would just screw things up. They kept him, they called it, you know, the basement campaign. And it helped him because more often than not, he would say something stupid on the campaign trail.
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Were you not critical of Joe Biden and his basement campaign? I got a sinking suspicion. Maybe I’m wrong. That you might have been. Anyway, and he says Trump may be a lot of things, but he’s not a coward. He stood up to the establishment more than any politician I am aware of under extreme criticism. OK, I have no problem that he ran on that. He said Trump is sitting in corrupt.
courts fighting bogus charges burning up campaign time. Are some of the charges against him ridiculous? Yeah. Yeah, again, that real estate one I’ve made fun of here on the program again and again and again. And quite frankly, I think some of these cases actually help him out because they’re so patently absurd and ridiculous. Some of the other ones in regards to conduct, in regards to elections,
Not so much. Burning up campaign time? Well, I couldn’t think of a better way to reach the American people. Again, this is ridiculous. Okay. Couldn’t think of a better way than have a national audience. Again, burning up campaign time. Any problem going on serious satellite radio programs or doing town halls?
So again, that argument to me is a bit flimsy, burning up campaign time. Not to mention, you know as well as I do. You know as well as I do. If you really care about the Republican Party and the issues of the day, we saw how few, how many, how, the ratings for the last debate were down 47%. You mean to tell me if Donald Trump wasn’t at that debate, there wouldn’t have been a hell of a lot?
more eyeballs there and an opportunity to go out there and put your positions with the best foot forward. And again, and he says, why in the world would he go put himself in front of people like Chris Christie, whose sole purpose is to sabotage Trump’s reelection? So what? It’s Chris Christie. You do it because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Who cares?
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If you have got courage of your convictions, you’re going to back down from Chris Christie?
Again, I watched these debates and I said, I could do these things with half my brain tied behind my back. That’s an old Limbaugh saying. With some of these challenges that are being made. If your ideas are superior and you’re intellectually superior, you go out there and you take care of business.
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I have a different way of thinking. Whenever I, even this day, when I get the opportunity, few and far between, to step on a lacrosse field and play ball again, I wanna go up against the fastest and youngest one out there. And I’m old, okay? Sometimes you get these pickup games out there and all of a sudden, hey, a 28-year-old, woo! Yeah, I wanna challenge myself.
Every single time you’re going to be challenged by Chris Christie, you’re worried about him. Why wouldn’t you put yourself up against that? Iron sharpens iron. You want to take that on. And again, then split his time even more for candidates that will attack him to get their name in the news. So what?
You welcome that. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And he says, I think not. That makes you a coward. That is my definition. You’re afraid to take them on just because, oh, you don’t need to because you’re leading in the polls. I’m going in there and I’m gonna get my point across. By the way, it’s not just about winning the Republican primary.
You know, Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden in seven swing states right now, but it’s close. Nikki Haley is winning by 17 points right now. Seventeen. So you’ve got to bring people from the other side and independence over to your side as well.
And then he talks about Vivek and he thinks that Vivek would not attack him in his opinion. Attack? He can attack his positions. I most certainly think that he’s going to attack his positions. He has attacked his positions. He hasn’t gone after Trump personally. Christie has, but none of the candidates have. They’ve gone after him in regards to some of his policies, just like I have, which is fair game, which is another one of the reasons why I have a strong distaste for Trump.
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because he’s in take on anybody else’s policies. He makes fun of them like a child, like we’re in some sort of playground. Ron DeSanctimonious, bird brain. Are you serious? Is that a high level? Is that a high, is that a sign of intelligence? No. Now you’re not taking on their positions. The only position that Trump takes on, Trump takes on is that they’re gonna steal your social security. Well,
Donald Trump, they’re not going to steal Social Security. Social Security is going to be cut within 10 years. And you and Joe Biden are refusing to acknowledge that and address the problem and address these fiscal issues, which, again, it needs to be addressed. Donald Trump went after Ron DeSantis, saying that Ron DeSantis mandated COVID vaccines in the state of Florida. No, completely.
Not true. My main office is in the state of Florida. Most of my family lives down there. They never mandated everything. So again, he goes after things too, and he’s not truthful about them. So again, you’re afraid to go up and have a conversation about the issues. Okay. And again, he says, I like Vivek too, but being well-spoken isn’t Trump.
What exactly is Trump? What does that mean? In my opinion, out of all of the candidates up on the stage, all the candidates out there, Vivek Ramaswamy has a better handle on the issues than anyone. Isn’t that what’s most important? Because again, that’s what matters most to me. Not putting on a show in front of people and holding rallies or anything like that.
The most important thing to me is whether or not you’re able to get the job done and your command of the issues and how you go about handling the issues. And again, at this point in time, I don’t have any idea what Trump stands on much of anything. I don’t. I go back to his 2016 platform. I mean, he’s held some rallies here and there, but we haven’t gotten real specific in regards to anything. And that’s what these debates are for. And, you know, I read to you.
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something here. Some Teddy Roosevelt, famous. See, Tom Brady used it for his documentary, that’s it called it, The Man in the Arena, but this is called The Man in the Arena Speech by Teddy Roosevelt. And Teddy said, it’s 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. The credit belongs to
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whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there’s no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails,
at least fails while daring greatly.
daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. I’m going to move on here. Third point being made. Trump’s response to the pandemic.
awful, period, the end. And he says, I think Trump’s response was unparalleled, keeping in mind facts that you don’t mention on the podcast. Again, we have covered this and maybe this listener wasn’t listening to this program going back to the infancy of the pandemic and how we covered this and how, I mean, dug into it, did our homework.
went back to prior pandemics, how they were handled, how this should be handled. We covered respiratory viruses and what they mean. The response was stupid at best.
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And again, it didn’t take long to realize how stupid it was if anybody took a step back, took a step back for a second. And your idea, and this is before social distancing, this is when they shut down all the stores except the big box stores. And I’m saying to myself, wait a second, so you want to shut down all of these small stores, but you’re going to direct the entire population
two big box stores so you can cram everyone in there so they’re close to one another. You remember how crowded those places were because everything else was shut down? I remember how stupid, they were wiping down carts. I’m like, this is the dumbest crap I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And this is why people don’t have any faith. If you have half a brain, you don’t have any faith. And the institutions that matter, well, yeah, the ones that rule over us at this point and time was dumb.
Unparalleled. Pandemics happen once every 100 years. No, they don’t. They happen more often than that. We covered here on the program, the pandemic that took place in the 1960s. At the same time, Woodstock was going on. Pandemics happen. And he says, since Trump is not a virologist, I’m not either.
I’m not either. I’m not a virologist either. But I figured it out and plenty of other scientists figured it out. And if you look into it, you read Scott Atlas’s book, there were plenty of people there at the White House that were giving a much different opinion than Fauci and Birx. He went with Fauci and Birx.
Let’s go back to the old the buck stops with who? The buck stops Trump.
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Okay, if I, man, it’s billions of dollars. If all of a sudden I were to, you know, investment policy and I’m to listen to these two investment wizards that do, you know, give me, tell us how we should take the direction for all of our clients and they’ve got this newfangled way and this is gonna happen. And I do that for my clients.
and I lose them a fortune, it fails. Am I gonna go out there and I’m gonna say, hey, you know, it’s not my fault, it’s the guys that I hired.
No, this guy’s hired. Yeah, again, this is the guy who claimed to drain the swamp. But who did he hire? Who did he look to? When there was plenty of people out there that’s saying this was stupid, the information was there. We covered it day in, day out. I yelled and screamed about this stuff. I yelled and screamed about shutting down the country and his stupid, because that’s what it was, handouts and giveaways and bonus and stimulus.
And, you know, here you go sending money to businesses and how that was handled and how that was going to be an enormous rip off. Unprecedented in its utter stupidity. That’s what it was. And then it led to Joe Biden who said, Hey, I want a stimulus package too. I want to run a helicopter over the country and dump money and did the same damn thing. We’re $33 trillion in debt. You do realize that.
Completely unnecessary. Much like George W. Bush in his Afghanistan adventure, war on terror adventure, puts us trillions of dollars in debt. 33 plus trillions of dollars in debt. COVID response. How much money we’ve gone over here on the program was stolen, went to Russia, went to Africa. Nobody was able to handle this, but they didn’t care. All they cared about was getting the money out the door because why? They cared about the politics.
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And that’s not what, I’m gonna calm down. That’s not what leadership is. Leadership is saying no.
Leadership is saying, no, it’s not always doing what is popular. I’m a father. I got three kids. Let me tell you something, OK? I don’t do what’s popular all the time in my house. Never have. I do what’s right. And that’s, again, his point here, again, I’m not, said that, he’s making a point. I just disagree with it vehemently.
If Trump would have fired Fauci, the media would have criticized him for firing based on political reasons. Who gives a shit?
You’re going to get criticized anyway. Donald Trump, the moment he went down the escalator, Trump Tower, you know, when he started running for office, has been criticized. In other news, sky is blue and water is wet. So you’re going to be criticized for firing Fauci?
You don’t even have to call it a firing. You just gotta take other people’s opinions into consideration. And there was plenty of people that disagreed with them.
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Who cares? You’re not supposed to care. If Trump leaves him in office, people like you say he should have fired him. Yup. Yes, it’s true. Trump shut down the economy for a short time. Short time?
My kids missed a year of school. It wasn’t a short time. It was a fricking disaster. Short time. Remember 15 days to stop the spread? What the hell happened with that?
The media would have crucified him for not shutting down the economy, causing the deaths of millions of people. Well, guess what? Again, I’m a big believer, and I’m bullshitting people. Okay? You level with people. You let them know, okay, this is what we’re dealing with. And you protect, you go out there and you protect the people that are most at risk. We knew that right away.
based upon what was taking place in Italy and the people that were most at risk. They had that information almost immediately.
sending kids home from schools, teachers, unions, say we’re not gonna work, we’re not gonna do this. My kids sitting miserable, taking these stupid online classes which were BS, wasting a year of their lives. Take a look at the test scores now and how they’re in the toilet. It’s because of these stupid shutdowns. Because the media would have crucified them, F the media. Who cares? They went after him.
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Anyway.
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It’s like trying to defuse a bomb that’s already gone off. What’s the point in doing that? Zero. Either that or you’re just worried about trying to get re-elected.
Anyway, all those reasons Trump chose a path he did not, he did, you leave out of the discussion. No, I’ve never left this out of the discussion. I’ve known exactly why he did this and it was wrong. And it would be something that I would never do. And I don’t believe that a guy like Teddy Roosevelt would have done it, or a guy like Harry Truman would have done it. Or, you know, I don’t think a guy like Kennedy, John F. Kennedy would have done it. I really don’t.
And he says, I would ask you if you’re going to accuse Trump of the choice he made, at least mention the criteria around his decisions. I mentioned the criteria and the criteria you’re giving is politics. So if you’re saying that politics and being criticized in the media is an excuse, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I just I’m cut from a different cloth. Then that to me is not. An excuse.
But anyway, let me tell you something to this, again, fantastic points you make, and it’s good. Debate is great. Debate is a great thing. And again, you can go on, I can talk about Trump and a myriad of different things and the great things that he did in regards to foreign policy. And do I think that we would be bogged down right now sending money to Ukraine if Donald Trump was president? No, I do not. I do not. I totally…
His points when it came to NATO and the EU paying their way, he did a lot of great things. His tax cut policy, I don’t think went far enough, but was decent. I think I gave it a C plus, B minus grade, which is pretty good because I’m a pretty tough grader when it comes to that. Trade policy, another thing. I’m totally against that. Terrible. Tariff man is not the way to go.
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The tariff man is taxes. That’s all tariff man is. It’s just taxing the American public. But we can talk about this another time. And again, I appreciate all of this and I appreciate all listeners and I especially appreciate the listeners that take the time out, send me emails. Disagree with me. Because that’s what’s great and that’s what this country needs. It needs honest debate. Not when you’re making fun of people. Not when you’re calling people names. Anyway, God bless. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
