9 posts from Monday, January 27, 2025

statement is somebody who spent at least half a century in the conservative constitutionalist movement. The three great conservative constitutionalist presidents in the last century, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. And Donald Trump has the potential to be the greatest of the three. And I want to give you a little bit of my background for those of you who don't know, I don't just come on here because I have a TV show. I come on here because I have decades of experience in the conservative movement, in the constitutionalist movement, in the liberty movement. And I want you to know that with my background, that when I say that Donald Trump has the potential of being the greatest conservative president in the last century, I mean it. 1976 and '80, I worked in the Reagan primaries. 1980, I worked in the Reagan general campaign. I spent eight years in top executive positions in the Reagan administration, including Chief of Staff of the Department of Justice and Deputy Solicitor of the Department of Interior, as well as a stint at the White House. And from the Reagan Revolution to the Tea Party movement in 2010, I was involved in the Tea Party movement, one of the outspoken leaders of the Tea Party movement. I wrote the most widely read conservative book since Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. This one here, Liberty and Tyranny. Millions and millions of you read this book, a primer on conservatism and liberalism. I've been involved as one of the leaders in the Convention of States movement with our friend Mark Meckler, over 5 million members. I have one of the largest syndicated radio shows that I've had for nearly 25 years on the planet, with millions and millions of listeners on AM and FM terrestrial radio, through podcasts, through YouTube, through Sirius satellite and so forth and so on. That's thanks to you. And of course on Fox, when we're not dealing with football like tonight, and this will be the end of it. We have the number one prime time evening weekend program. We're very proud of it. We're very proud to be here. And I was president of Landmark Legal Foundation. It's the most consequential constitutional conservative legal foundation in half a century and thanks to our litigation and the help of others, school choice is now a possibility and you're thinking, well, Mark, aren't you lovely? Good man, pat yourself in the head. That's not what I'm doing. I'm trying to provide you with some of my credentials. So when I tell you that Donald Trump is one of the most conservative and is the potential to be the most conservative president this entire century, I know what I'm talking about. He's consequential. He's historic. He's iconic, the things he did in his first term and the things he's doing now right out of the shoot. We've never seen anything like this. Now, some of you might be saying, well, what about all these tariffs? I'm a free market conservative. Well, I'm as free market as you can get, but I went back and I looked, I looked at president Reagan, you see Lighthouser, who is the head basically of trade and tariffs for president Trump was the deputy under Ronald Reagan. And so as our friends at Cato in 1988 pointed out, and they were very angry about it, Reagan was more into say quotas. He was more into limitations on what other countries can ship into our country. Let me give you some examples. As Cato pointed out, he forced Japan to accept restraints on auto exports. The agreement said total Japanese auto exports of 1.68 million vehicles in 1981, 1982, 8% below 1980 exports, he tightened up considerably the quotas on imported sugar imports fell from an annual average of 4.85 million tons in 79 to 81 to an annual average of 2.86 million tons from 82 to 86. That's a massive drop. He negotiated did Reagan to increase restrictions of the multifiber arrangement and extended restrictions to previously unrestricted textiles. The administration unilaterally changed the rule of origin in order to restrict textile and apparel imports further and imposed a special ceiling of textiles from communist China. And finally, it pressured Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, the largest exporters of textiles and apparel to the United States into highly restricted bilateral agreements. Reagan required 18 countries, including Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Finland, and Australia, as well as the European community to accept what he called voluntary restraint agreements, which weren't voluntary, to reduce steel imports, guaranteeing domestic producers a share of the American market. When three countries not included in the 18, Canada, Sweden, and Taiwan increased steel exports to the U.S., the administration demanded talks to check the increase. The administration then slapped tariffs and quotas on so-called specialty steel. Reagan imposed a five-year duty beginning at 45% on Japanese motorcycles for the benefit of Harley Davidson. He raised tariffs on Canadian lumber and cedar shingles. He forced the Japanese into an agreement to control the price of computer memory chip exports and increase Japanese purchases of American made chips. When the agreement was allegedly broken, the administration slapped a 100% tariff on $300 million worth of Japanese electronics and goods. Reagan pressed Japan to force its automakers to buy more American made parts. He demanded that Taiwan, West Germany at the time, Japan and Switzerland, restrain their exports and machine tools, with some market shares rolled back to 1981 levels. Other countries were warned you better not increase their shares in our American market. He accused the Japanese of dumping roller bearings because the price did not rise to cover a fall in the value of the yen. The U.S. Customs Service was ordered to collect duties equal to the so-called dumping margins. He accused the Japanese of dumping forklift trucks and colored picture tombs in the United States. He redefined dumping in order to make it easier to bring charges of unfair trade practices against certain competitors. I had not known all this until I started to really dig in. Coolidge was a big tariff guy. Reagan, more quotas than tariffs. And of course, Trump is a big tariff guy. Everybody knows McKinley was a tariff guy. You know who else was? Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln. I'm not saying you should support them or oppose them. I'm saying that this is actually rather typical until really after World War II of the positions of many Republicans and many of our founders took and really more Reagan than we may have realized. Japan agreed to suspend its 28% tariff on cigarette imports. Taiwan agreed to open its markets to beer, wine and cigarettes. The president threatened retaliation. Japan agreed to buy American semiconductors. The European community agreed to give US citrus producers easier access. Japan eliminated tariffs on 137 leather items and reduced tariffs on aluminum products. South Korea reduced its barriers to US motion pictures and television programs and so on and so on and so on. Mr. Conservative, Ronald Reagan. What else has Donald Trump done? Look at this. He's taken the most extensive steps right out of the box to deal with the border, as he did in his first term, the establishment of a physical wall and other barriers at the US borders. He's going to complete it, deterring and preventing the entry of undocumented individuals into the United States. This is what he's announced and implementing within literally 24 hours of taking the oath, detaining aliens apprehended on suspension of violating federal or state law, that is undocumented migrants and removing them promptly, pursuing criminal charges against undocumented migrants of those who facilitated their unlawful presence in the US, notably ending the practice of catch and release, enacting federal state partnerships to enforce these immigration policies, obtaining complete operational control of the borders of the United States. This is what he's directed the United States government to do. That includes deploying sufficient personnel to the borders. He's just ordered active duty military to the border, terminating parole programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Why? Well, communist and terrorists and revolutions. That's why utilizing advanced vetting techniques to determine familiar relationships and biometric scanning for all individuals encountered or apprehended by the US Department of Homeland Security, he's declared a national emergency at the southern border of the United States in order to put military personnel there. Now, what else has he done? He's involved in the biggest deportation of illegal aliens since Dwight Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower. Oh yes, the great Dwight Eisenhower, who everybody praises. They praise him as sort of a moderate centrist Republican president. The left points to him all the time. Can't we have an Eisenhower type such a, you know, a uniter? Okay. Not so much in the 1950s, as many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona, Texas, and points beyond rates, the Christian Science Monitor. Well, Ike was obsessed with removing them. He said the rise in illegal border crossings by Mexican, his word, wetbacks, not my word, to a current rate of more than 1 million cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation and ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the federal government. Years later, the late Herbert Bernal Jr., who was Eisenhower's first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer, the writer of this piece that the president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigrants when he took office, America quote, was faced with a breakdown of law enforcement on very large scale, said the former attorney general, when I say large scale, I mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico every year without restraint. The orders came straight from the top from Eisenhower, the new president. He had put a former West Point classmate, General Joseph Swing, in charge of immigration enforcement, General Swings, fast moving campaign, soon secured America's borders and accomplishment. No other president has equaled illegal migration had dropped 95% by the light 1950s. So what Trump is proposing is not radical. It's common sense, as he puts it. And when he says common sense, for many of us, it means conservative because conservative is common sense. What about the federal bureaucracy? Trump is doing things now. No president has ever done right out of the box. This is the Hill. The president signed orders mostly aimed at the federal government workforce, targeting some of former President Biden's executive orders in an effort to undo them. He signed an order to implement a regulatory freeze that aims to prevent bureaucrats from issuing any more regulations until the Trump administration has full control of the government. He then signed a federal government hiring freeze with an exception for military hiring until full control of the government is achieved. Trump signed a separate order directing federal workers to get back into their damn offices and leave their basements. He also signed an order withdrawing immediately from the Paris agreement, you know, where the communist Chinese can build 100 coal power plants every week or every month, which stymies us. In other words, he's not going to export sovereignty and our governmental decision making to some international bunch of leftists and Marxists. Additionally, he signed orders to address the cost of living, prevent government censorship of free speech. He's actually one of the great civil libertarians. He signed an order to prevent government censorship of speech, which has been on the rise in a very aggressive way, not just since Woodrow Wilson, but in modern times since Barack Obama and certainly Joe Biden. He said enough of that. He's a free speech Bill of Rights president. This is very, very important to understand. What else makes him one of the great conservative presidents right now? Taxes. President Trump in the past, he tax cuts his tax cuts, the biggest gross tax cuts in American history, over $5.5 trillion over 10 years. He cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21%, the largest percentage point reduction of the top marginal rate in history. And now he wants to cut 21 to 15% for companies in America and locating in America. Why? To massively increase economic growth, prosperity, jobs, jobs. The child tax credit was increased by 573.4 billion over 10 years, larger than any previous change to credit specifically targeting families. Trump's tax cuts included some of the most substantial reforms to the tax code in American history. For example, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act nearly doubles the standard deduction to simplify state filing. And now, of course, in a new Trump presidency, he's got several policies, including extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Cuts Act changes. He needs Democrats to do this. If he doesn't get them, you're going to have a 45% tax increase. Bring back the deduction for state and local taxes. Salt. He wants to increase that. Reducing the corporate tax rate for domestic production, as I explained. Exempting various types of income from income tax, like overtime, tips, other things that he had mentioned. Repealing the green energy tax credits, which, of course, are a big sum of money given to left wing groups primarily. Look at energy. Have we ever had a president like this? Ronald Reagan came into the presidency. The first two things he did is he eliminated the regulations on the production of natural gas and then oil. So what did Trump do? Ending Biden's policies of climate extremism, streamlizing permitting, reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burns on any production in use, including mining and processing of nonfuel materials, energy actions and power consumer choice in vehicles. He pointed out shower heads, toilets, washing machines, light bulbs and dish washers, no more of the government meddling in your bathroom, your bedroom, your home and your cars. He declared an emergency, use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure, whether it's the electrical grid, whether it's pipelines, whatever it is, and leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our national landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers. These are

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