The Second Trump Presidency Will Change America Forever | John Solomon

Transcript:

Rebecca Weber: Welcome back to Better For America. Today, I’m honored to have a very special guest, John Solomon. John is an award winning investigative journalist. He’s an author and founder of Just the News, which is really a groundbreaking news platform that focuses on delivering facts without bias. John has decades of experience in uncovering some of the most important stories in politics, government, and national security, and has been a trusted source for hard hitting journalism.

John, it’s so great to have you back with me today. Thank you for being here.

John Solomon: Great to be with you. Really, really enjoyed. Great, amazing time to be talking. History’s happening by the minute.

Rebecca Weber: It sure is. I mean, Trump’s day one agenda, it really was a roaring success. I think he had over 46 presidential actions on day one, January 20th, including 26 executive orders.

Twelve memorandums, four proclamations, four appointment announcements, and so on. and in your recent article, which I loved, you highlighted President Trump’s second term as really ushering in promises of security, prosperity, accountability, and fairness. How do you anticipate that those initiatives are going to shape the nation’s trajectory, especially when we compare that to his first term?

John Solomon: I think the issue of fairness, which isn’t the term we use very often during the, campaign, but I think it’s going to be a central theme of his president as he tries to explain to people, why am I shrinking the size of government? Why would it be more fair to you? I don’t put more money back into your pocket.

why am I putting tariffs on China? Because they have had an unfair advantage against the United States for four decades and we still treat them like a third world country, but they’re a superpower. I want to get the pan of my cabin out because it’s only fair. I, we built it. We Americans built it and then we gave it away for nothing.

and in this moment of insecurity, we need to keep that as an open trade route for military and other reasons. So why do we want to do it? We’re going to get there. and so I think he’ll use a lot of these big ideas and boil them down into the common sense fairness that Americans equate with how we go about doing our business.

We don’t want something unfair, but we also want things to be fair. And so fairness will be a, a marketing sales point from, for so much of what he does. And you heard the word fairness several times in his inauguration day speech and in the leading up to it and the interviews he did just before the, the arc of his presidency is going to rest on the three eyes, the three eyes.

He ran to fix inflation, the broken economy, the insecurity, the border. The crime in our cities, the insecurity across the globe from Afghanistan to Russia, Russia and Ukraine and Israel, and then the insanity, the things that a Mac so powerfully stood against allowing men into women’s bathroom, sports, prisons and locker rooms, trying to teach our Children that their skin color would determine their entire future.

Critical race theory. The idea that investment managers should not go out and make the best money for you, but to take some of that money and try to, manipulate the market to give an advantage to certain green climate technologies. That’s ESG because of the great work of a Mac, and it’s 2 million members and arguing for common sense.

A lot of those Yeah. Early insanities have now been completely, put on the back burner. DEI is out of most companies. It’s out of the government now. but that insanity is that third rail that Americans look back and said, this isn’t the America I grew up. Oh, wait, that’s right. I don’t want to be in this America.

And I think solving those three eyes is the key to his presidency. and each of them is going to require a partner when it comes to the. Insecurity across the globe, you’re going to need an Israel, Hamas and Iran, Russia to make deals. You’re going to need the Arab partners to back the president like Qatar did in the temporary ceasefire that Donald Trump helped negotiate before he took office.

To fix the economy, you’re going to need Congress to cut the size of government and get inflationary pressures down and get interest rates down. And I think the. Arc of success and the speed of success will determine how well Donald Trump can get those partners to or alongside of him and get the work done.

If they get the work done quickly, he could cement a quarter century of conservative Republican rule. Not unlike what Donald, Ronald Reagan ushered in in 1980. but if he gets some choke points, if the Republicans in Congress failed up deliver, if Putin doesn’t want to. Be a willing partner in a peace deal the challenge has become a little bit more because the left is going to be fired.

They they’re in court today suing and they got an injunction already against birthright citizenship the new executive order And they’re going to have their foot out every step of the way the deep state will have their foot out. Liberal groups will have their foot out trying to trip them up.

So getting those strategic partnerships and getting everybody to or in the direction of a very ambitious agenda will really determine how far and how quick he is in his success.

Rebecca Weber: It really does seem that President Trump has his pulse on what the American people want. And, you know, we hear a lot about, you know, he ran for the forgotten man, the forgotten woman.

And recently said, our greatest asset is we the people. So I think the American people are seeing that, certainly AMAC members are. And we were just so thrilled to see that the Lakin Riley Act was passed in the House. A 263 to 156 vote. all voting Republicans, John, supported the bill. I, I can’t imagine why any Democrats wouldn’t.

I mean, it’s just insane. But what I loved was the Senate advanced the bill and added certain measures to deport illegal aliens who cause death or serious bodily injury to another person. I’m curious from your perspective, what might be some of the more impactful aspects of this legislation? do you see it influencing policy or, or maybe sparking even, you know, broader debate and change in the future?

John Solomon: I do. And there are little signs of some tectonic political plates shifting. 12 Democrat senators and 48 or 46 house Democrats voted for the bill. That’s one of the largest, losses that the democratic leadership have had on a bill in a long time. what does it mean? It means that maybe the far left of, the democratic party is beginning to lose its grips on people who realize the party is losing its relevance because of its extremism.

That. Dynamic, if it continues, if Donald Trump can keep appealing to a John Fetterman and other, you know, the RFK, phenomenon continues to expand, more Democrats joining Donald Trump will create more speed and more definitive victories and they’ll feel bipartisan in nature because more than just half the country signed it.

So far, Donald Trump’s done a great job. keeping his rank and file together. Something that Republicans often struggled to do the last five years, but not Donald Trump, he got it done. but getting those Democrats to cross over, even when you don’t need the margin of victory, starts to create a moral authority for the Trump doctrine.

and it creates a sense of the country that we’re working together in the era of division is over. Now, the bad, the bad critics of Donald Trump are going to keep throwing eggs at them, right? And they may become more and more marginalized. It does seem like. People who have been divisive in this first week have ended with the short end of a stick.

And, I think, you know, Donald Trump is starting to project it. He’s the president of all the people, not just the Republican party with these early victories. I think Lake and Raleigh does it now on a, Operational ground. Lake and Raleigh gives a indisputable law that can’t be overturned by executive order when another president comes in with a different agenda.

It’s on the books now, and it’s going to empower both local police, state police and our brothers and sisters and ice and C. P. B. To get more and more people out of the country more quickly, without being challenged. It also gives some authority for the Justice Department because there’s a lot of the books.

They were supposed to remove this person. If you’re 1 of those sanctuary cities in your. Preventing that law from being complied with you now have a clear law that you’re going to be held in a found of is obstructing. You’re literally obstructing an action that’s encoded in the law. The law says we have to deport this person.

You’re not letting me see it. You’re now going to be arrested. That’s going to be a powerful tool. The first time a mayor or city police chief in one of those blue woke cities tries to get in the way and like, well, there’s this law in the book. Now you’re obstructing it. You’re going to prison with the illegal alien.

We’ll see you there.

Rebecca Weber: We’ll see you there. Yeah, AMAC members were thrilled to see that act passed. So important to keep our communities safe. And another issue that AMAC will be very heavily focused on in 2025 is continuing on the election security initiatives. We need to ensure that our elections are free and fair.

You had a recent discussion with Congressman Brian Steele, and you explored legislative efforts like the SAVE Act and the ACE Act. These are aimed at securing U. S. elections. What do you think the key challenges will be that these bills will face in Congress, and how do you think they’ll impact the integrity of future elections?

Do you think we’ll see the SAVE Act, for example, be passed?

John Solomon: I do. I actually think it’ll get through both chambers. And, I think the, the experiment of Georgia, which began with a pretty reasonable law that, you know, required voter I. D. And other basic protections that are, by the way, 80 percent popular American people.

It got demagogued. We lost the all star game in Atlanta because Democrats tried to pretend this was Jim Crow to now. Most Americans like it’s not Jim Crow to but that had to play out. And when it played out and then the courts ruled on in the favor of governor Brian Kemp and, and the secretary of state Rafsenberger and the common sense of Republicans that pursued this, then all of a sudden people took advantage of the law.

And what happened? Voting went up in Georgia. The, the very thing that Democrats predicted didn’t happen. It didn’t drive down voting. It drove up voting. If you make it easy to vote and hard to cheat, more people will. come out and vote. And I think why Georgia is so important is it is such a powerful case study.

It will undercut the demagoguery of house Democrats who are going to try to stop this. And all the things that Brian style talked about in this bill are things that Americans support by 80%. They don’t want non citizens. They don’t want the. Russian ambassador in Washington to be able to vote in the Washington D.

1. Elections. That’s insane. But that right now it’s lawful. You can actually do that in the District of Columbia. So you’re gonna do that. They want people to use a voter I. D. We use it to get on a plane. Why can’t we use it to exercise their most precious right? They believe in keeping the voter rolls clean.

So you don’t have to have people who are dead 10 years telling the voter rolls. We think of that as Chicago style voting. These things really Our common sense American. And the danger has been for Republicans that they got demagogued on it, but Georgia now two consecutive elections of increased voting because they, they put common sense security measures in, I think takes that demagoguery away in a big way.

And Brian style was leaning into that in my interview. and I think all, all three of these laws will pass. The one to keep an eye on is the act blue investigation, because we’ve talked a lot about. But the money that flows in is another issue. We know the Democrats tried in the 1990s to cheat in a big way in the elections.

Bill Clinton, the China fundraising scandal, lots of people went to prison. That was done an old fashioned way. Yet when you created a straw donor in the nineties, we didn’t have digital fundraising, so you had to. Give a person a check. They would write and then you reimburse them behind the scenes today.

It’s possible digital fundraising for someone to mimic my identity and give donations of my name without me ever knowing because of fundraising and some of the early things that Brian Stiles team has found in the investigation of act blue as Act blue wasn’t using the CVV security code in the back of your credit card that protects you and make sure that this is a true identity of a person really making the transaction.

They were not automatically rejecting foreign bought gift cards. Well, if you want it to launder money in your Russia, just buy a bunch of foreign, money, cards and then put them in the name of John Solomon and donate, and he might not know when the money’s flowing in. So the fact that that system had that looseness to it, that Lucy Goosiness to it.

Has led Congress to believe that maybe there was a foreign intrusion of money into our system, unlike something we’ve seen since the 1990s. And they were recently alerted to an extraordinary new body of evidence. And that is the treasury department has suspicious activity reports, hundreds of suspicious activity reports involving transactions that went through or associated with act blue.

Doesn’t mean act blue itself was doing something wrong, but maybe other bad actors were having hundreds around a single. Entity is very rare. In fact, James Comer called it the largest number of, suspicious active reports he’s ever heard of assembled by the treasury department. It does suggest that maybe there might’ve been a foreign intrusion through the, on the democratic side, through its most popular fundraising platform.

I’d keep an eye on that because if that gets validated, I think you’ll see some major changes to our fundraising laws to require. better security, better identity protection going forward. That could be the fourth of the four election integrity things that happened this year.

Rebecca Weber: Yes. And that’s what we’re so thankful for.

More transparency in government, especially on the election integrity front. So important. And of course, another issue that is so important to AMAC members, who are comprised of mainly people 50 and older is the economy, in Trump’s second term. I’m curious how some of what he’s going to, his, his decisions may differ from his first term.

you recently interviewed economist Steve Moore and you highlighted the administration’s economic agenda. how do the policies differ from the first term and, and maybe what potential effects might they have on the nation’s economic landscape?

John Solomon: I think, Steve Moore said it was like a light switch.

It was so different that, you know, Joe Biden was the dark switch and then Donald Trump’s become the light switch. It’s everything turns on. the Donald Trump believes in lowering the cost of government so that more money is in the pockets of Americans and they grow wealth that way. He believes in less regulation.

He believes in more free markets and less manipulated markets. Joe Biden believed in bigger government, bigger regulation, and manipulating the markets with things like, EV mandates and, lots of extra money to go to inefficient forms of, of energy like wind or solar that isn’t. Chronic and it has intermittent problems.

And so what do you do when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing? We manipulated the markets and that created this cycle of inflation that now makes a 7 a dozen in New York and milk feels a lot more expensive in energy and gas are so much more expensive across the country. I had people in California who are clear liberals saying, you know what?

I’m good news. I got a man. I’m going to be happy about Trump. Like, wait a second. You say, how about Trump? I know gas is going to go down to California. Thank God. And so you see people understand that Donald Trump has a common sense path that even a critic can see is going to lower the cost of living every day.

And when you lower the cost of living every day and you lower the cost of, Government every day, all of a sudden the cost of borrowing starts to come down. That’s important for two reasons. When you get 36 trillion, almost 37 trillion of debt, we’re now paying as much on interest rates as we are in the daily operations of the government.

And, those of us who have children and grandchildren that want to have the American dream we had, I want to buy their first home. Well, I bought my most recent mortgages at two and three quarters and three and a half. They’re at seven, 8%. that makes it the American dream unachievable to a much larger segment of American population than historically has been the case.

So, smaller government brings down smaller inflation, smaller inflation brings down smaller interest rates and prosperity booms. It’s literally the reverse of everything Joe Biden did. He did big government, big interest rates, big inflation, big regulation. And, this, a country came to a halt for the everyday America.

The economy under Joe Biden was fantastic if you were an oligarch and an elitist, but if you were a working class and middle class American, it didn’t work for you. And Donald Trump’s going to make it work for them.

Rebecca Weber: That sure seems it. he’s going to need Congress. How do you think he will do as in terms of really, rallying the conservatives?

we’ve got to balance the budget. We’ve got to reduce inflation. We’ve got to address this. Rising national debt, he’s gonna need the votes to get that done, and some moderate Republicans may not go along, you know, with some of the what’s in in that proposal. How do you think that will play out?

John Solomon: The biggest difference for Donald Trump in 2024 beyond the fact that he understands the way Washington works and all of the secret hands and feet that come out of places that you didn’t know even existed to trip you up, which is what happened in his first administration, is that he has two lieutenants.

In the house and Senate that he personally trusts. He never trusted Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell never really liked him. He didn’t really trust Paul Ryan at the beginning of Paul Ryan didn’t really trust him. And so, in the first, Trump administration, the very first victory that Donald Trump could really substantially rack up took.

11 months. It took the Trump tax cuts of December 2017 before he had a single legislative victory, even though he had a Republican Congress, it was all Republican Congress. Donald Trump racked up his first significant victory on the border of the Lake and Riley act within 48 hours of him taking office.

he has, now that he has lieutenants who he can trust, he can say, listen, this is what I need to get done, but I don’t want to micromanage you. You know what I got to get done. You know, your people. Figure out what they need, make the deal, come back to me, tell me what I need, and we’ll get it done. And one of the things that a lot of people didn’t pay attention to, I thought it was an extraordinary sign of Donald Trump’s maturation as a politician, as a political leader, is in the week or so before he came to Washington, he was sort of like the godfather.

He brought the five factions of the house, kind of like La Cosa Nostra brings in the five godfathers of the families, and they sat for a while, and Donald Trump’s like, Tell me what you need. Where’s your head? When I ask for these things, what are going to be your pressure points? Yes or no? He got to know them all, and, and he has a better understanding now what Mike Johnson needs to, to do.

Last year, he had some candidates he, I think, would have preferred to have run in the Senate, but he deferred to the establishment and to John Thune. And as a result, John Thune has a lot of respect for the president, and he’s invested in the president’s success because they made a deal on candidates. And now John Thune realizes.

All right, he gave me that runway. I got to go get the runway for the president to get these votes over the line. And I think you’ll see with Pete Hegseth in the next couple of days, and just a little while ago, they got John Ratcliffe confirmed that, that these two new lieutenants, are working hand in glove with the president and doing a good job and they trust each other.

That trust was missing the whole time Donald Trump was in the first presidency. This time there’s a very symbiotic. Trust there’s communication. There’s Donald Trump understands Congress is a different beast than running a CEO. Let the people who know how to run it, get there, tell them what you need, and then give them the room to do it.

And I think this Congress is going to outperform most people’s expectations, long as that dynamic stays in place.

Rebecca Weber: Mm. Very good. Optimistic message, and we love that. A great message of hope. John, before we let you run, during the recent National Prayer Service, we heard this Bishop Buddy. She urged President Trump to have mercy on immigrants and the LGBTQ individuals.

This is a plea that President Trump later criticized as nasty and not smart. Take a listen to this clip.

Bishop Budde: I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families. Some who fear for their lives.

Rebecca Weber: So John, given your extensive experience in political journalism, how do you interpret the significance of such direct appeals from religious leaders to sitting presidents?

John Solomon: Yeah, it is a, It’s the latest manifestation of a dynamic that we resisted for a long time in American history. And that was for institutions that weren’t built to be political, to suddenly become political and every institution that has dipped its toe into the political waters when it should be doing something else has gotten burned.

Just ask Bud Light or Target or the corporations that decided to get in the middle of, or major league baseball, which obviously stubbed its toes with the Atlanta all star game and that election integrity bill. People want companies. To stick to being good servants to their customers and the economy and their investors.

People want the FBI to just focus on solving crimes, not creating political solutions. People want ministers to minister to their flock, not go out and give an overtly, political speech. Masquerading as a sermon, clearly trying to show up the president at a at an event that has always been designed as an ecumenical unity event.

And instead it became a divisive event. And then let’s look at what that bishop did. That minister did right after she got off it. Where did she go? She went to the view. She went to CNN. She acted like a politician instead of a she was a political bishop as opposed to a religious bishop. And I think most Americans quickly processed that and said, That’s not what this breakfast was for.

This event was before, and it’s not what clergy should be doing. Now, she has a right to free speech, but there was a moment for her to rise above the politics at a moment of great American import and to create unity and common sense. And instead, she created division. And I think the backlash to her is not unlike what Bud Light got or Target got or the Major League Baseball got.

you stray out of when these institutions stray out of the lanes that America trusts them in and they start driving on the other side of the road, usually collisions occur. And I think this was a collision that probably over the next few weeks, you’ll make clear that it just didn’t, it had a negative effect instead of a positive effect, even if her intention was good.

The outcome has been to have great division instead of unity.

Rebecca Weber: Yeah, very well said. So John, your podcast, your new show, Just the News, no noise on Real America’s Voice, they’ve all become go to platforms for delivering in depth reporting and breaking stories. Please share with our listeners how to tune in.

John Solomon: You bet. Justthenews. com is where we get all our news. That’s the website. Jay Solomon reports on all social media platforms, Truth, Facebook, Twitter, or excuse me, X. We’re on all of those. I’ll tell you one of my favorite parts of the platform is every month when you come on and we do the AMAX special on Justinews, no noise.

We’ve got one coming up this week. I’m really excited about leaning into the first 100 days of the President’s, Donald Trump’s presidency and the extraordinary agenda. We got incredible guests, including the, the quarterback of all tax policies, the guy that might make sure that seniors get their tax cuts and tip, workers don’t have to pay taxes on their tips anymore.

Jason Smith. that’s one of my favorite moments of the week, and of course I get to, all the other days of the week I get to hang out with, Amanda Head and we do a television show on real America’s voice called Justin News. No noise. But, Rebecca, I’m really looking forward to. our special coming up this week and many more conversations like it because I feel like we’ve been able to break some very important ground and create some conversations that we’re missing in the marketplace.

So I’m very, very excited about it.

Rebecca Weber: Well, thank you, John Solomon. Thank you so much. You’re such a relentless truth seeker, and we are so grateful for you. Thanks for holding those in power accountable. Keep up the great work, John. happy to have you here and look forward to having you back again soon.

John Solomon: Sounds good, Rebecca. Thank you so much.