WASHINGTON DC, Oct 13 — It was a rare opportunity when President Donald Trump sat down for a wide-ranging interview on the AMAC Presidential Town Hall podcast. Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, and award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, host of the Just The News podcast, sat down with President Trump to discuss key issues of the upcoming 2024 Presidential Election.
They kicked off with the national emergency posed by the unprecedented Mexican border crisis asking Mr. Trump, what are we to do in order to secure the border?
“Number one,” he said, “we build a tremendous amount of wall [and] put an end to catch and release in the United States. We had catch and release [illegal migrants], but it was into Mexico. Catch and release can be a horror show when we release them and say, come back in five years for a trial. We had a ‘stay in Mexico’ policy that nobody thought we could achieve. And we built 561 miles of wall. We were going to add another 200 and I said, we’re going to do 400 miles. The hard part was done. And then we had that ridiculous result in the election, and it just sat there. And now I hear they sold a lot of it [the materials] for a very small amount of money. Now they say we’re going to build it, but they’re only going to build 20 miles and they probably won’t even build that.”
It came as no surprise that Mr. Trump sees President Biden to be weak, at best. As he put it: “He’s the worst president in history, the most corrupt president in history, and the most incompetent president by far. He can’t even get off a stage, can’t put two sentences together. But I wish he was doing a phenomenal job, even if it meant that he wouldn’t be re-elected. He’s doing the worst job in the history of our country. You talk about the border, you talk about anything, talk about Afghanistan. There’s never been a more embarrassing period of time in our country’s history than what took place in Afghanistan. There was no reason for that.”
The former president went on to focus on the critical issue of the nation’s fiscal responsibilities. “We have a country that’s potentially very rich or very poor right now because we’re very stupid. If you look at Saudi Arabia and the oil-producing nations, they are the richest nations. Meanwhile, we have more oil than they do. We have more than anybody and Biden threw it away. I got it done. Nobody thought it could be done. The bottom line, we have more [resources] than any other country in the world. And we started off in third place.”
President Trump noted “By the time I finished, we were in first place by a lot and we were going to be energy dominant. We were totally independent on energy. We didn’t need anybody’s energy. We were totally set and within six months we would have been dominant. We were going to supply the oil and gas for Europe. We were going to supply it for everybody. We had so much and we had the best extraction, we had the best of everything, and we would have made so much money that Social Security and other things would have been able to be taken care of. If you look at the balance sheet of Saudi Arabia and some of these countries and you say, do you have debt? They look at you, they don’t know what the word debt means.
“We were going to be dominant to a level that nobody’s ever seen before,” he said. “We were going to make so much money and we were going to start paying down debt and we were going to take care of Social Security. The one thing I won’t stand for is people paying more. [Meanwhile, DeSanctimonious, better known as Ron DeSantis] wants to raise the minimum age [for Social Security] to 70 and to screw around with Medicare. But with energy, we have more than anybody else. And all of this fake energy that they talk about, [i.e.] the Green New Deal stuff is the destruction of our country. Wind is about 50 times more expensive per kilowatt hour. There’s many ways of measuring it. But the bottom line is, it’s much, much more expensive. Natural gas, which is very clean, goes for about $0.03, while wind costs about $0.50. That’s unacceptable. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel wanted to go all green, so they closed all the coal plants and they stopped even their nuclear plants. And they went green for a little while and they were going to go out of business in about 2 minutes. And now they’re building coal plants all over the place. China is building a coal plant every four days. And here we are talking about nonsense that doesn’t have the power or the technology to fire up our big factories and plants. And it’s very, very expensive. When you talk about cars, they want to go all electric. But we have gasoline. We have more gasoline than anybody’s ever had. And yet they don’t want to make gasoline cars.”
Mr. Trump went on to express concern about global hostilities. “One thing you don’t want to see is Russia and China unite. They’re natural enemies because they share a border and Russia has plenty of land and China doesn’t have enough land. That’s usually not a good sign. China needs land and Russia has it, but it’s not going to give it up, they are natural enemies. Yet Biden and Obama forced them together through stupidity. They forced them together and they’re pretty well united now. And that’s something that should never have been allowed to happen and it would have never happened with me. The problem in Ukraine would not have happened; zero chance that it would have happened for two reasons. I just said the price of oil wouldn’t have happened, and so [Vladimir Putin] wouldn’t have had the money. And also because I told him, you can’t do it, and if you do, I’m going to have to do this and that. To which he said, you’re not going to do that. I said, Vladimir, I will do it. And he didn’t believe I was going to do it, but he believed me 10%. And that’s why you never saw any sign of this stuff. It was incredible. A couple of months after I was out, I’m saying, you know, they’re going to do something here. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that we were so grossly incompetent in Afghanistan, not in pulling out because I was the one that got us down to 2500 soldiers. I was getting out, but we were going to get out with strength and dignity.
“We were going to keep the big airbase, not because of Afghanistan, but because it’s one hour away from where China makes their nuclear weapons. And you know who has that airbase now? China! It has the biggest runways in the world, massive, and it was built many years ago with very big dollars. And we fled in the dark of night. We left the dogs behind. And a lot of people say, they left the dogs behind and they left the lights on and they fled. All those soldiers died, all of $85 billion worth of equipment was left behind, brand new tanks and planes and goggles and 700,000 rifles and guns, 70,000 vehicles, many of them armor plated. And now Afghanistan is one of the top three arms dealers in the world and they are selling what we [abandoned there].”
John Grimaldi served on the first non-partisan communications department in the New York State Assembly and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Priva Technologies, Inc. He has served for more than thirty years as a Trustee of Daytop Village Foundation, which oversees a worldwide drug rehabilitation network.