Andrew Klavan and John Nolte dismantle Fire and Fury’s shoddy claims, exposing Michael Wolfe’s inconsistencies—like Steve Bannon’s baseless "treason" accusations about the June 2016 Trump Jr. meeting—and mock the media’s obsession with Russian collusion over Trump’s $7T economy and ISIS’s defeat. A supporter argues Trump’s policies could revive 1980s-style prosperity, cutting unemployment for minorities and undermining BLM protests, while dismissing his controversial tweets as a trade-off for outsider appeal. Klavan praises Ladybird’s Catholic themes and Nightfall’s Templar lore, framing Trump’s reelection on economic strength alone—regardless of media smears. [Automatically generated summary]
The smoldering pile of rubble, formerly known as Steve Bannon, has garnered a strange new respect from a mainstream media that used to call him everything from a white supremacist Nazi to a white supremacist Nazi.
The mainstream media is not that creative.
But now, because Bannon made some completely unfounded comments about a meeting he didn't attend during a campaign he hadn't yet joined, the same news media is suddenly citing the president's former chief strategist as an authority on meetings he wasn't at during campaigns he hadn't joined.
Bannon's new mainstream media role as a former white supremacist Nazi turned Russia investigation wise man follows the release of excerpts from a new book by Michael Wolfe called Fire and Fury inside the Trump White House, which confirms every prejudice the media has about the Trump administration.
It's chaos.
He's stupid.
Everything is out of control.
He's senile.
It's chaos.
He's stupid.
He's insane.
It's chaos.
He's stupid.
In fact, the media is so excited by the book, they haven't taken the 10 minutes it takes to realize that the excerpts released so far are complete crap.
You might even say the fire and fury signifies nothing except they told me to stop making Shakespeare jokes because no one gets them.
Anyway, the book does seem to be a tale told by an idiot, or at least by a guy who doesn't do the simplest fact-checking.
But that's the thing.
In creating an atmosphere of chaos and stupidity, you don't have to get the facts right.
You just have to make an impression and then keep referring back to the impression.
I'll show you what I mean.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing hunky-dunky.
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Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, the amazing Noltenator John Nolte is here from Breitbart.
He will be with us in a little while.
I always love talking to Nolte.
He has been more right about everything than just about anybody.
And he's one of the best observers of the media, possibly because he despises them so much.
And this is, listen, this has been a tough week for me.
I hope it hasn't come across.
I've had the flu.
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Hillary Clinton is my inspiration.
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Bannon's Treasonous Claims00:15:40
So that's a good thing as well.
I have to talk about this story because this book came out, and obviously we just got to cover it.
It was breaking while we were on the air.
We just got to cover it at the very last minute.
But it's based around this publication, promo release of some excerpts of this book by Michael Wolf called The Fire and the Fury.
What's it called?
The fire and the fury inside the Trump White House.
That's what it is.
And the thing is, I read the excerpt.
I read an interview the guy gave, and the book is garbage.
I mean, you know, I haven't read the whole book, so maybe there's wonderful, wonderful stuff buried in there.
But I can't believe the way the media reacted to this thing.
Now, we have to, the one thing we have to say is, listen, I love politics, and I'm a novelist, and politics is like a big novel being just playing out in front of you.
You never know what's going to happen next.
It's got all these surprises, got all these characters, all these big personalities, and all this.
And this is a great political story.
This Steve Bannon thing is a great political story because he was at the center of the mails from yesterday.
And I'll get back to that.
But you shouldn't think, you shouldn't confuse it with an important story.
It's fun.
If you don't enjoy politics, you shouldn't follow politics.
I said to a friend of mine over the break, I said, you know, anybody who loses a friend over American politics doesn't know anything about American politics because most of American politics is just going back and forth and getting utterly hysterical over absolutely nothing.
And this is one of those stories.
It really doesn't matter what happens to Steve Bannon next.
But it is fascinating and it's worth looking at.
But what does matter, what does matter is the way the media treats it because they are selling a narrative.
And when I go back to New York, I can tell you every single one of my left-wing relatives and friends is going to think that this story is the absolute truth.
And I'm going to show you how easy it is, how easy it is to debunk this thing.
So Michael Wolf famously, you know, John Puthoritz writes about this a little bit.
He just had a column as I was driving into work.
He said, what did he say about Wolf?
That Wolf has a lifelong habit of weaving Leaving solid reporting with errant speculation.
Well, listen to some of this stuff, okay?
The big one, of course, from the book is Bannon's take on the June 2016 meeting involving Trump's son, Donald Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was then, and then the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
We all remember this.
They were shouting treason.
Every mainstream media guy was shouting treason.
And apparently it was this kind of nothing meeting.
They probably shouldn't have had it, but nothing really came of it.
So Bannon says, and this is the big quote: the three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor with no lawyers, even if you thought that this was not treasonous or unpatriotic or bad blank.
And I happen to think it's all of that.
So it was treasonous, unpatriotic.
You should have called the FBI immediately.
The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these Jumos up to his father's office on the 26th floor is zero, okay?
Now, let's think about this.
Bannon joined the Trump campaign in August.
So that's two months later, right?
Two and a half months later.
He wasn't at this meeting.
He wasn't in the campaign.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
I mean, his knowledge is the same as mine or yours.
He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Now I want to play the media reacting to, and remember, this is Steve Bannon, who they hate more than they hate anybody.
I mean, they would rather Adolf Hitler were in, you know, in the government than Steve Bannon.
Remember how they just hated him?
And now suddenly Bannon is talking about a meeting he wasn't at two and a half months before he's in the campaign.
Listen to this media reaction.
Welcome to a five-alarm dumpster fire for the White House.
Or shall we call it Bannon's Rebellion?
The Russia investigation has been blown open in dramatic fashion.
What it really does is, as you put it, it really legitimizes from the Trump world that this Russia investigation is real.
So why would anybody question the legitimacy of the coverage of the Russia investigation when we have Steve Bannon talking, you know, who let's face it, is kind of a blowhard, right?
He's a guy who talks in these very, very elaborate, very overdramatic terms, talking about a meeting he was not at in a campaign he wasn't involved in.
I mean, this is just random commentary.
It's like anybody could have said this.
And it's Bannon who they hate.
And it's Bannon who just lost Alabama to the five Democrats in Alabama.
I mean, it's Bannon who has just incredibly, has made these incredible miscalculations, but suddenly, suddenly, so they asked Sarah Sanders about this, the presidential spokeswoman, and she made what is, of course, a totally reasonable point.
If this is obviously cut five.
Did the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., commit treason?
I think that is a ridiculous accusation and one that I'm pretty sure we've addressed many times from here before.
And if that's in reference to comments made by Mr. Bannon, I'd refer you back to the ones that he made previously on 60 Minutes, where he called the collusion with Russia about this president a total farce.
So I think I would look back at that.
If anybody's been inconsistent, it's been him.
Certainly hasn't been the president or this administration.
I mean, I mean, this is a perfectly reasonable point.
I mean, you know, prosecutors in trial always say, were you lying then or are you lying now?
Well, here's Bannon.
This is not the 60 Minutes one.
This is an interview he gave with the New York Times.
The 60 Minutes one that she references is also true.
He did say that.
But here's one from the New York Times, Cut Two.
I think the collusion thing is, and I've said it from day one, is a joke.
We couldn't, I was there.
We couldn't collude.
We had a tough time colluding between the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania and the RNC.
So again, which is it?
Is it a joke?
Is it a farce?
Or is it treason?
You know, I mean, if he says both things, don't we have to quiet.
But the question is, why didn't Wolf ask?
Why didn't Wolf compare this?
You know, yeah, he says this to me, but he said this here.
Isn't that what you would do if you were?
I mean, like, I write novels.
I make up false stories for a living.
Even I would say, oh, this doesn't make sense.
This is not jibing with something that happens on page 15.
It's not jibing with something that happens on page 30.
So the idea of this book, apparently, is that the Trump campaign was a campaign to lose, that they never expected to win.
So here is a take out of this excerpt from New York Magazine.
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine.
His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win.
Now, you all know Donald Trump, and you know that he doesn't care about winning.
So he just shrugs that stuff off.
He doesn't care about winning at all.
He says, I can be the most famous man in the world, he had told his aide Sam Nundberg at the outset of the race.
His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president.
Now, Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network.
That's true.
He did do that.
And he did probably think he was going to lose at some point, but that he was running to lose, very doubtful.
It was a great future.
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.
Now, a lot of this is coming from Bannon, who, by the way, had already given an interview to another guy named Josh Green, who wrote a book called Devil's Bargain, in which Bannon portrays himself as the far-seeing prophet who knows, who's the only one who knows that Trump is going to win.
In that book, he says Bannon came to Trump, and Trump loved how Bannon, an avid reader of history, fitted Trump's campaign into the broader sweep of history.
For years, Bannon had tracked and occasionally abetted the right-wing populist uprising sweeping across Europe and Great Britain, where others saw Trump's campaign as a joke or an ego trip.
Bannon framed it as the inevitable U.S. manifestation of these same forces, and Trump as the avatar of an us versus them populism that would galvanize an electoral majority to rise up and smash the corrupt establishment.
So in Bannon's old telling of this, and Bannon's telling of this in the book, Devil's Bargain by Josh Green, Bannon very much thought they were going to win.
And I think that as they approached, if you take a lot of the stuff in Wolf's excerpt out of, if you put it back into context, what you're listening to is people who thought, well, look, if we don't win, we'll still have a network, we'll still be famous, you know, kind of telling themselves it's not as bad as they think.
But they were out there to win.
There's just no question about it.
Okay, so which one is right?
Let's take the, this is the most telling part of the whole thing.
Listen to this.
The day after the election, this is from Wolfe's excerpt, the bare bones transition team that had been up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to Trump Tower.
And now he's portraying them as absolutely shocked that they won and they didn't know.
And Melania's crying because she'd been promised they were going to lose and all this stuff.
The building, now the headquarters of a populist revolution, suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue, but its otherworldly air helped obscure the fact that few in Trump's inner circle with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government had any relevant experience.
This, by the way, is certainly true.
It's certainly true that the opening of the Trump administration was chaotic.
Inexperience showed their inexperience.
Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him.
You need an SOB as your chief of staff, he told Trump, and you need an SOB who knows Washington.
You'll want to be your own son of SOB, but you don't know Washington.
Ailes had a suggestion, John Boehner, who had stepped down the Speaker of the House only a year earlier.
Who's that? asked Trump.
That's how dumb and ignorant, and this is a big theme, how ignorant Trump was.
Well, the problem is, here's a picture.
Do we have the image of Trump?
Here's a picture taken in 2013 of Trump and John Boehner.
This is now three years before golfing.
He's got a golf club in his hand.
And here's another shot, a video of Trump asking questions, answering questions about John Boehner two months before this story is supposed to have taken place.
Speaker Pena's resignation today, some conservatives were actually happy about that.
How do you feel?
Well, I think it's time.
I mean, it's really time for him.
He's a lot of problems.
We've got to get the country going, and I think it really is time.
Do you think it's a good thing for the party?
I think right now it is.
There's tremendous division in the party.
And I think right now, having him go is a good thing for the party.
Trump didn't know who's the John Boehner.
Absurd.
So you say, okay, that's a small detail, but you're writing a book about the president of the United States, right?
And you're telling an anecdote.
It's like the anecdote about how he removed the MLK bust from the Oval Office.
There's a meaningful anecdote about how ignorant this guy is.
And a novelist, me, Googled it and in 15 seconds realized the story wasn't true.
Okay, so you have a nonfiction book coming out about the president of the United States saying the guy is so ignorant, so stupid, so clueless that he didn't even know who the last speaker of the house is, which is absurd.
Trump follows cable TV night and day.
And you don't even check it, really?
Really?
And you go in, and now we go on TV and say, oh, here's this new book.
And it's so exciting.
It's absurd.
It is absurd.
And let me go on to this other piece that he wrote because Michael Wolf writes for the Hollywood Reporters.
Well, he wrote a piece about how he got this.
And by the way, let me know when we've got Nolte on.
Oh, we've got him?
Okay.
All right.
Let me rush through this because I don't want to keep John waiting, but I do want to say this first.
That he says, first he says, this is how I got in.
He says, after the election, I proposed to Trump that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication journalistically as a fly on the wall, which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job.
And I said, no, I just like to watch and write a book.
And he kind of shrugged this off.
Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around, checking in each week at the Hay Adams Hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the system, and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down day after day on a West Wing couch.
I'm not even sure I believe this part, but let's say it's true.
Let's say it's true.
So now he says, this is his description of the President of the United States in his first days.
Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions.
It used to be inside of 30 minutes.
It used to be inside of 30 minutes, he'd repeat word for word and expression for expression the same three stories.
Now it was within 10 minutes.
Within 10 minutes, he would repeat word for word and expression for expression the same three stories.
Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions.
He just couldn't stop saying something.
Now just stop for a minute, okay?
You're Sherlock Holmes.
How do you know that's not true?
You know it's not true because you've seen Donald Trump speak for 45 minutes off the cuff.
Just last October he did it on the White House lawn.
You've seen him talk to reporters off the cuff for 45 minutes and address all their questions until they got tired of asking questions.
Where does this guy?
It's a fantasy.
It's a fantasy.
The other day he did an interview with the New York Times.
They printed excerpts from the transcript.
There was none of that.
There was none of it.
What is it?
Come and go when he suddenly, when he's outside in the real world, he doesn't do it.
But when he's inside Michael Wolfe's imagination, suddenly he starts to do it.
This book is nonsense.
And the guy has done a great job.
Listen, I'm a writer.
I would never take away from a writer to promote his book.
Good for him.
He's promoting his book.
I'm sure it'll be a bestseller.
But it's nonsense.
I mean, the stuff that we have heard so far does not hold water.
It doesn't pass the smell test.
And so what we saw yesterday was Steve Bannon mouthing off a guy who we already know has made incredible political miscalculations in Alabama.
He's just made another one because the three things that Steve Bannon had were Trump.
He had Trump, he had Breitbart, and he had the Mercer money.
He's apparently lost the Mercer money, although Drudge says maybe he's got a new billionaire to fund him.
Now he's lost Trump because Trump has taken him to pieces.
Well, we have John Nolte from Breitbart.
We'll ask him how things are going there.
Although I know he won't, he's a loyal guy, and I know he won't say anything he's not supposed to, but let's bring him on anyway.
John Nolte, one of the best observers of the media out there, only because he despises them, and that makes him accurate.
I mean, basically, formerly, formerly of the Daily Wire, but stabbed us in the back and returned to Breitbart.
It's great to see you.
Happy New Year.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
You know, I know, listen, you are one of the few people in the business I consider a true friend.
I know you're not going to stab anybody in the back, but I do have to ask you about the smoldering pile of rubble who used to be your boss, Steve Bannon.
No, I mean, what is going on at Breitbart?
Because Breitbart has been covering this pretty straight.
They have not taken the bannon line necessarily.
Yeah, we have.
We've definitely been covering it straight.
Alex Marlow, our editor-in-chief, has made it clear that we're going to cover this straight.
We're not going to miss anything.
Just about an hour ago, a request went up for about six pieces about this.
So that's definitely what we're doing.
It's the biggest story.
Obama's Economic Drama00:15:51
It's the biggest political story.
I mean, it's all castle intrigue.
But I'm sad to report, actually, I'm glad to report.
I don't know anything more than anyone else does, which is the way I like it.
I don't know anything about the Drudge tweets.
I don't know if he knows something.
I don't know.
I don't know if he's trying to manipulate events.
Both are possible.
I just, I don't know.
And I don't know.
The other thing I don't know is if Bannon really said these things.
I mean, the White House is disputing the book, but they seem to be taking the banned stuff at gospel.
So I don't know if he said these things.
If he said them, speaking out of turn that way is not a good thing, obviously.
But if the president popped off and automatically believed the mainstream media, that's not a good thing either.
So as with all things, Trump, you just have to give these things a few days to sort of work themselves out before you get too emotionally invested in them because the media lies and there's usually a lot more context and a lot more truth that comes out over time.
And we just have to wait and see what happens.
I got to say, I am shocked at the, I'm not shocked, but I'm not sure what the word is.
I'm amazed, I guess is the right word, at the shoddy reporting on this.
I mean, I read the excerpt yesterday and I just picked it apart on the air.
I could pick it apart for another 20 minutes.
It's not very good reporting and it's stuff that's provably untrue.
And not only that, but these chaos narratives, and Michael Wolfe's probably been working on this book a long time.
These chaos narratives, they had a little cachet before we really understood everything that Trump was accomplishing.
And not just passing the tax thing at the end of the year.
But there's a lot of huge accomplishments within this administration.
And not judges, good judges, a record number of judges, opening these pipelines, the deregulation, just all kinds of.
It's like a conservative wish list.
Things that we wish George W. Bush would have done and he didn't do.
And I just don't see how he's portraying the White House as toxically chaotic and dysfunctional.
And it just doesn't that doesn't pass the results.
The results are very real and concrete.
So I don't know.
And they, I mean, they've that all the stuff you mentioned, plus the fact that ISIS, which had 23,000 square miles of territory, is now operating out of a port-a-san.
You know, I mean, that's uh, it was an amazing year.
And as somebody, I mean, you were onto Trump right away.
And we, I've always said this.
I was not.
I really disliked him, but he has he won me over by the end of the year.
I was sitting there going, like, if you're not enjoying this, you're not really a conservative.
I mean, this is like this, you know, I remember Reagan.
This is a better year than Reagan ever had.
You know, I mean, Reagan's year was after he left office and the Soviet Union collapsed.
That was his best year.
But this is this has been an amazing year of accomplishments.
And the idea that he sits around and repeats himself and all this, we see him on TV.
He doesn't do that.
He is the best politician I have ever seen.
And I used to say that about Barack Obama.
It's not, I'm not being biased.
Barack Obama is a brilliant politician.
He's just terrible at governing.
Yeah.
He hates America.
But Trump is a brilliant politician because he's a brilliant communicator.
And these things, Barack Obama is sober and no drama, Obama, and he was a catastrophe for this country overseas.
He was a catastrophe internally.
He put his boot on the neck of the economy.
And we're supposed to believe that Trump is a blithering moron and that the White House is a clown show, and yet he's turned the economy around and he deserves all the credit for that.
He has passed major legislation.
And it's not just the tax bill that passed.
They're going to open up the Arctic Wildlife Reserve and War for drilling.
And unless you were alive in 1995, you don't, you can't imagine how big of a deal that is because that was a huge deal back then.
And he overturned the Obamacare mandate.
Another huge deal.
I mean, this is this is a man of accomplishment.
This is a consequential president.
And it, and I think the timing hurts Wolf a lot because maybe the chaos narrative would have worked three months ago, two months ago, but I don't think it's going to work today because it just doesn't make any sense.
And you know what?
If he is that chaotic, I hope all my presidents are chaotic.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a governing, it's a governing technique in that case.
It's absolutely right.
And it is really interesting.
I mean, you have been brutal, not just on the media, because the media certainly deserves it, but you have been brutal to the Never Trumpers.
You basically, I mean, I always had some sympathy because I was never a Never Trumper, but I was so put off by his manner when he started out that I have sympathy with them.
But you basically don't give them any quarter.
You feel that they are not being good Americans, basically.
I think that they're flat-out saboteurs.
I think that's what they are.
I think they're Vichy Republicans.
They run to the mainstream media.
They undermine.
Trump is the guy taking flaming arrows in the back for our cause.
And they lied to us.
They said he wasn't conservative.
Well, that's a lie because he's more conservative than any of the guys they wanted to give us.
Mitt Romney didn't even want to get out of the climate accord.
So he's more conservative than McCain.
He's more conservative than Romney.
He's more conservative than George W.
He appears to be a hell of a lot more capable and competent than those three or George H.W.
And so they lied about that.
They were dead wrong about that, but they don't have the decency to say that.
And then they run around to the media and they, the guy taking flaming arrows in the back to get our cause into law and they're undermining him.
They're sabotaging him in the mainstream media.
And I think it's despicable.
I think it's un-American.
And they can all burn.
They can all die in a fire.
But tell us how you really think, how you really feel.
So let's, there are two biggest things.
Tell me what they do.
Tell me what good Never Trump does.
Well, you know, I see.
What other thing did they add to America?
Nothing.
No, I think that I think the sad thing is that they have missed one of the, I mean, about halfway through the year, I started to turn.
I started to say, oh, you know, this is really going pretty well.
Even before the tax thing, tax thing was, to me, dispositive.
That was like, that was a big legislative accomplishment in the first year.
But still, even before that, I started to say, you know, things are actually going pretty well.
And they missed it.
They missed one of the great, gleeful conservative years in American history.
And that's a shame.
That's too bad.
The mainstream media, and obviously at this point, I can barely believe the stuff that's coming out of their mouths.
But when I go to New York, when I visit my left-wing friends, my left-wing relatives, they buy it all.
You are such a good observer of these guys.
Do you feel that they're losing any traction at all, any credibility at all?
I mean, all this stuff about, you know, net neutrality was going to destroy the world.
The tax bill is going to destroy the world.
Surely at some point, people look out.
This happened to me during the Reagan administration when all I heard was he was going to start a nuclear war.
He was an idiot.
He was a movie actor.
He was stupid.
And then one day I looked and I thought, isn't that the Berlin Wall coming down?
You know, and I thought, you know, maybe they were wrong and he was right.
And that was the beginning of my change over to conservatism.
Do you think that that's going to happen to people now?
Or do you think the mainstream media has still got its hooks in pretty deep?
I think that with the media, they've gone all in on Bob Mueller.
And that's what everybody's pinning their hopes on, is that Mueller's going to dig up something.
And they've also gone in on Russian collusion.
And I think we all know that that's pretty much dead unless something's happening we don't know about, but there just wasn't any Russian collusion.
But it's going to come down to what it always comes down to, and that's the economy.
Everything's going to come down to the economy.
And I think the economy is going to roar.
I don't think it's Obama put his boot on the neck of the Obama could have had this economy because when you, the worse the recession, the better the recovery.
And he put his boot on the neck of the economy.
And now Trump removed that boot and he talks it up and he's making all the right moves.
And now the economy is going to boom.
And if Trump can keep us out of stupid wars, and I think he's going to, I mean, look what he's done with ISIS without putting a single boot on extra boot on the ground.
And of course, our military, you got to give him credit for that.
But if the economy booms and he can keep us out of the stupid war for the first time in 20, almost 20 years since September 11th, and people under the age of 30 don't even remember this.
We're going to have peace and prosperity in this country.
I mean, the 80s and 90s in America were a miracle.
They were amazing time to be alive.
It's as good as life gets.
And I think Trump can bring those times back.
And if the economy roars like I think it's going to, I think he's pretty much untouchable.
And we're always going to be a 50-50 country, but I think that's going to be enough that he's going to survive and win re-election.
So let's looking back at this year.
And I mean, this is a question I have to ask in a way.
Are there things that you are disappointed in?
You know, you really backed this guy to the hilt.
Are there ways that Trump disappointed you?
He does, in my opinion, and maybe he's got a grander strategy at work.
He does, in my opinion, create drama.
One of the, you know, when you look back at the 80s and 90s, there was drama.
There was the Bourke hearing and there was Iran-Contra and there was impeachment and Hillary care and all that stuff.
But it was ebbs and flows.
And then life would go back to normal and then something would happen.
OJ, the Delhi riots.
So I don't want to pretend it was all sunshine and roses.
But with Trump, it's constant drama, constant drama.
And it's not all his fault, and most of it's on defense.
But an example, and I don't think it was a sexist tweet because he says this about the guys.
But that tweet he said about Christian Gillibrand, the senator, the Democrat senator, it sounded, you could turn that tweet into a sexist tweet.
And I just wish he would think about those things because then it's three days of nonsense.
And then we all know that he says the same thing about the guys.
So by definition, it's not sexist.
But those of us who defend him are like, no, we got to do this.
Now we got to defend him over this.
And he should be defended over it.
But I would like to see him create less drama, at least the least amount of drama that he can.
That would help a lot.
And that's going to help a lot when it comes to his reelection because people, I think they're tired of the drama.
You know, I compare him all the time to Randall Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, that it sometimes takes a kind of an outlaw to break the soft tyranny that just descends on people without their even knowing it.
And I think unfortunately, I think that all these things go together.
Like, I don't think you can take that part of Trump away and get the good parts of Trump.
It's just something that seems to be all one big thing.
What are you looking forward to?
2018?
What makes you giddy?
Well, I'm really hoping, and this just came across the news today, that he's going to be able to open up the states for health insurance because that would be a huge, huge deal.
Open up the market, get more free market into health insurance.
And I think it would also help to undercut Obamacare.
Anything that undercuts Obamacare is God's work.
And, you know, the other thing that's on the horizon is I think there's, you hear all these rumblings about a big sexual harassment scandal in Congress.
So I'm curious how that's going to play out.
But I think Trump is just going to keep doing what he's doing.
He's going to talk up the economy.
He uses the bully pulpit brilliantly.
And I hope he goes out in campaigns because he needs to get his base revved up.
And I hope that he, you know, I think that he's going to keep doing everything he can to keep the economy.
You know, that's the thing.
He's not dumb.
All this Russia stuff, all this never Trump stuff, his eye was always on the ball of the economy.
He knows that that's all that matters is the economy.
And I think he's going to keep doing that.
And he also feels surprised us too.
I think other conservative things are going to come down that we never expected.
And he'll surprise us like he did throughout last year.
It is funny about the economy.
One of the things, you know, they're always trying, as they always try to portray every Republican is racist.
One of the things I really like about Trump is that Trump just feels like whether you're black or white, you need a job.
And he feels that like black people are going to love him because they'll have jobs.
And Latinos will love him because they'll have jobs.
And he just thinks that that's going to be enough to get past the identity politics thing.
I don't know how right he is, but I think it's kind of touching that he feels that way.
And you go back to the 80s and 90s and we weren't divided like we are now.
And that's because, and I'm not, I'm just, I'm talking analytically.
I hope I'm not, don't sound like some old man being nostalgic.
But if you go back and you look at the 80s and 90s, we were nowhere near as divided as we are now, racially or among economic or gender lines, because things were good.
Life was good in this country.
Everybody, you didn't have to worry about anything.
You weren't stressed out.
And that's another thing is that if the economy can get better, people, Black Lives Matter is going to dissipate because they're going to have nothing to complain about.
And I think Obama intentionally enjoyed the fact that the economy was bad because he knew it created stresses, that he could use his hands up, don't shoot lies and his George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin lies to divide us.
And that's what he was, that's what he wanted to do.
And of course, the media was on his side.
And I think you're right.
I think Trump understands if he can get the economy going.
I mean, the Hispanic unemployment right now is at unemployment rate is at a record low.
The black unemployment rate, I think, is at a 17-year low.
And that's going to do more for those populations, plus getting the illegals out of here, because that'll raise jobs.
That'll increase jobs.
That'll increase wages.
All of that stuff.
He gets it.
His eye is on the big picture.
And the media and even Bob Mueller, they can't override a good economy.
John Nolte, it's always great to talk to you.
I hope you'll come back on again soon.
I really, it's the only time I get to see you anymore.
so it's good to have you all right all right bye bye and uh you know if you want to read he's at breitbart.com And he just write, his stuff on the media is so good and so accurate.
And he knows exactly what they're talking about all the time.
You know, in a lot of ways, you could look at the history of this country for the last few years, few decades, as everything was the Reagan economy, basically, until 9-11.
And then 9-11 changed everything.
Bush overreacted, went too big in his response.
He wanted to transform the Middle East.
It was a worthy goal, but he didn't have the wherewithal to pull it off, and he didn't really have the vision to pull it off.
And Obama just, he does not like America.
He doesn't like it.
He wanted to fundamentally transform America from the most powerful, you know, freest country, wealthiest country on earth to what he almost made it.
And I think Nolty's right.
If Trump can bring us back to the kind of 80s and 90s of it all, we could have another great 25, 30-year-old run.
Girl's Dreams00:09:26
And, you know, I always say people call a 25, 30-year-old run.
They say it's a bubble.
I think like, yeah, it's also a third of a lifetime.
You know, it's like, it's more, more than a third of a lifetime.
So you can have a pretty good life with those bubbles.
All right, let's do some stuff I like to end the week.
You know, this is the time when if you're in one of the show business guilds or unions, you start to get, at the end of last year, like in December, you start to get what they call screeners, which are free DVDs where you can watch a movie, the movies that you missed, and then you can vote for them in the awards.
So I'm in the Writers Guild, so I get them for that.
And so I've started watching some of them, so I just thought I'd report on a couple of them.
I saw this picture, Ladybird finally, which just got such great reviews.
It's by a woman named Greta Gerwig, who works with Noah Baumbach, who did The Squid and the Whale, which is a very, very powerful anti-divorce statement, in my opinion.
A very strangely conservative film.
This also is a strangely conservative film, and it's pretty good.
My wife said to me, we watched it together, and my wife said she was surprised I watched it because it was girly.
But I didn't find it girly because it's completely unsentimental.
It is a story about a young girl.
It's about a girl in Catholic school.
And it is about, you know, it shows her as being kind of a pain in the neck and kind of annoying, but she has this really interesting relationship with her mom, who is living under great financial stress, you know, and is constantly picking on this girl because she has girl dreams.
You know, she has dreams of being something more than she is.
So here's a brief cut.
Who plays the, it's Laurie Metcalfe, who's a wonderful, wonderful actress, who plays the mom.
And she has this argument at the very opening of the movie as they're driving in the car to go to school.
I want to go where culture is.
Like, who in the world did I race such a business?
Or at least Connecticut or New Hampshire, where writers live in the world.
Mom, you can't even pass your driver's stuff.
Because you wouldn't let me practice the way that you work or the way that you don't work.
You're not even worth state tuition, Christine.
My name is Ladybird.
Well, actually, it's not, and it's ridiculous.
You should just go to city college.
You know, with your work ethic, just go to city college and then to jail and then back to city college.
And then maybe you'd learn to pull yourself up and not expect everybody to beat everything.
She just throws herself out of the car.
It's the opening scene of the movie.
It's quite entertaining and quite gripping.
I didn't find it great.
I don't think it's a great movie.
I mean, I don't think they really make great movies nowadays.
It's not big enough.
It's just a tiny little film.
I was touched, though, by its kind of old-fashioned values.
I mean, it sort of centers her in this Catholic world that you realize as the movie goes on is really the best thing about her life.
And it's kind of symbolized by the fact that her name is Christine, a female version of Christ, and she doesn't want to be called that.
She wants to be called Ladybird.
And that battle is sort of part of the whole theme of the movie.
Anyway, really worth watching, I would say, you know, on DVD.
Another one I've watched so far is Molly's Game with Jessica Chastain.
This is by Aaron Sorkin.
Everybody knows Aaron Sorkin, right?
He's the one writer in Hollywood that everybody knows.
He's the guy who wrote the West Wing, created the West Wing.
He's a, you know, I became a, I'm probably one of the first people to become really aware of Aaron Sorkin because what became his movie, A Few Good Men, was a Broadway play before it was a movie.
And I saw it on Broadway.
And I remember thinking, wow, this is a really talented, shallow guy.
And that's what I remember thinking that as I watched the play, and I think he's still talented.
I think he's less shallow.
I think as he's grown older, he's become a little bit richer.
The problem with this movie, it's really well written, and Aaron Sorkin does a really good job with it.
And Jessica Chastain is a good actress, and Indris Elba is in it, who is one of the best actors around.
I love watching him.
It's 133 minutes long.
And anybody who just looked at the description would say, yeah, bring this in.
I'll give you an hour and 45 minutes.
Bring it in at an hour and 45 minutes.
Why they let him do this movie that just goes on and on and on, I have no idea.
I mean, because this has a lot of good stuff in it, but it's just too long, but too long by 40 minutes.
However, however, I do not know if Kevin Costner can win an Academy Award, but he turns in a small performance in this as Molly's father.
It's about a girl who wants to be an Olympic skier but gets terribly injured, never gets that wish, and ends up running a high-stakes poker game and gets arrested for breaking the law.
And it's about her story as she goes forward.
It's tell backward and forward in time.
And he plays her father, her hard-driving psychiatrist father.
And he is so good in this movie.
Kevin Costner can be kind of a lazy actor sometimes.
Like he shows up and you get the feeling he doesn't, you know, all right, I'll give a performance.
But when he turns up, man, he is great and he turns up in spades in this.
And this is this wonderful scene where he shows up at the moment of crisis and he's a therapist and he offers to give her three-minute therapy.
I want to check your pulse.
Have you found a pulse?
Yeah.
Just admire my watch.
I can see you're getting warmed up, but I really don't have the emotional bandwidth to defend my as usual irresponsible behavior.
I know.
I got your email.
I get that I'm not welcome in your life right now as your father, though you should know I can give if I'm welcome or not.
But I'm not here in my capacity as your father.
I'm indifferent to whether your father lives or dies.
I'm a very expensive therapist and I'm here to give you one free session.
You think what I need right now is a therapist?
Yeah.
And he gives her a three-minute therapy session and he says, it's wonderful how quick this goes when you're not charging by the hour.
Anyway, if you got more than two hours to spend, I wish I could just recommend it and say sit and enjoy it, but it's just too long, you know.
I mean, you don't get that 40 minutes back at the end of your life.
So, you know, it's got some great stuff in it, and Kevin Costner is, he is just amazing.
But I want to talk about stuff I like, and here's the thing I want to recommend to you.
There is a show on the History Channel making absolutely no splash whatsoever called Nightfall.
And I've seen the first episodes, which I guess are like three or four episodes.
It's produced by Jeremy Remmer, Dominic Miguela.
But it's such an interesting thing.
It's about the end of the Templars, which is one of the most dramatic stories in medieval history.
The Knights Templar were destroyed by the king, you know, and charged with all kinds of, you know, homosexuality and stuff like this.
But what it really is, is it's the story of the Holy Grail from the King Arthur myth, pushed up from whenever that mythical time of Arthurian legend is into the 13th, 14th century when this happened.
So all the characters there, Gowan is there and Galahad, not Galahad, yeah, Galahad.
Galahad is in it.
I mean, all the characters from the Holy Grail are there.
The queen is having an affair and the king, you know, just like in King Arthur.
And the lead guy whose name's Sir Landry is essentially Sir Lancelot.
And it's just a weird, weird thing that they take that myth and then push it onto this historical thing.
I have to say, so far they have treated the Christianity of the Knights with great respect and not, you know, not endorsing it.
It's not a Christian story, but they've treated it with great respect.
They have not romanticized the Saracens, the Muslims in the Crusades and all this.
So I really have appreciated that.
I don't know where it's going because I haven't seen enough of it, but it's really fun.
It is really fun, really well written.
Here is a brief promo that they put out for it.
Every man has two sides.
The man he wants to be.
The man he really is.
This is the future of our church, Europe united under the one true God.
No heretics, no kings.
This is defiance.
My God, Landry, I cannot remember it.
I decide what is best for Franz.
I am Franz!
She's mad for power.
So am I.
So are you.
So is everyone who leads men.
They have frozen!
A mighty opponent!
It's a good promo.
And it also, I just have to plug this woman, Olivia Ross, who plays Queen Joan.
She plays the queen in it.
She is so beautiful and so sexy.
She's a Shakespearean actress that nobody's ever heard of until now.
And she is an absolute revelation.
She's just such a joy just to look at her.
But she's also a really good actress.
Olivia Ross: Queen Joan Revealed00:00:53
All right, Another Kingdom will take you through tomorrow.
Another, the first of the last three episodes of Another Kingdom comes out tomorrow.
It will get you through one part of the Clavenless weekend.
Then you're on your own.
However, we will be back on Monday.
So gather here if you survive.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer, Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
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The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing Production.