Ep. 127 - Is It Time To Turn On Trump? ft. Howie Carr
A $1.3 billion omnibus budget that preserves and expands Obama era initiatives has conservatives wondering: with Republicans like this, who needs Democrats? Is it time to turn on Trump? We analyze the budget and the state of conservative policy alongside Howie Carr, author of “What Really Happened: How Donald J. Trump Saved America From Hillary Clinton.” Then, three cheers for John Bolton!
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A $1.3 trillion omnibus budget that preserves and expands Obama-era initiatives has conservatives wondering, with Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?
Is it time to turn on Donald Trump?
We will analyze the budget and the state of conservative policy alongside Howie Carr, author of What Really Happened?
How Donald J. Trump Saved America from Hillary Clinton.
Then, three cheers for John Bolton.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
We're here.
You can tell I'm not in my regular broom closet of the Ben Shapiro Show.
I'm in New York.
I'm going to be in New York for the next week or so.
I'll be giving a speech at Yeshiva University tonight, and then I'll be giving a speech at Ithaca College on Thursday.
The main takeaway from this, of course, is that if you don't write a book, then people will invite you to speak.
If you don't use words at all, then people will assume you're good at using words and come give a talk.
We're going to be talking tonight about why the left is so humorless, why the right is so funny right now and the left has absolutely no sense of humor.
And then the speech on Thursday will be titled, Give Me That Old Time Religion, America's Christian Foundation.
So, two related topics in this beautiful comedy of our lives.
But, you know, if you're around, maybe I'll see you around the streets of New York.
A good place to check would be all of the cigar bars.
We have a lot to talk about today.
I want to thank our friends at National Review, by the way.
National Review is very kindly hosting me.
I was going to do my podcast from just the streets of New York, just kind of walking around, looking at the sky, you know, tattered clothing.
But they've been very warm and they've taken me in.
It's very nice of them.
So thank you again to NR.
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Okay.
We should get into this.
I am going to analyze the budget a little bit later in the show.
Conservatives are very upset about this.
Conservatives are very rightly upset about all this.
My whole Twitter feed over the weekend was just people saying, should we turn on Trump now?
Is this it?
Are conservatives done with Trump?
And I did keep going back to this question of gratitude.
We've gotten some good stuff out of Trump, and also he saved us from that hellish nightmare of a Hillary Clinton presidency, which we shouldn't underestimate how terrible that would be.
I did an interview with radio host Howie Carr, because Howie is the author of a new book, What Really Happened?
How Donald J. Trump Saved America from Hillary Clinton.
You know, very nice, subtle title.
It's a really fun book.
I highly recommend reading it.
I talked to Harry about this before the budget came out, and so you shouldn't judge Howie as though this were coming out after the budget.
But here are some of his thoughts.
He knows Donald Trump.
He's known him for years.
He was the last radio person to speak to him before the election results came in in 2016.
So let's cut to Howie for his perspective.
Then we'll look at the budget, and then we'll talk about how great John Bolton is.
Howie, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me, Michael.
The book is called What Really Happened?
How Donald J. Trump Saved America from Hillary Clinton.
A far, far better book than What Happened, written by my third cousin once removed Hillary, the only book in history for which the cover answered its own question.
Thanks for damning me with faint praise.
By the way, here's the cover of the book.
You can order it on Amazon.com or HowieCarsShow.com.
Click on store.
It is really good.
I really have to encourage every conservative and Republican to read this book.
It is...
First of all, you'll learn a lot of things you didn't know.
Second of all, it is such a joy.
It is the grin I don't think left my face from the beginning to the end, reliving this wonderful event and kind of learning what was going on back behind the scenes.
But the title says it all, doesn't it?
You know, a lot of Trump critics on the right insist this wasn't a binary election.
Oh, Trump isn't that great.
He tweeted some awful thing.
He doesn't hold his Chardonnay glass by the stem.
Right?
We were headed for four to eight years of Hillary Clinton, 12 to 16 years of Democrat rule.
That awful woman who campaigned on gutting the First and Second Amendment, who called conservatives deplorable and irredeemable.
How bad would it have been had Hillary won?
Oh, it would have been awful.
I mean, I was prepared for the worst when it was on Election Day.
I thought it was over.
You know, again, you I mean, she had publicly said she was going after gun rights and free speech.
You know, she called it Citizens United and the Heller decision on the Second Amendment.
But, you know, read between the lines.
That's what she was talking about, the First Amendment and the Second Amendment.
And she would have put on some extreme liberal on the Supreme Court.
They would have had the majority five to four, maybe six to three.
It would have been horrible.
Open borders, unvetted immigration from terrorist-influenced countries.
It just would have been a total disaster.
You know, confiscatory tax rates, deficits out of control.
It would have been horrible.
We got a break.
The United States of America got a break on November 8, 2016.
That's what it felt like.
It felt like a relief.
And you write in the book, you say, quote, Now it would be up to a thrice-married, potty-mouthed, one-time casino-owning billionaire from Queens to defend Adams' moral and religious people, to be the last conservative standing athwart the tide of history, as William F. Buckley once wrote, yelling, Stop!
I think you're right.
What does that tell us about our political culture?
Fifty years ago, we had a bookish Catholic wasp from Yale to bring the conservatives to victory.
Now we need a boar from Queens.
What does that mean about our culture now?
Obviously, the culture has been coarsened, but I think the Adams people, I referred to John Adams saying that you need a religious, moral people to keep a republic.
I think John Adams' descendants, the people he was talking about, they understand that they are and were up against the wall, and they needed a bodyguard.
I quoted Tucker Carlson before he took over Bill O'Reilly's slot, and he was writing, I think it was in Politico, and he said, they're not looking for a moral exemplar.
They're looking for a bodyguard.
It's the same thing.
That's why Stormy Daniels, you know, CNN and MSNBC can have all the fun they want with Stormy Daniels.
But that's not going to cost Donald Trump any votes.
It will not cost him one single vote.
And if they think that that is what is going to bring this guy down, they are living in a fantasy.
Now, I think you were Donald Trump's last interview before the polls closed on election night.
Did he think that he was going to win?
Did you have that sense from him?
Well, I don't think he still would have been working the phones, you know, at 6.30 on election night if he hadn't thought he was going to win.
The night before the election, election eve, I was in Manchester broadcasting from my affiliate up there, and then we went over to the rally that he had, and that's where he pulled the letters out from Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, endorsing him.
And, of course, it had been endorsed earlier, more or less, by Tom Brady, the quarterback.
And, you know, but after he left Manchester that night, he flew to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And he had a rally at 1230 in the morning in Election Day in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And that's why I laughed when I saw Michael Wolff's book earlier this year saying, oh, he didn't really think he was going to win.
He didn't even want to win.
You know, come on.
You don't go to a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan at 1230 in the morning on Election Day if you don't want to win.
And he obviously wanted to win.
I mean, he's still angry about losing New Hampshire, you know?
I saw him right after Christmas at Mar-a-Lago, and he was asking me about New Hampshire, because I'm on eight stations in New Hampshire.
And he said, why did they pass such a weak voter vote?
This is the same-day registration, right?
Same-day registration, right.
There were 6,000 people did same-day registration on Election Day, and he lost the state by 3,000 votes, and Kelly Ayotte, the Republican senator, lost her Senate seat by 1,000 votes.
And according to New Hampshire law, you have six months after you vote as a same-day registrant to transfer your driver's license.
And the Secretary of State's office in New Hampshire did a study, and of the 6,000 people who took ballots under the same-day registration law, only 1,000 of them re-registered.
So that means that...
The election probably was stolen from him.
And it was definitely stolen from Kelly Ayotte.
And he's very disturbed about that.
Every time I've talked to him since the election, he's brought up New Hampshire.
And I'll bet he's still thinking about it.
That's so interesting because from the Michael Wolff book, you say, oh, he doesn't care.
He was just joking.
He didn't really want to win.
But when you talk to people who know the guy, who have spoken to him about it, he's tracking everything.
And I would not be surprised at all.
People have no idea what it's like on the ground.
I have seen buses of voters come in across state lines.
You see these things happen at polling places, and the Democrats are just better at it than we are.
And speaking of another aspect of the Democrat political establishment, let's forget about Hillary for a second, or hopefully forever.
I see you right in the book about the mainstream media's incestuous relationship with Democrats, and it's even more shocking than I had realized.
I spent half of my life harping on the mainstream media, but the relationships you describe are staggering.
How against Trump was the deck stacked in 2016?
It was totally stacked.
You see the surveys they do every once in a while, you know, how many positive stories versus negative stories it gets, and it's over 90% negative.
But I think the problem, Michael, is that when I was coming up in the mainstream media, what you did was you started out, you know, whether you were in TV or newspapers, which I was in both, you started out like a regional newspaper or a regional TV station, and you worked your way up to a major market.
But now, as I said in what really happened, the way you move up now is you're a Democrat operative.
And most of these people that you see on the cable news shows have never been reporters.
They've never covered a fire.
They never covered the police beat.
They never covered the county commissioners.
Look at who you have.
You have Stephanopoulos, Clinton's spokesman.
You have Jake Tapper.
He worked for Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law, who was a congressman, and her husband went to prison for bank fraud.
He was a congressman, too.
Still owes $10 million.
He hasn't made restitution for.
You have Chuck Todd from NBC.
He was a spokesman for Tom Harkin, one of the stolen valor senator from Iowa who claimed he was a combat pilot in Vietnam.
He was a pilot, but just on cargo planes.
I mean, these people, you know, I guess Tim Russert and Chris Matthews started the trend.
They were both aides to Democrat politicians.
Matthews to Tip O'Neill, the speaker, and Russert to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
But that's the way you move on.
All of them are so married into it.
I could just go on for an hour just talking about all the people who were married in.
David Gregory's wife, right?
She was always representing the Clinton aides.
Right.
She was representing all the people in the email scandal, and she got them all, you know, grants of immunity.
And Savannah Guthrie is married to, I think, one of Al Gore's people.
And Christiane Amanpour was married to James Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
And look at Chelsea Clinton gets the job at NBC. The most highly paid internship in the history of the world.
Right.
$600,000.
$600,000.
And she's the only intern, Michael, who ever had her own producer.
You know, I clearly was doing internships wrong.
I really should have demanded more in my negotiations.
One title I want to ask you about, chapter four, you title, Never Complain, Never Explain.
Why is that?
Well, that's an old saying from a Boston mayor, James Michael Curley, and that's what he always said, you know, never respond to criticism.
And I used that one time I was with Trump on going up to a rally in Bangor, Maine.
Because again, for someone who didn't know, didn't want to win the presidency, he knew how Maine operated.
They separate the congressional districts in the electoral college vote.
So he knew he couldn't take southern Maine, but he could take northern Maine, and he did.
So he kept going back to Bangor and northern Maine, central Maine, to campaign.
So I went with him one day from Boston to campaign in Bangor.
And I decided I was going to get a good response from the crowd.
So it was being live streamed.
It was on cable TV. So I said, and you know, our senator in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.
And so...
Two minutes later, I'm walking off the stage and one of Trump's aides says, they're already coming after you, Howie.
He shows me on his cell phone.
They're already attacking me on Politico and everything.
I thought it was a joke because, I mean, how could it be racist?
She's not an Indian.
She's a white person masquerading as a Native American.
So I didn't really care.
We were on the plane back to New York after the rally.
And I told Trump when it happened that he said to me, whatever you do, Howie, don't apologize.
Don't apologize.
He said, remember Jimmy the Greek?
He was doing okay until he said he was sorry.
Then it was like that.
That's right.
I know.
Then I told him about the quote from James Michael Curley, never complain, never explain.
I like that you're quoting Curly and Trump is quoting Jimmy the Greek.
That's a beautiful image.
I have one last question before we let you go.
I know we're on a tight time limit here.
Trump 2020.
There's no Hillary to save us from.
Will Trump be able to muster the same coalition to defeat whichever other old geriatric socialist they drum up?
Or is the Trump victory primarily about saving America from Hillary Clinton?
I don't know the answer to that question, Michael.
I said at the end of my book that I didn't know if he's like a one-off guy like Julian the Apostate, you know, the Roman emperor.
He was the last pagan emperor.
His parents were Christians.
He tried to bring it back, and he was the one guy.
Or Oliver Cromwell.
The new model army.
He seemed to be a game changer until he wasn't a game changer.
I don't know how it's going to play out.
I certainly hope he gets another four years.
He needs that to even begin to drain the swamp and the deep state.
Of course.
Well, one hopes that he can pivot.
You know, luckily with the Democrats, we can always count on them to shoot themselves in the foot.
So maybe they'll run an even more unlikable, desiccated, socialistic candidate next time.
We'll just have to see.
I suggest...
I think that's an endorsement.
I don't think she's going to make it, unfortunately.
I don't think she's going to make it.
I really hope they pick this up, that Howie Carr has endorsed the Democrat nominee Elizabeth Focahontas-Liawatha-Warren for president.
Howie Carr, thank you so much for being here.
Listen to his show.
Buy this book.
It is so enjoyable.
I promise it is going to be the most enjoyable reading you do for a while.
What Really Happened?
How Donald J. Trump Saved America from Hillary Clinton.
Howie, I'll talk to you soon.
Thank you, Michael Knowles.
I appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
He's so diplomatic, isn't he?
It's unbelievable.
We really clearly had a melding of the minds.
I should have put on my Pocahontas dress and then we really could have come together.
Howie Carr.
So that's all the good stuff about Donald Trump.
It does remind me, it does warm the cockles of my heart.
Not the cockles, the cockles of my heart.
To think about what he saved us from, because it really would have been awful.
Hillary Clinton was campaigning on gutting the First and Second Amendments.
Those were separate tabs on her campaign website.
So there is all that.
Now we've got to talk about how awful this budget is.
I try to defend the president here.
I'm a member of a team.
I'm on the Republican team.
Donald Trump has done great work, so I give him more grace than I would give to Liz Warren, Pocahontas, or whatever.
This budget is really, really bad.
We're going to talk about how bad it is.
But out of deference to my party and president, we're going to do it after the paywall.
Because we have to talk about that.
I also have to talk about John Bolton.
What a wonderful, amazing appointment this is.
And why people get him totally wrong.
They treat him like a caricature.
We'll delve a little bit more into John Bolton.
go to dailywire.com right now, then you hear the whole thing.
What do you get for $10 a month, $100 annual membership?
You get me, you get the Andrew Klavan Show, you get the Ben Shapiro Show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag.
Now, everybody can listen to the mailbag, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
Many are called, but few are chosen.
Same thing with the conversation.
You can ask questions in the conversation.
Next up, I believe, is the Supreme Lord of the multiverse himself, Andrew Klavan.
You get all of that, but none of that really matters.
What you really need is the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Now, obviously, mine is parked outside in Manhattan.
The Leftist Tears are just constantly flowing.
I lived in Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy.
It reminds me a lot like that.
So I've got it parked out there so I can ride it all the way back down to the financial district where I'm staying.
You have to go get that.
I also would like to put in one A little plug, because we're here at National Review, they've been very nice to us.
The William F. Buckley Jr.
program at Yale is hosting the Disinvitation Dinner.
They do this dinner every year where they take some speaker who's been disinvited from a college campus and they give him a speech to give.
It is a really wonderful dinner.
I was, I think, the first fellow of the Bill Buckley program at Yale, or in the first year of student fellows.
It's a wonderful program.
One of the few things that is...
Pushing intellectual diversity on college campuses.
I can't speak highly enough of it.
That dinner is going to be addressed by Charles Murray this year.
Charles Murray is wonderful.
So that will be Wednesday, April 18th.
That will be at the Metropolitan Club in New York City.
Black tie optional.
It's going to be super chic.
So if you're interested, check it out at the Buckley Program.
Reach out to them.
It is a wonderful event.
If I can be in town, I certainly will be attending it myself.
Okay, go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back to talk about all the bad Trump.
I try to resist this the best I could.
You know, Ben does the good Trump, bad Trump thing.
I really try to resist that.
I am a partisan.
He is my guy.
I really want to defend him.
This budget is so terrible.
This budget is so phenomenally terrible.
I can't get over it.
In the past, we know that Donald Trump has called for budgets that will end the Tiger Program, grants for transportation projects from the Obama stimulus, that will end ARPA-E, an Obama-era energy research agency, that ends the CDBG, which is an urban slush fund, the CBGB, I don't know, the ABCDEFG, all of these agencies, all of this constant funding.
He said, we've got to slash that, we've got to cut that, we need to Fund the wall.
Mexico's going to pay for it.
We'll build this big wall.
We need $23 billion to build the wall.
What happened in the actual budget?
Triples the funding for Tiger.
Doubles the CDBG. It boosts ARPA-E budgets.
It increases the Energy Department renewables budget by 14%.
The Energy Department should not exist.
I believe this was the department that Rick Perry forgot the name of that he was going to cut.
This department should not exist.
We should be slashing its funding.
We're now increasing its renewables budget 14%.
It increases non-military spending.
$63 billion.
We should be slashing non-military spending.
There's no cut in funding to sanctuary cities, as was promised and threatened.
There are no new detention facilities for illegal aliens.
It doesn't eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities, as Donald Trump promised.
Not that I think we need to end those things.
I don't really care.
It's not a lot of money.
But doesn't do it.
Doesn't cut Pell Grants.
Doesn't cut Head Start, the Obama Education Program.
Doesn't cut funding to the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, or the CDC, Center for Disease Control, both of which are Extraordinarily wasteful and get involved in things that they have no business being involved in.
It even maintained the EPA's level of funding.
The EPA, villain number one.
Scott Prude has done a great job at that agency, slashing the bureaucracy, but they're maintaining their funding, which is outrageous because they're cutting their staff.
It rolls back a ban on the CDC researching guns as a disease.
So right now, there's a ban.
The CDC can't...
We don't research guns as a disease because, as you might realize, guns are not a disease.
They're a constitutionally protected civil right.
The Democrats have always wanted to research them as a disease because they want to pretend that every terrible thing they don't like, you know, freedom, liberty, defense of our civil rights, that that's a disease somehow.
Well, too bad.
It's going to roll back that.
And we don't get anything in return.
The Freedom Caucus said, OK, we'll roll back that provision as long as we can get reciprocity for concealed carry throughout the states.
Did we get that?
Absolutely not.
This bill, this omnibus budget, strengthens gun background checks, because I get whatever.
I mean, we have strong background checks already, and the government just fails to do its job.
And in some cases, like the shooting in Florida, the school district intentionally tries to hide all of the warning signs.
And in the case of the federal government, Barack Obama used that district as an example of how we should stop disciplining people.
There are a lot of gun laws on the books, tens of thousands of gun laws on the books already, but okay, he's going to strengthen background checks.
For what reason?
I have absolutely no idea.
I give $6 billion to the National Science Foundation.
I know these things all sound nice.
I have a lot of graduate student friends, a lot of people who are in grad school.
The NSF is mostly a scam.
The NSF, as Reason Magazine has pointed out, funds studies on how sea monkeys swim in formation, to teach land monkeys how to gamble, they run shrimp on treadmills, and watching humans play Farmville.
Those are some of the studies that your tax dollars are funding at the NSF. Really, they're just funding grad students who want to get free money, and those are the sort of things that they're seeing.
Planned Parenthood is funded for some reason.
No idea why.
They just did it.
Now, I understand.
Maybe it's hard to defund Planned Parenthood.
Maybe you need to get some concession from the other side.
You're willing to negotiate.
What negotiation?
What art of the deal?
This budget is terrible.
It's hard to blame the congressman here because no person has read this 2,000-page bill.
Nobody has read it whatsoever.
Rand Paul tweeted out a picture of him.
They took him 10 hours to print it or something like that.
No one has read it.
The President hasn't read it.
No member of Congress has read it.
Trump actually says he hates the budget.
He said, don't ever send me another one like this again.
But he signed it anyway.
He said it was a matter of national security.
Military funding is a matter of national security, but what about the art of the deal?
Come on, man.
If we lose the House, which I'm actually not predicting, but history would tell us that there's a very good chance we're going to lose the House.
If we lose the House, then have we just squandered our opportunity here?
Very frustrating.
That's the bad.
There is some good stuff in this budget.
Not enough to make up for the bad, but it hikes defense spending 10%.
I suppose that's fine.
2.6% military pay raise.
Fine by me.
$1.6 billion for border security.
I guess that's good, but that money explicitly cannot be spent on the wall.
The wall is going to cost $23 billion.
That's what Trump requested.
So far, we have $0 allocated for that and $1.6 billion for border security.
It's a drop in the bucket.
There is a 6% cut in foreign aid and other State Department programs.
Good.
That's a start.
It's less than the 25% we were promised, but that's fine.
It nixed some slush money for New York.
New York City Gateway Rail Tunnel Project, that's not in.
Okay.
There's no amnesty for illegal aliens.
Good.
And it doesn't stabilize Obamacare, which was a real risk that that would make it into the budget.
It didn't.
Okay.
That legitimately is a win.
Very, very frustrating.
Very frustrating.
So is it time to turn on Trump?
That's the question.
Is it time for conservatives to turn on Trump?
No.
The answer is no.
It isn't.
It's easy to get emotional about these single issues.
There's a lot of spending.
A lot of things that we were hoping for didn't happen.
But a lot of things don't happen in the first year of a presidency or the first two years in a presidency.
You can't do everything.
And I am reminded of the Heritage Foundation, which shows that Donald Trump has completed two-thirds of its agenda and says he's completing it at a faster rate than even Ronald Reagan did.
Now you might say Ronald Reagan had a Democrat Congress.
That's true.
You might say Donald Trump has more to run up against than any president in modern history.
They're throwing spaghetti at the wall, the March for Our Lives, the Women's March, the Stormy Daniels interview for some reason.
They're throwing everything they can at this guy.
It's totally incoherent.
It's just because they hate him.
91% to 93% of mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is negative.
There are federal bureaucracies and activists within the Democratic Party who are trying to undermine this president, who have been trying to delegitimize this president from day one.
Okay, that's fine.
Those are a lot of excuses.
I hope Donald Trump is right.
I hope he's right and he says, I'll never sign a bill like this again.
Because he can't hold us forever.
He cannot hold us forever.
I mean, this is signaling that we need to strengthen gun control laws and we need to fund all of these agencies.
Not good stuff.
It's really not good stuff.
I'm still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because, as we talked about with Howie, things are a lot better than they would have been.
And they're a lot better than any other Republican who somehow miraculously would have been elected.
They're better probably than we would have seen there.
But that rope doesn't go on forever.
I mean, you can't There cannot be another bill like this.
So we'll see.
Now, on the same day that they announced this omnibus bill, Donald Trump appointed John Bolton to be the national security advisor.
And I think he did this just to make me feel happier.
I think he did this for conservatives who were going to be so angry about this awful budget.
They said, okay, I've got to give him something.
Let's fire McMaster and hire John Bolton.
If you're unfamiliar with John Bolton, here's just a little tour of who he is.
The point that I want to leave with you in this very brief presentation is where I started.
There is no United Nations.
There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world, and that's the United States, when it suits our interests.
And when we can get others to go along.
The secretariat building in New York has 38 stories.
If you lost 10 stories today, it would make a bit of difference.
The United States makes the U.N. work when it wants it to work.
And that is exactly the way it should be because the only question, the only question for the United States is what's in our national interest.
And if you don't like that, I'm sorry, but that is the fact.
Yeah, John Bolton...
God bless America.
That is such moral clarity.
People are trotting this clip out and they're saying, see, he's crazy.
He's unhinged.
That is such moral clarity.
There is no such thing as the United Nations.
There is no such of all of us coming together and holding hands.
There is one moral leader in this entire world.
And that's the United States of America.
The most moral, the most generous, the most prosperous, the freest country in the history of the world.
And then there are a lot of other people.
And they don't all play by our rules.
And it's not like they're all happy-go-lucky and trying to help out one another.
They're all bombing each other and trying to do horrible things.
The United States can exert moral leadership when it serves our interests.
People on the right, the left is trying to gin up anger on the right against John Bolton.
And mark my words, it is people on the left who are doing this.
Vox.com ran an article, why conservatives are very angry about John Bolton.
Washington Post is feeding these sort of things.
When was the last time you knew what conservatives wanted Vox?
What made you the spokesman for conservatives in America?
What they're trying to do is paint him as a neocon, a neoconservative.
You know, those guys who want to spread democracy abroad and they get a little too abstract and all of those things.
Because he worked for George W. Bush and his administration was largely neoconservative.
Interested in spreading democracy abroad, Wilsonian in its foreign outlook.
John Bolton is not a neocon.
He's not a neoconservative.
He's not interested in spreading democracy abroad as a good, above all other goods, a good in itself.
He's interested, as he just said, about the United Nations, in the strategic interests of the United States.
What serves our interest, that's what we will do.
And coincidentally, it will be good for the rest of the world.
It's a caricature to call him a neoconservative.
I must say, a little bit of disclosure, I am friends with the Bolton family, but I've admired the guy before.
We were friends, and I really like them personally.
I got to meet him in D.C. one time years and years ago, and he's one of the smartest people I've met in Washington.
You can ask him to talk about, I don't know, Afghanistan, and he'll just monologue.
He'll just go.
He's so supremely knowledgeable.
You will not find anyone in D.C. who says that he isn't knowledgeable.
By the way, at the U.N., he had a lot of accomplishments.
There's this caricature that he's never seen a country he doesn't want to bomb because he suggests that preemptive war is not a terrible idea, which obviously it isn't.
It's a perfectly reasonable idea.
But at the UN, he had a lot of accomplishments.
He created a new partnership with Interpol to strengthen sanctions against al-Qaeda.
He got the Security Council to adopt sanctions against those individuals who contributed to the genocide in Darfur.
He lifted sanctions against Liberia to help President Asirleev after the brutal reign of that country's previous leader.
He was closely involved in diplomatic efforts in Burma, Burundi, and Congo.
He pushed Ethiopia and Eritrea to accept International efforts in those countries.
He was diplomatic but strong on preventing Iran from enriching uranium.
And as tensions with North Korea are reaching a fever pitch, it seems no coincidence that just now John Bolton is being named NSA. He was very strong on North Korea, very tough.
Called him like he saw him and said that it's a mass murderous, hellish regime.
By the way, the North Koreans, Kim Jong-il at that time, said that John Bolton was a bloodsucker.
They called him a bunch of other names, too.
So you can see the Vox doesn't like him, the Washington Post doesn't like him, and the Kim dynasty in North Korea doesn't like him, and then good conservatives do like John Bolton.
Should tell you a lot about what you need to know in that case.
He speaks very bluntly.
He takes America's strategic interests at heart.
And it's very good to have that voice in the ear of the president.
That is a move to the right.
And it's a little different from what Trump talked about on the campaign trail, but that is all right by me.
I'll leave on a high note, because this budget was so depressing.
But there is at least a glimmer of hope there.
We'll see what happens with it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow.
I'll probably be in some other cavern somewhere in New York.
