Lord Conrad Black’s Donald Trump: A President Like No Other contrasts Trump’s "everyman" business grit—mixing extermination poison, digging coal in West Virginia—to elite politicians’ cultural disconnect, like Obama calling miners "clingers." Black argues Trump’s bluntness (e.g., "shithole countries") and trade policies targeting Mexico’s $65B surplus and China’s market dumping reflect a pragmatic, fairness-driven approach, reversing post-American decline. His book, praised by Ezra Levant as a balanced yet "breezy" antidote to media bias, frames Trump’s resilience against adversaries—from mob figures to Kim Jong-un—as honed in cutthroat business battles, unlike Obama’s passive foreign policy. Trump’s social media dominance and potential to weaponize platforms like Twitter against oligarchs (e.g., Bezos) could redefine political warfare, with immigration a key 2024 rallying cry. [Automatically generated summary]
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All right, without further ado.
Tonight, a special conversation with author and historian Conrad Black about his new book, Donald Trump, A President Like No Other.
You're watching The Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
You come here once a year with a sign, and you feel morally superior.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I publish it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
Welcome back.
Well, a very exciting day today on Victoria Day.
The entire show will be dedicated to a new book on Donald Trump, published by Conrad Black.
The book is called Donald Trump, a President Like No Other.
And joining us now in studio is Lord Black himself.
Welcome to the show.
Great to have you in the studio.
Thank you, Adrian.
Thanks for having me over.
I'm a fan of yours.
I haven't been in a long time, but I want to tell you, let me confess to you, when I heard you had this new book out, I was nervous because you've written some very thick books of history before, and I thought, this is going to be a slog.
I was ready for a phone book.
This was a 256-page, breezy, readable, fun book.
Some pages you laugh out loud, some pages you say Donald Trump's a rascal.
And you know what?
I think you managed to be fair, but not to suck up to Trump and not to be a gotcha critic either.
No, no, no.
I tried to play it right down the middle.
And the true Trump is, in fact, a very entertaining person.
So a book about him should be rather entertaining.
Yeah, you know, a president like no other.
That's sort of an ambiguous statement.
You could say that if you were a Trump hater or a Trump lover.
But he's such a great person.
But no one can dispute that that is true.
There's never been one like that of that country anyway.
A lot of people despise him.
What's interesting to me is a lot of his critics today, 10 years ago, would have been his super fans, or at least people who wanted to bask in his celebrity and his wealth.
Well, they'd see him as fine in his place, as a sort of blowhard billionaire, but the idea that he wanted to take over the system and kick out the people that he said had misgoverned the country for the last 15 years, obviously that offends all those who identify with the people who've been established in office in both parties all that time.
You have an interesting and quick history of his family life.
A very interesting family.
And there was always, you say it beautifully, there's always been a drop of the showboat in the American culture, a little bit more than our Canadian culture.
Considerably more.
And it goes right to the start.
I mean, the Declaration of Independence is beautifully written by Thomas Jefferson.
But in the midst of it, there's a blood libel on the native people.
There is an indictment of poor old King George III that makes him sound like someone who was on trial at Nuremberg.
And he wasn't.
He wasn't a terribly competent king, but he wasn't an evil man, for heaven's sakes.
And the Americans were the first important country in the world that weren't defined by a culture unique to them.
I mean, the French spoke French, the Spanish spoke Spanish and so forth, and the English were the, or British were the English-speaking country.
So the Americans, as a substitute, devised the theory that we are the first free country.
Well, of course, they weren't.
They had no more civil liberties than the British or the Swiss or the Dutch or most of the Scandinavians.
But that was what they staked out, and it's worked.
And if it works, don't knock it.
In a way, it was a country more about the future than the past.
Exactly.
You know, and the history of Trump, would you call him a swashbuckler?
You use a lot of great adjectives.
Yeah, he's certainly that.
And in preserio.
That too.
You know, and at the worst, sort of a carnival guy, you know, I mean, a huckster, but P.T. Barnum, all that, but also a statesman.
He runs the gamut.
I mean, in some ways, he's a slightly down market salesman.
But in some ways, he's a great patriotic American leader.
Hands Dirty Politician00:03:42
And that's the thing.
It's interesting.
Right now, there's a question of black America.
Can they embrace Trump?
And you've seen Kanye West and others break with the taboo and consider Republicans.
And it's funny because until very, very recently, Donald Trump was the star subject of hundreds of rap songs because in some ways he embodied the audacious American dream, get rich, live fancy.
I mean, he wasn't part of the gun culture.
And he was sort of anti-establishment, which they identified with.
Well, how is it possible to be a blue-collar billionaire?
Because the blue-collar thing, really, it's not as if he ever worked with a blue-collar on, but the blue-collar aspect, and the way you mean it, is a person not interested in spending all his time going to opera committees and being on the social pages of the New York Times.
He's someone who started relatively modestly in socioeconomic terms and made a billion dollars, but still has the sort of everyman mentality and relates to the people.
You know, there's a little passage in your book about how to save money, he would mix his own extermination poison just to prefer the cockroaches.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, that's what I'm saying.
No, sorry, that's right.
Don't leave your viewers to the illusion of what he was trying to explain.
He got his hands dirty in like a million dollars.
No, but his father said, look, we don't have to go and buy this stuff.
We can make it ourselves.
And that's what he did.
There's famous...
I mean, we have to get rid of the roaches.
We can't have roaches in our buildings, but we can make our own insecticide, whatever.
Yeah, but what was interesting to me is that other people, especially those, he didn't come from, he came from some wealth.
Yeah, oh, you know, his father was a wealthy man.
And the idea that he would literally get his hands dirty was something that many people would find either off-putting or too grubby.
His father was a wealthy man, but he didn't start as a wealthy man.
And they weren't the wealthy New York that the world knows.
They weren't Manhattan.
They were Brooklyn and Queens.
They had a very comfortable house, and his father had two Cadillac limousines licensed, New York State license, F1 and F2, FT1 and FT2.
And Fred, Fred Trump.
And so they clearly weren't poor.
And he went to Fordham University and to Horton, University of Pennsylvania.
And prior to that, he matriculated from a New York State Military Academy.
So absolutely was not a rags to riches story, but it was never the socioeconomic topic.
His father was never socially prominent.
He went to the construction sites.
There's famous pictures of Trump with a hard hat in the site.
Now, any boss could come through, but I think he dealt with enough frontline people, grassroots people, to keep that sensibility.
On his holidays, even in high school, he would work for his father on construction sites, not in the office, on construction sites.
Donald knows how to build a building.
He knows every phase of it.
And including, he went to Horton because it was the only business school that had a specialty course in real estate, including construction, the only one.
And so he sought from absolutely the most basic position working with his father's work crews right up through university.
You know, Charles Murray, the great American scholar, I know him well.
Wrote about coming apart, which was one of those books, and how the white working class is being disconnected from the fancy Manhattan, LA cultural capitals.
And he developed a quiz called, How Thick Is Your Bubble.
Trump's Digging Deeper00:15:20
And there's questions in it that are sort of startling.
Like, have you ever been on a factory floor?
Have you ever worked in a job with physical labor that you come home and your body is sore?
Like questions like that that remind liberals, maybe you don't know, maybe you're leftist, but you don't know the working class.
And I think of Donald Trump, and we've got some video clips of Trump over the years, and I'd like to play one for you.
If I may say one thing, I know Charles Murray, and he was here in Toronto several months ago, and there's a dinner for him, quite a large dinner that I went to.
And they invited questions after he'd spoken.
So I asked him, and this was very shortly after Trump was inaugurated, and I asked him if it were not the case that if he succeeded in what he was trying to do, it would possibly reverse the trend he was describing.
He said, absolutely, if he succeeds, it will reverse it, because he is not out of touch.
And there's a respect that he respects working men and women in a way that traditional liberals would put them like in a glass case at a museum and wouldn't want to touch them for fear they had mixed the rat poison.
They would profess sympathy for them as a group but not wish to associate with them as individuals.
Exactly.
And there's one little clip, and I use it from time to time on my shows.
It was at a rally, I think it was in West Virginia, which is about something that's almost as dirty in the mind of the fancy set as an exterminator's pesticide, and that is coal.
It's just a very simple moment, but let me show you a quick clip I'd like to talk about.
Here's Donald Trump talking about coal.
But the miners don't want to leave anyway.
Is that right?
You want to stay here.
You want to open the mines.
We're going to open the mine.
I see over here, Trump digs coal.
Look at that.
Trump digs coal.
That's true.
That's true.
I do.
You know, what a contrast between Hillary Clinton, who in one of her debates said there's going to be a lot of coal miners out of work.
Barack Obama, the same thing.
They say they're for the working class, the working poor, but only if it's, I don't know, the kind of aesthetically fashionable jobs.
Trump digs coal.
That's a shocking thing to say in today's environmental era.
But he always said beautiful, clean coal.
But you'll recall President Obama, when he was running for the office and in the primaries eight, nine years ago running against Hillary Clinton, when she won in Pennsylvania, he made those disparaging remarks about blue-collar Pennsylvanians who took out their frustrations and their lives with guns and religion.
I mean, I think that is quite a lot of people.
Clingers cling to their Bibles.
That was a phrase.
Yeah, but I mean, that's much closer to the disparagement those people feel.
They might in their minds think we want to better their lot.
They're not living well and we want to help them.
They might be sincere in that.
But I don't identify with them.
I think they're idiots.
You know, one of the things that's so I found that Trump digs coal comment interesting for two reasons.
First of all, it's one thing to even say you're with a coal miner because that's an obsolete, old school, that's dirty.
That's the dust that you're facing.
It's blue-collar, white man stuff.
That's not coding in Silicon Valley.
So it's uncool to begin with.
But then Trump actually meant it, and he pulled the United States out of the Paris global warming movement.
Which was the dumbest treaty in history, rivaled only by the Iran nuclear treaty.
I think everyone knows the Paris Global Warming Treaty is sort of a sham, but it's like the emperor has no clothes.
Oh, you can't say that, or it's the third.
Trump pulled America out and the sky didn't fall.
Sky didn't fall.
And meanwhile, the countries left behind who are advanced countries are now having intense discussions amongst themselves about what they are going to do about the $100 billion a year that China and India, the world's greatest polluters, fast-growing economies, are expecting from them.
I want to ask you about this plain spokenness.
And there's a few quotes from your book I want to give.
There's so much to cover.
I tell you, it was hard for me to find excerpts from the book because so many things were, I want to tell you.
Let me pick one from random.
And thank you for your kindness.
Oh, you know what?
I won't lie to you.
I was nervous when I got this book.
I thought, this is going to be heavy duty.
I love every page.
Let me read something.
I think you nailed it.
I think you nailed it.
A lot of people say, oh, Trump, he's insulting.
He has rude nicknames.
He uses words like he calls country shitholes and stuff.
I want to read a paragraph.
By the way, I think it was house and not.
That's right.
Which is slightly late.
That's right.
One of the things he's so good at, I think it's a Manhattan thing, is nicknames.
You give people a nickname and it sticks, they're doomed.
Well, he's got that New York telephone.
Yeah.
I mean, okay.
Let me read from the book.
Instead of leaking research and gossip about rivals, Trump just trotted rumors out directly, no matter how frivolous.
Thus, as time went by, to establish that Senator Lindsey Graham had given his private cell phone number to Trump, he gave it to a crowd of thousands, and he repeated spurious stories about Senator Ted Cruz's father having had an association with Lee Harvey Oswald.
And you go on and give more examples.
But I think the key is your first point there.
Every politician does that, but they just leak those insults or accusations or wild gossip through surrogates.
They plant stories here or there.
Trump just comes out and says it.
Right.
And it's shocking, but at the same time, it's absolutely refreshing and honest.
Well, I'm not Elvis altogether honest, but I agree.
It's refreshingly candid.
And you're perfectly right.
I mean, Franklin D. Roosevelt was always above the fray, but he had some of his entourage who were specialists in absolutely harpooning the opponents, you say.
But his fingerprints were never on it.
But Trump's not like that.
I want to play a clip from a debate.
I'm laughing when I shouldn't laugh.
He tries to get people to laugh, and he's good at it.
Well, and that's the thing, because you're laughing out of shock because he says something you're not supposed to, but then you're laughing because if there's a grain of truth to it, it's going to stick.
And when he low energy Jeb, it sticks because you think, yeah, he is sort of low energy.
Let me play a clip.
Here's him versus Hillary Clinton, and he's saying something you should never say.
Take a look.
She doesn't have the look.
She doesn't have the stamina.
I said she doesn't have the stamina.
And I don't believe she does have the stamina.
To be president of this country, you need tremendous stamina.
Hillary has experience, but it's bad experience.
Saying Hillary Clinton has no stamina, and she was just 10 feet away from him, and she was smiling that rictus grin.
But you know what?
I think it clicked, and there were some health scares for Hillary Clinton on the campus.
She fainted on camera, you know, going after the 9-11 Memorial Day.
And she said she'd had pneumonia for a few days, so there was a problem.
And we see later in some of the access to information documents that came out how often she was napping, she was taking naps every day, sleeping.
I mean, and I don't know if that's something more serious, but Trump just put out there what the undernews, just sort of murmurs.
And he does that on Twitter.
And the other side of it is he does have superhuman stamina.
He almost never sleeps.
He works all the time.
Even people who don't like him at all admit that he is astonishingly persevering and strong physically.
Well, it is quite something.
It's hard to believe.
I think he's actually a year older than Hillary Clinton.
I think more than a year.
He's just about to turn 72 or just as, and I think she's just coming up to 70.
And he looks more vigorous than she does.
I want to say something else, because again, until you put this in words, one of the things I value, I mean, I follow Donald Trump closely, as the whole world does.
And I think I follow him closely because I'm a journalist.
And I sense things, but one of the things I like the best about your book is you crystallize my hunch into a, oh, that's right.
I didn't see it that way.
Let me quote something that I really found valuable.
Trump has learned something about how to gain and hold the respect that is naturally available to the chief of state, and the country has somewhat got used to him.
I think you're right there.
And here's the key.
There are markedly fewer malapropisms.
There have been no bungled foreign initiatives, fewer indiscretions.
His economic program is working, and his enemies are largely a tired coalition of character assassins and hacks.
But let me come back to that first point.
Markedly fewer malapropisms, fewer indiscretions.
Everyone tries to hang.
Trump is so mouthy.
He's so lippy.
But when you think about it, other than the bluntness, he hasn't screwed it up.
And you would think a guy who's always tweeting and shooting from the hip would blow it up.
He hasn't blown it up.
But early on, there were some tweets that were ill-considered, but there are very few of them now.
And look, this may be just neat, but my impression is when you see him now, he has both hands in the podium.
You see the CELO office in the podium, and he looks and sounds like a president.
He's very fluent, and he speaks with authority, and not in that somewhat boastful manner that he used to have.
I mean, when the question was raised about the Nobel Prize, he said, look, that's a nice thought, but it's premature.
What I want is a victory for everybody, for the whole world, not a prize for me.
Now, that was a very intelligent presidential thing to say, and he might not have said that two years ago.
And by the way, there's no chance he's going to get that.
That's determined by a small committee of the Norwegian people.
But he'll give it to Al Gore and Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama just for getting elected and getting up again.
Well, it's a political gift.
Yeah.
But the presidents they should have given it to, President Truman, President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, President Nixon, they didn't give it to them.
President Reagan.
The very first thing in your book is you dedicate it to the presidents you've known.
You list them.
LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush.
Maybe I'm missing one in there.
And Clinton Trump.
The fact is, I knew Jimmy Carter, and I knew George W. Bush, but I must say I didn't want to say this, but I didn't particularly respect them as presidents.
As men, yes, but not as presidents.
Whereas the others, I did admire them.
How did you get to know and meet Trump?
Because I want to ask you a little bit about him.
Well, because we own the Chicago, my associates and I owned the Chicago Sun-Times, and it had a low-rise building in downtown Chicago.
It was clearly a prime site to develop.
And it had been owned by Marshall Field, a department store company and person.
And so he had a low-rise sort of almost, you know, with escalators rather than elevators.
It was almost like a department store.
So the Trump organization's bid was the best bid.
And that's how I got to know him.
And all my American directors said, oh, you know, hang on to your wallet.
This man's a scoundrel and so on.
But he came in exactly on time, exactly on budget, built a very much admired building, 98 stories, had the place full six months before it opened.
He was the best partner I ever had.
And then we stayed friendly after that.
We were neighbors in both New York and Palm Beach.
And he was very loyal to me in my legal difficulties, volunteered to come and give testimony for me.
And so we're friends.
I haven't seen him lately, and I obviously don't bother him in his present position, but we were friends before.
I have a theory I would like to test on you.
My theory about Trump and why he gets away with not malapropisms, but his bluntness, the shit house comment, for example, or his criticism.
Here's my theory.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who, for example, I don't know if you remember that clip when she laughed before the camera was on about we came, we saw, we killed Mohammark Gaddash.
So there was a public Hillary and a private Hillary.
There was the Hillary that acted very presidential, and then there was the brutal Hillary behind the scenes.
The one who gave the secret speech to the South American bankers about open borders and everything, while denying it all.
Yeah, the one who would give speeches and take the big dough from Wall Street and then demon.
My theory is that Donald Trump is absolutely the same in private, in public.
Absolutely the same level of audacity, profanity, brutality, humor.
And that's my theory.
Tell me if that's right.
No, what you see is what you get.
I agree with you.
It's like anything else.
Like all of us in our jobs, we get better at it as we hold it longer and work at it.
And he's seeming more like a president than he did the day he started.
But you're absolutely right.
The Donald Trump one knows is the one one sees.
What is surprising to people who know him are these portrayals of him as a horrible, evil man.
I mean, he isn't that at all.
I mean, he's a tough businessman, but he is a hard-driving man whose objectives are reasonable and commendable.
Your second last paragraph in the whole book.
I'm not going to give it away.
There's so many great, I don't want to give it away, but this, I think you nail it.
With President Trump, no setback is admitted or accepted.
He's defiant.
For him, rebuffs are really victories, disguised victories, moral victories, or the preludes to victories.
Hyperbole, truthful and otherwise, is his common parlance.
He speaks for the people.
He has been a very successful man, and he has repeatedly outwitted his opponents, which is why he's attacked with such snobbery.
You don't hear snobbery used against a billionaire, as in the snobs attack a billionaire.
Normally, it's the other way around.
Envy and spitefulness.
But America is reversing its decline and wrenching itself loose from the habits of lassitude, elitist decay.
That's a mix of things there.
Because normally snobs don't hate a billionaire.
They want to be a billionaire.
How much of it's jealousy?
It's hard to be precise about that.
I think there was condescension to him before as a Vulgarian.
Once he was elected president, the envy became a tremendous encrustation on the minds of a great many wealthy people who had thought of him as a culturally inferior person, even though he was, in terms of his wealth, a parallel to themselves.
But now that he is the 43rd direct successor to General George Washington as president, I think the envy is the size of what used to be called Mount McKinley.
Used to Dealing with Tough Guys00:04:29
I believe President Obama's changed it to some native name.
I like the fact that no setback is admitted, and if it's a defeat, it's just a victory into success.
He's never defeated.
You just fight on.
I saw that in the Obamacare repeal thing.
He just fought on it, and he did get the mandate, the coercive part of it, canceled in his tax bill.
So he just never gives up.
I was worried.
I mean, I learned from your book, I guess I should have known, but I didn't know it, that he really seriously considered Ross Perot's Reform Party as an option.
He considered the Democrats.
So he's always been an outsider.
My fear when he won, as I thought, geez, he doesn't have deep roots in Washington.
All these insiders are going to run circles around him.
And I felt like that's how his first six months sort of was until he put his own people around him.
Also is the ⁇ he had attacked the whole system, both parties and all factions of both parties, including the Republican leaders in the Congress and most of the Republican senators and congressmen.
And so for the first six months, they just sat in their hands.
They didn't do anything to put his program through.
But you see all the Never Trumpers are leaving.
About 30 of them are not running again.
Ryan's going, Corker, Flake, and so forth.
And they're in lockstep behind him now trying to get his program through.
So he's, you know, it was a war on the whole system.
He won the nomination, then he won the election.
Now he's won over the congressional Republicans.
You take it in stages.
We're talking with Conrad Black.
The book is called Donald J. Trump, A President Like No Other by Regnery.
It's available online.
We'll have the link for Amazon underneath this video.
I think one of the reasons Trump may be successful, you allude to it, being in real estate in New York City, you're not working with Swiss.
That's right.
It's not angels.
It's not an industry dominated by angels.
Let me just read a line.
I'd like you to expand on this.
Donald Trump is not a blundering reactionary, but a battle-hardened veteran of very difficult businesses full of unethical people.
And he's no Eagle Scout himself.
He is a very tough and almost demiurgically energetic man.
I got to look that word up.
His personality is so startling and at times garish that there's a large section of the population that will not warm to him.
That's right.
But if his persistence brings continued success, he will accede to this board of majority.
I think the reason he can stare down Kim Jong-un, oh, that's still in progress, the reason he can stare down the UN on the climate BS, the reason he may succeed with Iran is because he's used to dealing with some of the toughest guys, including the mob, which was in the construction business and the casino business.
I think he's the first, well, not the first, he's the biggest bruiser in that office since maybe Teddy Kennedy, Teddy Roosevelt.
What do you think?
He's a very good friend.
Oh, yeah.
When that guy charged onto his platform in one of the Ohio cities, I forget the date here.
The would-be assassination?
Yeah.
Yeah, not Cleveland or Cincinnati, but one of those other Ohio cities.
His first reaction wasn't sort of timrous.
It was a hardening of his fists and turning towards this person and security.
Is he physically a big man, he looks like it.
Yes, yes, and solid.
And while his doctors have advised him to lose some weight, he's quite muscular.
He plays golf all the time.
He's a strong man.
And he does, to use his word, have the stamina.
Some of the, I think you're probably right.
You mentioned Theodore Roosevelt because he was a rancher and a man and an explorer and a person who required a great deal of himself physically.
Some others were very strong in other ways.
I mean, Franklin, because he lost the use of his legs, he had bigger biceps than Jack Demsey and massive chest because his upper body did everything, you see.
That's on his crutches, how he propelled himself around.
But he is, Donald Trump certainly is, you know, he's a can-do.
Let's get it done.
He's also used to dealing with bad dudes.
And I think that the John Kerrys of the world who say, well, but Article 42 of the UN Treaty.
Trade Imbalances and Boomerang Politics00:05:48
And Trump has no time for that.
He knows B.S. when he sees it, and he sees a con man in Kim Jungin's approach to the world.
So it's not just a physical.
It's a straight correlation of forces.
So he's the president of the U.S. and he knows the power of the United States.
He's not afraid to threaten to use it.
And let us face facts.
Barack Obama didn't think that way.
I mean, he had his qualities, but the idea of approaching different countries with diverging motives to those of the U.S. interest and saying, in effect, look here, I represent and I'm the commander-in-chief of the greatest military power in the world, and I won't stand for this.
That was not how he operated, but Donald Will did that.
I remember when Barack Obama was photographed holding a book, I think it was by Frid Zakaria, called The Post-American President.
Post-American.
That is the exact opposite of Trump's slogan, make America great again.
Post-American world.
I remember when Obama was asked at his first NATO meeting, do you believe in American exceptionalism?
And he said, yeah, the same way the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
I don't know if you remember that.
Yeah, I do.
The exact opposite.
He wouldn't wear the American flag.
The exact opposite of Trump.
Maybe you wouldn't have had Trump if you didn't have Obama first.
Yeah, and George W. George W. really brought on the economic crisis, even though they were Clinton's measures, the housing bubble, but he sat there for eight years until it blew up.
And he was rather indiscriminate in his use of military force.
And then you add to that Obama's flatlining the economy and his passivity and, frankly, weakness in foreign policy, the self-dissolving red line and that kind of thing.
And the Americans just couldn't take it anymore.
The key metric, in my opinion, was GDP growth per capita went from 4.5% with Reagan, 3.9% with Clinton, 2 with George W., 1% with Obama.
Americans will not settle for that.
They won't stand for it.
You know, the decline.
And again, this is something we talked a little bit about, Charles Murray.
The fancy class can handle the decline or they don't see the decline in the middle of the country.
They're not in decline.
You know, I want to, you've been very generous with your time today, I want to talk a little bit about something that purist, pure conservatives, libertarians would have criticized before, and that is Trump's an economic nationalist, not just a, so he threatens to upset the pure libertarian globalism on economics, and a Milton Friedman type, and all the think tank conservatives would be opposed to it.
Let me show you a clip.
I think this is fascinating.
This is from the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988.
So what's that, 30 years ago?
And back then, the economic challenger to America was Japan, not China.
But I think if you swap China in, you could play this tape today and it would be Trump in 2018.
There's also a reference to Kuwait.
Trump has similar thoughts about OPEC today.
Here, without further ado, here's a clip from Trump on Oprah 30 years ago.
You got a full-page ad in major U.S. newspapers last year criticizing U.S. foreign policy.
What would you do differently, Donald?
I'd make our allies, forgetting about the enemies, the enemies you can't talk to so easily, I'd make our allies pay their fair share.
We're a debtor nation.
Something's going to happen over the next number of years with this country because you can't keep going on losing 200 billion, and yet we let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets and everything.
It's not free trade.
If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it, Albert.
Just forget about it.
It's almost impossible.
They don't have laws against it.
They just make it impossible.
They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.
And hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people.
I mean, you can respect somebody that's beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country.
Kuwait, they live like kings.
The poorest person in Kuwait, they live like kings.
And yet they're not paying.
We make it possible for them to sell their oil.
Why aren't they paying us 25% of what they're making?
It's a joke.
Isn't that interesting?
That kind of talk, free market peers was, oh, that's terrible.
You're going to throw the world back in a recession.
I note that America is booming.
Unemployment is low.
It's at record lows for blacks and Hispanics.
Industrial companies are reshoring.
Apple repatriated a quarter of a trillion dollars.
Manufacturing is coming back.
And he actually hasn't, other than his new squabble with China, he actually hasn't done anything other than use the bully pulpit yet.
Deregulated to encourage investment and change the psychology.
I mean, half of economics is psychology, and he's changed that.
The soft point is workforce participation is at 62.8%, and it should be a bit higher.
But you just remember on his trade thing, he's all for trade.
What he doesn't like are trade imbalances.
He wants the United States to export more rather than the others to export less to the U.S., as long as it's fair trade.
I mean, let's just look in one sentence at Mexico.
They had a trade surplus with the U.S. of $65 billion.
They were facilitating the entry into the United States of half a million completely unskilled people, maybe good people, but unskilled people illegally every year.
And they were enticing American factories away to just inside the Mexican border and then encouraged them to export back into the U.S., creating unemployment in the United States, and encouraged them to retain their profits in Mexico so they didn't pay taxes in the U.S.
Now, you don't blame the Mexicans for doing what they can, but the United States doesn't have to put up with that.
It's 20 times as powerful a country as Mexico, and that's not fair trade.
You Fired the Secretary of State in a Tweet00:08:32
It's interesting.
I mean, on Twitter, you can search individual people how many times they've used the word China, Iran.
I went through every single tweet Donald Trump's ever written on China.
Boy, he's written a lot.
And there were, I'm talking about tweets five years ago when he was not really in be careful, I'm on the campaign mode.
Though he did say to the New York Times some months ago when they asked him this directly, he said, yes, the fact is I've gone gently on China on the economic side because the number one crisis at the moment is North Korea and we need them there.
And this is nothing but the truth.
Well, you're right.
But he's also not afraid to call them out when they, for example, they broke the North Korean embargo.
Boy, he came down on.
So that same bluntness that we saw against Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
In a tweet, he'll call out Little Rocket Man in North Korea.
In a tweet, he'll say, I've had it with giving money to the Palestinians.
In a tweet, he'll say what everyone knew was.
You fired the Secretary of State in a tweet.
On China, to stand up for industries that no one would care about.
Again, these are the blue-collar folks in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, all the way.
And they're just supposed to roll over and yield to the forces of history.
States haven't voted Republican in a generation.
I don't think the Democrats have got it yet.
I think they're still pandering to the coastal elites in Hollywood and Manhattan.
There are a few of them who still think they can destroy the Trump administration.
And there are some who think this is their opportunity to get ahead of the future and take the Democratic Party far to the left, you know, the Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders left.
But I think the great sort of center of that party is very confused right now.
We're almost out of time, and I appreciate you spending it with us.
I've really enjoyed this.
I loved this book.
I loved it.
Thank you, Excel.
Thank you, Ezra.
I mean, I knew I'd like it, but I didn't think it would.
It's the best book I've read.
I mean, Jordan Peterson's book, I'm a super fan of that.
It's a very, very different book.
It's a wonderful book.
It's a very different book.
It made it come.
And you know what?
To see all the sniping attacks on Trump cataloged, and you're, oh yeah, that one.
Oh, yeah, that one.
And they each, they're like a fruit fly.
They have a very short life.
And you almost forgot until I saw them catalog there just the muffins.
Oh, remember the Charlottesville business.
I mean, nobody remembers it now.
In theory, the argument was that he was going soft on the Ku Klux Klan of the Nazis.
I mean, this is nonsense.
No one can believe such rubbish.
Well, and maybe that's the reason why the media has fallen in the polls in terms of people's trust for it, but the media doesn't know that.
So they think they're the arbiters of whether or not Trump is.
Well, what really frustrates them is that he's used the social media to outwit them.
I mean, he issues a tweet.
45 million people get it at once.
And their research, the president's research is that those people send it on within 10 minutes to at least 45 million more.
So 90 million people are in almost direct touch with the president in 10 minutes.
Well, let me ask you about that.
I'm going to move away from your book now.
I'd love it.
And I recommend it.
The book is called A President Like No Other.
You can get it on Amazon.
We'll have a link below.
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube helped win Brexit.
I don't think the social media titans figure that out.
Trump won that way.
Certainly not the fancy people.
I mean, New York Times two weeks in advance was saying 92% chance Hillary's going to win.
And I think shortly after Trump won, when the people said, what went wrong, they said social media, they started to crack down.
They deleted 30,000 Facebook pages from Maureen Le Pen in France.
We see Silicon Valley really tightening up, mainly on conservatives.
I haven't seen any liberal taken down for— Well, Google's starting to take the heat from being a left-wing operation.
Well, and Mark Zuckerberg, when he testified at Congress.
They gave him a pretty good roasting.
But they didn't do anything other than they roasted him.
And he admitted they're not.
So here's my question to you.
Donald Trump wins because he goes around the media direct to the people.
But if he doesn't, we mentioned briefly Teddy Roosevelt.
Will Donald Trump take on this oligopoly, these extremely powerful people, as powerful in our day as J.D. Rockefeller?
Bezos is the one he's focused on at Amazon.
Look, I don't know.
I mean, remember this, Ezra.
You know, you've got to respect the First Amendment.
I mean, people have the right to say what they want in the U.S.
And no one's going to tamper with that.
But I think what he will not hesitate to do is focus the irritation of his followers and himself on them.
And even now, every week, as you know, he goes out into the middle of the country to Oklahoma or Arkansas or Iowa or something.
He was in Michigan last week, I think, and rural Michigan.
But they pack out the local stadium, a big stadium, and then he harangues his supporters for about 90 minutes, but it's all over national television.
And then at some point, he points at the press box and says, they are the authors of these lies.
And people shake their fists.
So he'll do that.
But if you mean actually try and legislate against political opponents in business, I don't think that would work in the United States.
And it shouldn't work.
I love the First Amendment.
I wish we had it in Canada.
I think it's our greatest flaw as a country in Canada not having it.
I'm talking about, and maybe I'm getting too technical here, but it would be like a telephone company listening to your conversation saying, oh, we're going to shut you off now because you're saying things on our telephone we don't like.
So they're no longer a platform.
They're a publisher.
What happens when Facebook?
I thought that he would act against that.
I feel like that's where we're going.
It sounds like maybe you don't see this as grave a threat as I do.
The truth is I don't follow it as much as you probably do, but I think if it is happening, I would see it as grave a thought as you describe.
But if that is what they're doing, public opinion would support him if he is.
I think that's the gravest threat to his re-election.
There's one more.
The president's ability to mobilize public opinion, any president if he knows what he's doing, is very great.
I have one last question because I know our time is up.
I've said before, and I'd like your reaction to this, I've said, if Donald Trump builds the wall, no matter what, he'll be re-elected.
If he does not build the wall, no matter what, he will not be re-elected.
What do you think of that?
I think the wall is essential to his credibility, to his base, to the economic part of his platform, the security part of his platform, and his war against the fancy opinion set.
What do you think?
I agree with one slight modification.
It doesn't actually have to be physically a wall.
He has to create the border.
And if, because of the chicanery in the Congress, he can't get the wall done, if he deploys military and paramilitary units to make sure that the illegal entries are reduced to practically none, he'll fulfill his promise saying he's doing that as he continues to work to build the wall.
But I think I'd flip the coin also in this way.
He is going to go after the Democrats as the party of open borders, let anyone come in, let them vote, even if they're not citizens, and it is, as they claim, improper to allow census takers to ask people if they are in fact citizens, which is just incomprehensible.
He's going to hang that around their neck like a toilet seat and he's going to kill them.
But if he abandoned the immigration issue, I agree he would go down, but he's not going to do that.
I hope you're right.
Well, listen, I've enjoyed this.
Time has flown.
I've got about 300 more questions.
We're going to have to save for another day.
I love the book.
I wouldn't say that if I didn't love it.
I would have said I liked it, but I love it.
I think it's the every Trump supporter needs to read it because it's an antidote to so much of the poison out there.
And it's not a love letter.
No, it's not a love letter.
It's fair.
It's a good idea.
And you're a good faith critic.
I mean, McDonald can get on anyone's nerves, including mine.
But there he is.
Well, I really enjoyed the book, folks.
It's called A President Like No Other.
Donald Trump, the author is Conrad Black, who spent the last nearly an hour with me.
I've enjoyed it.
You can get it on amazon.ca or.com.
We'll have the links below.
And we'll be back with our regular format tomorrow.