Rod Martin argues rural hospitals face Congress’s cuts while slamming a Manhattan trade court’s ruling stripping Trump’s tariff authority, later reversed by appeals—calling it judicial overreach mirroring immigration enforcement attacks. He frames Trump’s tariffs as Reagan-style economic warfare, leveraging U.S. export dominance to isolate China (e.g., Taiwan threats) after Clinton-era missteps like MFN status fueled its rise, contrasting Nixon’s realpolitik with today’s supply-chain decoupling. The episode ties Trump’s 2016 trade promises to his 2025 policies, suggesting his approach could bankrupt adversaries as Reagan did to the USSR. [Automatically generated summary]
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Welcome back into the Stone Zone.
Substack, Substack.com, is a place where writers and thinkers, right, left, and center, can express their views, views that the mainstream media is disinterested in because, well, they're not politically correct or they may be offbeat or they may be off the official fake news narrative.
Among the liveliest takes there is Rod Martin.
Rod D. Martin has the Rod D. Martin report.
The Martin Report, I urge you to check it out.
And the man himself joins us now, Rod Martin.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
So I should tell folks, you are an entrepreneur, a founder and CEO of Martin Capital, an investor, a futurist, one of the guys that helped start PayPal.
You're a staunch anti-communist.
What I love is the fact that you're also a thinker.
And the Rod Martin report on Substack is a fountain of ideas and free expression.
So I want to jump right into it because these court rulings are coming so fast you could get whiplash if you try to pay attention.
But yesterday, we were told this incredibly obscure international trade court, which frankly I've never heard of before, in Manhattan, had suddenly ruled that President Donald Trump didn't have the authority to go out and negotiate trade deals with other countries.
Now, just hours ago, a new federal appeals court has overruled that.
You just wrote a great hot take on this.
Rod, give us your take.
Well, it's completely absurd.
It's a true travesty.
And I give you about 1,800 words of analysis on rodmartin.org on exactly that.
Came out about half an hour ago.
The appeals court stayed the ruling for now.
So the Trump administration will have an opportunity to appeal this.
They seem to be going straight to the Supreme Court.
Maybe they go to the appeals court first.
But in the meantime, the tariffs continue.
The president.
The problem here is the grounds on which they overruled him.
They technically applied very strictly non-delegation doctrine, which all good conservatives would support.
We don't believe that Congress should have the right to delegate legislative authority to administrative agencies, the executive branch generally.
But that's not really the situation here.
This is a foreign policy issue, not a legislative issue.
Congress has clearly acted in repeated acts going back to 1930 to permit and enable the president to use tariffs as a tool in the conduct of American foreign policy.
And this has never been meaningfully challenged.
This court, yeah, I think most people had never heard of.
It was started in 1980, but it's the successor to the old U.S. Customs Court, which was established in 1890.
And in all of that time, none of these activist Democrats have ever seen fit to question when Barack Obama imposed tariffs or Joe Biden maintained presidentially imposed tariffs or Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson or VR.
It's a complete political circus.
It is shameful and it simply isn't the law.
Yeah, it's as you say, it's madness.
But we saw the same thing surrounding the question of whether the president had the authority to deport illegal immigrant gang members with criminal records in many cases who are very clear danger to those around them and to the country.
We actually had a court rule that the president had no such authority, which of course he does.
The Supreme Court ultimately stepped in.
I'm hopeful that they will do so again.
Now, one of the things I like about the stuff you put up at rodmartin.org that you also have at Substack is the fact that you've actually read the art of the deal.
So you actually understand our 45th and our 47th president.
That in itself, I think, is one of the reasons why your observations are so on the money.
Give me your overall take on the president's tariff strategy, because I've said on this show and elsewhere, I actually don't believe that Donald Trump loves tariffs.
I think he'd love to have no tariffs.
He'd like to have an even playing field with no tariffs between any countries, or we could sell whatever we want in their country and vice versa.
But that's not what we have.
People say, oh, you're against free trade.
Well, we want fair trade.
And the trade hasn't been fair.
So the president uses tariffs as a cudgel.
And frankly, based on what I've seen, so far it appears to be working.
But I'm more interested in your take.
You're absolutely singing my stock.
And I just face again and again on Fox Business and other forum because it's just plain as day.
Donald Trump has made his position clear.
I would say possibly most clearly at the 2018 G7 meeting, where he just stood up and he told them, look, I'm a work guy.
Obviously, the right outcome is to have no trade barriers whatsoever.
That's going to be prosperity for everybody, but you guys won't play ball.
And they wouldn't, and they didn't.
And so now we get the reciprocal tariffs just to jerk their chains.
The fact that everybody misses, and I don't understand why, is that America is the largest consumer market in the world.
Everybody who exports has to sell to us.
And by the way, a lot of these countries are heavily dependent on the export sector of their economy.
Germany, 48% of their economy.
China, more than 20% of their economy.
And some of that gets transshipped through Vietnam and different places.
Doesn't matter.
You know, the bottom line is without the U.S. market, China goes into a depression.
And so would Germany, and so would much of the world.
They need us more than we need them.
So of course Donald Trump understands that.
That sort of is the new thing, and you mentioned the yard of the deal.
I would also like to single out what I think is actually in 1997, which is just extraordinary, particularly in the last chapter, which goes on at length about his political views, and it reads just like a campaign statement from 2016 or 2024.
It's extraordinary how consistent this man has been over time, albeit picking up a pro-life position along the way.
But otherwise, he's consistent as the day is law.
And the people who haven't done the homework and won't do the briefing always get him wrong, always misunderstand him, and they're not going to get any better.
Rural Americans deserve access to the best of what our country has to offer, especially health care.
Across every state, every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families healthy.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.
Don't cut rural health care.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I would also point out his book, The America We Deserve, in which he actually foresees the rising threat of Islamic terrorism, and he actually predicts the attack on America on 9-11.
An extraordinary book.
I agree with you.
The only issue, frankly, on which he's really changed is I think with the birth of his son, Baron, he became pro-life.
I think that gave him a new appreciation.
But beyond that, if you go back and look at the speech he gave in New Hampshire in 1988, when he spoke to the Plymouth, New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce, many people said, oh, is he running for president?
Is he going to New Hampshire because he's running for president?
No, he's going to New Hampshire to get exposure for his ideas.
He talked about the folly of the trade deals.
This is pre-GAT, pre-NAFTA.
But he said, we're getting killed in these trade deals.
We send social workers.
They send killers.
They send their best and brightest.
We send bureaucrats.
We're getting rolled.
And why are we continuing to pay a disproportionate amount for the protection of Europe?
Why are our NATO allies not paying their fair share for their own protection?
Remember this like it was yesterday.
He said, look, I understood that after World War II, they were devastated.
They were destroyed.
They were broke.
We were still relatively prosperous.
And the Marshall Plan was necessary and so on.
But now, with our economy in trouble, why are they not paying their fair share?
This was 1988.
Of course, in 2017, he made our NATO allies pony up.
Every one of them was behind in their payments, and every one of them was forced to cough up millions and millions of dollars.
Rod, you wrote this, and I loved it.
Speaking of Trump's use and maneuvering for tariffs, you said, this is like Reagan's zero option all over again.
Reagan deployed a large number of new nuclear weapons to Europe to counter the Soviets' similar deployment while proposing that all such weapons should be banned.
Everyone laughed until 1987 when he achieved exactly that.
But speaking of Reagan, who you and I agree is one of the 20th century's greatest presidents, he also used market power, specifically a huge arms race coupled with collapsing the price of energy from which Russian derived the cash it needed to continue to compete, and he bankrupted the Soviet Union.
Trump remembered this lesson, and now you say China is learning us.
Talk to us about China.
China, you were talking about how Trump is checkmating China.
Expand on that, if you would.
Well, you're exactly right.
This is Reagan's zero option strategy from what became the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.
When Reagan put it out there, everybody called him crazy on both sides of the aisle.
But he was right.
You know, putting pressure on the Soviets by deploying nuclear missiles, both the cruise missiles and the Persian II, put the Russians in a position where they absolutely had tons of reason to actually abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons.
It's the only time it's ever happened.
And it was highly successful.
And it was just because Reagan was a visionary and willing to go for the deal that these days Trump would go for.
That most of our political class doesn't have the creativity to even imagine, and they're horrified by the concept.
Same thing with using the Saudi alliance to collapse the price of oil.
And that's where we're out.
You just saw the trip to the Middle East where we're buttressing those alliances.
We've got to bring Israel into an alliance with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf states.
And that's already started the Abraham Awards.
But in the process, we're isolating China.
And Donald Trump understands perfectly clearly what the beltway class has got: that China is a geopolitical threat.
It's a regime run by a communist party that routinely threatens to nuke American cities to invade an American ally in Taiwan.
This is not Germany.
This is not Japan.
This is not a friend.
This is at best a frenemy.
And we have to decouple from them sufficiently that we're not dependent on them for strategic supply and also enough that their economy is sufficiently depressed that they can't afford military interventions and an invasion of Taiwan or potentially Siberia or whatever they might attempt.
Donald Trump gets it.
Everybody before him failed in this regard, starting with Bill Clinton letting China into the WTO, letting China have most favored nation status, honestly taking tons of Chinese campaign cash in the 96 election.
Decoupling From China00:02:25
And that's the genesis of our allowance of these people.
No, you're absolutely right.
I often say that Richard Nixon gets a bum-wrap.
People say that Nixon, because he restored economic relations with the Chinese, is responsible for the threat that China poses today.
But people don't recognize that at the time that Nixon went to China, China was a dirt-poor, agrarian society.
Most homes did not have indoor plumbing.
The rural areas didn't even have electricity.
The country had no technological capabilities.
They had a military capability, but it was antiquated.
It wasn't until the Clintons gave them most favored nation trading status.
And frankly, Bill Clinton sold them in the Loral scandal, sold them our missile targeting technology in return for millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions.
These are the things that made China the danger that it is today.
There was no way for Richard Milhouse Nixon to see that 30 years later, after he played the Russians off against the Chinese and vice versa to secure a strategic arms limitation agreement, which the Russians were going cold until Nixon announced he was going to visit Beijing, and then suddenly they wanted to make a deal.
There's no way Nixon could see that China would emerge as the threat that they have become.
Folks, if you're just tuning in, if you're just tuning in, this is the Stone Zone.
We're talking to Rod Martin.
You can find his great stuff at rodmartin.org.
Don't go away because we'll be right back with a bit more with Rod Martin talking about the politics of the day.
Right now we're focused on China, but I want to ask him when we come back about Russia and about Vladimir Putin and the quest for peace in the Ukraine-Russian war.
Again, you're in the stone zone.
I'm Roger Stone.
He's Rod Martin of the Rod Martin Report, and we'll be right back.
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