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Dec. 28, 2024 - Sean Hannity Show
30:19
Callers Share The Future - December 27th, Hour 2
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This is an iHeart podcast.
All right, this is Jeffrey Lord filling in for our friend Sean Hannity, and our phone number here is 800-941-7326 or 800-941-Sean.
So let's spend a little time on the phones here.
And what I see up here is our friend Claire from Florida.
And Claire, why don't you tell us a little bit about why you called?
Okay, well, I'm a lifetime Republican, and I could rattle off all the names to prove that.
But so I am a Republican.
However, I think that Biden pardoning Hunter was the right thing to do as a father.
That's his responsibility.
If Biden had not pardoned Hunter, he would be castigated about it for the rest of his life.
Now, I hope people will call in and discuss that with you, but that's my opinion.
I don't approve of Biden, but I approve of pardoning his son because he's the father.
Well, you know, it might surprise you, Claire, but I tend to agree with you on that.
I just think that I think there's so much more, and I think we will find out as we move away from the Biden era.
The memoirs will come out and investigative reports will come out.
I think we will learn a lot that is not very favorable to the Biden family or as they've been mimicked, the Biden crime family.
I think that is important to get to.
But I think in this situation, and remembering in terms of family history, I was not to date myself, but I was in college when Joe Biden was elected to the United States Senate.
He was 29 years old, soon to turn the required age of 30.
And to be elected a United States Senator was a big deal.
And within a matter of weeks after that, there was a car accident that killed his wife and little girl, and I think injured Hunter and brother Bo.
And I suspect, and then of course, a number of years later, Bo passes away from cancer.
I think if you're the father in that situation, that's enough.
And you wanted, Hunter has, I think, unquestionably made a mess of things.
That's his problem.
He'll have the rest of his life to get his act in gear.
But I do think that I don't think that Joe Biden could have done or would have done anything else.
And so, you know, on we go.
And I think just in terms of the Bidens in general, I think now the time is here to move on, to move forward.
And having studied presidents enough from, you know, George Washington on and having worked for a president, I worked for President Reagan, what happens is the minute their successor is elected, it sounds kind of harsh, but wow, people just turn their attention from that person who had been president and turn it to who the new guy is.
So I think that process has already started.
I think you saw it at the international level, as I was saying earlier, when President Trump, President-elect Trump, went to France to celebrate the Notre Dame Saus.
So, okay, Claire.
Well, Claire, thank you very much.
I think that that was a good thing to get cleared up here.
I need to turn now, want to turn now, to my old friend Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union.
Hello there, Matthew.
How are you?
Hey, Jeffrey Lord, how are you?
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas.
Happy New Year.
Happy Hanukkah and all the rest.
Yeah, I think it's great.
Well, celebrating.
Yes, it is indeed.
It is indeed.
And I was sort of wondering, what's your take now that 2024 is behind us?
2025 is beginning to take shape.
Matt, for those who are unaware, is also the head along with wife Mercy.
And by the way, Matt, some little bird told me that there was something going on with Mrs. Schlapp today.
I don't know what that might be.
She got a little bit older today, just a little bit.
Uh-oh.
That means she's finally 18.
Well, that's good.
That's good.
Well, I think that, you know, CPAC and the Conservative Union and all this, we have our work cut out for us, and it's going to be very interesting to see as we move into 2025 and presumably the next four years.
What's your take on what lies ahead for us?
Well, first of all, I have to say a debt of thanks and gratitude to you, Jeffrey, because you saw what was going on in the country.
You were a Reagan guy.
I was a Bush guy.
And you saw what was going on with Donald Trump, and you were with him early.
You stuck by him.
I'm very proud of CPAC.
No matter what happened, we stuck by Trump.
We put him on our stage in Orlando, Florida when they closed us down in Washington, D.C.
Yes.
And we put Donald Trump on the stage about 50 days after January 6th and caused a controversy at the board.
Some of our people said you can't invite Donald Trump after Jay 6.
And I said, no way.
He's going to be on our stage.
He's our president.
And you guys have J6 all wrong.
And so now we're today, after all of that, and all I can say is I don't know if there's a more important year than 2025 in probably, I don't know, the last 80 years.
This is a big one.
Yes, I think that's absolutely right.
I think that's absolutely right.
There's all kinds of things that can happen here.
And I'm led to believe that Mercedes is on the line.
Is that true?
Do we have Mercy?
Oh, I see.
They're telling me that she just vanished.
Don't you love 21st century technology, Matt?
Hand the phone over to her when you're ready for her.
Here's my take on this year.
We've got this first year of a presidency is awfully important.
It's critical.
We have these small majorities in the House and Senate.
And for those of us who are insiders and know too much, it's easy to get discouraged.
But for everyone else who's just rooting Trump on, I think the key is, is we've got to keep these congressional Republicans, these Senate Republicans, on the Trump train.
They've got to get a plan on this budget.
I read lots of theories and talk to a lot of people that have different theories about what they can do on the budget.
But I just want them to get on the same page on the budget between Speaker Johnson and John Zoon and the president and his team.
And my advice to them would be keep it simple, stupid.
Not that any of them are stupid.
But, you know, Republicans have a hard time sticking together.
And in this case, I think if they try for one budget resolution, get the taxes in there, get all the border stuff you need in there, add a few other policies that we all are on board, get one done.
And don't be too worried about how fast you do it.
And then let's see how much time we have left on the clock to do a second one.
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.
You know, one of the things that I remember vividly when I was starting out my career in Washington, I was working for Congressman Bud Schuster from Pennsylvania.
Oh, yeah, legendary.
Legendary indeed.
And while he was particularly famous for serving later as chair of the House Public Works and Transportation Committee, as it was then called, he also served on the House Budget Committee.
And as his legislative director, I was assigned to do the staff work and go to all these budget committee meetings and read the federal budget, which, as you know, was thousands of pages and all of this kind of thing.
Yeah, but you could do it back then.
I don't think you could today.
Yeah, I think that's about right.
Well, one of the things that I learned, which sort of took me aback, and I have remembered this always, is it wasn't just liberal Democrats on the committee who were putting stuff in this budget.
It was Republicans.
And I thought, oh, my goodness, what is going on here?
And, you know, all these years later, I can see why so many Americans who've sort of caught on to how this works are making complaints about the so-called uniparty and that kind of thing.
What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I will tell you, the birthday girl has joined us.
Mercy is here.
And I'll give you a quick answer because I know you're going to want to talk to her.
But my view is this, which is it's a pox on both their houses.
They are both parties.
Both major parties are responsible for outrageous decision-making around the budget.
Most Republican presidents haven't helped the matter.
I mean, the problem is when Reagan was president and we actually had budget fights, closed down the government, or the government was closed, I should say.
And then Duke Gingrich tried to do the same thing when we got the majority in the House for the first time in 40 or whatever years it was.
And the Republicans overcorrected.
They thought, oh, my God, we lost the shutdown fight with Bill Clinton.
We'll never win a budget fight again.
We might as well just join him on the spending front with our Republican pork joining the Democratic pork.
And it's resulted in a very precarious financial situation for America, which means the free world is in a very precarious position.
And I really applaud those Republicans who are saying, look, enough is enough.
We've got to kind of rein in the spending.
And it's not just these CRs.
This is like a little fraction of the budget.
You know, when you were working on the Hill, that was a big part of the budget.
Now it's a tiny little part because we put almost all the government on autopilot with the mandatory spending, which is kind of a made-up title.
And we've got to get into all that spending.
You know, I don't know if President Trump wants this to be a focus of his, but the fact is we don't have much time left.
The Republicans better start acting like the Reagan Republicans.
Yeah.
Marcy, what are your thoughts on where President Trump goes with all of this that we're coming along with?
Yeah, no.
Look, I think it's very important for President Trump to remain the top, how can I say, spokesperson leader of talking about these budget fights.
I think that, you know, of course, Elon and Vivek have an important role.
They're leading the Doge efforts, but, you know, they really have never worked in Washington a day.
And I think it's important for them to understand that they They will have to work closely with the Office of Management and Budget and figure out, you know, yes, strip out, take out all these DEI initiatives throughout all of the government, figure out where all this misspending is happening.
I mean, you're talking about that the Pentagon couldn't even, you know, they failed their audits seven times.
You know, there needs to be major fixes in the government.
With that being said, you know, I do think that the American people are expecting tax cuts.
They're expecting tax cuts quickly.
And I think that has to be the top priority in addition to securing the border and making sure that if they move forward with this sort of deportation plan, that it's not going to become into a public relations fiasco, but really hone in on these criminal aliens.
So I think that that is where the top priority has to be.
I do think that I've been watching X yesterday and today, and I see Vivek commenting about the immigration visas and Elon as well.
And I'm like, dude, guys, stay out of immigration.
Stay in your lane.
Focus on cutting the government.
Don't get off message because at the end of the day, it is President Trump.
It is President Trump's agenda.
And we all just have to support him to make sure that his agenda gets accomplished.
And he's going to have a very short window because as you know this, Jeffrey, that your political capital, you start losing it after a year or two.
And he's got to move quickly.
Just as a matter of curiosity, are Elon and Vivek, are they coming?
Have they expressed any interest in coming to CPAC?
They have.
And Vivek has been, you know, he's come very regularly the last couple CPACs.
Someone we've actually worked really closely with.
And I don't have a relationship with Elon Musk other than Mercy and I had a wonderful conversation with him in Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago when we had an event down there.
And we've talked with some of his people and they say he wants to come.
And we'd, of course, love to have him.
But, you know, our focus is two things.
Number one, what's the best way to use CPAC to push the Trump agenda?
And we'll be right in the middle of the first 100 days when CPAC starts in February in Washington, D.C.
So like, it's almost like the midterms, right?
Like, how are we doing so far?
How many cabinet secretaries have been confirmed?
Where are we on this agenda?
How many of these day one executive orders are being fought out in courtrooms, which I think 100% will, sadly.
So I think we have to use CPAC to leverage all the people around the country who are so excited that Trump won.
But the second thing CPAC has to do, Jeffrey, is what it's done really well in the last few years.
We've broadened this effort.
People say Big Tent, I don't really love that analogy, but we've expanded this coalition.
We were the first people to invite Tulsa Gabbard.
We were the first people to invite Donald Trump.
We were the first people to invite Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Like when these new voices popped up on one issue area, we didn't say, oh, you can't join our club because you don't agree with us on everything.
We said, hey, why don't you come over to our club?
We'd like to hear your thoughts.
And it's a great ride as we expand this coalition.
It's less about parties now.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think, alas, we're running out of time here, but I do think that the parties have switched positions, if you will.
I think the Republican Party is the party of working class Americans, working Americans.
And I think that's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
I think this started with President Reagan, and President Trump has taken it to the max.
Well, Matt and Mercy, thank you very much.
I will make plans to see you at CPAC.
And happy birthday there to the Mrs. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, right?
Okay.
Thank you very much.
And we'll be back.
This is Jeffrey Lord in for Sean Hannity.
And if you want to call in, our number is 800-941-7326.
All right.
Welcome back.
This is Jeffrey Lord filling in for our friend Sean Hannity.
Our number here is 800-941-7326.
And let's take a call from John in North Carolina.
Hey, Jeffrey, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
And you?
Happy New Year, you know, and all the rest.
Yes, sir.
I'm enjoying the time off.
My comment is I've been following politics and listening to talk radio for many, many, many years.
And about 15 years ago, I started, I'm an independent voter.
I'm not a member of any party, but I do vote.
I use common sense.
I back Trump.
And what I don't understand is about 15 years ago, I looked at everything and I said, you know what?
The behavior of these Democrats, they're just like organized crime.
And I felt, and it's not meant to be an attack.
It's not meant to, you know, be name-calling, except it aptly identifies what we're up against.
And if you look at the traits of organized crime, such as tax evasion, which Hunter Biden does, and people are on the take.
We're always finding, and I'm not saying Republicans are, you know, that avoid any of this, but the con men, you know, the term con men comes from confidence men, the people that could go out and fool you.
So what I'm saying here is I think the media commentators that are trying to be as truthful as they can really, like when Trump got the term fake news to stick, I think we should try to get the term organized crime to stick whenever we're talking about either deep state.
Well, I'll tell you, you know, I don't know whether the organized crime thing will fit or not, but I think you're on to something.
And I was thinking about this.
And I'm of an age that I remember vividly as a child.
My parents were very active in Republican politics in Massachusetts, so they were always very interested in what was going on.
And together we watched in January of 1961, I was in the fourth grade, hello, President Kennedy being sworn in and giving his inaugural address, which was very memorable.
The phrase that stuck, ask not what you can do, what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
And I know without question, and I was one of them, it inspired young people to get into politics.
Now, that said, I think that the problem eventually became that young people who were doing this, that's all they were going to do.
And it was a limited experience looking back.
They didn't say, well, I'm going to go build a business or I'm going to do this or I'm going to do that that has nothing to do with politics.
They just stuck with politics all the time.
And this is what encouraged, I think, a lot of, you know, or a fair share of elected officials.
It's just, you know, that's all they do all the time.
And I think over time that that is not a good situation here for them or for the country.
I think that they get so wrapped up in this.
I think Joe Biden, frankly, is a perfect example of this.
He was 29 years old when he was elected to the United States Senate and makes what?
I don't know, whether there's $150,000 or $200,000, something as a United States Senator.
How in the world does he afford multi-million dollar houses and all of this kind of thing?
Well, he affords it because he, so go the allegations, he was the big guy peddling political influence in return for money in Ukraine and these other places.
I don't think that Joe Biden is alone.
He may be a standalone in terms of the size and the amount and the offices he held.
But I'm willing to bet you could find people in public office, alas, unfortunately, at much lower levels of government, local or state, who were doing some version of the same thing.
And that's where I think this has gotten off the rails here.
You have to be, you know, with that said, you have to come from an honest foundation.
I've worked for major corporations.
I've lived overseas in the Middle East.
I've worked with high, I was not in the military, but I worked on big dollar Middle Eastern private corporations.
And I saw, I dealt directly with corporate officers that were less than honest.
They were lying, and I knew it.
I couldn't say anything at the time because I didn't have the power, but the corruption and people, people are too dishonest.
Everybody's got to look into the soul mirror and make sure that you're doing the right thing.
Well, you have to be raised by parents who are raising you with a sense of integrity.
I think that's number one.
And sometimes I think that sort of falls down.
And that is definitely not a good thing.
So, well, John, thank you very much for calling.
Let me see.
Do we have some time here?
I think we're going to move on to Josh in Minnesota.
Welcome to Sean Hannity's show.
Thanks for taking my call.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So what do you want to talk about, Josh?
Well, first I was going to talk about Biden, but then you start talking about the shift in the political parties.
And, you know, I grew up in northwest Minnesota.
My grandmother was a DSL delegate, but was also a strong believer in pro-life.
Wow.
And my grandfather was a bricklayer, president of the Bricklayers Union.
And I grew up in this area.
You know, we were strong Democrats.
And our state representative was a Democrat.
And we had Colin Peterson from this area going to Washington.
And it all shifted about, I don't remember exactly what time, but about, you know, the Obama administration, you know, those representatives kind of retired.
And since then, this whole area has voted Republican.
And, you know, we sent Michelle Fish back to Washington.
We've got a Republican local rep. And it's just, you know, we grew up with those values that, you know, I'm a veteran and you grew up with loving your country and just kind of, you know, middle, moderate, conservative type values.
And what was once, you know, what my grandmother would have supported as a DSL delegate would have been more Republican views now.
Yeah.
You know, and as a 50-year-old white male, I almost feel like a minority now.
And I'm really scared for my kids, the way, you know, the state of the political parties in the country have taken over.
Well, I noticed it says here that you were appalled that Biden was making false comments on his way out of office.
Saying that he wholeheartedly believes he left the country in a better state when he took over is just absurd.
Well, I'll tell you something about President Biden.
I personally have long since come to the belief that he's just kind of sloppy about what he does and boasting when he does that.
And I had a personal experience long ago.
When I was a kid, a teenager, I was a big Bobby Kennedy fan.
This would be the father of the current RFK Jr.
And when he died, it was tragedy.
They put out these long-playing records.
I was in high school.
I bought the records and memorized his speeches.
Now, that's 1968.
In September of 1987, I was working in the White House for President Reagan as a political director.
And Joe Biden had just finished chairing the sort of disgraceful Robert Bork hearings for the Supreme Court, really not doing a good job of it.
But he was also running for president.
And he got caught by Governor Michael Dukakis, his Democrat opponent, plagiarizing from the British Labor Party leader.
His name was Neil Kinnock.
And the campaign said, oh, it was a mistake or whatever.
He didn't do this, that kind of thing.
Well, I knew differently.
And the reason was that back in February of that year, we'd had a big snowstorm in Washington.
And Washington is terrible in snowstorms.
Everything shuts down.
I live relatively nearby, so I walk to my office in the White House, totally alone in there, nothing going on.
The phone isn't ringing.
So I thought, well, I'll see what's on C-SPAN since, you know, I can't do anything.
And there was Joe Biden giving a speech to the California Democratic Convention.
And I thought, well, that's interesting.
He's supposed to be a good speaker.
I'll listen.
I listened.
And what did I find?
I was getting to the end of his sentences before he was.
And why was that?
Because he was plagiarizing from Robert Kennedy.
And I, you know, had the presence of mind to pick up.
I called a reporter at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd by name, and brought over my records, long-playing records, to the New York Times.
And within a matter of days, there was a front-page story about questions being raised by his speeches and quoted, among others, my much younger self and all this kind of thing.
But I just, I was amazed.
I thought, how can anybody think?
I mean, Robert F. Kennedy Sr.
was one of the most famous people on the planet at that point, now deceased 20 years by the time this incident happened.
But still in all, you know, I'm here in New York and I go past signs for the RFK Bridge.
The Justice Department in Washington is named after Bobby Kennedy.
So to think that you could sort of, you know, take something from him and nobody would notice, I thought was just, you know, wow.
Yeah.
But typical, I think, you know, just sloppy in terms of how this, how he sort of operates here.
And I think, I think we're paying a price, Afghanistan, that kind of thing.
So.
Yeah.
I grew up listening to Paul Harvey on the radio.
You know.
Yeah.
And, you know, you know, egos don't have shows like that anymore.
And you're like, we've got family members that are far right, and I got family members that are, I just kind of keep my mouth shut.
You know, I believe in, I believe in Trump's policies, but sometimes I wish he'd just stay off Twitter.
Well, you know, that's a modern thing, and I don't think that's ever going to go away, whether it's Trump or anybody else.
I think that, you know, this is ingrained.
You know, I remember reading historically that I think it was 1920 that there was the first radio broadcast of a national political convention because radio was itself brand new.
And, you know, over time, the technology changes.
And then we got to television and you had that famous 1960 television debate with Kennedy and Nixon.
And the question became how to use makeup and all of this kind of thing because Kennedy took the makeup, Nixon didn't.
And people thought that those who watched on television thought Nixon lost and those who listened to it on the radio thought he won.
But my point is the technology changes and we are in the 21st century.
So buckle in is more or less what we've got to do here.
Oh, we long for the old days.
So, yeah, yeah, things were much simpler in those days.
And now, and I always am sort of, you know, simultaneously horrified and amused.
You see somebody who commits a crime and they have no recognition that there are cameras all over the place.
Like this Nitwit who killed the healthcare executives.
So, well, Josh, thank you very much for calling.
And this is Jeffrey Lord filling in for Sean Hannity.
And give us a call at 800-941-7326, and we'll be back.
All right.
This is Jeffrey Lord in for our friend Sean Hannity.
And we are going to be reached here at 800-941-7326.
And let's go to Greg in Iowa, who wants to talk a little bit more about Hunter.
Good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon.
So my point is with Hunter, and I know it's a terrible deal, you know, especially for his dad, even though it's Joe Biden.
But if you love your child, discipline him.
If you love your child, don't.
And now that he's been given a free pass, what's it going to be like for the next 10 years?
I think we all know what the outcome's going to be.
He's going to end up in the gutter again.
And there'll probably be an unfortunate outcome that comes along with that.
But all that being said, Biden had to pardon him to take all the legal troubles off the plate because if Hunter went to court, Biden was going to end up in court.
Well, I think that's a considerable situation there.
I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, the infamous reference to the big guy, 10% for the big guy, who might that be?
And I do think that they were, as long as Hunter was out there, that they were in a position to find themselves very much in trouble here.
And so I think he's done what he's done to, you know, in part because it's Hunter.
I don't have any doubt about this.
And you're right.
He's walked away with excuses his whole life.
And, you know, the question is now, what is he, 50 years old, something like that?
Is he going to get his act together and change his operation here and get us act together to be decided?
We will see.
So, well, thank you very much, Greg, for calling.
We are going to go into another break here.
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