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Jan. 22, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
32:28
Power of the Pen - January 21st, Hour 2
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This is an iHeart podcast.
All right, hour two, Sean Hannity show as we continue from our nation's capital, the swamp, the sewer.
The only good thing is many people have left.
It's far less crowded than it's been.
It's still freezing.
Can't wait to get back to the free state of Florida.
Just saying, just a thought, just an idea.
You know, who would want to do a radio show in 70-degree weather when you can do it in zero-degree weather?
I mean, why people like that on this?
I think you're wrong.
I want to let the audience know that Sean is doing beautifully in this winter weather.
I love this winter weather.
His hair looks great.
He's wearing a tux every night.
It's going beautifully.
I wore a tux one night, and that's it.
He's actually wearing it here to radio.
He loved it so much.
Yeah, take a picture of that.
I'm going to post it on X. Put that on X, and we'll see that I'm in a Nike black shirt and a hoodie.
Listen, it's your type of tuxedo right there.
That's my tuxedo, exactly.
Anyway, so this issue of preemptive pardons came up in 2020, and you had all these elected Democrats, and of course, the state-run legacy media mob.
They don't know they're dead.
I mean, they're still losing their minds over Donald Trump.
I mean, to watch conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow comparing Elon Musk to a Nazi and comparing, you know, all of this and this scathing rant and slamming the president of these tech CEOs because now they want free speech because they feel like they were abused by the Biden administration to lie about COVID and to lie about Hunter's laptop and want to get things right.
By the way, this was prior to the election, at least in the case of Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't care if you like Mark, don't like Mark, but the letter he wrote to Jim Jordan was long before the election, where he admitted that they did everything the Biden administration pressured them to do.
And he said he would never do it again long before the election.
And so changes were, you know, happening to begin with.
Anyway, so here is the Democrats, the state-run legacy media mob, which for all intent and purposes is dead because they lie.
They peddle lies and conspiracy theories for a living, and nobody trusts them anymore.
They convince their audiences that Kamala even had a chance of winning.
She did not.
But this is what they were saying about preemptive pardons in 2020.
And we'll conclude it with Adam Schiff, who listened to his words closely because he's one of the people that got the preemptive pardon.
President's reportedly asking his staff whether he can issue preemptive pardons for himself, his family members, Rudy Giuliani.
There's a simple answer.
No.
No, Mr. President.
That would be a gross abuse of the presidential pardon authority.
Do you think that those pardons are appropriate?
Do you think they would be legal?
I don't think they are appropriate at all.
Is there an innocent explanation for someone to seek preemptive pardons for family members?
Would you do that if you knew you were innocent and just worried about outside forces?
The answer to that is going to be no.
It's the president's own family.
It's people that have been covering up for the president in addition to his own family.
And so there is a self-interest at play as well.
And I think that makes this quite unique.
All right, joining us now, former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.
I know hypocrisy is nothing new in this city that you worked in for quite a long period of time.
And by the way, you were the last person as speaker to balance a budget.
You did it five years in a row.
And I hope Doge and Elon Musk are able to achieve that which you achieved.
However, this is just rank hypocrisy.
It's pretty despicable even for Democrats.
I mean, the fact that they just flip and flop and flail on such an important issue is pretty stunning to me.
I'm surprised you're stunned.
They're crooks.
Why didn't I think of it?
They're just crooks.
They're just liars and conspiracy theory peddlers.
No, you just have to think of the Bidens as the Delaware version of the Sopranos.
The Biden Soprano family.
Yeah, I mean, the minute you think of that, what you know is that Big Joe, in the end, is going to take care of the family because otherwise they're going to go to jail.
Now, what he did not understand, I think, is that once you are pardoned, you no longer have a Fifth Amendment right to not talk.
Alan Dershowitz made that point.
They all now have to go before these committees.
They'll all have to talk, and they can't plead the fifth.
You are 100% right.
So in that sense, it may backfire.
But look, nothing, look at the level of corruption in Minnesota.
Look at the level of corruption in California.
The Democratic Party is a party which has only survived by paying off its allies by stealing from the taxpayers and by rigging the game.
So anytime I see Democrats do that, all I say to myself is, oh, they must be Democrats.
I mean, you know, it's like going to the zoo and seeing a really tall giraffe and being shocked because, you know, giraffes are really tall.
These guys are.
You know, you are a word, Smith.
You know, you do have the best analogies.
Let's move on to maybe something more important.
I mean, I went through in the last hour the list of everything that Donald Trump got done on day one, and it is remarkable.
And I won't repeat it all here because it would take the rest of the show.
However, you know what he did yesterday.
America knows what he did yesterday.
I thought the inaugural speech itself was one of the it was like he prosecuted the case so brilliantly that no jury would would go against him, against Kamala and Joe with the solutions that he would be implementing, part of which he did yesterday.
But then we got another challenge, and that is some of the agenda is going to have to go through Congress.
And they have a very small majority in the House.
I'm going to be doing a town hall tonight with Speaker Johnson.
That'll be on Fox News and House Republicans.
And then I'll be interviewing John Thune.
That'll air later this week.
And then I'll be interviewing Donald Trump in the Oval tomorrow.
How do we get this through?
How do you get the rest of that agenda, transformational agenda through?
Well, let me start back with what Trump's already achieved.
And maybe his best initial decision was moving his doors because it was so cold.
There would have been people who I think might have died if they'd gotten there at 6, 5 in the morning and stood outside all morning.
So I thought that was a great decision.
Coles and I were in the rotunda for the inaugural speech.
We saw you numerous times on TV.
You both look very nice dressed up.
You really did.
Well, we were happy.
We were having a good time.
But I went back this morning and read Jefferson's first and second inaugural, Jackson's first inaugural, and FDR's first inaugural.
This is clearly the speech, and I'm going to write about this, that what Trump did was clearly the most radical speech, the most revolutionary speech ever given at an inauguration.
I mean, I personally was really happy because I spent my whole career being against the establishment, but I thought it was a stunningly effective thing.
Second, he's moving so fast.
A good friend of mine, Steve Attenheim, wrote me, and said, you know, Roosevelt's 100 days are going to be Trump's 10 days.
And I think there's something to that.
You look just to the number of executive orders he's signing, the number of different things he's doing, I think it's going to be remarkable.
Now, since you're going to have this meeting tonight, let me just say, as strongly as I can, they have to have one reconciliation bill.
It has to be passed ideally by Memorial Day, which Johnson has said is his goal, at the very latest by July 1st.
And I would say the president should threaten to call the Congress back in for all of August and have no break unless they get this thing done.
And the reason is simple.
Reagan did not implement his tax cuts until 1983, and in 1982, we lost 26 House seats.
The Republican leadership convinced Trump in 2017 that they had to do Obamacare first, which they failed at.
But that pushed back the tax bill until December.
They got no punch.
They lost 40 seats in 2018.
If we lose the House next year, the last two years of Trump are going to be like Pelosi.
You're going to have investigations, impeachments, blocking new ideas.
And my point is, this is the game.
I mean, they need to focus more than any other single thing on having a big enough economic boom next year that we can win, and we can win.
There are 13 seats held by Democrats that Trump carried.
There are 21 seats held by Democrats that Trump came within five points of.
That's a 34-seat target group.
Many of them are voting stupidly.
For example, they voted against having sports for boys and girls.
Now, that's like an 80% issue.
The problem for the Republicans is they're just very good at targeting and focusing and communicating.
But we have to have the tax cuts, the energy stuff, affordability, economic growth, all of it in one big bill.
And then Trump has to commit about 10 weeks and go into all of these districts, both of the weak Republican districts and then the Democrat vulnerable districts, and just have a huge rally in every single district and do what Reagan did, which is arouse the American people so they force the Congress to come to Trump.
You don't get there by negotiating with the Democratic leadership.
You get there by arousing the American people.
It might be some issues that Democrats may have to help out on, like raising the debt ceiling, for example.
Sure.
But that's why you build a grassroots organization.
And Tip O'Neill complained he went from a 26-point advantage, 26-member advantage, to losing 46 Democrats to Reagan because Reagan was so effective in communicating the country.
As Tip said at the time, there was this tidal wave of telephone calls.
Well, If we take these 34 Democratic districts and we build the entire Trump machine there, just as we did for the presidential campaign, and we have Trump and VIT in them, you're going to see 10 or 15 Democrats split on everything because they're going to face a choice of not making it back.
And very few of them are going to want to sacrifice their career over one or two issues.
Have you spoken to Speaker Johnson?
Have you spoken to Jon Thune?
Have you spoken to Donald Trump about the strategy?
I've talked with the president.
I've talked with the speaker.
I'm going to call and talk with the majority leader in the Senate.
And I've been talking with his staff because I just, you know, and I've sent messages to every single Republican senator because I really think the senators have to understand the key here is keeping the House.
And you have to have a sense of urgency.
I believe Trump can get one big bill through the House because I think he can bring that much pressure to bear.
He can arouse the public that deeply.
I think it's dangerous to think you could do it twice in a short period of time.
There seems to be the rub there, but it seems that in my last conversation, and I'll have another conversation tonight with Speaker Johnson, but their strategy seems to be your one bill strategy.
That's what they're going to send to the Senate.
Then the Senate obviously will mark it up.
They'll, I guess, go into conference and either come out with a deal or we're at an impasse at that point.
I mean, how do you see this going down?
An impasse.
If the House sends one big bill to the Senate and Donald J. Trump is out campaigning for that one big bill, the senators aren't going to be at an impasse, including some Democrats who are up for re-election next year, which again has to be part of your targeting process.
But you put, you know, I mean, Trump just by telephone conference calls can reach hundreds of thousands of people.
And he can say them, you know, you need to go and drown your senator's office in phone calls and text messages and emails and go see them.
You know, it'd be nice to have like 3,000 or 4,000 people show up at a senator's office back home and say, we want you to help.
There's a point where, and I can't overstate this.
If you read Reagan's farewell address in 1989, he says very clearly, people say I won great legislative victories, but the truth is you, the American people, won these victories.
It was your calls.
It was your work.
You were Reagan's regiments.
And that's what understand.
I have told the people that went out and got Donald Trump re-elected against all odds that we will call upon them again, and they will need to be deputized.
And we'll give out the phone number to Congress.
Those moments are coming.
We're not going to abuse it.
I always tell people to be polite, but we'll help in any way we can as well.
All right, quick break, right back.
More with former Speaker of the House New Kingrich on the other side.
Your calls coming up as well.
Don't forget our town hall with Speaker Johnson, House Republicans tonight, my Oval Office interview, first interview with Donald Trump tomorrow.
A busy week from our nation's capital.
It's the Sean Hannity Show.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
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Our number is 800-941.
Sean, if you want to be a part of the program, more with Speaker Gingrich in just a moment, programming notes tonight at the Capitol.
Speaker Mike Johnson, House Republicans.
Will they unite behind the Trump agenda?
That's my main question of the evening and how they're going to do that.
Then on Wednesday, an exclusive interview, Donald Trump's first from the Oval Office since being inaugurated.
Looking forward to that.
Not looking forward to the frigid weather.
Just a side note: I want to remind you, our friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, they're on the front lines every day.
This conflict, in spite of, quote, the ceasefire, it continues.
You have tens of thousands of Israelis.
They have been displaced from their homes.
And now on January 27th, it's International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
And of course, we then remember the great evil of the Holocaust, millions of Jews slaughtered during the Nazi reign of terror.
Now, today, with the rise of global anti-Semitism, also in the halls of Congress, also on college campuses, and the constant attacks on the Jewish people, it is more important than ever to remember the atrocities of the Holocaust to ensure that this never happens again.
Iran can never get a nuclear weapon, or we will live through a modern-day Holocaust.
But our proud partnership with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews continues.
You have tens and tens of thousands of Israelis that are displaced, and they are the ones providing the food, the shelter, the medicines, the bare necessities, including, by the way, those remaining Holocaust survivors.
Whatever you can donate today to help provide these necessities to Jewish communities is desperately needed.
And your gift is you're taking a stand against radical Islamic terrorists that attack them on October the 7th.
They never fully had the support of Biden and Harris, sadly.
But whatever gift you can give, you can go to their website at supportifcj.org, supportifcj.org, or triple eight 488-IFCJ 888-488-IFCJ today.
All right, a few more moments with the Speaker of the House, then we'll get to your calls coming up, 800-941.
Sean, if you want to join us.
And, you know, Mr. Speaker, we have talked a lot over the years about principles that we both share.
I call this an opportunity that maybe you get once every 100, 150 years.
You are the historian.
Tell me if I'm way out of line here.
And that is, we now have a chance as a country to return to constitutional order.
And by that, I mean, you know, we give lip service to limited government, the concepts of limited government.
We give lip service, you know, to cutting out waste, fraud, and abuse.
We give lip service to more freedom, the vision of our framers and our founders.
Now we actually have a chance to do it.
Cutting $2 trillion would go a long way to cutting back the size, the scope, the influence of government in our lives.
These are things to me that are doable.
We can be an energy-rich country, cut taxes, save Social Security and Medicare, build the next generation of warfare, deport all these cartel members, rapists, murderers, and known terrorists in the country.
We can do all that, and we'll be able to afford it all and start paying down the debt.
Is this vision of mine completely out of touch with reality, or is it a possibility?
No, I think it's very possible, and I think this is potentially, and I emphasize potentially because we now have to deliver.
I mean, all we've done is we won the ticket to get in the game.
We didn't win the game.
But this is potentially, and I really felt this listening to the President's inaugural address yesterday.
This is the biggest change since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.
So you're talking about a really long period.
And I think if we can execute as a team, if we can get things done, we'll be amazed.
But I particularly had to say, Sean, I thought immediately of you when Chris and I were sitting in the rotunda, and the president said, drill, baby, drill.
Because it was a dinner with you in the spring of 2008 where we together came up with the idea of drill here, drill now, pay less.
you drove it, your listeners...
Oh, I've got to be fair, though.
Give credit where it's due.
That was your idea.
I said, I am totally on board.
And we pushed it hard.
And we didn't get what we wanted that.
We got some of it when Trump was president the first time.
Right.
Well, but we had, with your help and your leadership, we got a million four hundred thousand people signing a petition.
We drove it into the convention that summer, and it evolved from drill here, drill now, pay less to drill, baby, drill by the time of the Republican convention.
But I couldn't help but think, because this is how history occurs.
Here we are, literally, you know, more than a decade later, and now you suddenly have 17 years later, that phrase has been driven into the Republican Party.
It's being driven into the country's consciousness, and it is going to lead between Canada and the U.S., we're going to be an enormous energy powerhouse that is going to be able to both lower prices in America, create an enormous number of jobs in America, and allow us to offset the Russians and anybody else in the world market.
But I hope you have some sense that you literally participated in making history, because if we had not pushed it that hard and done so for years, I mean, I wrote a book at one point called Gasolina 250 and had Barack Obama attack me because it was impossible.
You know, and all this stuff came, history kept coming our way.
I think we had the same experience when we passed welfare reform, where, by the way, we got 101 Democrats to vote with us and 101 voted against us.
But that was literally 31 years after Ronald Reagan first proposed it, running for governor of California.
And sometimes you have these long sweeps of history.
And what you have in Trump now is a charismatic leader of enormous energy and drive and courage standing at a point in an intersection where if you just take, and I'm doing this in my next newsletter at Gingrich 360, if you just take the key parts of his speech yesterday, you suddenly realize this is a cultural revolution, a political revolution, and a governmental revolution all in one.
And that's what makes it so extraordinary.
I actually am hopeful.
I think this is the greatest opportunity we will get for the rest of our lives.
Let's put it this way.
If we fail, we'll never, for example, if we fail on energy, our kids will inherit 40 trillion plus in debt that they'll never be able to pay back during their lives.
We won't, the promise of Social Security and Medicare will go away.
They will means test it, and they will lower benefits dramatically because they squandered that money and they never put it in a lockbox.
These are not small issues.
The thing that probably worries me the most and that I talk most often about is we don't, we know we have known terrorists in this country.
We know where they came from.
We know they came from Iran.
We know they came from Syria.
We know they came from Egypt, home of the Muslim Brotherhood.
We know they came from Afghanistan, home of ISIS.
We know that they came from Venezuela, Trende Aragua gang, in now 20 states.
We know they're coming from China.
We know they're coming from Russia.
There's no way anybody can convince me that they're coming here because they want a better life for their children and their grandchildren.
They are here.
They are plotting.
They are planning.
They are scheming another 9-11 attack on our homeland.
Maybe worse this time.
I don't know.
And any day, any minute, I think it's a matter of when, not if, but I pray to God that I'm wrong.
I'd never want to be more wrong in my life.
I'd print up t-shirts.
Hannity was wrong.
But I think it's inevitable.
And we will be on a war footing at some point during the Trump administration because of these people Harris and Biden led into the country.
And they'll have more blood on their hands.
They have a lot of blood on their hands now.
Well, I think it partly depends on how aggressively and effectively we're able to execute deportations.
How do you find them?
Oh, I think it takes work, but I think there will be no sanctuary cities left in America.
There'll be no place where you don't have sheriffs and police working with you.
And I suspect that we're going to gather up a lot of information pretty rapidly.
And, you know, it's not perfect, but the truth is that we have done a pretty good job of tracking down and stopping people in the past.
And I think now that you have a pro-safety, anti-terrorist, anti-illegal immigrant administration, you have a lot of resources that are going to come to bear very fast.
And I agree with you.
It's a possibility.
It's something I worry about a lot.
It's not in the top five, but it's certainly a significant concern.
But I do believe that you have a new border director who is a remarkable professional.
I think he has reached out to lots of people.
And I think you're going to see, one, the border control, two, starting, I think, today, you're going to see substantial deportations.
And the Congress is passing, you know, passed the bill, which basically drives that if somebody gets picked up for virtually anything, they will be held until the federal agents can determine whether or not they have a criminal record.
That's going to clean up things very fast.
You know, Giuliani was very shocked at how fast they cleaned up, for example, the squeegee men who used to come up to you when you came into New York City, and they would walk out when you stopped the red light and they would put a dirty sponge on your car and then demand money.
Yeah, they'd clean your windshield with dirty water.
Right.
And people were just furious about it, but not under.
And then they'd shake you down for money, and little old ladies would have to hand over five bucks to get filthy, dirty water put on their windshield.
Well, they decided to focus on them as the first step towards reestablishing safety in the city.
To their shock, they found that actually there were about 40 of them.
Yeah.
And they said.
It was their full-time job.
Yeah, they said.
They got rich doing that.
Right.
The next time you touch a car, it's trespass on our private property, and we're arresting you.
And then we're going to take you down to the station and check to see if you have other outstanding warrants.
Within two weeks, there were no squeegee men left because they changed the equation.
Well, I think you're going to see the feds change the equation.
And I think they're going to say to anybody who claims they're a sanctuary city, how would you like to have no federal money?
None.
We can arrange for it by Monday.
And all of a sudden, you have a bunch of mayors going, you know, I really think this is a great program, and I really want to be part of it.
You know, you might have problems.
I've thought this through, and I think that's exactly the strategy.
Here's a little problem that Mike Johnson's going to have, and that is he has a California contingency of Republican House members.
And I mean, their jobs probably would be over if, in fact, that happened.
Now, the better answer is that California gets wise.
And I mean, how does anyone put any faith in California when they don't practice the science of forestry and clear out brush and have controlled burns and they have fire hydrants that don't have water in them and reservoirs that are empty?
Explain how that state ever gets an ounce of common sense.
Well, I think nothing, you know, it's like when you have kids growing up, sometimes nothing teaches them as much as burning their fingers on the stove.
You know, you can tell them all day the stove is hot, and then they finally go, oh, the stove really is hot.
My finger burned.
Look, first of all, I suspect there are a lot of Californians now who've begun to realize what a disaster, just in plain performance that government in California is.
I also think you're going to see a big recall effort for the mayor of Los Angeles, another recall effort for the governor.
And I think you will see some things.
We appreciate your time.
Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, thank you, sir.
And we will check in often because your advice, your counsel, your strategies are brilliant.
And we appreciate your friendship as always.
Thank you.
All right, quick break, right back.
We'll hit the phones as we continue.
Don't forget Hannity tonight.
Speaker Johnson, House Republicans, Town Hall, Donald Trump tomorrow night, Oval Office for his first sit-down interview.
All coming up as I continue from the DC Swamp.
It's the Sean Hannity Show.
Up next, our final roundup and information overload hour.
All right, let's get to our busy telephones here.
Let's say hi to Ricky's in Ohio.
Yeah, I just want to say that, you know, listening to President Trump yesterday's inauguration speech, it was amazing.
He touched on every subject that he said he would do when he got in as president.
And as a father of three daughters, I really appreciated him saying, you know, there's two genders.
There's males and there's females.
And I appreciate that very much.
And so do a lot of people here in Ohio that got young daughters playing sports.
I think that was very important.
And I also appreciate his transparency on everything that he did yesterday on signing all those orders and being very transparent, showing them to the people of this country and the world.
It was amazing to watch.
And it's only really just begun.
And the one thing I could tell you, he was so dialed in yesterday and so on his game.
And I've known him for 30 years.
And I can't really explain it.
And I have my theories, and there's no point going over what Hannity's theories are, but I think that winning this election has changed him.
I think two assassinations or two would-be assassins and coming within a millimeter of dying has changed him.
Do I think he's even conscious of it?
I'm not really sure.
To some degree, I think he's more religious.
I think his faith has grown.
And I think that he is, he just realizes that he's on borrowed time at this point, and he wants to accomplish this for his country.
That'll be his legacy.
And the guy that stood up and said fight, fight, fight is going to spend four years doing just that.
He will fight, he will fight, and he will fight some more.
And he's not going to stop.
And Republicans, they better stiffen their spine and get a backbone because they're going to need to fight with them.
Anyway, we love our friends in Ohio.
Congratulations, Buckeyes.
Big win last night.
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