April 6, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:22
3642 The Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory | Roger Stone and Stefan Molyneux
What is the truth about the theory that President Donald Trump and his associates colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russian government to "hack: the U.S. Presidential election? Roger Stone joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the non-existent evidence behind this theory and why the mainstream media and democrat political establishment continue to propagate this flimsy narrative. Roger Stone is a well-known political operative and pundit. A veteran of nine national presidential campaigns and has served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents. He is author of the New York Times bestseller “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,” as well as “The Clintons' War on Women,” “Jeb! and the Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty” and “The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution.”The Making of the President 2016: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution: http://www.fdrurl.com/Making-of-the-PresidentJeb! and the Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty: http://www.fdrurl.com/bush-crime-familyThe Clintons' War on Women: http://www.fdrurl.com/clintons-war-on-womenThe Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ: http://www.fdrurl.com/who-killed-kennedyFor more information from Roger Stone, go to: http://www.rogerstone.comhttp://www.stonecoldtruth.comhttp://www.stonezone.comYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio, back with Mr.
Roger Stone, a well-known, I would dare say these days ubiquitous, political operative and pundit, a veteran of nine national presidential campaigns.
He has served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents.
He is author of the New York Times bestseller, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, The Case Against LBJ, which I will say is a true mind-blowing piece of work, as well as the Clintons' War on Women, Jeb! and The Bush Crime Family, The Inside Story of an American Dynasty, and most recently, The Making of the President The Inside Story of an American Dynasty, and most recently, The Making of the President 2016, How You can check him out at rogerstone.com and stonecoldtruth.com.
will put a link to Roger's excellent books.
Bilal, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Comrade.
I mean, Stefan, pardon me.
Yeah, of course.
Great to be here.
For those who don't know, we offered to do this interview entirely in Roger's native Russian, but he declined, thinking that it might be a bit of a dead giveaway.
So let's start with this...
Aspect as a whole, because I plan for this show to be listened to for at least 500 to 1,000 years.
So for those deep into the future who do not understand this mania about Russia hacking the U.S. election that is continuing month after month and only seems to be escalating, like it's like some sort of giant crock in trying to pluck sailors off a ship, the way that they're reaching for these justifications...
Can you give those who aren't as familiar with the whole Russian mania, Russophobia, what is going on and what do you think is behind it?
Sure.
There was a juncture during the campaign, Stefan, in which Donald Trump jocularly said that if the Russians had Hillary Clinton's missing emails, the emails that she had ordered deleted at the State Department, that they should release them.
That...
Drew an immediate response from the Clinton campaign with this new narrative that the Trump effort was being aided by the Russians, that Trump associates, myself included, have colluded with the Russians to somehow tip the election to Donald Trump.
Now, my hat is off to John Podesta because it's a brilliant strategy.
Distract from your own business activities and those of your brother and those of the Clintons within the context of the Clinton Foundation and distract from them and send the media and others on a wild goose chase looking for Trump's non-existent Russian connections.
The neocons that infect the intelligence services and the Pentagon Very disappointed in the failure of Hillary Clinton to win because she had promised them an expansion of the proxy war in Syria.
They were wringing their hands in glee.
We might even get a no-fly zone guaranteeing World War III, which they seem to think is a great idea.
They picked up this theme, yet to this day, We have seen no evidence that would hold up in a US court of law of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
This is a witch hunt, a wild goose chase.
And what I particularly resent is twofold.
First of all, my mother's people are Hungarians.
And members of her family were crushed on the streets of Budapest in 1956.
So claiming that I have any love for the Russians is nonsense.
I came to politics attracted to the anti-communism first of Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan.
I hate All totalitarian states, including the current Russian system, which is a rotten system that oppresses gay people and Christians and Jews and other minorities.
I have no illusions about their system or the fact that Vladimir Putin is a killer, that he's a former KGB agent.
I do think he's a strong leader in certain terms of using his vast police powers to keep control and using his armies to push his agenda.
But that doesn't mean I'm for World War III. You see, this has become the new McCarthyism in this country.
If you're not for war with the Russians, well then you must be a traitor.
The irony of this, of course, is that it is the Obama and Clinton policies that brought us to brink of war with the Russians.
Well, not to mention, of course, that back in the day, I'm old enough to remember when the left was actively involved in covering up genuine links to the Kremlin back in the days of McCarthy.
And of course, when McCarthy was aided by a young Richard Nixon in his pursuit of infiltration from the Kremlin through the State Department and other areas in the 1950s and the 1960s.
So back in the day, of course, the left was very interested in covering up legitimate ties to a communist dictatorship in Russia.
Now that Russia is no longer a communist dictatorship, authoritarian to be sure, but not a dictatorship.
Now, instead of them covering up genuine ties, they seem to be inventing imaginary ties to a far more benevolent regime than the one they protected in the past.
Well, I don't know if the new regime is more benevolent, but I do know that this is demagoguery.
It's red-baiting.
It's fear-mongering.
It's name-calling.
Look, a lot of people say, you know, Roger Stone, you're a dirty trickster.
How can we believe you?
I'm an extreme partisan, and I have certainly cultivated a certain image for bare-knuckle politics.
But, Stefan, there's one trick that is not in my bag.
Treason.
That's not in my bag of tricks.
Nor is it fair to level that criticism of Donald Trump.
And then what I really have a problem is the way that we manufacture facts.
So yes, it is absolutely true that I tweeted in August that John Podesta's time in the barrel will come.
There will be a focus on his Eastern Europe Political business activities as there were on Paul Manafort's at that time.
So context is important.
At no time did I predict the hacking of his email.
At no time did I discuss or mention or comment on the potential of the hacking of his emails.
When his emails were hacked and produced by WikiLeaks, I was as surprised as anyone else.
And yes, I did have a source.
And that source did tell me in August that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks folks had a serious treasure trove of documents on Hillary Clinton.
He never said the word email.
And that they would drop them in October.
And he reminded me of this in September and the balance of August.
And of course in early October this came true.
I've only recently learned on July 31st, WikiLeaks themselves tweeted this exact same information, that they had a plethora of documents or information about Hillary Clinton, and they would release them in October.
So I'm not sure what the state secret was.
But to now come back and claim I had advanced knowledge of the scope, The specifics, the issues, the timeframe for disclosure.
I knew none of those things, and I never said that I did.
Right.
Now, turning from, I guess, somewhat manufactured links to Russia to ones that seem, to me at least, a little bit more tangible.
I've talked about this on the show before, but it's worth revisiting for people who aren't aware of it.
the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton, during the State Department and issues around the transfer of significant piles of control of uranium to Russia.
That seems fairly significant, as well as money that John Podesta has received.
I wonder if you could help people sort of understand how the usual leftist tactic of projecting onto others who are innocent the guilt that you yourself are feeling.
How does this sort of play into the narrative that they're trying to manufacture?
Well, you can go to stonecoldtruth.com and read a story that I wrote on October 13th regarding John Podesta in a phony bank deal where he received stock worth many millions of dollars, failed to report that, as I believe is required you can go to stonecoldtruth.com and read a story that I wrote And, It is part and parcel of the uranium deal you reference.
That was on page one of the New York Times to their credit They did a really excellent investigative journalism job of getting to the bottom of the connection between contributions to the Clinton Foundation and the transfer of our uranium or a substantial portion of it to a company that is controlled by the Kremlin.
And then there's the gas deal and Tony Podesta's ties there to the state-run gas company.
I mean, they're absolutely right.
There was a presidential candidate in bed with Putin.
There was a presidential candidate whose aides were compromised by Putin if, in fact, John Podesta was supposed to report his bank stock that he was gifted in this And then they would have blackmail information on him.
So there was a candidate in bed with Putin, but it was not Donald J. Trump.
And frankly, the mainstream media has been slow, pardon me, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.
In picking up some of these stories, but they are, of course, very real.
In these two worlds that not just America, but the West as a whole seems to be inhabiting with both people or both groups sort of facing their own...
I don't want to say echo chambers because that sounds like it's all propaganda.
But let's just say there's different information coming to different groups.
So people who are skeptical of what you're saying will say things like this.
Well, you know, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA have all seemed to reach the conclusion that Russia attempted to interfere in the election of last year.
They were hacking emails of officials with the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign and so on.
Comey has come out saying, well, they, the Russians, they wanted to hurt our democracy, hurt her.
And help him, referring to Donald Trump.
So for the people who see that and for whom these alphabet soup of security agencies have a significant amount of credibility, what is the explanation if they've had all this chance to look at, I don't know, backdoor information or hidden information and have come to these conclusions?
Well, I guess I'd make two points.
If one looks at the historical track record of the intelligence agencies, it's hard to have any confidence.
They lied about Benghazi.
They lied about rendition of terrorists through third-party countries that do use torture.
They lied about weapons of mass destruction in the possession of Saddam Hussein.
They lied about Iran-Contra.
They lied about the Vietnam War.
This is a long legacy.
So I don't have the kind of confidence That some Americans have in these institutions.
That is not to say that they're entirely politically corrupted.
They're not.
They're only corrupted at the top level, at the leadership level.
There's no question in my mind that both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have many diligent, honest, hardworking men and women Who are only trying to do their job under their charter.
But as I indicated, the leaks coming out of the top level of the CIA, leaks that are felonies, if in fact the wiretapping of myself and others in the Trump camp was done through a super secret FISA court warrant,
which is what I believe, then you have A layer of political appointees at the top of the CIA, one level down from the director, who have not been relieved of their positions, who still have access to sensitive intelligence, and who are leaking like a sieve.
Who's leaking the president's conversations with other world leaders on the telephone?
It's really extraordinary.
Based on my own research, my book on the Kennedy assassination, my book on the Watergate break-in, where the Watergate burglar team has clearly been infiltrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, we learned only months ago that one of the Watergate burglars,
91-year-old Virgilio Gonzalez, who still lives in Miami, Was still actively working for the agency at the time he was recruited for the Watergate break-in.
And by his own admission, reporting everything to his case officer.
So the burglar team in Watergate had been infiltrated.
And Nixon had earned the enmity of the military-industrial complex.
You see, when they elected him, they thought he was the ultimate cold warrior.
They thought that he might get tough in Vietnam, which is interesting when you consider how many bombs Lyndon Johnson had dropped.
Instead, Nixon ends the Vietnam War on a faster timetable than the Pentagon wanted, withdraws American troops on a much faster timetable, opens backdoor communications with the Chinese going around the NSC and the State Department to open the door to China through a diplomatic Trip to that country and the restoration of normal relations.
And at the same time, he negotiates a deal with the Russians on the limitation of nuclear warheads.
My God, Nixon was for peace.
We got to get rid of this guy.
And they did.
Not that he didn't make it easy because a small group of misfits, I think, played on his paranoia for a political caper that never made much sense.
Anyone who's been in a political campaign for president knows that there's nothing worth having at the party headquarters.
The action is at the presidential candidates' headquarters.
So it's even hard to understand what they were seeking in the Watergate break-in.
But if you'll read my book, the break-in is clearly sabotaged with the purpose of getting caught, which ultimately brought Nixon down.
That cover-up, however, It took almost a year and a half before it crumbled, due largely to the repertorial efforts of the Washington Post and later the New York Times.
That's why when people say to me, well, there's no evidence that Donald Trump has been under surveillance, well, we're only a couple months into this scandal.
I think we're going to learn a great deal more.
In fact, I think that the surveillance of the president will turn out to be Broader and begin earlier than we currently know.
Well, as I said, when we talked last year, this was the election that counted for everything.
This was a win big or lose big election.
And now, if these leaks turn out to be the case, if this unmasking of people, whether accidentally or on purpose, included in massive amounts of surveillance, if it turns out that this has been the case, and then we can also understand why the stakes were so high, For the people who may have ordered it, who may have orchestrated it, and who may suffer some significant consequences should all of this come to pass and come to light.
It shows one of the reasons why they were so desperate to win.
I actually think that now the puzzle is coming together.
The theme, the narrative of Russian collusion to help Donald Trump was the justification, was the rationale For the surveillance of Donald Trump and his campaign.
If that falls apart, if there is no evidence of that, because you're right, the intelligence agencies keep saying it's happened, but they produce no proof whatsoever.
None.
None that would stand up in a court of law.
And if they can produce none, it will become pretty clear that the president was being monitored for political reasons.
Watergate times 10.
Nixon had a small group of private citizens who were misfits break into the Watergate.
There's still no evidence that he knew about it in advance or approved it.
Whereas Barack Obama has used the entire machinery of the federal government and our intelligence agencies to spy on the Republican candidate for president and later the president-elect.
So we know there has been a limited amount of surveillance.
According to the New York Times, Stefan, of January 20th, Headline in the print edition, wiretapped data utilized in probe of Trump associates.
They changed the headline on the online story, but that story goes on to say that three associates of Donald Trump, including Roger Stone, have been monitored by wiretaps, and that the CIA, or pardon me, the NSA now has emails, records of financial transactions, And then on January 30th, they add intercepts of telephone calls with Russian contacts.
Where are they?
Produce them.
Let's hear them.
Let's see them.
They don't exist, not as far as I am concerned.
So I think that they are running out of rope here.
I don't know what General Flynn did or did not do.
I'd like to know.
I don't know General Flynn.
I've never met him, never spoken to him.
I've seen him on TV. But I think until some solid evidence of misconduct comes to the fore, he's also entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Just because you meet with the Russian ambassador, which is not illegal, or just because you communicate with WikiLeaks, which I have not done directly, but because I reject the idea that WikiLeaks is a Russian asset just because the NSA says but because I reject the idea that WikiLeaks is a Russian asset just because the NSA says he is, Let's see evidence of an attempt to rig this election.
They have not yet produced it.
Well, this is why they use this term hack, which could mean just about anything that you want it to mean.
And something that really troubles me about this kind of pseudo jurisprudence, Roger, is that the whole point of this stuff, if there is some defensible point to it, is they're supposed to gather all of this metadata because they suspect some form of wrongdoing.
Now...
If that wrongdoing is supported by the evidence, is supported by the data, then they pass it along for potential prosecution.
But if there's nothing that's found, or at least nothing prosecutable that is found, then it's supposed to sink back down into the surface of the NSA and never, ever, ever see the light of day.
And that's really the whole point of this.
Because what seems to have happened now...
Is there's entire agencies out there that can say, well, we've got all this data and we've got all of this stuff that's bad, but they're never in any obligation to produce it, which is counter to the entire purpose and shield that people are supposed to get from unsuccessful investigations or investigations that come up flat.
So I really don't like it.
It seems to me kind of, it's kangaroo court, it's Stalin, it's a court of public opinion and so on, because they say, well, we have all this data.
Trust us.
We're not going to show it to you, but it shows that bad stuff happened.
That's not ever how it was supposed to work.
No, and nobody can be prosecuted on that basis if any prosecution is warranted.
Look, I feel violated.
I have no doubt whatsoever that I've been under surveillance.
I say this because Not only the New York Times story of January 20th, but a bunch of these fake news sites on the left are popping up with small incidental details that could only be known by someone who was into my email, into my Twitter feed, into my Facebook feed, and so on.
And that's a big step.
You're violating the civil liberties of an American citizen.
You're violating my right to privacy.
Now, there's two ways that that can happen.
The government can go to a judge, a federal judge, with evidence and probable cause, and he could order it, he or she could order it, or you go to the super-secret FISA court.
Which approves just about everything, yeah.
In which no probable cause or evidence is required.
However, leaking the fruits of a FISA court warrant is a felony itself, meaning whoever spoke to the New York Times for their story on January 20th It's facing 10 years in jail for each count.
So this is a police state tactic.
I'd like to know who violated my right of privacy.
Monitoring emails between my wife and I, my business associates and I, hundreds of reporters and I, it's unsettling.
And it has no basis in anything other than politics.
I think I was under surveillance on the basis of a Clinton campaign press release, in essence.
And that's a serious question.
What was the press release?
What do you mean?
Well, but I mean the entire invention of the theme that Donald Trump is in bed with the Russians is the justification for these wiretaps.
No hard evidence.
No Proof that would stand up in a court of law.
A campaign meme invented by John Podesta to distract attention from his own business activities and put the onus on Trump and then picked up by the deep state and used as a rationale for surveillance of one of the two major party candidates for president.
That's where I think we end up in this whole issue.
Right.
What if you could help my listeners, Roger, understand this concept of the deep state?
Now, of course, it's a term that's popped up relatively recently, though it's been used ever really since the Second World War, to some degree to indicate the sort of essential underpinnings of government that not only use elected officials as a distraction, but continue in a way that elected officials who come and go don't.
I know you've done a lot of work looking into this.
How would you best describe the What the deep state is and what challenges it's facing with the Trump administration.
Sure.
Let me try to explain this.
I think President Dwight Eisenhower, one of our greatest presidents, described it as the military-industrial complex.
It's the same thing.
It is the Pentagon, the defense contractors, And the intelligence services, who seem to, regardless of who is president, many of the officials in those departments, the careerists, if you will, stay in place.
And they have been in the forefront of the neocon control, I would say, or domination of foreign and military policy that led us off to the Iraq War and other So while the White House may change hands, while the Congress may change hands in terms of party control, this is a permanent bureaucracy in place.
And they have very powerful tools of surveillance and other sophisticated methods that have recently been exposed in the Vault 7 disclosures by WikiLeaks, the ability To use your cell phone as a listening device.
The ability to take over the control of your automobile if they want to crash it into a tree, shall we say.
So the deep state was riddled with neocons.
They favored Hillary Clinton's candidacy.
She was a known commodity.
Her husband had done business with them, had given them the Skirmishes around the globe that they wanted, had given them broadening of their powers.
And they were deeply invested in her candidacy, largely because they favor an expansion of the war in Syria.
Now deeply disappointed in her failure, they seek to undermine President Trump.
They seek to undermine an agenda of detente.
Trump has no illusions about the Russian gulag.
He has no illusions about the evil of the Russian government.
But he'd like to negotiate for peace, at least try, as they said here in the 1970s, the 60s, I guess.
Let's give peace a chance.
I'd like to try negotiating before we go to thermonuclear war.
Right.
So, I had initially thought that the Russian narrative was somewhat invented because the leaders of the Democrat Party had put forward a candidate who was not good, to put it relatively objectively.
Never seemed that comfortable with the crowd, didn't get in front of the press, didn't give enough speeches, didn't have the kind of rallies, never generated the kind of enthusiasm, and of course, existed as a somewhat green-tinged harpy in the minds of many people who remembered her from the Clinton days and her treatment of some of the women who As you point out in your book, The Clinton's War on Women, who had accused Bill Clinton of improper behavior, should we put it as nicely as humanly possible?
Why not?
Sexual assault.
Sexual assault and rape.
So the fact that they took, I mean, it was an ungodly amount of money, like well over, well north of a billion dollars to try and get this woman to the White House, and failed to a first-time candidate who was widely perceived as a joke, whom academia was against, who the media was against, the comedians were against, the newspapers, magazines, television, everyone was against, and she was considered a shoe-in, and then they failed.
They failed really, really badly.
So I thought they just invented this initially.
Okay, well, we failed.
We don't want to fire ourselves.
So let's pretend that we did a great job.
We were just sabotaged by sinister, alien, external influences that nobody can verify.
You know, they didn't choose Canada.
They chose some country far away, foreign language, nobody knows what's going on.
But I think, yeah, I think that as we're going forward and we realize the degree to which Trump and his team may have been surveilled and you have been surveilled and other people I've talked to privately are pretty sure, you know, they see their cell phone battery draining visibly, you know, as six million different agencies are listening into what they're doing.
That, yeah, this idea that they had to look into possible foreign interference in the election might be a fantastic smoke screen for everything that was going on in the deep state and with the alphabet soup of in-your-inbox agencies.
And where do you think things might go from here?
Part of me is like, get them!
The other part of me, eh, they're Democrats, they're like grease dolphins, they're going to slip out.
Well, first of all, I agree with the first part of your analysis.
There seems to be a disconnect with reality here.
Hillary Clinton was a very weak candidate.
She had a certain lack of vitality and energy.
She certainly put forward no ideas, no plan for the country other than more of the same.
And I think the number's closer to two billion dollars.
And that's without including the value of, say, CNN's constant pounding on Trump, which was a de facto political commercial.
What's that worth?
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
And now we learn that on the net, Google and Facebook and others were fooling with Trump's logarithms, trying to limit his reach.
So he was outgunned in the old media.
He was outgunned in the new media.
He was outspent.
You're right, he was an object of scorn by the elites in this country.
And somehow he won.
And he ran a guerrilla-style campaign, underfunded, probably spent Grand total, 275 million, perhaps.
So there's an unwillingness to come to grips with reality.
They need some excuse why they lost, and it can't be, we ran a lousy candidate who ran a lousy campaign.
Despite the enormous financial advantages, despite the enormous media advantages, they somehow managed to lose.
And therefore we must blame someone.
Let's blame the Russians.
It's disingenuous.
And then when they return Nancy Pelosi to leadership and they elect a leadership team at the Democratic National Committee that includes a radical Islamist who insists that the Jews are responsible for the Holocaust, yeah, I'd say the Democratic Party is Pretty screwed up.
The old Democratic Party, the party of Harry Truman and John Kennedy, Scoop Jackson, a party that was anti-communist but socially progressive, that party no longer exists anymore.
The Democratic Party will not stand up against the oppression and murder of gay people by Islamic radicals, the oppression of women by Islamic radicals.
This is a different New Democratic Party that I barely recognize.
People forget just how much Kennedy was a fan of Joseph McCarthy and how tight they were and how, of course, as Catholics and so on, they were significantly invested in skepticism and hostility towards an atheistic, dominatrix doctrine like communism.
So let's touch on your book.
And, you know, please just, everyone, go buy a copy and read it.
You're a great writer and, of course, lots of insights.
Give me the, and not quite the elevator pitch, but what What do you feel are the major factors that helped this truly shocking win to people who weren't sort of reading the right tea leaves of Donald Trump getting into the presidency?
There's two aspects of it.
One is the sea change in where American voters get their information.
This is the election in which the mainstream media monopoly on the dissemination of political information is finally broken.
And this is due largely to technological advances.
With the majority of people now getting their political news from their handheld device, instead of the stationary television in the living room, and having to go through the internet now to get that news, well, it doesn't take consumers very long to figure out when they get to the net that there are better places to go than,
say, CNN. And it gives rise to an alternative media that is vibrant, that is interesting, pardon me, and is in some cases producing better investigative journalism and a broader cross-section of opinion than some in the mainstream media.
That, I think, is what opens the door to Donald Trump's election.
Without it, it would not be possible.
We see a situation in which there is an attempt to throttle and choke off that vibrant new alternative media with these police state tactics of censorship deciding that Stefan Molyneux, that's fake news, so we're not going to let him reach anybody on Facebook or through Google.
This is tortious interference.
It's a classic violation of antitrust law, but it's happening today.
I have seen my growth at StoneColdTruth.com, which is where I report on politics, Zor during the election, Well, a lot of people don't really understand this particular process and they say, well, they're private companies, they can do what they want.
However, if these sort of big...
Internet companies, media companies, or media hosting companies, if they classify themselves as sort of akin to a public utility, then they're sort of like the people who bring you water or electricity.
Let's say that the guy in charge of the electricity company is a Democrat.
He can't sit there and say, well, I'm not delivering.
Any electricity to Republicans, right?
Because that would be a violation.
So you have to have, if you're going to claim this sort of utility status, which gives you some benefits, then you do have to have a neutral platform and you cannot be going around censoring people specifically for political opinions.
Of course, you know, I mean, incitements to murder and so on.
Illegal speech, absolutely, but not political advocacy.
And I think that's where they're going to run into some challenges.
All right, then to go back to the book, I think the other big theme that's worth touching on is an examination of how the pollsters could be so wrong.
And in some cases, I think this is disingenuous.
I think there were some media pollsters, some professional pollsters who inflated their democratic Voter sample to create an artificial lead for Hillary Clinton.
But in other cases, I think there's an honest mistake.
And that mistake is assuming that the makeup and the turnout in the election was going to mimic four years ago very closely.
It was never realistic to assume that Hillary Clinton would generate as large an African-American turnout as Barack Obama, who is a Iconic, historic figure.
Or that she would get as high a percentage of that vote as Barack Obama.
And in both cases, those assumptions were wrong.
But those assumptions were utilized in the turnout model for a number of these media and professional pollsters.
They misunderstood who was coming out.
They underestimated turnout in rural areas, which came out in record numbers for Donald Trump.
They also underestimated the crossover appeal of Trump to white working class Democrats in places like Western Pennsylvania or Northeastern Ohio who voted for Obama, who thought Romney was far too country club for them.
Who thought that John McCain was a cranky old man and therefore they voted twice for Barack Obama and in this election they voted not for Hillary Clinton but for Donald Trump.
Take Pennsylvania for example.
If you go back and look at it, Romney and McCain and Trump all lost the city of Philadelphia by approximately the same overwhelming margin.
All of them sustained defeats in the suburban counties around Philadelphia, which historically used to be Republican strongholds, but are no longer.
Today they're purple, if you will.
They're swing areas.
But the reason Trump carries Pennsylvania is because he substantially outpaces Romney and McCain in western Pennsylvania among white union member Democrats Who voted proudly for Barack Obama.
That factor was not taken into consideration by many of the mainstream media pollsters.
Tony Fabrizio, who was among the Trump campaign pollsters, brilliant survey researcher in my opinion, what is not only the first one to spot this trend among white working class Democrats, But who advocated to the Trump campaign that to win, they had to expand the map.
They had to go into Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which ultimately were won by Trump.
Highly improbable early in the race.
And they had to hold on to Pennsylvania.
No small task.
Obviously, there is a closing factor here that I also write about.
Donald Trump Launches a superhuman physical effort in the last two weeks of this race.
Donald Trump is doing five and six campaign events a day in those target states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, doubling back to Florida, doubling back to Ohio.
And during the same time period, Hillary Clinton is in Chappaqua in her pajamas Looking at swatches of fabrics for the curtains in her upcoming Oval Office.
She is vastly overconfident.
And frankly, she just gets outworked in the closing days.
Trump is a closer.
He is campaigning like a whirling dervish in the closing days.
I've equated this with the 1948 race for president.
In which Republican Tom Dewey was so far ahead in the polls that he suspended campaigning.
He avoided saying anything controversial about anything, not wanting to alienate anyone.
And he was so busy picking out his cabinet that Harry Truman jumped on a train, took it across the country in the most Vituperative, negative rhetoric saying Republicans have stuck a pitchfork in the back of every farmer in America.
It's a sample.
As Truman moves west, his crowds are getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
He ends up in California, which he carries despite the fact that Dewey's running mate is the governor of California, Earl Warren.
And the more I looked at it, Tom Dewey and Hillary Clinton had a lot in common.
Cold, aloof, overconfident, no specific campaign program, no program for the country.
Hillary Clinton turns out to be Tom Dewey without the mustache.
Well, and this is the thing.
Of course, Donald Trump had a very positive and articulated vision.
We could understand why he wanted to run for office.
He had a particular passion for the country, a particular passion for the future.
I could never quite figure out, other than a sort of Gollum-like lust for the Ring of Power, what exactly Hillary Clinton was doing in the race, what big vision she had.
And the other thing, too, I try not to get involved in endurance combats with people who can sleep three hours a night.
I mean, you're just not going to win that much.
I mean, the man did work like a workhorse.
And, of course, people are surprised every time I point this out.
He is a stone genius.
You look at his SAT scores, you look at his college entrance exams, you can map those to IQs.
It's off the charts.
The guy is brilliant, and he does have this astonishing ability, despite having been born into fairly decent privilege, silver spoon in his mouth, and being worth a huge amount of money.
He has this...
Always has had this preference for the common man, you know, rather speak to the cab driver than the owner of the cab company, but he has the ability to listen.
You know, people think that sales is all about putting stuff out there.
No, sales is all about absorbing, understanding the needs.
You can't sell a sports car to a guy who's got nine kids, and you can't sell a minivan to a guy with no kids.
So he had the capacity to listen and reflect back and show the American people that he really understood what their issues and concerns were.
Hillary Clinton never seemed to have that sort of absorb and reflect back and embody people's needs and preferences.
And Trump really did absorb that.
And as it turns out, flyover country can fight back.
Well, and not only that, but she actually, in an incredible burst of elitism, she attacks Trump supporters as deplorables.
An enormous mistake.
Now, that was not, you know, some ad lib that went wrong.
That was a premeditated campaign thrust that was a disaster.
It's snobbery.
It's elitism when you start attacking your opponent's supporters and saying they're irredeemable.
So the arrogance, the elitism, the wealth, the evident wealth for someone who's been in public service their whole life, I think voters found all those things offensive.
And Trump, as you pointed out, although he's a billionaire, although he has an Ivy League education, he still has an amazing ability to communicate with the average person.
He speaks colloquial English.
He talks the way real people talk in everyday life.
It's not polished, it's not highfalutin, it's not high oratory, but it's the way people talk and therefore it made him, I think, very understandable I got a thing too, Roger.
Let's close with this thought.
I want to get your thoughts on this, because I know you were watching both the alternative media, which you write about in your book, but you were also watching the mainstream media, as was I, with fascination.
Because I grew up in the day where the mainstream media could make or break you.
And there was really no recourse.
You know, I mean, maybe you could try and take him to court, but it would drag on.
And, you know, if you got vindicated, the stain would still...
I wasn't there to see them take down McCarthy, but I read about it.
I remember as a kid when they took down Nixon.
I mean, the media had a huge amount of power.
And I think the people who came of age who were young in the reporting field, they sort of now are the managers or senior managers or on the board or whatever, and they still think they have this power.
It was incredible for me to watch, Roger, that just about every time It's one thing to take aim at something, pull the trigger and miss.
It's quite another thing to take aim at something, pull the trigger and the gun goes off in your face.
That seemed to happen repeatedly with the media.
And, you know, for instance, they thought they had the great gotcha with the comments that Trump had made privately recorded.
Who knows where they figured that out from?
But, you know, the sort of grab by the pussy comments and so on.
And people, you know, were appalled, as was Trump, you know, like, oh, it was a private conversation.
I'm sort of, I hate that I said it and all that.
But when people came flocking in with this outrage, there was an army of people there saying, oh really?
Disrespect towards women.
This is your standard.
Let's talk about Bill Clinton.
Let's talk about the 1990s.
Let's talk about Juanita Broderick.
Let's talk about Paula Jones.
Let's talk about Catherine Winnie.
Let's talk about all of the people.
That have accused, and fairly credibly so, Bill Clinton, and this is the woman who stayed married to him.
And so when the media thought they had Trump, there was an alternative geyser of information that was coming into people shocked at what Trump had done and finding out that the media had been covering up infinitely worse stuff on the other side.
And that sequence repeated itself over and over again, thus not only propelling Trump, but discrediting the media, which to me is a two-for-one deal.
Well, and also proving the point, though, that victory would not have been possible without a vibrant and robust alternative media and free access to the internet.
Because without that, the mainstream media calls the tune.
I think they undid themselves with their own arrogance, their own high-handedness, and as, you know, certified members of the ruling elite, They could never get their head around the fact that Trump could even potentially win.
I mean, I am seeing John Halpern from the circus, the HBO show, and I read yesterday that he's writing a book on Donald Trump, The Man.
This would be like me writing a book on the Hillary Clinton I love.
I mean, there was no juncture at which Mr.
Halpern conceded that Trump could possibly win this election.
So perhaps some in the media are adjusting their view of Trump the man or Trump the political phenomena.
But it was an extraordinary misreading by the American political establishment Because they were looking too much at the last race and using the same standards to judge this race, they underestimated the anger of the American people who really are fed up with the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama continuum.
Because although they claim to be in different parties, although they cling to different rhetoric, Their policies are exactly the same.
Endless war, erosion of our civil liberties, massive debt and spending and borrowing, an immigration policy that really makes our borders porous and endangers our streets and neighborhoods, trade policies that have in fact shipped all of our jobs offshore,
and a foreign policy That seems to be dedicated to bolstering the Muslim Brotherhood and their power while undercutting our traditional allies like Israel.
The palpable voter anger, which was I think only perceived by Donald Trump and not yet perceived by the career politicians who opposed him for the nomination, was tapped into by Bernie Sanders.
But was not, I think, fully understood by Hillary Clinton.
That anger, combined with a vibrant alternative media, I think are what won this election.
Yeah, well, Bernie Sanders provoked resentment, but Donald Trump did inspire hope, and that's a world of difference.
So thanks so much, Roger.
A great pleasure to chat again.
I really wanted to remind people, you've got to check out these books.
The Making of the President 2016, Jeb and the Bush Crime Family, The Man Who Killed Kennedy, the case against LBJ, which was my introduction to your work.
RogerStone.com, StoneColdTruth.com.
Thanks for all of your work.
I'm sure we'll stay in touch.
A real pleasure chatting today.
Great to be back with you.
And you can go to Amazon.com or Barnes& Noble.com.
We are this close to another New York Times bestseller, so we could use a little help to go over the top.
We'll check out the links below.
We'll put direct links to those books, and let's see if we can get some downloads and get those numbers up.
