Friday Wrap-up with Bob: April 25, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-up with Bob: April 25, 2025

Welcome to another Friday Wrap-Up with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. This is Bob Barney. Welcome, to any new listeners and any old listeners of course to the program.

We are going to go over what made news this week and what it might mean for you and your family and what the future may bring about that news. 

Two big stories of the week, I guess we’re going to talk about, is story number one, the Pope dying in Italy, in Rome at the Vatican, and the continuing ups and downs of Wall Street based on the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump or being threatened by Donald Trump, and what I think is a possible manipulation of the stock market and of other markets like the oil futures by maybe insiders rewarding themselves with undue profits, and we’ll get into that in this program today.

3:24 However, the first subject of the day is that of Pope Benedict passing away on Easter, a pagan Easter day, symbolic, I guess, to Satan the devil and all the minions of Satan who understand what that day really means. And I want to go over some things that we did this week that I want to talk about because I think it’s really important that we understand the history of the Catholic Church and who they are according to the Bible. I’m talking about the Bible here.

I’m not talking about what this woke theologian wants to say or this person who doesn’t want to offend wants to say. I want to talk about what God has to say about who the Antichrist is, who the Beast of the Revelation is, where they come from, and what their history was. This week we had many broadcasts on the Plain Truth Today broadcast about the Pope, the history of the Pope, the idea of the papal primacy, the idea that the Pope is Christ on earth.

4:59 One of the shows we did is from the Bible scholar John MacArthur (you can watch here), which I really wish people would go back and listen to. It’s a few stories up here. It’s right on theplaintruthtoday.com. You and your family would benefit listening to this featured video. Here are some of the things he said that I think you should listen to. One, the papacy is unbiblical. It is unbiblical. There’s not one tiny shred of evidence in scripture for the papacy. Nor is there any evidence for cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns. It’s all an invention of men and demons to create an illusion of spirituality and an illusion of transcendence. It was all developed by evil people, satanically led to create a false religion that would be the enemy of the truth.

The appeal is because of the power and prestige and the money. 

Do they try to support the papacy from the Bible? Yes. Listen to this. Again, this is their theology from Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Roman Dogma. Christ appointed the Apostle Peter to be the first of all the apostles and to be the visible head of the whole church by appointing him immediately and personally to the primacy of jurisdiction. Now what they do is go back and say Peter was the first pope appointed by Christ. And we go on to that story and it’s really interesting for you to listen to and I really recommend that you do listen to that one and the other ones we have. The history of the Catholic Church, the evils committed by popes in the name of Christ as being Christ on earth in the Catholic Church and the absolute changing of God’s times, calendars, and laws that was predicted in the book of Daniel that the Antichrist and the false prophet and the evil end time empire would perpetrate against God’s people. And you can prove it word by word.

6:45 If you go to these studies that we put up please know they are not affiliated with us whatsoever. In fact, some of these probably have positions that I do not agree with when it comes to one day the Sabbath is or if they’re going to follow Sunday or whatever. But my point to you is that these people go through the Bible and you could see for yourself, read for yourself, the absolute proof that the Catholic Church fulfills everything that God, through Daniel and through the book of Revelation and some of Paul’s writings like in Thessalonians, tells you to look out for. And it’s there in plain view in front of you. 

In spite of this, we heard this whole week how great Pope Benedict was, that he was the Pope of the people.

He was a communist!

He was a communist and he was an anti-capitalist, and he was anti-American and he was anti-west!

 7:58 That’s what this pope was. He was an evil person along with most of the other popes I’ve ever known who also were evil people because they are representing Satan, Satan’s church and not God’s church. That’s the plain truth. You can hate me for what I say. I’m telling you what you can prove with any minor Bible study about the Catholic Church. Just do so on your own. Don’t believe me. Don’t follow what I have to say. Don’t say this or that that you’re going to listen to me. Don’t listen to me. Go and do your own research and you will see that the Catholic Church began as a total corrupt church led by corrupt popes and corrupt ministers and priests that took the ancient Babylonian mystery religion including all of the holidays, all of the worship days, and all of the polytheistic gods and turned them into saints.

There is no queen of heaven. Mary is dead. She’s buried and she’s waiting a resurrection from the dead like every other Christian who has died is doing. There is no such thing as all of these holy days that the Catholic Church instituted like Sunday worship, like Christmas, like Easter. Look it up for yourself. Like I said, don’t believe what I say, but you’re going to find out like I did some 50 years ago when I didn’t want to hear the same words. You’re going to hear or you’re going to find out with your research that what I’m telling you is the plain truth. It is undeniably the truth of God and the truth that your books will show you, your Encyclopedia Britannica will show you. Heck, your Catholic Encyclopedia will prove to you what they did because they admit it, and then you got to make a decision. The decision I didn’t want to make for some four years because I didn’t want to be the odd man out, and I know you don’t want to be the odd man out, but guess what? God wants you to be the odd man out. And if you don’t want to be the odd man out, God doesn’t want you, not this time around at least. 

Commercial Break: This is Bob Barney talking about the Plain Truth Today and the PlainTruth.com news magazine that you find online.

9:56 It’s the one place that you go to to find out what’s going on today and why it’s happening and if God has anything to do with it because we know that God has a hand behind the news. That’s theplaintruth.com and theplaintruthtoday.com. From theplaintruth.com, you can easily click on our message board, our Your Health Today, the podcast here, or even the stories that you will find on the main page of theplaintruth.com. That’s theplaintruth.com. Visit it every day. 

Well, we’re back for the Friday wrap-up. Bob Barney here, we’re going to move on to the next subject today. And the next subject looks like there was a pause or a reprieve of the White House when it comes to these ridiculous tariffs that we’ve been talking about for the last several weeks and how they just did not make sense. And they were destroying our value of Wall Street. People don’t realize this, but 70% of Americans are invested in Wall Street. Wall Street is not something that a bunch of billionaires and millionaires do. The average person working with an IRA or a 401k is invested in Wall Street. And of course, for the last two, three weeks, we have been on a ride that has just absolutely scared the bejesus out of everybody. And it looks like Donald Trump got the message with his approval rating at an all-time low.

It’s a bad story when you look at the poll today where Donald Trump was actually the worst of the last seven presidents for the first 100-day approval. He’s only at 44%. He’s under the 50%. And Joe Biden, in his first 100 days, had a 54% approval rating. Barack Obama had a 69% approval rating. Now, I know people say they don’t want to believe these polls, and a lot of these polls are fake. But unfortunately, even the Trump-positive polls like Rasputin and those are given the same type of results. And I can see why. I talk to people every single day who voted for Donald Trump in my business, and they’re salespeople or they’re selling things, and they have gone berserk on Donald Trump. They cannot figure out what he was doing. The one thing I did tell everybody, and that’s why these programs, though I am not afraid of hitting the plain truth about what Donald Trump was doing wrong, I kept ending these programs is that hopefully God will open up his eyes or people around him will start speaking up. Because what he has done is he has selected a cabinet, basically, of yes men and women, and they do not want to tell him what he does not want to hear. But Donald Trump’s a person that will listen to all sides if he is cornered and forced to do so, which he did.in the first administration. But this time he has a cabinet that whatever he comes out with, no matter what they really believe, they tell him it’s the smartest thing that anybody’s ever come up with, and he’s a genius, and he’s sitting next to God, and that just feeds an ego, which has caused all of these problems. This was not a plan.

I don’t want to hear people tell me after the plan, oh, this was his plan all along. What, to mess up the economy?

 11:33 Unless, and I hope this is not the case, and now there is some investigations by Democrats, but they don’t have power in either branch of the House, which I believe could change in 26, and we’re going to go through impeachment all over again. There are many people, and I will tell you I don’t think it’s unfounded, that are accusing this White House of manipulating us to stock market in order to make money, because all they, you know, Donald Trump knows that all he’s got to do is say one bad thing, and the stocks the next day will tumble 1,000, 2,000 points, and during the day all he’s got to say is one positive thing, even if it’s not true, and the stock market rebounds by 1,000 or 2,000 points. We just came two, three weeks out of this, and seeing this every day, up and down, up and down, and only doing so based on what came out of the White House. Well, if you have somebody in the background selling short and selling long in the stock market, somebody with that kind of knowledge could have made billions of dollars with enough money. You talk about the Nancy Pelosi inside information on the stock market. This could be a real scandal. I don’t believe it’s going to be one, and I don’t believe that’s happening, but it’s something we always have to watch.

The plain truth does not take sides. I am a pro-Trump person. I told everybody last year that he was the last hope, and he still is, between him and Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or any other Democrat that I know of that’s running for anything, but at the same time, when he does things wrong, I’m going to nail him to the ground on it. I’m going to show what he’s doing wrong, and I think what happened is this Bessett guy, who is a Wall Street insider, finally started—I heard he had a shouting match with Elon Musk, and everybody could hear. It was kind of embarrassing because the Prime Minister of Italy was there and hearing it in the background. They were in another room, but I guess they were so loud, fighting, that everybody could hear it in the press room or the Oval Office, I think, where the press was actually interviewing Trump and the Prime Minister. But the plain truth of the matter is that I think Bessett got his way, and I think he convinced Donald Trump that this tariff thing is going to destroy the economy. It’s going to destroy the poor people of the United States who cannot afford runaway inflation.

 13:34 I think somebody finally got to him and said, you know, Mr. President, gas is not coming down like you said last week. It’s actually going up, and so is oil going up. And so he did a reversal. Now, I’m not going to say anything bad about Donald Trump about doing a reversal like I know the Democrats are going to do because they didn’t want him to reverse his stand. If Donald Trump’s business experience tells them anything—and it’s a smart experience to have, I’m a businessman, and I know you have to have this ability if you’re going to survive— is that is changing direction on a dime when you realize a move that you made did not work.

If you’re a smart businessman and you’re a lean, well-run company, you can change your position on a dime and come up with a plan and execute it before anybody realizes what’s going on. And that’s what smart businessmen can do, and Donald Trump has always been able to change direction when he sees and it’s been proven to him that his way wasn’t working. And I know a lot of people who do not like Donald Trump, the never-Trumpers out there, are going to use this against him.But I think this is the strongest point of a man that I will tell you right now I think is too arrogant, but this is his strongest point. He can, on a dime, change direction and do the right thing. And what he’s doing now, if it is true—and he’s not manipulating the stock market— if this is true and we’re going to have a lot lower tariff with China, a reasonable one, 25, 40, 50 percent, probably down to 25 percent in my estimation, and that’s going to allow China to lower all of the tariffs against the American agricultural business and we’ll be able to sell soybeans. And this needs to come out pretty soon because I know farmers personally in my area, and they want to grow soybeans but they’re not going to grow soybeans, and they got about two weeks to plan what they’re going to plant. And if they can know they’re going to have trade with China again, they’re going to plant a lot of soybeans because the other crops, other than peanuts, Virginia, and this is in Virginia, Virginia peanuts are the most famous peanuts in the world, the largest peanuts in the world. But other than peanuts, all the other crops, corn, wheat, cotton, they’re all-time lows.

15:56 Farmers can’t make money growing them. They make good money growing soybeans and growing peanuts. But they really want to grow a lot of soybeans because that goes to China and brings a lot of money this way and their way. And, you know, Brazil grows more soybeans than we do and that could have been the big winner here. But I think if Donald Trump has really changed direction and he now makes a deal with China and we can become friendly again, it’s going to help a lot of business. It’s going to help my business. I told you before, you know, I’m honest about where I’m from. In our business, the automotive paint industry, most of the resins that you make your paint out of comes from China. Most of the additives and ingredients and minerals that you use in the paint business come out of China. Most of all of the toners, the pigment itself, the colorants that, you know, because they are made out of minerals. Most colors are made from minerals like copper and bauxite and stuff like that, that you make colors out of. Most of that, again, is coming out of China.

And so the automotive paint business and probably the general paint business would have really suffered if this 150 to 250 percent tariff went through because there is no manufacturers in America doing what a lot of things are going on in China in the paint world. And that’s the simple truth because we can think the liberal EPA would shut down and force down most of these companies in America that tried to do the same thing for the last 100 years. And they realized it was a no-win situation to stay in America, and they all went.PPG, Exalta, Shearn Williams, they all went to China. American companies went to China to build their plants, their resin plants and their pigment plants in China because they knew they had a friendly EPA there that wasn’t going to shut them down over nonsense, which was going on in America. We are, our government, big government, is the reason why we are no longer manufactured.

16:45 Do you know why we don’t have steamships or I should say cruise liners registered in America? Do you know why? Because the unions in the 1960s forced through a bill in Congress that mandated for every passenger on a cruise ship, there had to be one crew member. So, for example, the SS United States, which we’ve been covering on the Plain Truth Message Board, because terribly speaking, it’s going to be destroyed and turned into a barrier reef, which is just awful in my opinion. I’m a historian by love, and that’s the only boat named after the United States of America, holds the speed record of crossing the Atlantic, and it’s a beautiful boat or ship, I guess, if you’re really technical about it. And that, and it was forced to go out of business back in the late 60s because of this law. They could only have 2,000 passengers, not 3,000 passengers, because they had to carry 2,000 crewmen.

 So the companies, they go to Panama, they register their ships in Panama, and guess what? They can put 3,500 people on a cruise boat that paves their way with a 500-man crew. And anybody that, a lot of people love the cruise, and I have never heard somebody complain there wasn’t enough people to take care of them when they only have 500 to 3,000 or 3,500 passengers. This was where the unions caused the demise of the cruise industry in America. This was the cruise industry in collusion with Congress, the Democrats in Congress, that were pro-union in the 1960s and 70s, that absolutely passed laws that they think were going to get more of them hired and got them all fired when all the cruise companies moved out of America. It was a crying shame. And this is what happened to boat building, this is what happened to all kinds of manufacturing during the last 40, 50 years. That our government, mainly our government, being bought out by unions and other, it’s not just unions, and by other conglomerates and other special interests, absolutely made it impossible for us to manufacture in America on a worldwide basis.

See, one of the things that I think so many people do not understand, it’s just a consumer out there, that a company, in order to survive and become big, I’m not saying a small company like myself, we can survive off of only American customers, but if you are a big multinational corporation headquartered in America, you need to sell in Europe, and you need to sell in Africa, in Asia, in Australia, you need to sell even in China, because there’s all this other population out there, and if you can’t compete globally, then you’re not going to be a global giant, and eventually, you’re going to go out of business and get gobbled up by the big guys in Europe or in Asia. And that’s the simple facts of what happens to big companies that are working in countries that are so much against big companies, and they’re pro-union or pro-other special interest, and so it forces these companies either to go out of business or sell out to Europeans or Asians that take the companies over. We’re seeing that with U.S. Steel.

19:01 Do you know why we don’t have steamships or I should say cruise liners registered in America? Do you know why? Because the unions in the 1960s forced through a bill in Congress that mandated for every passenger on a cruise ship, there had to be one crew member. So, for example, the SS United States, which we’ve been covering on the Plain Truth Message Board, because terribly speaking, it’s going to be destroyed and turned into a barrier reef, which is just awful in my opinion. I’m a historian by love, and that’s the only boat named after the United States of America, holds the speed record of crossing the Atlantic, and it’s a beautiful boat or ship, I guess, if you’re really technical about it. And that, and it was forced to go out of business back in the late 60s because of this law. They could only have 2,000 passengers, not 3,000 passengers, because they had to carry 2,000 crewmen. So the companies, they go to Panama, they register their ships in Panama, and guess what? They can put 3,500 people on a cruise boat that paves their way with a 500-man crew. And anybody that, a lot of people love the cruise, and I have never heard somebody complain there wasn’t enough people to take care of them when they only have 500 to 3,000 or 3,500 passengers. This was where the unions caused the demise of the cruise industry in America. This was the cruise industry in collusion with Congress, the Democrats in Congress, that were pro-union in the 1960s and 70s, that absolutely passed laws that they think we’re going to get more of them hired and got them all fired when all the cruise companies moved out of America. It was a crying shame.

21;11 This is what happened to boat building, this is what happened to all kinds of manufacturing during the last 40, 50 years. That our government, mainly our government, being bought out by unions and other, it’s not just unions, and by other conglomerates and other special interests, absolutely made it impossible for us to manufacture in America on a worldwide basis. See, one of the things that I think so many people do not understand, it’s just a consumer out there, that a company, in order to survive and become big, I’m not saying a small company like myself, we can survive off of only American customers, but if you are a big multinational corporation headquartered in America, you need to sell in Europe, and you need to sell in Africa, in Asia, in Australia, you need to sell even in China, because there’s all this other population out there, and if you can’t compete globally, then you’re not going to be a global giant, and eventually, you’re going to go out of business and get gobbled up by the big guys in Europe or in Asia. And that’s the simple facts of what happens to big companies that are working in countries that are so much against big companies, and they’re pro-union or pro-other special interest, and so it forces these companies either to go out of business or sell out to Europeans or Asians that take the companies over. We’re seeing that with U.S. Steel.

Japan wants to buy it out and run it in America. The reason that this is the case is because Japan realizes, we still make great steel, we have great steel workers, we have great employees, but they’re going to come over, and I got news for you, they’re going to bust the unions when they come over, and that is why the United Steelworkers do not want this deal to go through, even though most of the steel workers themselves do want the deal to go through. It’s just one of the facts of the economy that people don’t understand. But Donald Trump has done a pivot, and I think it’s welcome news, and probably most people are going to be very happy when they see their 401ks and IRAs in another three to four months, when they see all the money they lost, and I’ll tell you right now, they lost a lot of money, and they’re going to see it come back, and that’s going to help people kind of like the Trump administration again. 

23:56 Donald Trump tried to do too much too fast in his 100 days, and he thought that was going to all work, and that is a naivety, and as the problem is, I have a friend of mine who told me you can go to Ikea and get a better cabinet than the one Donald Trump picked, and there’s some truth there. I actually said you probably can go to Walmart and buy a better cabinet than Donald Trump picked. The majority of his cabinet members, with a few exceptions, they have no experience in running big departments in government. Pete Hegseth is a good guy, I’m sure he’s a great guy, and I told you this when he was running, that I was against him for getting the job, because we needed somebody like what Ronald Reagan picked to Casper Weinberger, somebody who could go in there and have the, I’ll use the Cuomo word, gravitas, in order to run that department with an iron fist, and those people knew they had to listen to him, but if you read between the lines what’s going on with Pete Hegseth right now, he’s being undermined by the people in the Pentagon who are probably going to end up winning the battle, and I do not believe he’s going to be Secretary of Defense that much longer, and you have this with position after position after position where Donald Trump decided to hire Fox News people to run departments that they are not trained or qualified to do, and they’re all going to end up failing, and this caused the first 100 days to be a massive failure in my opinion. This country started going down the route of stagflation and absolute depression if this policy of Donald Trump was to continue, but like I said in this program, I do think that Donald Trump does have the ability to save himself, and he has the ability to change direction on a dime when he needs to, when it’s proven to him that he was going down the wrong road, and I think one of the things all you had to do is turn on the damn business channel and watch all the stock markets keep crashing and all the other things going to happen.

Monday, he had a meeting with Walmart, Target, and Home Depot. You know what they told him? That in two weeks, the shelves in our places are going to be empty. We have nothing coming in. We have nothing coming into the ports. We canceled all our orders, and very soon people are going to be all over the TV news saying I can’t buy anything I need for my child. There’s no baby formula. There’s no this or that. There’s no diapers. There’s you name it. It was going to be splattered all over the news, and that would have been the end of Donald Trump, and he had the brains, in my opinion, to realize he had to change direction really fast, and that’s why a day after that meeting with those three companies, which employs those three companies, by the way, employs more Americans than any other entity other than the federal and state government, which itself is a crime when you think about that. 

25:22 I think good news is ahead for Donald Trump if he continues to lower the tone and to start listening to people that disagree with him but disagree with him because they know what works. They don’t want to see him fail. They just are telling him what he’s doing wrong, and they’re all going to stand up to him, which he does not have a cabinet, in my opinion, willing to do so. 

Well, that’s the Friday wrap-up, and I just want to go over the weekend before we sign off for the week, and tomorrow we’re going to have a show, which is our Sabbath show by Garner Ted Armstrong, who has passed away more than 20 years ago, but it’s still a very good show, is Who Was Jesus?, and he gets into what the Bible says about Jesus, and what Jesus says about himself, and who he was, and I really recommend those people who think they know who Jesus is and has never read one of those books by Garner Ted Armstrong. He has a great book out called The Real Jesus, and if you ever can get your hands on a copy of that, and I still think you can buy it, and you read that, it will blow your mind. You will realize you have never heard who the real Jesus is by any of these mainstream so-called Christians. That’s 7-11 a.m. tomorrow. Now, every Saturday night, we have a story.

27:21 We either have a radio story from the 40s and the 50s, or we have a short story, a famous book that someone narrates, which we play that, or we show a TV show or a movie once in a while.  On Saturday night, the Sabbath night, at 7-11 p.m., there’s no noon show on the Sabbath day, on Saturday, but we do have a 7-11 p.m. story every week, and Tomorrow’s Story is a really fascinating short story by H.G. Wells, you know, the time machine guy. Well, he wrote this short story in 1896, so it’s way over a hundred years old, and it’s called The Apple, and The Apple is an allegory to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and it’s a very, very good story to listen to. I think you will be mesmerized when you listen to this, I believe it’s about a 35-minute short story about a guy given a fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and of course, it’s a sci-fi type thing, but it’s a very interesting story that has biblical connotations, perfect for the Sabbath day. And then Sunday morning, we haven’t picked a show yet, but we usually do a political show, 7-11 a.m. Sunday morning. It’s usually over an hour, not a half hour, like most of these shows are even shorter, and that’s because it’s the only show we ever do on the Sunday, unless there’s something very special, we don’t do another show. And then, of course, Monday morning at 7-11 a.m., we’re back again with new shows, and sometimes the Best of Bob shows, or other older shows that maybe people haven’t listened to. We get new people every week listening, so sometimes we replace some older shows, but we always let you know that. But, Sunday, I mean, sorry, Monday morning at 7-11 a.m., there will be a broadcast, and at noontime, I have a show already done for noontime, it will not be a live show, and then 7-11 p.m. Monday through Friday, there are three shows a day on the Plain Truth Today broadcast. There’s 7-11 a.m., there’s noontime, and there’s 7-11 p.m., and then Saturday, there’s the two shows, and then Sunday, the one show.

29:45 So, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by ThePlainTruth.com, the place where you find out about today’s news in the light of what God thinks about it all, because God is the force behind the news, and God is the person, or the beings, that make up the news whenever they want to. In a blink of an eye, tomorrow’s news headline can change if God wants it to. The most powerful beings on the face of this universe can do that, and you need to be aware of it, and that’s what The Plain Truth is trying to get you to do, is to become aware of God’s influence on what happens in your life, in the life of this world, and your family.

Until Monday, this is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening. We do appreciate you, and you have a blessed and safe week.