Ronald Reagan vs Donald Trump Part 1 (Transcript)

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Hi, Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and this is part three in the final part of the series on Ronald Reagan’s policies versus Donald Trump’s policies, and what president I think was the greatest of the two. And actually, I think that Donald Trump’s first time in office, he was very good at what he did. The country really excelled.

I think he surrounded himself with very good advisors, some of which he didn’t like and fired because he didn’t like always what they had to say. But I think it was just a successful administration. And I also have been on record to say, I think this administration, the second time around is going to be a failure.It’s going to be a failure. And I think even Republicans are going to turn on him. And I think he could actually be removed from office or with health issues that are not being reported everywhere, but they’re reporting in other places.It’s possible he has some health issues that they’re trying to cover up as well. But I wanted to finalize this program by going over some differences of Reagan versus Trump. Some of the Trump strongholds, what I think he is good at doing, and also why I believe Ronald Reagan really had everything down correctly.Ronald Reagan understood not only the American people, but he understood the world, and he also understood economics.

You know, a lot of people used to laugh at Ronald Reagan’s voodoo economics, even his vice president called him that when he ran against him for the presidency in 1980, showing you the Bush family never believed in Reaganomics at all right from the beginning. But Ronald Reagan actually had his degree in economics, and unlike most presidents. And Ronald Reagan really did understand the fallacy of socialism. And I’m going to play one very famous radio. Ronald Reagan in the 1970s had a five minute radio show, and we’ve showed some of these shows in the past. And I don’t think there’s a better one at showing you the fallacy of socialism and what it does to a people than this one here. It’s called The Modern Little Red Hen. And I just think when you hear this again, I’m going to play this. It’s four minutes, five minutes long. I imposed a little poetry on you. It was called The Incredible Bread Machine and made a lot of sense with reference to matters economic. You didn’t object too much. So having gotten away with it once, I’m going to try again.

This is a little treatise on basic economics called The Modern Little Red Hen.

Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat. She called her neighbors and said, if we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it? Not I, said the cow.Not I, said the duck. Not I, said the pig. Not I, said the goose. Then I will, said the little red hen, and she did. The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain. Who will help me reap my wheat? Asked the little red hen. Not I, said the duck. Out of my classification, said the pig. I’d lose my seniority, said the cow.I’d lose my unemployment compensation, said the goose. Then I will, said the little red hen, and she did. At last it came time to bake the bread.Who will help me bake bread? Asked the little red hen. Oh, that’d be overtime for me, said the cow. I’d lose my welfare benefits, said the duck. I’m a dropout and never learned how, said the pig. Well, if I’m to be the only helper, that’s discrimination, said the goose. Then I will, said the little red hen.She baked five loaves and held them up for her neighbors to see. They all wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, no, I can eat the five loaves myself.

Excess profits, cried the cow. Capitalist leech, screamed the duck. I demand equal rights, yelled the goose.And the pig just grunted. And they painted unfair picket signs and marched round and round the little red hen, shouting obscenities. When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, you must not be greedy.But I earned the bread, said the little red hen. Exactly, said the agent. That’s the wonderful free enterprise system.Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the productive workers must divide their product with the idle. And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, I am grateful.I am grateful. But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread. And there’s a reason why she never baked any more bread.And this is the problem with socialism. Socialism allows lazy people to make the same amount of money that hard workers do. And so what happens to the hard workers? They soon learn to become lazy themselves, and productivity ends, and starvation and famines begin within the land.It’s happened in China. It’s happened in Soviet Union under Stalin, especially, when millions of people starved to death.

They actually ate their own babies in Russia in the 1940s and 30s.Can you believe that? We’re not talking about biblical times here when you’re talking about cannibalism. We’re talking about within a hundred years, people in Russia were so hungry, they ate their own babies. This is what communism and socialism brings. This is what happens when governments mess around with businesses. And this is the biggest difference that I see between what Ronald Reagan believes about the role of government and what Donald Trump believes about the role of government. Here is a story that was brought on MS Now.That’s the old NSNBC, I believe. But listen to this story, and see if you do not see that Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump has a very different idea about what government’s role in business should be. …money called politics. The Trump administration continues to sink its claws into big business, and they are using our taxpayer dollars to do it. According to the New York Times, the administration has committed more than $10 billion to snatch up ownership shares of many private companies. At least nine of those companies are involved in steel, minerals, nuclear energy, and semiconductors, and the deals were all struck within the last six months alone.

Charlotte Howard joins us, executive editor and New York bureau chief for The Economist, and financial journalist Brendan Greeley. His book, The Almighty Dollar, comes out next year. Charlotte, the Trump administration seems to think that these investments are necessary for national security, for reducing our reliance on other countries like China, for critical resources. But is the government buying ownership stakes in private companies the way to do it? Because if these shares suddenly go south, that’s on us. We’re the taxpayers. So this is a phenomenon that’s not new, this concern over dependence on foreign countries, particularly China.And it’s a legitimate concern. It’s a legitimate concern. I used to be our energy and commodities editor at The Economist, and I covered this, you know, five years ago about how China had really shored up its control, particularly of rare earths, but other parts of key supply chains.And what’s interesting is that Donald Trump, in trying to make America great again, is in many ways mimicking the strategy of China, actually, by being much more interventionist in the private sector. And this is not the only way that one could counter China’s dominance in these supply chains. So for instance, you could sign trade deals with allies, which might be a cheaper way to get access to the really essential goods that the United States needs.But Donald Trump is interested in doing this within America’s borders in a very interventionist and expensive way. Okay, but Brendan, let’s say there’s a key contract up for bidding, and the government has to choose between multiple companies. And one of these companies, let’s say the government, has a big fat ownership stake in.How, I mean, should we be confident that they’re going to pick the best company?

Like, doesn’t this warp the way free markets works?

Well, that’s exactly where I’m going to end that. And that’s exactly what happens when government interferes. FDR tried the same exact thing, by the way.FDR was a socialist. FDR was a communist wannabe. But unfortunately for FDR, he was more fortunate for America.FDR soon realized in the beginning of World War II, he needed business. He needed business doing the things the government cannot do properly. The government can’t build jeeps.The government can’t build aircraft. The government can’t build boats. They think they can until they tried, and everything goes wrong.And that’s what happened with FDR in the early 19, or the late 1930s and early 1940s. And then finally, hat in hand, he had to go to the big companies of the world, Ford, and General Motors, and DuPont, and the companies he thought were the evil people of the world. And he went to them, and they built us an armament for World War II like we have never seen, or the world has never seen in the history of the world.The amount of bombers we built, the amount of tanks we built, the amount of ships we built. We were launching one ship a day from one of our shipyards during World War II. Unheard of.China can’t do that today.

You know, China has 1,000 ships. They’re the largest navy in the world.And we used to have 1,000 ships, by the way, but now we’re down to 268, believe it or not. But we used to produce a ship a day. That’s 365 ships a year during the war.That’s over 1,200 ships in five years’ time. No one could ever match the ability of American manufacturers. The thing that broke the back of the Soviet Union was they could not compete with American enterprise in the war machine.And Ronald Reagan knew that when he became president in 1981. And he had his first cabinet meeting about Russia. And all the experts, you know, even the people that I think were good advisors to Reagan, all had ways to negotiate with Russia and to try to make Russia understand our policies and try to make a detente with Russia, to try to come to some kind of an agreement with Russia, so they would somewhat follow what we wanted them to do.And Ronald Reagan stopped them midpoint and said, I have a new idea. Why don’t we just try to win this damn Cold War? And he did it. He did it because he realized if he unleashed America’s might and manufacturing might at the time, that the Russians could not keep up.And when he announced Star Wars, that was the reason, you know, people laugh at Star Wars, but it was the thing that scared the heck out of the Russian leadership, where they did not want to sign any peace treaty that had Star Wars available in it. They balked for years because they did not want to get in a space race for defense against America because they knew they could not win that war. And that was Ronald Reagan’s secret to winning the war.And he won the Cold War.

There is no question about it. He won the Cold War by unleashing America’s manufacturing might and not burdening it with government regulations and government bureaucracy that Donald Trump wants to do.And you see right here, he’s taking stakes in American businesses because he says it’s for national security. But if it was national security, then what he would do is go to the best businesses and give them tax breaks, like what happened in World War II, where the United States gave all kinds of tax breaks to these big businesses to produce the machinery they did. And they had quotas they had to meet.And if they didn’t meet those quotas, they didn’t get their bonuses. And these companies all met their quotas and they got their bonuses because companies, like what I do for my business, we know more than what the government knows how to do anything properly. As a matter of fact, it’s a joke when the EPA shows up or OSHA shows up because they do not even understand our business that they try to regulate.They don’t have a concept. First of all, they’re in their 20s or 30 years old. They don’t even know what they’re doing, but they’re from the government and they’re here to destroy.They’re not even here to help. They don’t even act like they’re here to help. And that is the problem.And that is the biggest thing that I see between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. 

Now, listen to here. This is Dr. Phil giving a quick psychoanalyst of Donald Trump.And I think it’s kind of funny. And it was meant to be funny. But I’m going to finish up after this.Would you agree he lacks diplomacy? Yes, I would agree. Would you agree that he has an impulse control problem? I guess I absolutely would agree with that. Would you agree that he thinks people see things from only his point of view? Well, I think he would like it that way.Yeah. And I think if you go look up certain personality disorders, you might see some of those things. I hope that is the truth.Donald Trump has personality disorders and they are rampant at this administration. The idea of some of the statements that he makes and some of the things that he’s doing, like with Venezuela and the Middle East and Ukraine, some of the things like shooting survivors in the water after their boat was sunk. It’s a war crime.It’s a war crime that we killed Germans and Japanese after World War Two for doing. Shooting American pilots, for example, aircraft crew members, when they jumped out of an aircraft and they were in their parachutes. And sometimes the Japanese would shoot these people in their parachutes before they could land to the ground, which is against international law.There is a reason that most countries want to follow international law, because when the tide is turned and it’s your soldiers in the field, you want them to be given somewhat of the same treatments. 

Now, I understand people are going to say, well, nobody ever gives us, you know, nobody plays fair but America. Somewhat true.But I will say one thing. In World War Two, there were prisoner of war camps in Germany. They had many American prisoners of war.And every year before Christmas, and it was a joke and a lot of movies made fun of this, but every year the Red Cross had to come in and inspect these prisoner of war camps. And, of course, they would give them new blankets and they would give them all kinds of new food to try to fool the Red Cross. But why did the Germans even bother? Because they themselves were obeying international law.Yes, the Nazi Germans were obeying international law, even if they were to turn in a blind eye the minute the Red Cross left. But they didn’t deny the Red Cross from even showing up. They didn’t try to deny it.And I actually see a Donald Trump that would actually deny it today. And that is a problem.

I think Donald Trump, when this last interview we saw, when he said he’s following the examples of China, and I’m going to say this right now, I do not know a megalomaniac businessman.And most of them are. I don’t care if it’s Steve Jobs that started Apple or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Bezos or Elon Musk. These are all egomaniacs.And their big ego is what helped them succeed when everybody else that tried to do what they did failed. I mean, it’s, you know, people who do succeed tend to believe in themselves and they tend to be a little arrogant. And but the problem is that most of these arrogant business people, and I see Donald Trump as one of them, they have a problem when it comes to me and what I call the capitalistic way.They are not truly capitalist. They do not believe in capitalism. That’s why they want to be in China, for example, or they want to be in other totalitarian countries.Because like in World War II or before World War II, Henry Ford thought the Nazis were the greatest government on the face of the earth. He built a Ford factory in Germany. And he said, and so did so many other industrialists at the time, that America needed to be more like Germany because we needed to have a strong leader that kept Congress at bay and allowed business people to go their own way without being bothered.And this is why so many people today, Bill Gates went on record many years ago was saying that China is the true superpower and the true place where everybody wants to go to manufacture. And it’s never going to change. Well, I agree with some of the things and reasons why they do it.But it’s not very patriotic.

I have to buy from China. I’m going to be producing some things in China.You have to do so. But at the same time, if I had an opportunity to do what I have to do in this country, I would do it in this country first. But the problem is this country does work against you.And the idea that Donald Trump decides he’s going to start owning businesses and try to follow China’s model instead of trying to follow Ronald Reagan’s model, I find that being a problem. And I just see that Donald Trump has decided that big government is the answer, and that is democratic policy. That is not Republican policy, and it’s definitely not Ronald Reagan policy.Now, old-time Republicans like Richard Nixon was a big tent Republican. He believed in the EPA. He gave us the EPA.He gave us OSHA. He gave us price controls. He gave us all kinds of policies Democrats would love today.But he also gave us, didn’t take effect, but he tried to give us Obamacare. I remember, and I’ve given this story many times, when the Republicans were the ones that really wanted to push Obamacare, but it was going to be called Nixoncare and pay for universal insurance payments for all Americans. This was a Republican idea out of the Nixon administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s that never went anywhere.People don’t mention that too much today, but that was a different Republican party than what Ronald Reagan brought us. Ronald Reagan brought us, I am sorry to say for those people who don’t want to believe this right now, but Ronald Reagan brought us 35 more years because we were at the end of our rope at the end of the Jimmy Carter years.

We had runaway inflation, runaway debt, and we had a malaise in this country where the people in this country no longer believed in the people of this country or the manufacturing ability of this country or what this country could do.And one man, it took one man, Ronald Reagan, to wake the American people up and give us pride again, give us pride to do our jobs well. And we boomed in the 1980s, and we boomed and we destroyed the largest threat of mankind in nuclear war when we destroyed the Russian or the Soviet Union, I should say, empire, and that was all Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump has promised he was going to end the war in Ukraine one day when he became president.He said he was going to make peace in the Middle East, and claims he did with the Gaza peace deal, which is broken every single day. 367 known Hamas people have been killed since the peace deal. That doesn’t sound like a peace treaty to me.The same thing going on in Venezuela. Is it because Donald Trump’s family has business interest in oil companies doing business with Venezuela, that he’s doing what he’s doing to Venezuela? It seems to be the case. It seems to be this administration, unlike the first time around for Donald Trump, it’s more about what Donald Trump can do for Donald Trump and the Trump family than what he can do for you or me.And this is the reason why in the first administration, he did not surround himself with billionaires.

In fact, the billionaire class boycotted Ronald Reagan. They did everything they could do to destroy Ronald Reagan.They were behind the Democrats. The people that own Twitter and the people that own Facebook and the people that own Google made sure that Donald Trump was going to lose in 2020 because they couldn’t stand his guts. And the reason why was that Donald Trump stood up for the small guy.He stood up for small businesses. Big business does not like capitalism, just plain and simple. Big business likes corporatism.They like only capitalism amongst themselves, and they want to make sure the little businesses out there, the mom and pop businesses, cannot succeed. And they use big government to put those little guys like myself out of business through regulations that they themselves never need to follow, but the little guy is forced to follow or they’re shut down by big brother. And this is why the idea that people may have that we are in a capitalistic society in America today under Donald Trump, it’s a fallacy.We are not. We are under a corporatist. We are under a system where only big business is benefiting and only the wealthy people are spending the money.Everybody says, oh, we’re going to have a great holiday season and sales are up 9%. 85% of Americans are not buying what they bought last year, but 15% of Americans are buying four times what they bought last year because they’re making all the money.

There has not been a time like this since the 1890s.And you know what they call the 1890s? The gay 90s, because everybody was doing so well. Wall Street was doing well. Stock was doing well.The billionaires of the time, they were millionaires, but we would consider them billionaires today, like the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts were doing tremendously well. But 80% of the American public was living below the poverty line. Children as young as 8 and 10 years old was working in dangerous coal mines.Girls as young as 8 and 10 and 12 years old were working in sweat factories making garments where the doors were actually locked. And there was a time in, I believe, New York City when the building caught on fire and hundreds of young girls below the age of 14 perished because they could not get out of the burning building because all of the doors were locked to stop them from being able to go out and take breaks. This is the working conditions of the so-called gay 1890s, and that is what I’m seeing happening today, where the very top percentage of the American people are spending all the money, they’re living really great, and the poor and the middle class of America is being decimated.Well, under Ronald Reagan and under Donald Trump’s first administration, this was not the case. In both scenarios, both with Donald Trump in 2017, 18, and 19, and Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, the middle class outpaced the very wealthy of this country. Everybody accused Ronald Reagan of a policy of trickle-down economics.

That was a fallacy, a name put on his economic plan by Democrats who could not come up with any other excuse of why they could never do what he did. His so-called trickle-down economics trickled down so well that the middle class of America did better than the wealthy of America. Look up the facts.And the same thing with the first time of Donald Trump’s administration. Black people made more money than they ever made under any president. Women made more money than they ever did under any president.Hispanics made more money than at any time under any president. Minorities of all types made more money than at any time under any president. Young teenagers and young adults made more money than in any presidency before him.This is what was going on in 2017, in 2018, in 2019. Do you remember the TV shows where corporations were coming up and handing out bonuses to their employees? And the whole idea of America changed from the Obama, where everything was ratcheted down under communism, to the first Trump administration, when everyone saw a growth of this country and a manufacturing boom. Tamco came alive in 2017.We were almost out of business in 2016, my wife and I, family business.

And in 2017, we boomed and we never looked back. And in 2018, we did twice the sales we did in 2017.In 2019, we did twice the sales of 2018. And in 2020, we did almost three times the sales we did in 2019. This was the entire Reagan administration, even through COVID, for my company and my wife’s company.We grew every year. Well, since Biden became president, and now Donald Trump’s become president, our company has struggled. And we have lost sales from where we were in our high point in 2021.And this is the case of every small business person that I know or talk to. They all tell me the same thing. They’re either treading water or they’re losing ground.But the big companies keep doing better and better and better, because they have a friendly government now in Washington, D.C., willing to work with them, spend money, taxpayer money, buying their stock, but not caring about what’s going on on Main Street. And that’s the same plain truth. And I hate to say that.

The difference between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump is simply summed up in these final words I’m going to say today. Ronald Reagan believed in America. He loved America.And he loved American citizens. And he loved the American ideal of what we stand for. In the world, we were a city on the hill, shining its light for everyone to see and everyone to look up to.My sales manager for international sales tells me when he started traveling around the world during the Ronald Reagan presidency, how the entire third world looked up to us as what they wanted to be like. Everyone saw America as that city shining on a hill that the whole world wished they could be like. That is the world and how the world saw the United States of America under Ronald Reagan.And I can tell you right now, the same man who works for me now in my international sales, running our sales for Tamco around the world, just says that is not the case today. The same countries he goes to today continually says to him, especially during Biden, but even now under Donald Trump, what’s happened to your country? What’s happened to your people? What’s happened to your leadership? What’s wrong with America? This is the problem that we’re facing today. And Donald Trump’s second term has done nothing, absolutely nothing like the first time he was president to help the American people.And I believe that is because Donald Trump simply does not now believe in the strength of the American people. That’s the plain truth. I’m sorry if the people out there who want to hero worship Donald Trump and put him up next to Jesus, but he’s not.And I don’t even believe he’s anywhere near what Ronald Reagan was and what Ronald Reagan was to America.

Well, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth, the one place to go to, in my opinion, to find out what’s really happening in the world, why it’s happening. Does God have anything to do with it? That’s something most news shows don’t tell you about because God is the biggest newscaster there will ever be on the face of the earth.And we give you that point of view and what the Bible says is going to happen, what your future is going to be, what the future headlines are going to be in the world. Yes, the Bible does predict the future headlines, and you can bank on it. You can bank on the prophecies of the Bible.They are going to come true. They are the plain truth news that you need to know. You don’t really need to know the news that you are fed today, which mostly are fake news lies.What you really need to know is what God thinks about what’s going to happen to this world and what he’s going to make happen to this world and how you can fit into it, you and your family, and maybe protect yourself or find yourself alive in the world to come as a spiritual being. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth. Thank you for listening.I appreciate all of you. Please keep sending me any emails you have or any comments you think, and we’ll be back again. Bye-bye.