Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: January 16, 2026 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: January 16, 2026

Hello, this is Bob Barney with another Friday wrap-up on The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by ThePlainTruth.com. I’m doing this from a little bit of an echo here. I’m doing the beginning if this a day early from my office at work. It’s actually our apartment office that we have for our
employees that come into our plant for training or other purposes.
But anyway, it’s Friday, it’s wrap-up time, and I wanted to get off on some things going on this
week that the news is covering or not covering. And many times they don’t cover the same way
we do here. We try to inform our listeners and our readers to the plain truth about what’s really
happening and why it’s happening.

And in many cases, if God has anything to do with what’s happening. One of the things that I
think I’m going to say today, again, it’s going to be almost like a diatribe against what’s going
on with this president administration. But I have to say that Trump 2.0 reminds me of a
Democrat president more than Trump 1.0 or any other Republicans in the past.
I mean, from every single policy that we see coming out of this White House could have come
out of Barack Obama’s or Joe Biden’s. And when they did it, the people on the so-called right,
the so-called mega make America first people had a problem with it. But for some reason, when
Donald Trump does it, they think it’s great.

For example, I’ll give you several examples before I hit you with the big one. Example number
one, when Hunter Biden was doing his foreign affair travels and selling White House access to
the vice president, everybody thought he should be put in jail, including myself. But no one
seems to talk about or even care about that Don Trump Jr. has a club in Washington, D.C. that
cost like a million dollars a year to join that you are promised that you can hobnob with cabinet
members and maybe even Donald Trump himself.

A pay for play type club in Washington, D.C. No one does a follow up investigation of it. No
one’s talking about it. No one is even hinting that there’s corruption there, although the Trump
family has earned some seven to 10 billion, depending on what source you want to follow,
worth of income so far in 2025 from things that happened that his presidency has helped them
make money from their their Trump coin to all other types of business ventures that have been
helped by Donald Trump’s presidency.

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This is the stuff that we saw the Clintons do. We saw Joe Biden and Hunter Biden do more than
about anybody I’ve ever seen before then. Things that used to bother people who claim they
wanted to make America first again.
But I’ll give you that’s just one of the things. The corruption is unbelievable. I’ll give you a
second one that though it is being reported, it’s not going to be reported like I am going to
report it here.

And that is despite all of the press coverage you’ve heard about how bad the Chinese economy
is doing because of Trump’s tariff tactics, which I have on this show all by myself because I do
have firsthand information what’s going on in China because of my manufacturing plant, which
all of my raw materials basically are sourced in China. That’s just a fact of doing the paint
business in the world today. That the Chinese had a record trade deficit with America.
Did you hear that? A record trade deficit with America. 1.22 trillion dollars higher than at any
time. And this is after the tariff.

So if you do a 25 or a 50 percent tariff on that, you’re looking at four or five hundred million, I’m
sorry, billion, four or five hundred billion dollars worth of tariffs or other charges that were
either charged to the American consumer or charged to companies that were eating those
tariffs. But I got news for you. That’s not the whole plain truth.

That’s not the entire story because many of these companies, many of these fat cats who was
giving Donald Trump money for his White House expansion and for other things, they were
exempted from these tariffs like Apple, like Amazon, like we just found out last week, Johnson
and Johnson agreed to lower their medical costs, their prescription medication to self payers by
a considerable amount. Sounded great until you heard the last line of that and which nobody
really wanted to talk about was in order for them to agree to it, to the Trump administration,
Trump, I’m sorry, Trump administration dropped all tariff charges against Johnson and Johnson
so they can continue making their medication and prescription drugs in China, which they have
been doing all along. And none of it has moved back to America because they’ve lowered the
cost because Donald Trump wants to show he can lower costs because his tariffs have caused
prices to go through the roof.
So get around those, he’s now doing away secretly or not being reportedly anyway, tariffs to
the big guys while us little guys out here are still paying these tremendous tariffs and passing
them on now to our consumers. You’re paying this and the idea that you thought you were
going to beat China at its game of manufacturing when they have a manufacturing base like we
can’t even imagine anymore because we don’t even have a workforce that wants to work and
the ones that we do have are being deported. And I know people don’t want to hear that, but
try to find somebody who wants to work.

As someone who employs quite a few people, it’s pretty hard finding anybody that’s an
American citizen that is, who really wants to do a normal job that doesn’t include sitting on their
butt all day long, looking at a computer screen and doing nothing and getting paid top dollar to
do that. That is the American workforce today. And you may think that I’m full of baloney, but
anybody listening to me right now that is a small business owner knows exactly what I’m
talking about.

I talk to dozens and dozens of small business owners every week and salespeople from my
manufacturing companies that I buy raw materials from, they tell me the same story.
Everybody’s business last year, except for the big mega giants who were given reprieves on
their tariffs, all of the smaller family-run businesses like my own were down considerably in
sales last year in the 2025. We did better under communist Joe Biden, under the guy who
couldn’t even think straight because he was full of dementia, he has a mind of a maggot, and
we did better under the Biden years than we’re doing under the Trump years in my business.
And I know hundreds, and I’m not exaggerating, hundreds of other people in business like
myself saying the same exact thing. So yesterday we put up a story, a video about why the
tariffs have actually caused unemployment in manufacturing, and why prices don’t seem to
have gone up yet. And it’s a video that we put up yesterday noon, I recommend everybody go
back and look at that video.

And also, there’s a companion on theplaintruth.com, the main page, a story that I wrote as a
companion to that video, explaining the facts, the figures, and statistics of why China has done
so well under these tariffs, and we have done so poorly. And why American jobs, manufacturing
jobs, every single month since the tariffs were announced, have declined. You keep hearing,
you know, 50,000 or 80,000 people have gotten jobs, and the Trump administration loves to go
to the podium and broadcast to the world, oh, we added 58,000 jobs last month, or you know,
that $12,000 job loss last month is a lie, don’t believe it, but when the statistics say it’s 58,000,
and you say, oh, they’re accurate numbers now.

But the problem is, of the 50 or 60,000 people a month getting a job, none of them are in
manufacturing, they’re all in service industries, working at Walmarts, or grocery stores, or
restaurants. They’re not in manufacturing. In fact, for the last nine months, every single month,
there has been a loss of manufacturing jobs in America.

Are you reading that anywhere? Well, look at the statistics. We got them published. Look at it.
10,000 to 12,000 jobs a month being lost in manufacturing. Some months, as high as 35,000
jobs were lost in a single month in manufacturing. And these tariffs, people to this day tell me,
these people who think Trump can do no wrong, I talk to them every day, tell me, and they’re
not in business, by the way, they’re either consumers, or retired, or working for another
company, and don’t actually understand what’s going on.

They’re at a loss when you try to tell them, actually, manufacturing jobs are going down. No,
they’re not, they say. They’re not going down, they’re going up.
We’re hiring all kinds of people. You are? Read the statistics. Go and see what the labor boards
show you, what ADP reports show you.
The jobs we are creating today are jobs in the service industry, and not in the manufacturing
industry. And China, and other nations like Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore, and India, their
manufacturing jobs are going through the roof, because a lot of companies, in order to get
around the tariffs, when especially when you’re talking about clothing and things not chemical
oriented, where China really is very far superior to those other countries, you’re seeing the
manufacturers not coming back to America, they just switch from buying t-shirts made in China
to t-shirts made in Malaysia, and they go from a 55% tariff on t-shirts to a 20% tariff, and
actually even cheaper prices, because one of the little known facts is that in China, labor is a lot
more expensive than people think it is. You can hire laborers in India, Pakistan, Malaysia, for
example, Vietnam, for half the hourly rate that one pays in China for the same type employee.
People don’t know that. China is not necessarily cheap labor. These are the things that you’re
just not being told, and the news today has fallen asleep, and no one is telling you the plain
truth but this show.

I’ll be right back. ThePlainTruth.com is the place to go to to find out what’s really happening
without any of the bull in between that all the other stations give you. We also try to show you
that God has predicted much of what’s going to happen in the pages of the Bible.
No, God doesn’t talk to us daily. He doesn’t talk to me daily either, but he does talk to us in the
pages of the Bible, and ThePlainTruth.com and The Plain Truth Today broadcast tries to show
our listeners and our readers exactly what God has predicted will happen. What is tomorrow’s
headlines? You can read those in the Bible and on The Plain Truth.
That’s ThePlainTruth.com. Please visit it every day. On the same subject as what this White
House is doing that I don’t understand, I have to admit, and I’ve been telling this to my wife for
a while now, that every time that I see a new program that this administration puts forward to
help the poor people, which maybe in the short run would help the poor people, but it’s
democratic strategies. I mean, this so-called mega White House is not following any sound
business practices or any good conservative government practices.
He is as democratic of a president as Barack Obama or as Joe Biden, maybe has a little bit more
faculties than Joe Biden did, but they basically are doing the same thing. Did Obama attack
Syria? Well, after the line in the sand, eventually, no, but he was going to. Biden did quite a few
times.

So did Trump. They’re all world order people right now. Donald Trump has decided, I think he
was a lifelong Democrat, but I think he has decided that the only way he can make his legacy
work is to convince the whole American people that this was the best time they’ve ever had.
He wants to give them everything for free, knowing that it’s going to be another 10, 15, 20
years before all of the pipe comes home to be paid for and the fiddler then goes to work. But
the thing that I’m getting into now, this Greenland saber-rattling thing, we’re going to take
Greenland, he says, if they like it or not, we’re going to take Greenland, he says, we have to
send in troops. We’re going to take Greenland, for example, he says, even if it takes deadly
troops and deadly action.

This is the comments coming out of a White House that I think has gone insane when it comes
to Greenland. But here is the problem. I had a problem with, and I did a show on this, when he
first changed illegally, because the Congress must do so, the Department of Defense to the
Department of War.
And I said at the time, are we a warrior nation again? Are we a warmongering president? Or are
we a peace and defensive government? There was a reason that the War Department was
changed to the Department of Defense, and it was done by both Democrats and Republicans
who understood the need for a name change that we didn’t look warlike like after what Hitler
looked like. And that is the reason why it was the Department of Defense. But it was a clue with
the Department of War that he wants to be a warrior president and wants to bring us into many
wars.

The problem is the United States is as much of a paper tiger in many aspects as is the Russians
are in Ukraine, because it’s the exact opposite with us. We have all of the bells and whistles,
great airplanes for conventional warfare, but we really don’t have the nuclear arsenal that we
did at one time to defend ourselves against nuclear attack. On the other hand, Russia has a
very terrible defensive system and offensive military system, but they got a lot more nuke
missiles, and hopefully, for their sake, they could not just blow up on the ground.
But I don’t really ever have trusted Russian technology when it comes to this. But my point
being, we have not really fought a war with a true enemy like Germany and Japan in World War
II. Not in Korea.
We could have won that war in two days. Not in Vietnam. We could have won that war in a few
years by just bombing it up the face of the earth if we wanted to.
That wouldn’t be the right thing to do. We shouldn’t have never got there in the first place. I’m
just saying, it wasn’t a case where we could ever have lost the war that they ever could defeat
us.
It was a case of political wars ever after World War II, and we fought mostly nations who
couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. They had no real army. They had no navy or air
force.

How is that a true enemy? And if we ever get against people with air forces and navies and a lot
of nuclear weapons, we may, as a country, find ourselves in deep doo-doo. And this guy is
doing the absolute wrong things. I don’t care if you’re a mega supporter and say, oh, he’s a
great guy.
He’s a great negotiator. This is negotiation. It is perception is reality.
You have France sending troops to Greenland. You have Denmark sending troops to
Greenland. You have now Germany talking about sending troops to Greenland to defend
against the United States of America.
Do yourself a favor. If you’re a mega supporter, look up article five of the NATO charter, which
is a Senate approved treaty. It is not a executive order from a president.
It’s a Senate approved treaty. Look it up. Article five of attack on one is an attack on all.
If we attack Greenland, we deserve to be attacked by all of our so-called allies. It’s insane. And
I’m sorry if people want to stick their head in the sand like an ostrich and not see that this is
insanity.
This is not diplomacy. This is nothing. If Barack Obama, or especially if Joe Biden talked this
way, everyone would be talking of 25th amendment overnight, including Democrats and
Republicans and all of the press.
That’s where I’m going to end that one. And we’ll get into the last subject after this brief word.
Remember again, theplaintruth.com is the place to go every day to find out what’s going on on
our message board, your health today, the main page of the Plain Truth, as well as these
podcasts.
Go there every day, theplaintruth.com. Thank you. Well, the last thing I’m going to talk about,
last couple of things I’m going to talk about, we’re going to start with a report that was out and
it’s not verified. And I, you know, it is a, the person who said it is verified and we have it on the
Plain Truth.

And it’s a, a medical doctor who probably is a liberal. So we got to be aware of that. But anyway,
he claims from watching videos and his name, I believe, let me look that up here.
Professor Bruce Davidson, a Washington State University College of Medicine in Spokane,
Washington said, I think from watching the videos that he had a stroke on the right side of his
body. I’m sorry, on the left side of his body, which controls the right side of his body. And he, in
the article, we put it on the message board.
I didn’t put it on the main page or anything else, but the message board. I do think there is
some things going on with, with Trump’s health. I think you could see it with his hands swollen
and the bruising and also the, the legs.
And I do think he’s having some heart problems. It would be normal at his age, especially he
has not followed everybody, you know, a hero worshiped his diet of McDonald’s, but eventually
that kind of diet does catch up with you. And it’s going to be an interesting story.
What happens with his health in the, in the coming months or, or years of his presidency? And
is that going to become a developing problem? And I think it may yet be. And I won’t go any
further there, but I think it’s worth bringing out on a Friday wrap up. It is on the message
board.

And I think it’s an important thing to go over. The last thing I’m going to talk about is really the
articles we had yesterday. We did some videos and I did, I did a story on the main page of the
Plain Truth.
You can go back and read about it. But the truth is Trump’s promised manufacturing boom that
he announced when he did the tariffs and I’m a manufacturer, I know this firsthand as well, has
been a bust so far. And the, the, the truth of the matter is the manufacturing has declined by
72,000 since April 1st.
If you didn’t hear that again, we have lost 72,000 manufacturing jobs since April 1st. It is the
biggest decline of manufacturing jobs in the longest time. And that you would have to go back
to really, I think the Obama years to see that kind of decline in manufacturing.
I think it even beat Biden’s years where the EPA, especially in OSHA and the regulations that
Obama put on, especially small manufacturers, literally drove many manufacturers out of
business or laid off a lot of people and they moved their operations to overseas. I know almost
every resin manufacturer that used to make product in America, and there’s a few left, but not
that many. And even the few left, much of their manufacturing is being done in other countries.
And the real reason is not the cost of labor. Everybody who loves to pick on big business or little
business, I’m a little business, I’m not a big business. They want to pick on us for buying stuff
from overseas or having stuff manufactured overseas.
But there is a reason for it. And the reason for it is quite logical. And that is because Democrat
rule, but I think we have a little bit of Democrat rule right now, if you’ve listened to this story,
but for the most part, Democrat rule, especially under Bill Clinton, and then Obama, and then
of course, Joe Biden, really went big time green energy and green this and green that.
And the casualty was American manufacturers, especially the smaller manufacturers who could
not move to China or could not find other sources to manufacture their goods in America. And
so they laid off a lot of people back then. And this manufacturing decline has been going on
since that great giant sucking sound that Ross Perot mentioned back in 1992 when everybody
in the mainstream media thought he was nuts.
But he accurately predicted what happened when we started farming jobs out. The mistake
here, and I want to say this from as a manufacturing perspective, the mistake here is that
people who don’t know, who sit at home in their armchairs and they watch the TV news, they
blame the manufacturers for going overseas for low, cheap labor rates. And that is not the
reason.

If you take what labor rates are really today in China, and they’re about half of what it is in
America, but that is one thing. You also have to export those products. You have to pay a long
time shipping and then truck shipping to the raw material manufacturer here like myself.
And then on top of that, since Trump 2017, 2018, with the tariffs on China, it actually is not
cheaper to buy your goods from China than it would be to buy from America. The reason why
these companies went overseas has nothing to do with saving money. It really does not.
And I know many people who are not in business are going to listen to this and say, well, you’re
full of baloney, Bob. It’s because they wanted to get cheap labor. It’s not the reason.
The EPA chased most manufacturing businesses out of this country or shut them down because
of the fact that the EPA and OSHA and other government agencies put such burden on
manufacturers, especially the smarter manufacturers to comply with EPA green regulation.
That simply, well, first of all, was not even scientific, but second of all was a plan. In my opinion,
the Democrats have always been aligned with big business.

The Democrats really want to protect the big businesses of America at the expense of the little
manufacturer. People, again, do not realize that the manufacturing of America, the majority of
people who work for manufacturers in America did not work for Fortune 500 companies. They
didn’t work for the Nestle’s or they didn’t work for the DuPont’s or they didn’t work for the
PPG’s or the major manufacturers of America.

Here is a statistic that I think will just shock everybody. Small businesses are the vast majority of
the U.S. manufacturers. It represents 98% of all manufacturing firms in the United States,
employing tens of millions and driving significant job creation, though they account for a
smaller share of total manufacturing output value compared to their share numbers of the big
guys.

What they’re saying here is that the big Fortune 100 manufacturers, for example, produce
probably about 75% of the goods that you buy, but they represent only 2% of the workforce
and of manufacturers in America. 98% of all the manufacturers of America are small businesses
under 50 employees, and they only manufacture about 30% of the total goods because they’re
small, and they are getting smaller and smaller and going out of business because big business
is working. I give this statistic all the time.
I got into the paint business in 1980, and there were 116 American automotive paint
manufacturers, most of which, if I gave you the names today, nobody even heard of anymore.
You’d have to be an old painter to remember names like Zaklak and others. What happened
over these 40-some-odd years, 45 years now, 46, I guess, is that the big guys, the big five,
bought out basically those 100 other paint companies.
They either bought them out or they waited for those to go out of business through EPA
regulations. The big companies love EPA regulations because they can afford to follow them,
and when they don’t, the government turns a blind eye because the government is really in
cahoots with big businesses. That’s the plain truth.
So by 1980, there was 116 paint manufacturers, and the big five had only a 20% market share of
all automotive paint used in America. By the year 2000, the big five, and there was, I think there
was about 35 manufacturers then, there was about 75 to 80% of all the automotive paint
bought in America came from the big five. In 2020, there were 16 of us left in the whole
country, and the big five have a 99% market share.
If that doesn’t tell you something, that big government and big business work hand in glove, I
don’t know what else will, but that is the situation we’re in today, and I think in another three or
four years, there will be less than six or seven paint manufacturers making automotive paint in
America, and the big five now are not even the big five because Exalta, which is formerly
DuPont, got bought out by Axo in Holland. BASF got bought out by a Middle Eastern firm, and
so now the big five are really the big three in the world, and the big three are soon going to
become the big two, and with a still 98, 99% market share, and you can guess what’s going to
happen to the price of paint, automotive paint that is, which is already like prescription
medication, way out of whack to the manufacturing cost, and it’s the government in cahoots
with big business that has forced this to happen in America. Now, if you go to other countries
where you don’t have an EPA, there’s probably no less than 300 automotive paint
manufacturers in China.

There are probably no less than 200 or 250 in India. There’s a dozen or more in Africa. There’s
three dozen or more in the Middle East.
There’s about 10 or 12 in Europe, small manufacturers. As you can see, the rest of the world has
not gone against the smaller manufacturers, as did America. Big government and big business
are the reason, I should say, not is, they are the reason why we are in this inflation mode that
we’re in.
I just don’t see that Donald Trump tariffs didn’t help anybody but big business, who have
mainly been exempted from these tariffs. The little guy like myself has not, and it has really
plummeted our bottom line, and it has stopped me from hiring anybody, and I haven’t laid
anybody off yet, but that’s just a matter of time if things do not change. I don’t see change
coming, and I do see one change coming.

We’re out of time for the Friday wrap-up. I can’t even get into tomorrow’s shows, but every
Saturday, tomorrow is the Sabbath, and every Saturday we have a 7-11 a.m. religious-type show
talking about the Sabbath day or religious-type things to do with the Sabbath day or God’s
word, the Bible. Then 7-11 p.m., we always have a short story or a video for an entertainment
for Saturday night, and then Sunday we always have a 7-11 a.m. show that kind of wraps up the
week.

It’s usually never me. It’s usually a YouTube video, but we’re out of time. I hope everyone has a
safe and blessed weekend.
Stay safe. I hope you follow the Sabbath day. It is the day God tells us to follow, and until
Monday when I will be back again on this broadcast, Bob Barney saying thank you for listening.
Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.