Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: March 7, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: March 7, 2025

Hello, it’s Bob Barney, and it is Friday wrap-up time again. I will be talking about a few topics today…some things that are out of the ordinary and I am of course going to talk about the Trump speech to Congress and some of the moves I think he’s making that are spot on and other ones that I think may be mistakes. We’ll get into that.

The first thing I’m going to talk about is how I have been following the journey of the ocean liner, the SS United States as it is being towed from Philadelphia all the way down the East Coast through to the Gulf of America. The ship will be prepared in Alabama and then be sunk and turned into the largest artificial barrier reef off the Florida coast of Destin-Fort Walton. There are people that are very happy with that notion, and there are others like myself who think it’s a crying shame.

I’m going to give a little history lesson on the ship, the SS United States.

This ship was built by Newport News Shipbuilding, which is known for the building of all the aircraft carriers that we have today. The designer who made the SS United States wanted to make the fastest and safest ship possible and an entire ship that was all metal. He allowed no wood paneling, he didn’t allow anything that could catch fire on that ship. He ended up making a concession by allowing a wooden grand piano to be put in the main dining hall. The historical happenings of this ship makes it famous. To this day, of all the cruise liners that held the record of the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, the SS United States has beat and holds the record. The truth is, the SS United States broke the record by far, going 40 knots or more, which is something like 50 miles an hour. No one knows how much throttle there was to it as it was confidential. Our Navy used this ship in a time of warfare in order to send troops overseas; just like the English used the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth to do the same. It was top secret information as to how fast this ship could truly go.

There are people out there who think it could go every bit of 50 to 60 knots.

You’re talking about 75 miles an hour on an ocean liner!

Anyway, the ship still holds the record of crossing the Atlantic by more than a day quicker than any other ship. Many of the who’s who of Hollywood, politicians and millionairs, etc., were fortunate enougn to be on that ship during its heyday when it was sailing across the Atlantic from New York to London and beyond. It has been at the Philadelphia shipyard now for some 30 years…just rusting away. They tried to raise enough money in order to turn it into a museum somewhere and money was raised to restore her but never enough to keep the SS above water.

The Queen Mary is in the Long Beach Harbor in California as an active site to visit but they couldn’t raise the money needed to keep it going and it was decided about a year ago, that they were going to scrap it. If you go to the Message Board and in the search engine you put in the United States ship, or just the United States, all the articles that I’ve covered over the years about that ship is going to be there. There are updates of the travel down the Atlantic seaboard around the tip of Florida into the Gulf.

7:56 You can find it on the Message Board and all the updates of the travel down the Atlantic seaboard around the tip of Florida and into the Gulf. Then finally it’s on its way and it entered, I believe today, into Louisiana. It is to me a crying shame that the American people are going to allow the only ship named after their country that holds all of these records that has so much history tied to it, that we did not find a way to restore it.We find ways to send billions of dollars to Africa, Ukraine, to Gaza, to Arabs all over the world. Believe it or not, we send foreign aid to China. We borrow the money from China, then we send it back to them and some of it in foreign aid but we could not find the 30 million dollars it would take to restore that ship to pristine shape, and put it in a harbor somewhere. It would have been nice in the Norfolk area because it was built at Newport News Shipbuilding. Or it could have been in New York City where it had sailed from. You could make a museum out of it there. I just think it’s a crying shame pulling down all the statues that the liberals did, burning all the monuments and defacing all the monuments as well.

It just seems that the United States citizenry wants to see or does not mind seeing our history erased and destroyed forever.

That ship should have been restored.

I think it’s a crime that it’s going to go out in the middle of the ocean and sunk to become a barrier reef. I’m just against it.That’s my feeling. 

I want to cut waste, fraud, and abuse from the government as well however, I think in the long run, preserving history is worth the cost. The reason why is because when you learn history and you do not forget your history, you learn from it and you don’t make the mistakes that people made before. That’s why I was a historian. I still am a historian, but that was one of my majors in college, political science, history, and English, but mainly history and political science. I just hate to see anything destroyed that is part of our history.

6:32 I’ll even give you an example. I tell you over and over again, I’m in the automotive paint business. My wife and I own a company where we manufacture automotive paint. One of the things that custom paint painters love to do is take these old cars, the 30s, 40s, 50s cars, chop them up, make them look different, and then do custom paint jobs on them. Some of them look very good, and a lot of those people buy from our company. We have some famous people that use our paint. In fact, the Fast and Furious movie, the last one, used all of our paint, and they bought it. But anyway, to get back to my story here, I don’t even like to see old cars chopped and restored in a different way than what they looked like originally. When I see a restoration of a car, I like to see it done exactly the way it looked, the same exact paint coat that was in there, and the same upholstery, same everything restored. That is my idea because I’m a historian, and I like to see history restored.

So that’s, anyway, that’s my take on the SS United States ship and what could have been. I’m sorry if other people disagree with me. I guess some divers want to see it as Barrier Reef, but I do not. I wish it could have become a museum.

The next topic are these wildfires in South Carolina, parts of North Carolina, and parts of northern Georgia. Someone added this post on our Message Board. It makes you wonder if God is not giving a message to our country. We have had the hurricanes that came through Florida and up into North Carolina having decimated the Asheville area, as well as the fires out in California, which left in ruins surrounding communities around Los Angeles, and now these really bad fires in the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina…were all of these devestating occurances a message from God?

When I was listening as the latest unfoled this week, it appeared that the authorities did not know whether or not these fires were set intentionally or by mistake. Someone commented on the Message Board, and I thought I would mention it today on this show, because it is something we always should think about…’is God behind this?’

Does God have a problem with this country?

If you’ve listened to this broadcast for any amount of time, you know that I will tell you the plain truth and I have shared that God is very upset with this country.This country has turned its back on God.  I know there are a lot of people out there who believe in God and are adamant about trying to do God’s will however, at the same time, this country is further away from God than it has probably ever been. One of the things that it would be nice to do….and we did this for Donald Trump prior to the election…you may remember, we did a day of fasting and prayer? You can revisit that day of prayer, here, called Jeremiah 32:27.

9:21 Well, the same thing needs to be done maybe about this country & to help the president, because he needs all the help he can get! Why? Because I think there are some mistakes occurring, and I think there are also some people doing a lot of damage to make sure these mistakes continue…mainly on the Democratic side of the aisle. Maybe we do need some prayers to God to help this country starting off with admitting our sins and admitting that we do not believe or take God seriously with His warnings about what happens when you reject Him.

When you reject God, God rejects you.

I thought that was a pretty astute post to the fires in South Carolina story that we had put up on the Message Board.

You can go to the Message Board and find it or click, here.

I think that it would not harm this country to collectively have another day of fasting and prayer and also to pray for this president, pray for our Congress and our leaders, and pray for our people to find God again. To ask God to help His children right themselves, too, because we’re upside down as a nation.

We put ourselves first.

We put God last.

I’m not talking about the people out there who are adamant believers in Jesus Christ, and they do what everything they’re supposed to do in the Bible, or they think they are, at least. I’m not talking about those people. There are millions of those people, but there are tens of millions of people who basically have written God out of their life. God is at a low spot in American history, and I’d like to see that come back and turn around. When I read that, it made me think of, well, the fasting and prayer might have worked last spring when it came to getting Donald Trump elected, because even at that time, most people didn’t think he had a prayer or a shot at beating Joe Biden with his so-called baggage. We won and had pretty good election results against Biden’s replacement, Kamala Harris, who herself was a buffoon, but that’s another story…

It just never hurts for the American public to return to God and to ask God what He can do for us and what we can do for God. All I have to do is read the Bible to know what we can do for God…we can obey his laws, worship him, and understand that He’s behind the good and the evil that happens to this world.

He is behind it all.

13:02 He can stop the evil if He chooses to, or He can allow the devil to do His bidding if He allows that to be…and He will not allow it to happen if we have ourselves right with God. If we can’t as a country get ourselves right with God, I do suggest that we as a people, that we get ourselves individually right with God, and maybe God will have at least a better look at us than He’s doing with this country. One cannot look at all of these disasters that have happened in the last one year’s period of time, and not even a year, and not see possibly the hand of God there. So I thought I would mention that as I had read that on the Plain Truth Message Board, the response. I forgot who wrote that, and I wholeheartedly agreed that maybe this country needs to continue to go back to God over and over again, and put God in charge of this country. Look up to God, not any man, and get ourselves collectively in line with God’s will…and maybe a lot of this stuff wouldwould turn around. Maybe also, maybe our economy would get better. Maybe things with our allies would get better. Maybe some of the feuds that we have picked all over the world would go away, and God would bless this nation again, and bless us with a great deal of wealth, and industrialization, and all kinds of goodness that can happen overnight if God wills it. 

Whenever we are in trouble, we shouldn’t try to find our way out of that mess.We should stop digging and start praying. That’s my idea about that.

In the last part of the show, I’m going to do a little bit of a commercial break right now, but when I come back, we’re going to finish up with the President Trump news of the week since last Friday. Last Friday was that holy blow-up with Zelensky in the White House.

Hi, Bob Barney here with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. This is one place you can go to every day and see what’s really happening in the world, and if God has anything to do with it, we’re going to mention it to you. That’s The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. Go to it every day, three times a day, 7-11 in the morning, 7-11 in the evening, and at noontime.There are three broadcasts every day, some by me, some by others, some are audio format like what you’re hearing today, and sometimes we put up YouTube and other types of videos from other people. That’s theplaintruth.com. Thank you.

Well, back to Friday wrap-up with Bob Barney and theplaintruth.com and the Plain Truth Today broadcast, and I wanted to get into last Friday.

16:45 Of course, everybody by now has seen many times the blow-up, and I have found a lot of fault with President Trump since he’s been elected, and mainly when it comes to his arrogance and stuff like that, traits and actions that I know God is not happy with…however, President Trump and Vice President Vance did exactly what should have been done with this guy Zelensky.

Zelensky is like a little spoiled brat, like a baby in his high chair somewhere where his feet can’t even touch the ground, and he’s used to demanding things, and he’s used to getting what he demands, and he found out when it comes to Donald Trump and even Vice President Vance that he can kick and scream all he wants, but he’s not going to get what he wants. It is going to be our way or the highway, and he was given the highway. If you believe the reports, he was actually shown the door and told to leave the White House. He was kicked out, and I think the American people were happy to see this man be treated the way he was because he did not just disrespect our President but he disrespected all the money that this country has sacrificed out of its own pocketbook, and I think ridiculously so, by the way, but sacrificed for the Ukrainian people. We really got spit in the face, and it wasn’t just Trump who got spit in the face, it was all of us, the American people!

President Trump acted in a very good way when it came to that.

Trump started all his tariff nonsense, and a lot of it is nonsense, and I’m going to give you a disclaimer here. I am in business. My wife and I own a paint company. I don’t like the facts, but unfortunately, probably 60 to 70 percent of all raw materials that we use in the paint industry are now manufactured in China, so we are subject to the tariffs. When I get finished with today’s broadcast, I think you’ll see that I’m very level-headed about what is right and what is wrong, even if it hits my pocketbook, because I’m ready to put my pocketbook where my heart is and where God is, but I don’t some things going on right now. I do no like having to buy so many raw materials from China, but it was the United States government, the EPA, OSHA, and other regulatory environments and high taxation that drove all of these resin manufacturers and other paint ingredient raw material manufacturers to China. Contrary to what people want to believe, they didn’t go to China for cheap labor to get around American wages. Even president Trump makes that mistake.

19:23 No company that I know of in the chemical industry moved to China because they have cheaper labor there. Now, a lot of them will tell you they like being in China because they say the Chinese worker is one of the best workers in the world and they’re not very necessarily smart in figuring things out that go wrong, but if you give them a thing to do, they’ll do it repeatedly over and over and over again like a robot and it will always come out exactly right. To manufacturers that do need some human labor, that kind of labor they do like. The biggest thing that they really like is when they go to China, they’re not facing a government that changes every four years and they’re not facing an EPA that was headed up by a bunch of liberal leftist communists who do not like the businesses in the first place, whether they’re a polluter or not. They want to put them all out of business because that is what the EPA is all about. These people that were in the EPA that I’ve ever dealt with are morons. They don’t even know what they’re doing. They don’t even understand what they’re doing, nor do they care to understand what they’re doing. They love the power trip that they’re on.

Same applies to OSHA, same applies to the IRS, the same applies to most government agencies. 

So that’s the real reason big businesses moved overseas. Now I did say one other thing when I said the government doesn’t change, does not change. It is hard when you’re building a, let’s say you’re going to build a resin factory…when you take oil and you cook the oil and you turn it into a resin, that’s how they do it, you cook it into a resin and then you purify the resin. The cleaner and cleaner automotive becomes…not as clean becomes industrial. It’s a big process.

There is lot of machinery and there’s a lot of building involved…a resin factory might cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build. So here’s the rub. You build a building that won’t even start making a profit for 15 years and you build that building. In four years you have a different president who has a different idea and he decides he doesn’t like your business. He passes executive orders that shut your business down, or he sigs the EPA after you and they shut your business down then all of that investment that you put into this plant to give people jobs in America is also shut down. 

22:23 This actually happened, you know, there’s a product that whenever you buy what’s called a urethane paint, it takes a hardener, a catalyst, and it’s isocyanate. And isocyanate used to be made in Europe mostly and America but because of EPA, both in Europe and America, most of the isocyanate factories moved to China. When Trump became president, President Trump became president in 2017, one company, I won’t mention their name, I don’t want to get them on a bad list, decided to open up three plants in Texas. We started buying our isocyanates from them and we were happy. I had on our TAMCO 411 page on Facebook, I would show pictures of truckloads of this isocyanate coming in and saying we are proudly bringing back American products here as much as we can because we’re an American company. Well, Biden gets elected in 2021 or stole the election, however you want to say it and guess what ends up happening? You guessed it.He wants put so many regulatory actions against that company, they shut down, took an awful big write-off and moved back to China. So we are forced to buy so many raw materials from China. I want to say that right up front because I am not opposed to President Trump putting barriers and tariffs on Chinese produced products, even the stuff I’m going to have to buy and pay a premium for, in the hopes that someday that stuff is going to come back to America and I can buy from America made by Americans.

There are some problems with that too, because the American worker today is not the American worker of the 1960s…I have to tell you that right now, as somebody that has to deal with that. I do disagree with the tariff and the war that we’re making against both right now Europe, but especially against Canada. Just for the sake of telling the plain truth, I buy no raw materials from Canada. Now, I do have some Canadian customers that used to buy from us and because of the tariffs that Canada is going to do and Trudeau has really made it almost impossible. This is something that’s not making it to your TV screen or even to the internet. But Trudeau made it almost impossible four months ago for an American small company like ourselves to ship ground, because we can’t airship flammable paint…but to ship ground paint into Canada through customs, unless you’re willing to set up your own Canadian tax number and make believe you have a presence in Canada and all of this nonsense…he has made it nearly imposssible.

So, all the Canadian customers that used to buy from us, now they can’t. We can’t send them to China. We have a small distributor in one part of Canada that we can still ship to them because they have a broker, but it really hurts the Canadians. It also hurts Americans in that, I heard over the weekend, my wife told me anyway, that a Canadian travel agency was saying that most Canadians vacation in America and she’s had something like an 80% cancellation rate because Canadians are so mad. Even the conservative Canadians are just so mad at whatTrump is doing with the Canadians saying they’re the 51st state and just being plain stupid about how he’s dealing with Canada. 

I just think, you just can’t go to war with everybody at one time.

I said this to my editor, Jennifer Vliet, that Hitler’s mistake, and I don’t want to compare Trump to Hitler, I’m not trying to do that. But Hitler’s complaint, if you understand history, was he was winning the war against England and France. He overtook France in a couple of days and he was going to win that war pretty quickly. The idiot went against Russia, who was his ally, and attacked Russia so he started a two-front war.

24:34 My point to President Trump is don’t make a war with everybody in the world because a good general’s got to pick soft targets. The target you have to pick are the ones that are the most critical to win. I believe the most critical one right now, in order, is China and yes, that hurts me personally, but I agree with that. Next, is Mexico, as long as they didn’t help stop drugs going over the border and people going over the border however, Mexico has complied. They put 10,000 troops on the border. They have stopped and everybody’s boasting in the Trump administration that it’s the lowest number of people crossing the border in forever. So why do we want trade barriers against Mexico right now? I’m no Mexico fan and again, I get no products from Mexico. Now, Mexico does have paint companies and they do have resin supply companies, but they’re mainly industrial and I don’t buy from them. So it doesn’t hurt me that he’s putting a tariff against Mexico.

I think you pick on one bully at a time and right now, put your emphasis on three things. Make it simple, like Ronald Reagan did. Make it very simple. Put your emphasis on three things…based on what DJT was elected to do. Close the border. Job done. Deport illegal aliens that are criminals, not just working in a job, paying taxes somewhere, that actually helps the system…leave those that want to work. Number three, fix the economy. How do you do that? By fixing the price of oil.

I’ve had many broadcasts that oil is the blood supply.

You know, blood keeps you alive.

Well, oil keeps the entire industrialized world alive.

It’s the blood of the world. 

26:02 And we have to get oil back to where it was when Donald Trump was president as 45. But last time, you know, there was a day back in 2019, you can look this up, that oil actually sold for negative $38 a barrel. That means if you owned a barrel of oil and you wanted to sell it that day, you had to pay somebody $38 to get rid of your oil. Now it’s going for $70, $75.Think about that. That’s a $100 swing. For the most part, in the whole time that I was making paint, from 2017 to 2022, even 2021, I should say, because Biden pretty much destroyed the economy the minute he became president.But the entire time, oil was running around $25 to $35 a barrel. By God, we put a lot more people to work. We had much lower prices than we have today and we had a lot more customers doing the work today than today because they could afford to buy the paint from us. But when we have to go up so much in our paint because of tariffs and because of inflation in general, and the thing is, is you could pay a person $15, $16 an hour in 2017, 2018, and that was good money to live on. Today, $25 an hour, which is almost, you know, what, 175, 75% higher than the $16 rate.You pay people, I pay people, start them at $25 now. They can’t even make a living. They can’t pay their food bill, their grocery bills, their fuel bills, their living expenses, their rent, their insurance. That’s all because of inflation. President Donald Trump needs a laser focus on inflation.

Forget about Canada and forget about some of this other nonsense. Forget about Ukraine trying to win a Nobel Peace Prize. Laser focus on the economy. Turn the economy around and you want to know what? The American people are going to love you.

That’s it for the Friday wrap-up.

Tomorrow, again, is the Sabbath day. I can’t stress enough.I think people need to look into the Sabbath day because that is the day that God wants you to follow. It’s not Sunday. It’s the Sabbath day. We’ll have a Sabbath day show, 7-11 in the morning and we’ll have a short story tomorrow night. This one’s going to be a video, a former television show from the 1980s, a remake of The Twilight Zone and it’s a love story. It’s a little, you know, sci-fi because it is The Twilight Zone but I think you’ll enjoy it if you take the time to watch the 22 minutes, that is all it is, without commercials. Then, of course, Sunday, we will have a Sunday show, 7-11 in the morning. I have not yet picked it. I’ll probably pick a YouTube video, one of, you know, we do like Megyn Kelly or Bill O’Reilly or Tucker Carlson on Sundays. We try to do a good show that wraps up the week or looking forward to the new week. Then we’ll be back Monday again with another three shows, 7-Eleven in the morning, noontime and 7-Eleven in the p.m.

29:21 Until Monday, this is Bob Barney wishing everyone a blessed and happy weekend. Stay safe and we’ll see you back here Monday. Bye-bye.