Friday Wrap-up with Bob: MAY 2, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-up with Bob: May 2, 2025

Hello, it’s Friday wrap-up again. These Fridays come by really quick, don’t they? At least they do for me.

This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today on Friday with the wrap-up, and we’re going to talk about a few issues today…basically the same things we’re talking about for the last few weeks because most of the circumstances aren’t changing that much.

2:30 We had the Pope die a week ago, and of course, the funeral was this past weekend, and there was an interesting story in European papers about the funeral. I guess Melania Trump was looking around, and President Trump was looking straight ahead, and the reports said he was quite exhausted from a lot of traveling and a lot of work that he’s done in the last 100 days. Well, she supposedly noticed other world leaders talking to the right, and he wasn’t being included, and a lip reader, according to this newspaper from England, said that she whispered and said, Donald, look to your right, and he did look to his right, saw other world leaders talking, and started to engage them in talking, and it was a story really about Melania Trump taking a much more active role than she did the first time around, hat might be trying to protect his image or protect him a little bit from all of the nonsense going around. I don’t know if it’s nonsense or not right now, but all the hoopla going around about the Trump, this second Trump administration, but I did have a point that I wanted to make to start this program off and to try to explain why many people do not like what’s happening this time around like they did the first time around, and why others think it’s going well.

5:01 I always say that the people who never think Trump can do anything wrong is called an ever-Trumper, and they are almost, if not as ignorant sometimes, as never-Trumpers. They just can’t see anything but Trump as if he sitting on the right hand of God, but one of the things that would really explain it, the other night I was watching a town hall on News Nation, and Bill O’Reilly was there, and Andrew Cuomo, and they interviewed President Trump over the phone, plus they had Bobby Kennedy there, James Carville on the left, and a few other guests that they interviewed in this town hall, and there was some intriguing comments from some of the people in the crowd that I would say they were saying that even though it might personally be hard on people, they think it’s worth the country to buckle down and take whatever tough medicines coming ahead, pull together, and not question Trump or his administration on anything they’re doing, and my wife and I was looking at each other, but it came to me, you know, this is what could be an answer there, and this is my opinion, so you know, take it with a grain of salt, but if you have a job, let’s say you really support Donald Trump. 

I really support Donald Trump. I did really well under the first Trump administration.

7:21 I supported him for running for this time around. I voted for him all three times, and I really believed that we were going to get a return to what we did in 2017-2018, which was really an administration that looked out for middle-class people and middle-class business owners, not the rich billionaires like the Bezos and the Elon Musk that seemed to be surrounding Bill Gates and stuff, that seemed to be surrounding this Trump administration. 

You know, you have his son, Don Jr., who just started a club in Washington, D.C. that cost $500,000 for a membership to join, and what do you get? Well, he’s right up front what you get. You get access to the Trump people, the Trump cabinet members. You can have dinner with them. You have a drink with them because they’re going to be members as well.

8:02 You might even run into President Trump. Does this not really sound like Hunter Biden selling Joe Biden’s influence to China and to Russia and to Ukraine another five, seven years ago, even closer than that once Biden became president? It stinks to high heaven. Now, all of a sudden, you hear people say, well, that’s OK. Biden did it. Why can’t Trump? Well, I thought if Biden did it and it was a crime, is it OK if some criminal does something that you have a right to be a criminal yourself? Now, I don’t say it is criminal, and it was probably not criminal what Biden did that you check, but it sure is something that stinks to high heaven if you have any common sense whatsoever. 

9:25 But getting back to the people who are willing to ride out this tariff storm, they have something, in my opinion, I’ve listened to a lot of them now, they have something in common. They have jobs, they have secure jobs, and they get the same paycheck week after week, no matter what the tariffs do. If the tariffs go up to 150, 200 or 300 percent, it does not affect their payroll. Now, they may be working for a Home Depot or Walmart or a job that depends on what happens with the tariffs, but they don’t feel it.

10:37 Now, if they end up losing their job because the business they’re working for gets driven out of business, and then they go to collect unemployment, and then they find out there are shortages in the people working for government in all these agencies because of dodge cuts, then maybe they will have a different opinion. It’s just possible that when it strikes home, all of a sudden, they think that this is a tragedy. But as long as they are working, as they are getting the same paycheck, they don’t have 401ks, they don’t have IRAs, they probably don’t even have bank accounts, they live paycheck to paycheck, they don’t see difference. In fact, even though inflation hasn’t gone down, they’re used to inflation, thanks to Joe Biden, because the Biden administration gave us the worst economy in my lifetime. He even beat Jimmy Carter. And so people see gas is not down at all. It’s actually up in my area. But from a year ago, it’s down 40, 50 cents. So people say, I can live this out. If this is going to make America have manufactured jobs, if we can make t-shirts back in America and sew pantyhose, instead of the Chinese doing it, then it’s worth it. And they’re going to stick it out because it’s not personally costing them. Who it’s costing is the middle class person that is a business owner, who’s trying to compete against the big giants of this world, who want to put them out of business.

And these tariffs, which many of the big businesses are being exempted from, the billionaires surrounding Trump, but the little guy, the little Mary Jo and Tommy Bob, little company out there, is not getting exemptions from tariffs.

12:50 My editor told me that she was listening to Glenn Beck and a woman called into him and said, if you’re going to talk to the president, I’d like to know what you can do for my situation. She runs a small business, and she said, the actual tariff on what she was buying is like five or 600 percent. 

One of the things I think most people don’t realize, and I think this is important to understand this, is that there is not one tariff from Chinese goods. It’s not 150 percent like people think. For example, what I buy, I’m in the paint business. I manufacture automotive paint. I tell you that all the time. It’s what pays for this program. I do not pay 150 percent tariff. I pay a 254 percent tariff on all raw materials that come from China. And you may say, well, don’t buy from China. There’s a problem there, because there’s many products that only China has. They have the world exclusive on some of these products, which we are mandated by the EPA to use. That’s a little secret that so many people don’t know. People make decisions about things that they really don’t have the education.

14:00 I’m going to give you a little primer about automotive paint and most all paints that you find for outdoor use. There are mandates. There’s a California rule, and then especially there’s a national rule of how much paint can have, how many pounds of solvent can be in paint. And the national rule is 3.5 pounds per gallon. And that means the average solvent weighs about 7.2 pounds, 7.3 pounds. So if you were to have 50 percent of your paint product, which most of paint products only have 50 percent solids in them, then you have a half a gallon of solvent. So that is three and about three and a half, a little over three and a half. And so what you have to do is either make a little higher solids product to get that VOC at 3.5. But if you want to deal in California, if you want to deal in other states like New York, Maryland, Delaware, Chicago area, Illinois, you have to be at a different VOC. They want you to be in a VOC around 2.1. That’s two pounds of solvent per gallon. And high solids paints will not work at that type of percentage because you’d have orange peel, which means it looks like a peel of an apple. You’ll have all kinds of paint problems. So what the government has allowed is certain solvents are called VOC exempt. And you can use them and it doesn’t count towards VOC. For example, acetone is considered zero VOC. So if you took a product and you cut it 100 percent with acetone, you would have a zero VOC solvent based paint. Even though it’s got solvent, it’s going to be considered free of VOC. The problem with acetone is it evaporates so fast that you cannot make a good paint out of it where you can carry a shine. There would be no shine to the paint. It would all look flat. So there’s another product called Oxall. It’s about the only other one that’s approved in California, approved in New York and all over the world for an exempt product. Unfortunately, it weighs 13 pounds per gallon. It costs about three dollars a pound. So you’re looking at a product that’s about fifty dollars a gallon cost.

15:23 Whereas, like for example, methyl amyl ketone, MAK, is about seven dollars a gallon cost. So it’s a lot more cost, but it’s considered VOC exempt. The problem is Union Carbide invented this product about 10, 15 years ago, and they sold their patent rights to China. So 100 percent of the world’s Oxall is made either in China or in Brazil by a company that is owned by China. So I have to buy, if I want to sell in many states in America, if I want to sell in Canada, if I want to sell anywhere else, I have to buy Oxall. I can only buy it from China. So we have a 250 percent duty going to be coming down on Oxall. So something that costs 50 dollars a gallon is now going to be 150 dollars a gallon. Now I sell a gallon of California Clear, for example, for about 180 dollars. Now you do the math. If my solvent alone is 150 minus, let’s say, half of that, 75 dollars, and then the actual resin that goes in it, which again is California compliant, and it comes from China, and you’re looking at my cost is going to be 175 dollars a gallon. And I now sell it for 180. So if I just double my money, which you have to minimally do in the paint business, or any business, then the customer is going to see his price doubled. And this is what a lot of people do to understand. So getting back to what I was saying, why do people want to say they can live this out, and you have to be patriotic, and you have to support Donald Trump, because it’s going to all work out in the long run.

16:58 And if it doesn’t, what harm does it do? Well, it’s going to put every mom-and-pop shop out of business. It’s going to put the whole middle class business worker out of business. That’s what it’s going to do. And eventually, when these people who don’t have a problem, because they have a job that pays them the same amount of money every week, no matter what they do, and they don’t worry about a 401k, they don’t worry about retirement, and they live in paycheck to paycheck, all of a sudden they’re going to worry when everything they go to buy is double and triple the price. And then on top of that, they lose their job because they were actually working for a small business, because 65 percent of all employed people in America work for small businesses, and that small business goes out of business, or they sell out to some big conglomerate company that shuts them down after they buy them out. I could sell my paint company tomorrow, probably make a pretty good dime off the sale, and what they would come in, they wouldn’t even look for a customer base, a customer list. They would just shut us down the next day. When I got into the paint business in 1980, there was 115 paint companies, I think 116, that made automotive paint in America, and the big five, still the big five today, had a 20 percent market share. Well, over the years, they bought everybody out and shut them down, and now there are about, I think, 14 or 15 paint companies left in America making automotive paint. I’m one of them, but the big five have a 99 percent market share.

Do the math, see what’s going on here. If they can use tariffs and government to put me out of business and every other little guy out of business, then what they will do, they’ll double the price of their paint, even after the tariffs are removed.

17:32 Do you know what a gallon, just to give you an example, do you know what a gallon of a red pearl, you go down the street and you see these foreign cars, these beautiful red pearl paint jobs, they almost look like a candy apple paint that’s got depth to them. They’re called a tri-stage, and you put down a base color, then you put down a color, and then you clear coat it. Well, a gallon of a red pearl’s relic, they call it, is about $3,600 in a product from the big five paint companies for their premier product. It probably costs them no more than 50, if it costs them even that to make. There’s a lot of room there when you buy out and there’s no more competition. Let’s say they’re getting all their raw material like I am from China, because that’s who makes it all, because they don’t have an EPA shutting down every darn raw material company in the world. Let’s say their manufacturing cost is 50, and they now have to pay 150, but they’re still getting $3,600. They can absorb that, but now if you’re a small guy like myself, and maybe you can’t do it for $50 because you don’t have the buying power, but it may cost you 75 or 80, but now it’s going to cost you 240, and you were selling it for 300, you can see the problem. Little people are going to go out of business.

The big companies are going to survive.

You almost have to say, is this a plan to do away with the middle-class business owners in America?

18:58 Because I know Democrats have been trying to do that for years. One of the reasons I’m so worried about what’s happening with this Trump administration is I always talk about the term cognitive dissonance, where people cannot find a balance. They swing from right to left. They never swing to the bottom. A clock goes left to right, and it never stops at the bottom unless it stalls. That’s how people vote. We’re going to have President Trump in power, and if everything fails, we’re going to see the Democrats completely take the House, completely take the Senate, and in 28, take the presidency, and then all little businesses like mine are going to be done away with by the EPA and by regulations, and because they are bought and paid for by big business, big pharma, big banks, but it looks like Trump’s doing the job for him, and it’s the little guy that’s going to pay for all of this. I’m just telling you that right up front, and so again, the guy who doesn’t think there’s any problem of waiting this out, he has nothing at stake. He doesn’t have a 401k. He doesn’t have an IRA. He doesn’t have any investments. He’s living paycheck to paycheck. As long as those paychecks keep coming, he’s willing to wait because it doesn’t make a difference to him. It will make a difference to him if he loses his job, however, and that’s the point there.

19:33 So I just thought I’d get that said, and let’s move on to the next subject here that I think we should talk about on the Friday wrap-up. Yesterday, we had a big departure from the first departure from the Trump cabinet. Mike Waltz, over this Signal scandal a few weeks ago, where he had inadvertently invited in one of the anti-Trump press people into the high military conversation, and he resigned today for personal reasons, and he was named, I guess, an ambassador someplace overseas, but the point being is he was the first casualty. There are a lot of reports saying that Pete Hegseth will be the next casualty because he’s been using Signal to be chatting with his wife and his kids and his family and everything else. If that’s true or not, I don’t know, but I want to tell you some of that about the Signal thing, why they’re using it, and who started it. Who started it actually was the Biden administration, and why did they want to use Signal? Why did they want to use a chat line that was encrypted? Because many people do not know this, but the Federal Government Records Act requires that every single piece of paper, every single conversation that the president has, or anybody in the White House has, it must be recorded and sent to the National Archives. If the president was to jot down a note from a phone call, that note is actually taken from him and given to the National Archives for records. I don’t know how many people out there know this.

I know a lot of people make decisions about what’s right or wrong, but they don’t know the law.

21:21 They don’t understand there is this sunshine in the law that allows the American public, maybe at a different time if it’s considered national security or not, but it goes into the National Archives.

So the Biden administration, and by the way I think that this was totally, totally corrupt, used Signal because there are no recordings of the conversations. There are no paper trails. Many senators, Senator Warner of Virginia uses it. Why do you think they use it? Because they can talk to people and there’s no record of them asking for donations or asking for money or kickbacks or anything else. And so the last thing you would expect that the Trump administration would do is use the same messaging system that Biden used to escape, get around the law, and I think illegally, and it implies to me that the Trump administration, like the Biden administration, simply did not want to have records kept of conversations going to the National Archives. That is not legal, and I don’t hear anybody talking about it in this country. I don’t hear anybody on the left or the right or the middle talking about it.

How about the idea that you can’t hold meetings in secret that’s not recorded somewhere for posterity’s sake, and it’s a good law?

It’s the sunshine laws. It’s like when I was in little politics back in the 1970s in Connecticut. We couldn’t hold a meeting. We couldn’t go to dinner together, the members of the zoning board, and just go have dinner together unless somebody was there to take notes because you had to record, whenever there was a quorum, you had to record every conversation so people could see if there was something going on that they should know about.

And that is what’s called bringing sunshine, bringing the public into the inner room of meetings of public officials, and it’s a good law. I know a lot of people in politics don’t like that law, and I think they’re happy to try to find a way around that law, but it is the law.

22:22 I think Matt Walz is going to be the first. I think Hegseth is going to be there, and then we’re going to start seeing some more and more Trump people, just like the first administration. This happens in every administration, by the way. It’s not particular to Trump, but you’re going to start seeing people changing seats or actually getting the boot. Then when they get the boot, all of a sudden, their demeanor is going to change, and they’re going to go on NBC, CBS, I doubt Fox because Fox won’t have them on, but MSNBC, and they’re going to start saying how bad Trump was, like the first cabinet. I mean, his own vice president from the first time around can’t find a good thing to say about him today. That might mean something, I don’t know if it does or not, I didn’t like him in the first place. But my point being, it’s amazing how they talk right now how great Donald Trump is, but if they’re booted, all of a sudden he becomes this impossible guy. Isn’t that what happens in Washington, DC? Don’t like the idea of it, but like I said, so Waltz, I believe is the first one to go. I think there’s some right around the corner.

I think Pete Hegseth will be the next to go. We’ll see him back at Fox. And then I think there’s some other heads going to roll when some of these Supreme Court decisions start ruling against things in the Justice Department, things the FBI has done, things that immigration has done.

When the Supreme Court starts ruling against things, they’re going to have to find fall guys to fall back on and blame.

23:58 The very, very last thing I really want to talk about is this town hall meeting that was on News Nation the other night with President Trump as a call-in guest with Bill O’Reilly and Andrew Cuomo. And if there’s one thing that came out in the show that was just so obvious is with Bill O’Reilly, somebody that I know he’s an arrogant thing and there’s many times I disagree with him, but a lot of times he really does have some good points. He is a Donald Trump supporter. He has been a friend of Donald Trump for some 35 years now. He knows Donald Trump quite well. He was the reason that Trump even did the show, in my opinion, because News Nation is, I think, the most fair and balanced news station right now on TV anyway. And it’s not always pro-Trump, and Trump doesn’t want any media that’s not pro him. He’s got an ego problem, and it’s not conductive for his job. But that’s neither here nor there. But Bill O’Reilly made a statement to James Carville when James Carville said, I don’t care who makes my t-shirts, I care who makes our airplanes, I care who makes our computer systems, I care who makes our tanks and our cars, but I don’t really care who makes our t-shirts. And I agree with him, by the way.

24:45 I don’t agree with James Carville that much all the time, but I do agree with one statement he said in the past. It’s the economy, stupid. That’s why Trump was elected, over the economy. Had nothing to do with that he had a mandate. President Trump has never had a mandate. He’s not liked by most of the people that even voted for him. It was a vote against Joe Biden, against Kamala Harris, and against Democrats over the economy, and over boys and girls locker rooms, and over criminal, illegal aliens murdering, raping across the country. That’s why Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris were hated so bad, and why Donald Trump won. Had nothing to do with the Trump agenda. It really did not, but President Trump is too arrogant to see that.

But anyway, Bill O’Reilly made this statement back to James Carville, I own nothing that is made in China. I make sure I have nothing that is made in China. You go to my web store, BillOReilly.com, and you can find t-shirts that you can buy that is made in America. Everything on my website is made in America. And I thought it was pretty funny when somebody in the audience said, yes, but we can’t afford $25 for a t-shirt, when we can buy five for $15 at Walmart made in Singapore. And Bill O’Reilly says, well, it’s time to be a patriot. You don’t have to buy things from China. The thing about it is, either he’s a liar, which I don’t think he is, or he is himself so isolated from reality of the world that he doesn’t even understand. Does he own a TV set? Well, he’s got stuff from China. Does he drive a car or somebody drive him around in a car? Well, that car has got parts and electronics from China. Does he have this item and this item and this item? Is his house being painted? Is he using a product? He’s buying stuff all day long made in China. And to make a statement, I have nothing in my house or on my body made in China, shows you just how uninformed, even informed people is. He says he’s an historian. That’s not a historian.

25:56 This is a man who is living in an isolated bubble and he doesn’t know what it really is like to be the average middle-class American today, trying to make ends meet in a world where you have to worry about your budget. You have to worry about where you spend money. And if it’s going to cost you $3,000, the last thing, by the way, is the iPhone.

I’m sure Bill O’Reilly has a cell phone and none of it’s made in America. Just shows you how just ridiculous that comment was, but nobody called him out on it. I would have. I wouldn’t have been very welcome on that show, but I would have called him out on it because he doesn’t obviously know what he’s using. 

But getting back to the whole idea is America is never going to bring back all of these jobs. Some of these jobs we don’t want. We really don’t want people doing manual labor when we have machines that can do it over here or machines that can’t do it. You need the manual labor and we don’t need to pay $35 an hour for somebody to sew t-shirts together. It’s that simple. But this is the problem that on both sides and in the middle, I’ve never seen a country that is so ill-informed.

I am a historian and I do remember my history.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Bill O’Reilly does. If he did, he would know what tariffs do…they bring world wars.

 26:23 But anyway, going back to, I know what’s going on. I am a real historian. I study, I read, I am up on things. I don’t bend things to meet my fancy. And unfortunately, that’s what we’re doing today. We’re doing it on the left. We’re doing it on the right. And nobody is actually being honest with themselves. That’s the problem. I had a person once tell me their boss said, it’s okay to BS people. But when you start believing in your BS, then you got a problem. Well, I just thought I’d say that about that town hall meeting about just how bad off we are when it comes to our experts and everything.

And of course, today’s the last day. Tomorrow’s the Sabbath day. We have two shows. We have a 7:11 AM show, which is a Sabbath show. And then we’re going to have a 7:11 PM show, which is a short story. And then, and Sunday we will have a Sunday show, usually political in nature. And then I’ll be back here Monday, Monday again, with another edition of The Plain Truth Today during the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7 11 in the morning, 7 11 at night and noontime, 12 0 1 Midday.

That’s The Plain Truth Today brought to you by the plain truth.com. The one place I think you go to, because you don’t pay to come here. We don’t ask you for money. We’re not beholden to you. We’re telling you the plain truth.

28:11 If you like it or not, you’re getting the plain truth. Now, if you don’t like it, a lot of people are not going to like what I have to say. I know you’re going to move on.

Jesus Christ and His entire ministry converted 120 people. Read it for yourself in the book of Acts, 120 people. Now His disciples did a better job than He did, but He did convert only 120 people. Noah did eight, saved the world with eight people, believing, hopefully believing the rest of the world died. So I don’t plan to have a big audience. I don’t plan to make everybody happy to listen to me. I’m telling you what God is saying in his Bible.

29:00 Like I said earlier, God doesn’t listen to me all the time. I don’t have visions of God. I don’t have meetings with God in the morning for breakfast or anything like that. I just read the Bible and go from there.

So and figure out where your problem’s really coming from, because I think it’s coming from the Bible and what it says that you don’t want it to say, and not what I’m saying.

Anyway, have a good weekend.

Have a safe weekend. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today saying bye-bye.