Ronald Reagan vs Donald Trump Part 2 (Transcript)

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Hi, Bob Barney with The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and this is part two of Trump versus Reagan on tariffs, on the role of big government and government in general, the idea the government may be buying into businesses and playing a major role in the governing of the people of the United States, doing away with personal liberties and freedoms, and just comparing the two presidencies, and I’m just asking a question, a plain truth type question, which president do you think was right? Now, today, yesterday, we spent a lot of time on Ronald Reagan and some of his speeches about tariffs, about immigration, about the idea of big government, and big government is the problem, as he pointed out accurately, in my opinion. And then we today, we’re going to start out with Donald Trump announcing the 10% baseline tariffs, and which rose whenever he had a fight with somebody, he would just off the cuff, raise their tariffs, like, like a spoiled child in a playground that didn’t get the toys he wanted. Starting tomorrow, the United States will implement reciprocal tariffs on other nations.

It’s been a long time since we even thought of that. But we will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us. So the tariffs will be not a full reciprocal.I could have done that. Yes, but it would have been tough for a lot of countries who didn’t want to do that. I’d like to see the chart if you have it.Could you bring it up, Howard? This is our great Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick. So if you look at that, China, first row, China, 67%. That’s tariffs charged to the USA, including currency manipulation and trade barriers.So 67%, I think you can, for the most part, see it. Those with good eyes, with bad eyes. We didn’t want to bring, it’s very windy out here, we didn’t want to bring out the big charts because it had no chance of standing.Fortunately, we came armed with a little smaller chart. So 67%, so we’re going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%. I think, in other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less.

So how can anybody be upset? Well, the next few days, he raised that 34% to 150%, by the way, sparking the inflation that we’re feeling today. Will be, because we never charge anybody anything, but now we’re going to charge. European Union, they’re very tough, very, very tough traders.You know, you think of European Union, very friendly, they rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.39%, we’re going to charge them 20%, so we’re charging them essentially half. That went to 25%. Vietnam, great negotiators, great people.They like me, I like them. The problem is they charge us 90%. We’re going to charge them 46% tariff.That went to 100% and now down to 10%. Taiwan, where they make, they took all of our computer chips and semiconductors. We used to be the king, right? We were everything, we had all of it.Now we have almost none of it have been probably anything like it in terms of the enormity. And there are a lot of bad things happen at the people that do the check-in and they’re looking at 10 year jail sentences if they do play. We’re going to treat them so good, but if they cheat, the repercussions are going to be extremely strong.Foreign nations will finally be asked to pay for the privilege of access to our market, the biggest market in the world. We’re right now the biggest market in the world. We had a great country four years ago in terms of the economics.

We were doubling up on China. We were doing so well. Well, we were doing well.The tariff against China in his first administration was an adequate tariff and it was the right thing to do. But tariffs against Canada, tariffs against the European Union, tariffs against Germany or Italy or England. What’s Ronald Reagan think about this whole idea of tariffs? And we played this before on Reagan on tariffs and we’re played again right now.Free trade serves the cause of economic progress and it serves the cause of world peace. When governments get too involved in trade, economic costs increase and political disputes multiply. Peace is threatened.In the 1930s, the world experienced an ugly specter, protectionism and trade wars and eventually real wars and unprecedented suffering and loss of life. There are some who seem to believe that we should run up the American flag in defense of our markets. They would embrace protectionism again and insulate our markets from world competition.By the last time the United States tried that, there was enormous economic distress in the world. World trade fell by 60% and young Americans soon followed the American flag into World War II. I’m old enough and hopefully wise enough not to forget the lessons of those unhappy years.

The world must never live through such a nightmare again. We’re in the same boat with our trading partners. If one partner shoots a hole in the boat, does it make sense for the other one to shoot another hole in the boat? Some say yes and call that getting tough.Well, I call it stupid. Free trade serves the cause of economic progress and it serves the cause of world peace. When governments get too involved in trade, economic costs increase and political disputes multiply.Peace is threatened. In the 1930s, the world experienced an ugly specter, protectionism and trade wars and eventually real wars and unprecedented suffering and loss of life. There are some who seem to believe that we should run up the American flag in defense of our markets.They would embrace protectionism again and insulate our markets from world competition. Ronald Reagan lived through the 1930s and he lived through World War II and he understood how the policies that we are following today are not policies that will make America strong in the long run. It will make America weaker in the long run because America needs to be in competition with the world based on the value of our products and not by a government standing by inefficient, bloated companies selling terrible products at inflated prices because they are being protected by big government.

Big government’s job is to be little government, in my opinion, and one of the things that can happen here is government’s only role is to play a referee and a referee to keep the playing field even. There are times you need tariffs and Ronald Reagan did do tariffs against Japan and some other nations that were our allies when they were following unfair practices. But you know, when he did it in a well and balanced way, Japan capitulated and they lowered the tariffs on what he was negotiating over.There are times that we do have to stand up even to our allies, but not to go to war with every one of our allies. Now, the next thing I wanted to get into is Donald Trump’s view of the world order. And this is probably the most scary thing because Donald Trump wants to have an imperial presidency.He wants to have a presidency that takes land away from, for example, maybe Venezuela. Maybe that’s why we’re there. He wanted to take over Iceland, if we can remember that.He wanted to take over Canada, which was the most stupid idea in the world. We’d just have more Democrats because the Canadians are quite liberal. The last thing we would need is Canadian provinces becoming states.But these are the things that Donald Trump thinks big government can help and solve all of our problems. And Ronald Reagan just understood that big government is the problem. And if we are going to go back to the idea of big government, of LBJ’s great society and pour trillions of dollars into worthless programs, as we have done under every Democrat that has ever been president since FDR, then we’re going to be back in the same boat we were in the 1970s, and maybe the worst boat that we were in the 1930s.

And what comes after that would be World War III. Do we really want a World War III? Do we really want to have a war with Venezuela? Do we really want to have a war with all these other countries around the world? Should we get involved with Ukraine? Should we get involved with all these places? Or should we tackle the inflation in America, the jobs in America, the businesses and help support those businesses in America, not just with tariffs maybe, but also to make them competitive, to give them the ammunition that they need to compete with the world? Because the plain truth here, and this is something most Americans are just unaware of, the marketplace for American goods is not just America. For example, my company is going to become a worldwide paint company.We’re putting offices in Asia, in the Middle East, in Italy, and we are going to be exporting many of our products all over the world. I’ll give you an example. In 1990, I think there was something like 75 million cars in China.Today, there are 584 million cars in China needing paint, and there’s only 350 million Americans. Think about that. In India right now, there’s less than, I believe, 50 million or 40 million cars, and there are a billion bicycles.Well, most experts believe that India will have three quarters of a billion, that’s 750 million cars in the next 15 years. Do we want to be able to sell to those people, or do we want to lock those people out and watch the world trade amongst themselves and forget about American businesses? American businesses need to trade overseas. We need a president who understands that, who uses a tariff as a way to open up markets, I agree, which Ronald Reagan did.

But at the same time, these retaliation, these personal infightings that Ronald Reagan picks with leaders of the world, just simply does not help our case. My export sales manager, he’s vice president of TAMCO International, has traveled the world now for some 38 years, I believe he said. And what he said was when Ronald Reagan became president, it gave him the inspiration to go worldwide and take the company he was working for at the time and make it a worldwide company.That company was called Dynatron Bondo, and it was the people who invented body fillers for automobiles. Up until then, everyone used lead to fix a car, fix the dents, and then put primer over the lead. And this Dynatron Bondo company, and to this day, like Kleenex, all tissues are called Kleenex, all body fillers are called Bondo by the people in the industry, because that was the first company that did it.And when he went around the world, because he had inspiration from Ronald Reagan, who he, like myself, thinks is the greatest president in American history since George Washington, that is, believed that we could sell these American polyester putties, called Bondo at the time, all over the world. And his superiors, the owners of the company, did not believe he could do so. So he went to Africa first, and the first thing he called them back with about a six or an eight container load order from one customer, which actually doubled the American sales for that company back in 1983.

And then he went on to other places. He went to China, for example, and sold body filler into China, something we don’t do today. And Chinese body filler is no good.European body filler is very good, but the Chinese stuff is junk. They would love to buy American body fillers in the body shops in China. But he went to the Middle East and sold to the Middle East.And by the time the company, which was a $12 million company in 1980, when he went to work for them, became a $300 million company, with less than $75 million of that $300 million coming from American sales. Another $225 million was coming from international sales. And when he approached me a year and a half ago, and we were really excited about Donald Trump becoming president and be like he was the first time around, which surprised us when he turned out not to be, he said, you understand that we can take your company and we can go worldwide.And your company will have the majority of its sales in the third world, because these people are learning how to paint. They get in cars that they never had before. They’re moving from bicycles to cars.

They’re going to have accidents and are going to need to repair them. And the world looks to American technology, especially in paint and body fillers, when they go on to buy something. And we have an advantage, not just price, because we don’t have a price advantage, but we have an advantage of quality that they cannot have anywhere else in the world, except from the European companies who make a very good body filler.And the thing about the European companies, they’re twice as expensive as the American body fillers. So as you can see, we have an advantage with a great product that the world simply does not have available to them at an affordable price. And Tamco is going to be a company because we make body fillers as well.Tamco is going to be a company that’s going to be able to sell our products all around the world and probably have more sales internationally than we will have in America. And that’s the case with so many of the top 50 American corporations today. And I’m not one who promotes big business, by the way, but the reason that Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola and all of these other retail type operations that manufacture and sell to the end users through grocery stores or through computer stores or whatever their business is, most of the sales from the top 50 Forbes companies are getting the majority of their sales from overseas sales.

Believe it or not, that’s the plain truth. Many Americans do not realize that. We think that we have the biggest market in the world.As a single country, we have the biggest market in the world. But do you know who has a bigger market than us? Our future enemy does. The European Union, which comprises of about, what, now maybe 20, 25 nations, it will end up with 10.But the European Union is actually the largest market in the world for everything. People do not realize this. We keep thinking America is the largest market.It’s not. And what these tariffs have done, even with China, is China now has replaced America with Germany, of all people, as the greatest source of their revenue. They are selling more goods and services and products to Germany than they do America today.And so China hasn’t really lost a skip in their beat, but American manufacturers have. Because what we are finding out with our company is that too many times we go to a new country, we show our presentation of our products and how superior our products are, and they want to buy from us. But they say to us now, we don’t want to buy from an American company.We don’t want anything to do with Donald Trump’s America. And if you think, and you laugh that way, well, that’s fine. We just stay here in America.That kind of attitude is going to make Americans not be able to sell worldwide, and then Americans are going to shrink in their world dominance. We are a superpower, and we have to act like a superpower. We cannot act like a country that is a third world country, and we’re only going to take care of ourselves.

This is the idea that Americans had before World War II, when they wanted to stay out of the war with Germany. They did not want to go to war with Germany, because they thought Germany would never bother us, as long as we need to stay out of England’s affairs and French’s affairs. And the truth of the matter is, Germany would have attacked us with an A-bomb if we didn’t get into that war.There are times we have to act like a superpower, and there are times we have to act as the good cop in the world, and not the bad cop, not to destroy Venezuelan fishing boats that we claim are drug boats, and yet there is no proof of this. Here’s another example of that right now. Rand Paul, who is a libertarian, and I will say a bit of an isolationist, which I am not, by the way, but has some very good principled points about trying to make wars where we don’t belong to make a war, has an answer to this Venezuelan drug boat situation, which I do not believe we are being told the truth by our government.That’s happened a lot in our history. They go against all of our tradition. When you kill someone, you should know if you’re not at war, not in a declared war, you really need to know someone’s name at least.

You have to accuse them of something. You have to present evidence. So all of these people have been blown up without us knowing their name, without any evidence of a crime, and for decades, if not centuries, when you stop people at sea in international waters or in your own waters, you announce that you’re going to board the ship and you’re looking for contraband, smuggling, or drugs.This happens every day off of Miami, but we know from Coast Guard statistics that about 25% of the time the Coast Guard boards a ship, there are no drugs. So if our policy now is to blow up every ship we suspect or accuse of drug running, that would be a bizarre world in which 25% of the people might be innocent. The other thing about these speedboats is they’re 2,000 miles away from us.If they have drugs, they’re probably peddling drugs to one of the islands of Trinidad or Tobago off of Venezuela. The idea that they’re coming here is like, it’s a huge assumption and really shouldn’t. You have to present some proof.It is the difference between war and peace. In war, though, you don’t ask people’s name, but if they want all out war where we kill anybody and everybody that is in the country of Venezuela or coming out, that has to have a declaration of war. It’s something that is not pretty, very expensive, and I’m not in favor of declaring war on Venezuela.So I agree with him 100%. We have no business worrying about Venezuela right now. What we have in Venezuela is a lot of oil that I think Donald Trump realizes, of course, what we always say, oil is the bloodline of the world, and America wants to have more dominance in the oil fields, and that is why he has interest in maybe invading Nigeria over so-called protecting of Christians being annihilated.

Well, they’re being annihilated all over the world by Muslims and by other groups, and yet we’re not talking about going into all these other nations to protect Christians there. We use Christians as a red flag moment, saying we’re protecting Christians when it is countries, for example, that’s full of oil, and we want the oil reserves. One of the things that made Donald Trump very famous in 2016 when he was running for president, he said he was against the Afghani war, but at least we should have got all their oil.That is what he said, and I think anybody who’s a Trumpite, including myself, remembers that speech and somewhat agreed with it, but at the same time, this idea that you’re going to go to war for oil kind of reminds me of the Bushes. It kind of reminds me of big government. It kind of reminds me of a CIA out of whack, causing us problems, like when it turned out that the two National Guard people that got shot by this Afghani refugee under the Biden administration, turned out he worked for our CIA.What’s wrong with that picture? What’s wrong with the CIA? And what’s wrong with this big industrial military complex that’s called American military, going around the world, selling our most advanced jets to Saudi Arabia, who I believe will be the location, by the way, of the biblical king of the south, as you find in Daniel 11, and that this prince may be assassinated, may be overthrown. Maybe it’s not in our time, I don’t know, but when it does happen, like Iran, they’re going to have all kinds of American weapons. You know, in the 1960s and 70s, the Shah of Iran was our darling, and Iran was a very modern country and a very pro-Western country.

But when Iran was deposed and the radicals took over, they had a lot of American hardware to be able to fight off Iraq at the time with, and any of their enemies. And it was Iran that sponsored terrorism around the world that they would not have been able to do without our involvement with their government back in the 60s and 70s, meddling with internal businesses in countries where maybe it would not be best for us to do. And what we’re seeing with Donald Trump’s second administration here is a very active United States government around the world, militarily-wise.We changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, something that there’s a reason why the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense, because we wanted to assure the world we were not going to be a colonizing, conquering nation going around taking land and taking other people’s oil, that we were a country of defense, not of offense. We weren’t a Department of War anymore, we were a Department of Defense. We would defend the American people with all of our lives and resources, but we would not be like the former colonizing nations of Europe going around the world, colonizing everywhere and making them slaves of America.And it seems to me, at least on the surface, I’m not sure this is really what he has in mind, but I’m afraid it is, he wants to be an imperial America. Teddy Roosevelt had that too, by the way, and Teddy Roosevelt was a great president. But in many aspects, America was just becoming a superpower under Teddy Roosevelt.

We were not the superpower that we were. I don’t believe Teddy Roosevelt would be acting in any way like Donald Trump is acting right now when it comes to most of these things, but he was a strong president. He was a president of America first, but America first does not necessarily mean America’s always the one that has to lead the charge around the world militarily-wise.Donald Trump won, in my opinion, mainly, this time around, by the way, mainly because he wasn’t Biden. More people voted for Trump because they did not want more Biden than they surely did not want Kamala Harris. This was not a mandate.I’ve said this over and over again with Donald Trump. He did not get a mandate. The mandate of the American people was threefold.We do not want any more big government that Biden gave us, putting boys’ and girls’ locker rooms. We did not want inflation to go rampant and continue to go rampant like under the Biden administration. And we wanted to get out of foreign wars.Donald Trump ran that we would not be fighting in foreign wars. What are we doing today? We’re meddling in Ukraine. We’re meddling in the Middle East.We’re meddling in Venezuela. We’re meddling in Europe. We’re meddling all over the world and trying to use our force of power as a big stick, which is just making enemies around the world.

And we don’t need a world full of enemies. You have to get along with many nations that have been our allies. Many of our allies are going to turn on us.The Bible says so, mainly Europe. But maybe it’s going to be us that makes them turn on us, because up until now, Europe has been a pretty good partner when it comes to military. Maybe that’s going to be the reason that they do change, because the Bible says the beast of the North, the King of the North, the Antichrist, is coming out of Europe, out of the Holy Roman Empire that’s going to be revised.And maybe it’s us that’s going to cause it by these insane policies of trying to pick a fight with everybody around the world. Here is a view from another so-called expert. I’m not sure if he is or not, but he has some good comments about Trump’s view on NATO and on world conditions and on foreign relations that simply may cause trouble in the long run.So here, a final take I’m going to do is a Republican representative, Don Bacon, and he’s on the Armed Services Committee, and what his take about the Donald Trump foreign policy since the second Trump administration began. And this is a Republican. This is not a Democrat.This is a Armed Services Committee member, and he should have some ideas about what’s going on. And he seems to be breaking from the ranks here, and I think you’re going to see a lot more of that before the 26th elections. But let’s listen.

What I’ve seen since the president came in, he uses like punching boxing gloves on Zelensky and uses velvet gloves on Putin. And you just see the contrast. One’s the invader, though, and one’s the victim.One wants democracy, and one has murdered his rivals. I don’t understand why the president keeps abusing and talking down Zelensky, who wants to be on our side, and Putin hates us. This doesn’t make sense.I’m an old Ronald Reagan guy. Yes, he’s an old Ronald Reagan guy, and so am I. And anyone has to say, when you are negotiating with an ally, a supposed ally, and I’m not wanting us to get involved too much with Ukraine, but we are a superpower, and we do have to have some involvement here. But it’s got to be a balanced involvement that the world can respect, including despots like Putin.When you are tongue lashing the people that are your so-called ally here in a war, and you are agreeing with everything that the aggressor is saying, think of Adolf Hitler, for example, and Putin’s no different than an Adolf Hitler, then all you’re doing is empowering his behavior. And it’s just unexplainable to me, this kind of foreign policy. I went to school for foreign policy, by the way.I do have a degree from the University of Connecticut in foreign affairs diplomacy and political science was my degree, and I know a little bit about stuff over the years, plus I do a lot of reading, and I understand how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, and he did not do it by agreeing with the adversary all the time and making them the heroes, and they’re his best friend. This idea that Donald Trump goes around and says, you know, Xi is his best friend, and Putin is his best friend, but Zelensky is not. That’s not good negotiating tactics.

You’re showing weakness to your enemy, and the last thing you want to do is show weakness anywhere. You do not make statements that Donald Trump makes. You do not even, for example, say how inferior NATO is, and I agree, NATO has got problems, but you do that behind the scenes.You don’t do that on TV, on Fox News, where your NATO allies start thinking, well, you know what? We’re going to have to do this alone because we see the writing on the wall, what’s going to happen with the United States of America, and it’s not pretty, and therefore, you’re going to see a Europe rearm with nuclear bombs, by the way, and become a world power and eventually be a bigger world power than the United States of America, and it may be this administration that brings it about. Well, that’s the end of part two. I will have a part three of this broadcast, and we will wrap it all up tomorrow with Ronald Reagan versus Donald Trump part three.I do want to say one thing before I leave. The Plain Truth today is the place to go to, and theplaintruth.com is how you get there. It’s the place to listen to what’s going on, to see other points of view.We play a lot of different videos from YouTube on other points of view as well. We usually try to give a commentary about if we think they’re right or wrong. We do not endorse these videos as plain truth ideas, as an editorial, for example, but the American people, honestly, are very illiterate when it comes to world affairs, how the world is living, what’s happening around the world, and we live in a cocoon, and we think we know what’s going on, and there is nothing more dangerous than thinking you know something when you don’t because that’s how mistakes happen.

That’s how wars happen, and that’s how defeats happen. You have to know your enemy. You have to know their weak spots and their strong spots, and you can never show your weak spots.You have to stay strong, and you have to act like Ronald Reagan did when he was negotiating with the Russians, all the different leaders, and finally Gorbachev at the very end. He knew how to negotiate, and he was a tough negotiator. People forget he was a union negotiator.He was the head of the Actors Guild. He knew how to talk to people. Well, that’s the end of part two of the Reagan versus Trump presidencies, how they differ.Tomorrow I’m going to get on how Donald Trump is doing a lot of right things, however, but the wrong things are maybe overshadowing the right things. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today. Thank you for listening.Tune in again tomorrow. Bye-bye.