Jim Rickards Rebuttal: Trump vs. Kamala… Trump Won
Summary
➡ The article discusses a debate performance, criticizing the speaker for using scripted responses and not providing clear plans. It also criticizes the bias of the moderators towards the speaker’s opponent. The article then discusses the speaker’s opponent’s performance, pointing out missed opportunities and weak moments. Finally, it discusses the controversy surrounding the 2020 election, arguing that the court cases did not address the actual allegations of cheating.
➡ The text discusses a debate between Trump and Kamala Harris, where the author believes Trump was unfairly treated by the moderators. The author also mentions Trump’s improved appearance and Kamala’s voice being unpleasant. The text further discusses the importance of Pennsylvania in the election and the situation in Ukraine. The author criticizes the portrayal of Ukraine as a democracy and the U.S.’s involvement in the conflict.
➡ The text discusses the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, suggesting a compromise could end the war. It also talks about the political debate in the U.S., mentioning Trump’s stance and the influence of polls on public opinion. The text further highlights the potential impact of the Ukraine conflict and the U.S. economy on the upcoming election, predicting a possible recession and stock market crash.
➡ The article discusses concerns about the economy, with signs of a recession and rising unemployment. It also covers a debate where the speaker criticizes the current vice president for not taking action despite having plans. The speaker predicts that if Kamala wins the election, it could lead to higher taxes, shortages of goods, black markets, and lower stock prices. The speaker also speculates about potential outcomes if Trump wins the election.
➡ The article discusses a hypothetical scenario where the Democrats could take control of the House of Representatives after the November 5 elections. If this happens, they could disqualify Trump’s electoral votes by labeling him an insurrectionist, leading to a situation where neither Trump nor Kamala Harris have the required 270 votes to win. The decision would then go to the House of Representatives, who vote by state delegations, not individuals. If Trump is disqualified and no other candidate wins a state, Harris could become president, with JD Vance as vice president. However, if the Republican state delegations leave the House floor, causing a lack of quorum, Vance could become acting president.
Transcript
First thing I want to say is everybody in the world says Kamala Harris won, except maybe one other guy. I looked at his column this morning. So if you want to, I’m sure everyone’s had seen the headlines or their favorite website or new show, whatever, but everyone says Kamala Harris won. I think Trump won. I’ll explain that because you can’t be, like, a total outlier and not offer an explanation. But the universal consensus is she won. Why does everyone think that? A couple of reasons. Number one, certainly as far as the media is concerned, they’re all very pro Harris anyway.
Overwhelmingly, not exclusively. Trump has his corner, so to speak, but the media is overwhelmingly pro Kamala Harris. So it suits them to say she won. Number two, the bar was extremely low. Extremely low. Practically. It was like the limbo rock. I mean, practically on the floor. And that’s because she cannot speak extemporaneously. And I’ll come back to that and how it played into the debate. She can’t answer questions. She either needs a teleprompter notes. Um, they. They’re calling, uh, uh, Tim waltz a support animal because she needs him around. Um, and kind of muddles, too. But she just.
She says things. They’re. They’re. They’re juvenile, they’re infantile. They’re circular, they’re repetitive. They make no sense. She’s been doing that all along. She cannot speak extemporaneously. So. So the bar was, like, really low. And then she. She passed that. She. She did better than what I just described. So, so right there. When you set the bar, you know, we like to think our candidates are up here. They set the bar down here. She was probably not quite in the middle, but she passed the low bar. So the fact that they like her anyway, where they support her, the fact that she did exceed expectations, and a couple other things that I would say Trump didn’t do as well as he could have.
So that was enough to develop this consensus that Kamala Harris won. So let me, we’ll expand on that, but let me give a different view, my own view, and I can say one or two others. Number one, nobody won. And what I mean by that is there’s, there’s no official score. It’s not a boxing match. You go to a professional boxing match, there are three scorers who sit at ringside, and they score that. They scored the match. And if somebody gets knocked out, okay, the other guy wins. But if not, they just add up the points and they award.
They say somebody won. They called a technical knockout. We didn’t actually knock him out, but he got more points. That’s it. That’s the system. There’s no system like that for this. So there was no, when everyone’s got an opinion from the New York Times to the Washington Post, and I do as well, but we’re all just expressing our views or opinions. A lot of them come with a heavy bias. So technically, nobody won because there’s no official scorekeeper. Consensus wise, media wise, Carol Harris won. That’s very clear. Let me think, and let me explain why I think Trump actually won.
A couple of reasons. Number one, spent a lot of time, I mean, decades, really, studying communications theory. And one thing I know about television or for that, me, a video or actually what we’re doing here is that people don’t listen very much to what the person’s saying, whether it’s to debate or a panel on tv or any, any content in the medium, people actually don’t really listen to the worst. What they do is they watch. They look at the, the speaker. They form an opinion. They look at your demeanor. Very subjective, but very kind of. Well, really kind of subconscious.
But they form views on the person, and they ask themselves the following question. Is this person being straight with me, or is she lying? Is this person speaking from the heart, being honest, it doesn’t mean you’re right about everything, but sincere. Are they fake or are they fake? Are they speaking to me or are they kind of speaking down to me? And it’s kind of a condescending way, but basically, it kind of boils down to, do I trust the person or not? That’s what people are actually thinking when they. Even at a subconscious level, when they’re watching something like this.
And so did she score some points? Yeah, she was very good at baiting Trump, meaning she was trained in her preparation and so forth to come up with four or five lines that were designed to trigger Trump. Now, I’m sure Trump’s training camp said, don’t get triggered, but you can’t help it. Or at least Trump can’t help it. So she talked about the crowd sizes at his rally. Well, that’s not relevant to policy. What does that have to do with Ukraine or inflation or the economy or tariffs or. It doesn’t have anything to do with any of those things.
But it was designed to trigger Trump because Trump has this kind of obsession with crowd sizes, starting with his own inauguration and the size of his rallies versus the size of her rallies, etcetera. So she threw that out there. Now, what Trump should have done is just pivot. In other words, say, oh, you want to talk about the size of my crowds, of my rallies? Let’s talk about the 11 million people who came across the border illegally and are raping and stealing and robbing and shooting and taking american jobs, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, don’t take the bait.
Just take the comment. Pivot to something that’s very much in your favor. In Trump’s case, the immigration issue is very much in his favor. He didn’t do that. He said, my crowds are bigger than your crowds and you can’t even get a crowd and you got to bust them in. But my people, they come. He started talking about the crowds. Well, he took debate. That’s a completely non substantive thing. But she was trying to throw that out there. Trump will take the bait. Trump wasted, first of all, nobody cares except Trump. And then he wasted three or four minutes of valuable time.
He only had 90 minutes and a couple of commercial breaks and the moderators took up time. So he kind of wasted some valuable time when he could have pivoted to immigration, for example, and that would have scored a lot more points. So he did take the bait. But beyond that, if you look at what she actually said, so much of it fell into a couple different categories. They were either platitudes and I have a few notes because if I’m going to do quotes, I want to get them right. She said we need to move forward. She said that three or four times.
She said we need to turn the page. She said that a lot. She got into this thing. Well known, it’s well known that you do this and it’s well known that you do that and it’s well known that you’re a racist, et cetera. You know, she repeated that five times. That was kind of the well known stage. She was talking about the war in Gaza with Israel and Hamas. She said, this war must end. Okay. She didn’t say how. Say, by the way, the two state solution that she talked about, that’s been on the table since 1917 in the Balfour Declaration when it was British Palestine or the Palestinian Mandate later, after World War one.
So the two state solution has been out there since 1917, 107 years, but suddenly she’s got the two state solution. So again, I’m just looking at my notes, standing as America always should. Standing as America always shouldn’t. What does that mean? Cliche. She talked about a new generation of leadership for our country. She’s been the vice president for almost four years, but somehow this is a new generation. I have a plan. She said that six times. I have a plan for this. I have a plan for that. I have a plan for low drug prices. I have a plan to get grocery prices under control, etcetera.
Never said what the plan was. And by the way, the only plan she’d announced, Washinghouse. She’s going to stop price gouging by big corporate supermarkets. My first job, when I was. My second job, when I was 15 years old, I used to work in supermarket stock and shelves. The one thing I learned about the supermarket business, they work on a 1% margin, 1%. So if they do $100 gross, they make a buck. The idea that they’re price gouging is ridiculous. There is inflation, but it’s not because of greed by supermarkets working at 1% margins. Anyway, my point being, her entire debate performance was, I would break it down into kind of three categories.
Baiting Donald Trump, all prearranged, you know, scripted, in effect, platitudes and cliches, which sound good, very superficially, but, you know, like, okay, well, what is the plan? Or how are you going to do it? Or you say you’re going to do this. You know, you haven’t told us how. It’s not even on their website. And then just these rehearsed modules. She, she cannot speak extemporaneously. That hasn’t changed that. She’s not that bright, but she’s talented enough to memorize stuff. And so when you listen to it, I mean, play it back if, if you want to kind of zero in on this stuff, if you listen to it.
These were all, they were all written by, you know, professional writers and consultants. She memorized them. Okay, I’ll give her credit for that. She’s, you know, she’s good at that. But she was sitting there, obviously concentrating, trying to get these things out in a row. But they were all like, she didn’t have a teleprompter, but she kind of had one in her head, which is, they said, you need to say this. It’s a two minute module. Here you go. Say it 50 times, you’ll probably get it right. Don’t talk about big yellow school buses or whatever else she’s been talking about publicly.
So she was either baiting Donald Trump, completely scripted and memorized, or spoken platitudes. When you watch it, you’re like, well, okay, she didn’t fall down. She didn’t babble. She didn’t talk the way she usually does in an unscripted moment. So again, this goes back to setting the bar low. And then she outperformed. So that’s the basis for saying she won. But it’s not. As a voter, as a citizen, you have to ask yourself, did she give me a reason to vote for her? Did she articulate, she says she has a vision, but did she articulate division? The answer is no.
So it was just, it was like eating potato chips. You know, the kind of. And you keep doing it, but there’s no nutritional value is one way to put it. So I would say it was a very, it exceeded expectations. The universal view was she won, but that was based on setting the bar really low. Now over to Trump. Trump, he did allow himself to get rattled. His weakest moment was, came toward the end when the anchors, by the way, just to digress for a second on the economic. This was not Trump versus Harris. This was Trump versus Harris and ABC News.
They were totally on her side. And when you say that, you sound like you’re whining. Oh, you lost her. You’re whining about it. No, I mean, I’m an analyst. You know, I would. I’ll be objective about it. In particular, the fact that they fact checked Trump. Now, they didn’t get their facts right, but that doesn’t matter. They. Oh, you actually said this. You know, so. So they were fact checking him. They never fact checked her. The questions were questions that really held Trump’s feet to the fire. Do you regret anything you did on January 6 as implying that he was an insurrectionist? Do you regret certain things you said, but they never asked her? For example, hey, President Biden, I, people forget he’s still the president, even though he’s lying on the beach in never hope of Delaware.
President Biden’s been senile for four years. Not like the last four weeks or four months. It’s four years. Hey, Madam vice president, and misses Harris or whatever. Why did you cover that up? Why were you part of a concerted effort to say, he’s sharpest attack? You couldn’t possibly keep up with him. The guy, like I accessed to death, he never stops working. Those are all lies. Why did you say that about him when in fact, he was so senile that you had to do a coup d’etat and throw him off the ticket? That would be a tough question, but they didn’t ask that.
And that’s my point, which is they were zinging Trump on how are you going to deport 11 million people? I would have said a million at a time. Let’s get started. But the questions were, they went right at issues that are tough ones for Trump, but did nothing kind of zero in on her. So there’s a lot of bias. I mean, it’s kind of obvious, and you expected, but it was there anyway and it had some impact. So Trump, I thought, his weakest moment, one of the anchors said, I don’t know the woman’s name, but she was kind of pushing him on Obamacare, the Affordable Care act, and you want to replace it.
What’s your plan? And they never asked, by the way, they never asked Kamala Harris what her plan was. She said, I have a plan for this, I have a plan for that. Nobody ever said, well, what is the plan? That question was not asked, but they turned to Trump. They said, well, what is your plan for affordable care? And he said, well, he stumbled a little bit. He said, well, we have a concept of a plan. Well, actually, if you’ve ever been in business management or political management or political consulting or anything of the kind or anything where you’re in charge, that’s how the ideas evolved.
You get some smart people in the room, you exchange ideas. Some are you go further, some you shoot down, you develop the concept, turn it into a plan, and then you articulate it, then you put it out there. That’s how planning works with a lot of iterations. So Trump wasn’t wrong, but he missed an opportunity to say, we’ll be announcing that plan in the next two weeks, but you can count on the fact that it’s going to be better than what we have now. That would have been the right answer. But he said, well, what’s the plan? What’s the plan? Well, we have a concept of a plan.
A weak moment. A weak moment for Trump. So he did get angry. He did take the bait. He did miss a few opportunities. Having said that, he did hit his points and he nailed her on the Afghanistan withdrawal. He nailed her on. He came up with a new phrase, migrant crime. That was the first time I’d heard that obviously the illegal immigrants are committing crimes all over the country, but he kind of branded it migrant crime. He talked about weaponizing the Justice Department. The fake cases coming out of the election in 2020, by the way, that was another whole avenue where they hit him really hard.
Do you still say that the election was stolen? And Trump said, yeah. And they go, well, you lost every case. There were 15 court cases. None of those cases remedied directly with the allegations or remedied the actual cheating. That was going. That was 2020. Now, I followed those cases at the time, and I’m a lawyer, so I know how to read opinions and interpret them. And Trump was right, they did lose 15 cases. But why did they lose them? None of those cases went to the substance. None of those cases looked at ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona, that were put in boxes and warehouses and never counted.
Or mystery suitcases full of pre printed ballots that were pulled out from under tables at three in the morning in Atlanta, Georgia. Or the fact that the poll watchers in Philadelphia were required to keep 10ft away from the people counting the ballots because of COVID But I don’t care if you’re Superman, nobody can read fine print from a distance of 10ft. You can’t do it. So they couldn’t actually do their jobs. That was going on all over the place. None of that was addressed in these court cases. Again, going back to 2020, what the court said was, you don’t have standing, meaning maybe somebody can bring this lawsuit, but not you.
You’re not in the right jurisdiction. There was also a contradiction, which they said, well, you’re bringing the case too late. If this is your issue, you should have brought it in March or April of 2020, not after the election or during the election itself. But they did bring them in March 2020, and they were, at the time they were dismissed. They said, well, no, you got to wait till the election. So which is it? The cases that were filed six months in advance, the courts threw them out because they said, you got to wait till you have actual wrongdoing.
And then when the wrongdoing occurred, they brought cases and the court said, no, you should have brought that up six months ago. So what it boils down to, by the way, is that the courts hate these cases. The courts do not want to be involved in election cases. They say it’s between the legislation and the voters and the citizens. Then if you think your county commissioner is rigging the vote, vote them out. If you think your secretary of state is certifying fake election results, vote her out. In other words, this is between the voters and the legislatures or the elected officials.
The courts want to keep out of it. They still feel burned by Bush versus Gore in 2000. They don’t want a repetition of that. So the courts did everything possible using what’s called latches, which is latin term, means you waited too long, jurisdiction standing, all these procedural things. And then through those cases, none of those cases, not one of them, ever got to the facts alleged. So Trump was right about that. But what are you going to do on a debate, in a live debate on ABC News when you have 90 minutes? Give people a law lecture.
I just gave our audience a law lecture, but I’m sure people can follow it. But an example of the anchors, the moderators hitting Trump with a question that he couldn’t possibly answer in, like, less than 15 minutes. And Trump’s not a lawyer. And it’s like, you lost every court case. So there the anchors are taking. Why are the anchors saying that? You know, maybe Kamala Harris could say it if she wanted to. She’s the debate opponent. But as I said, it was Trump versus Harris, Trump versus the moderator. So they ganged up on him. They baited him, they threw him hard questions.
They threw her softballs. Everything was rigged against him. Okay, again, I want to kind of come back to why I think Trump won. Oh, when I come back to what I said earlier, the people watch. They don’t listen. I mean, they do listen, but not really. They’re really wobbly. Trump had a pretty good appearance. He was not the orange man. He got little Botox. That’s fine if you’re on tv. It doesn’t hurt. So he got some botox, kind of took out some of the wrinkles. His hair was not orange. It was. It was blonde. They, you know, by the way, they all dye their hair.
So, you know this. I’m not picking on Trump. I’m just telling you a little bit of stagecraft, his, you know, comb over thing, whatever. Those styled a little bit better, so better styling, better hair color. He had a tan, but it was a real tan. It actually looked kind of good. It wasn’t like a. There’s one of those tanning parlor fake tans with that, whatever, where they paint you orange. So he often, often in the past, he has been the orange man. His hair is kind of orange. His face is kind of orange. He wasn’t the hair color was blonde.
The hairstylist did a good job. He had some botox. He had a natural looking tan. He looked a lot better. So that’s good. This is the kind of thing that people, again, they internalize subconsciously. Kamala, was she making her. Yes, again, cliches and platitudes, but she was making her points. But she was strident. More so than Trump. She has a nasal kind of voice like that and very high pitched. It was really nails on a blackboard. I mean, again, vote for whomever you want and take whatever side you want. That. That voice, which you don’t hear very much because she doesn’t do interviews and she doesn’t do anything other than a teleprompter stump speech.
It was kind of nails on a blackboard, and people noticed that. So I would say in terms of visual appearance, demeanor, pitch, tone, things like that, which are not trivial, they actually matter. Trump came off much more solid than she did. Let me just finish with. She did cackle once. I got to look at the name of the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the west and Wizard of Oz, because she kind of comes off like that without the hat, but just want to, again, go down my list. Yet Trump did. Afghanistan did. Inflation destroying the fabric of the country, weaponized the Justice Department.
He made the point that she was a failed border czar. He did talk about illegal immigrants. When she was talking about the January 6 defendant, Trump said, why are we prosecuting January 6, but we’re not prosecuting illegal aliens? Good point. Made the point that Nancy Pelosi was responsible for January 6, which is true. And let me see. He didn’t back down in the 2020 election. He said, she got zero votes, which is true. She ran in zero primaries, which is true. There’s supposed to be, the Democrats are supposed to be the defenders of democracy, and Trump’s a threat to democracy.
They just shredded democracy. They just hand picked her with no votes, no primaries. It was the most undemocratic process you can think of. I thought Trump was very strong on Iran. Iran is financing the hoodies. The Hezbollah and Hamas, the three two, shiite one and sunni militant terrorist threats to Israel are all being financed by Iran. And he said Iran was broke under Donald Trump, which is true. I’m an expert on economic sanctions, and I did this kind of work for the intelligence community, CIA and others. I know a lot about it. And Iran was broke.
So I think it was not only right, but Trump made that point on Ukraine. This was interesting to me because she hit him pretty hard. And then the host, of course, amplified it. They asked Trump three times, do you want Russia to win? I thought his answer was a good one. He said, I want the war to be over. I want people to stop being killed. It wasn’t about Russia winning or Ukraine winning. It was about, can we get the war over and stop killing people? That’s real. That’s substantive. I thought Trump articulated that very well, but they kept baiting him.
Well, do you want Trump, do you want Putin to win? And then, of course, Kamala Harris comes in. If Trump’s president, Putin’s going to be in Kiev. Kiev. She said, putin’s going to be in Kyiv. And then look out Poland, because Poland will be next. None of that’s true, by the way. But those are the talking points, by the way. Just as a quick aside, this debate was not really about the country as a whole, the popular vote, the electoral vote. And so this debate was about Pennsylvania. It was a national broadcast, national audience. I get it.
They talked about a lot of policy things, but this was all about Pennsylvania because, and that’s why you heard so much about fracking. And I’ll come back to a couple of other issues. But if Trump is Arizona and Georgia, and I think he’s well positioned to do that and wins Pennsylvania, he wins. He wins the election. He’s got to flip Arizona and Georgia from 2020. But if he does that and takes Pennsylvania, he wins. If Kamala Harris takes Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, she wins. Even if Trump gets Georgia and Arizona. We’ll be in our newsletter, strategic intelligence.
We’ve already covered this. We’ll be talking about some more in the coming issues. But she has almost no path to victory without Pennsylvania. Trump has almost no path to victory without Pennsylvania. So I’m overstating it a little bit. There are some alternatives. We’ll talk. But basically, whoever gets Pennsylvania wins. So that’s why you heard so much about fracking. Fracking? I was born in Pennsylvania. I went to law school in Philadelphia. I rooted for the Phillies and Eagles. So I’ve got some Pennsylvania chops I can lay claim to. That’s why you heard so much about fracking. It’s a big deal in Pennsylvania.
And then she said, when they were talking about Ukraine, oh, to Trump, by the way, what are you going to say when Putin takes care of, and he’s looking at Poland, what are you going to say to the 800,000 voters of polish dissent in Pennsylvania? Well, there actually are 800,000 voters or some large number of polish descent in Pennsylvania. This has a large polish community. But those illustrations of how this whole thing was really about Pennsylvania, even though they didn’t advertise it as such. But I thought Trump’s answer was really thoughtful and the right answer, which is, look, what are we doing there? Why are we spending $250 to $275 billion fighting a war that has nothing to do with us? And they say, well, you’re defending democracy.
It’s not a democracy. I mean, Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, was elected over four years ago in a rigged election. But leave that to one side. He won a four year term. His term expired last Maya, May, 2024, was the end of Zelenskyy’s term. Why is he still the president? They didn’t have any new elections. Well, I can tell you the answer. He declared martial law, he suspended elections, and he is a military dictator, a dictator. And Putin said, I won’t negotiate. I might negotiate with Ukraine, but I’m not going to negotiate with Zelensky because he’s a military dictator.
He’s not duly elected anything. Democracy is dead in Ukraine. But you still get, by the way, most people don’t know that, but that’s the case. But you still get this, oh, we’re fighting for democracy. No, we’re not. We’re fighting for a military dictator who’s skimmed billions of dollars, bought houses in Dubai and Miami, and he’ll be on the first plane out when the curtain comes down on the bogus government there. But the moderators kept saying, do you want Putin to win, or do you want Ukraine to win? That’s a false dichotomy. You create a binary choice.
You want Putin or Zelenskyy. What is it? That’s not how the world works. There’s like a million gradations in between. How about a peace treaty where both sides agree the fighting’s over. Russia keeps Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine keeps the rest. Ukraine’s neutral. They don’t join NATO. That’s a compromise. That’s somewhere between a pure Putin victory and a pure Zelensky victory. That’s how wars end. In most cases, not all. I mean, world War two is different, but the idea that there could be a negotiation and who would be in best negotiator and who could actually put that together, that was never put on the table except by Trump, who said, I’m not picking sides.
I just want this thing to be over. Very thoughtful answer, but kind of went right over everybody’s head. And he was sort of branded as pro Putin. But this is just Russia, Russia, Russia all over again. And then Trump talked about close to world War three, not a talking point. We actually are close to world War three, closer than we’ve been to since the cuban missile crisis. It’s an extremely dangerous state of affairs. You’ve got nuclear armed powers on both sides. And Biden, he’s still the president, although she’s around. They escalate, escalate, escalate. And we are getting close to nuclear war in Ukraine and in Israel and the Middle east.
So I think Trump scored some very powerful points through the fog of her platitudes, her baiting him, taking the bait, moderators ganging up on Trump, fact checking Trump, not fact checking her, et cetera. So that’s kind of my summary of the debate. But if you want to know who won, Matt, I’ll tell you right now. We’ll know this coming Friday or Saturday over the weekend. Why do I say that? Because the only thing that matters really is the final vote. And that’s, and the polls. Okay, so my opinion, I just gave it other people’s opinion. They all think she won.
Okay. That’s what the headlines say. Got it. But there is no official score except one the voters. And so we’ll see what happens on by the, I’m not going to say we’ll see what happens on election day. This election is going to be over by October 15 because most, two thirds of the voters are voting early. So we’re in the real time election right now. People are filling out their mail in ballots, putting them in the dropboxes or they’re faking them or whatever’s going on. But we’ll look at the polls this weekend. Polls have been beginning with the coup d’etat when they threw Biden under the bus.
Then it was like Queen Kamala, coronation of Kamala Harris. Her polls went up. Yes, they did. Some pollsters stopped taking polls because like, hey, we got a good print. Let’s just wait three weeks and let everyone think she’s still ahead, even if she isn’t. But now we’re getting new polls. Things were trending in the past week. Things were trending in Trump’s direction. Still close by. This is close. No two ways about it. But the Kamala honeymoon was over. Things were trending in Trump’s direction. Let’s see what happens Friday. My expectation is that that trend will continue because I think people will internalize the substance, notwithstanding the cosmetics.
If you see a big surge in camellia, then I’m wrong. But I’m willing to wait till Friday today. I’m willing to be judged by the polls, but my expectations that Trump is going to continue to gather strength. Yeah. Well said. A couple of questions for you. In between now and the election, it does sound like. Right, polls are open, we’ve got mail in ballots, all sorts of stuff happening. It’s not really a one day election. It’s a month and a half or whatever in between now and the election. Is there anything big, any other big milestones or anything else that you see happening? Because this debate, we were waiting for it.
This is a huge one in between now and the election. But anything else that you see coming up that we should keep our eye on? Yes, two big ones that have nothing to do with the political debate, but that will affect the outcome. The first one is Ukraine. We talked about Ukraine. Russia is rolling up victories much faster and of more significance than Americans realized. I don’t expect Americans to be able to recite the names of 15 ukrainian villages, but people do read the headline, the New York Times or the Washington Post or NBC News or whatever, Fox, and it’s not being reported because there’s been a continual propaganda campaign to say Ukraine’s using the wonder weapons.
They got f 16s, by the way. The f 16s are being shot down. And then she went through that. She said, well, we gave the Bradley fighting vehicles, Abrams tanks, stinger missile. We did, and they all failed. The Bradley tanks are burning on the battlefield. Sorry. The Bradley fighting vehicles are burning on the battlefield. The Abrams tanks are burning on the battlefield. The f 16s are being shot down. The Himars precision guided artillery is hitting empty cornfields because the Russians figured out how to jam the GPs. And none of those weapons are working, which should disturb NATO.
Forget about Ukraine, but Russia is taking, you hear these names like, are they taking care of now? They may not have to, but these towns you’ve never heard of that are major logistics hubs. You got to study the battle space. Look at the railroad lines, the major highways, the rivers, etcetera. And there are certain towns or large towns, small cities, whatever you want to call them, that are key hubs. Russia is taking those. Once you do, you can’t, you, meaning the ukrainian armed forces cannot resupply these other outposts, these other fortresses because you’ve taken the transportation hub.
There’s no way to get there. And so that’s going on. The Kursk invasion of Ukraine invaded Russia. Well, again, you got to know the geography, the part of Russia that they invaded and they did. They took some territory. It’s forests and dirt roads. I mean, they didn’t get anything of significance. They didn’t get anywhere near the Kursk nuclear power plant, which was the original objective that failed. Theyve now been surrounded and theyre going to be annihilated. Theyre going to have two choices, surrender or die. But the Russians arent there yet. But what I just described, Matt, is going to, by October 1, mark it down.
Thats going to be the beginning of a major offensive, really, the annihilation of the troops in Russia, which are, by the way, their best reserves. When those troops surrender or are killed, Ukraine will have no reserves. And then on the battlefront in Donbas itself, moving towards the Dnipa river, Russia is rolling up booglidar and other key logistics hubs, and they’re going to be major advances and the ability of Ukraine to hold out, which will evaporate, basically, and it’ll be very, very clear. The other one, we have a little friend called the economy, and, sorry, federal Reserve, sorry, White House, the economy is bigger than all those things.
The Fed is basically a puppet show. Come out now. They’re cutting rates. They’re going to cut rates September 18. We’ve already told our readers about that. Everyone thinks it’s stimulus. It’s not stimulus. When the Fed is cutting rates. What they’re saying is we’re in a recession. The lowest prolonged rates in us history were during the Great Depression. Low rates are associated with very weak economic growth, deflation, disinflation, and recession. In a prosperous economy where things are growing, interest rates actually go up because they’re competing for funds. People say, hey, I want to borrow some money, want to issue some bonds because they want to build a new factory, I want to hire people, et cetera.
So rates actually go up, not sky high, but five, six, 7% because people are borrowing the money and banks are freely lending to expand the economy. When rates come down, by the way, the Fed’s behind the curve. Short term interest rates are collapsing on their own, just in the market. Forget the Fed now. So the Fed’s going to cut rates on September 18, probably cut them again in November. There are no more Fed meetings between September 18 and the election. So whatever they do September 18, that’s it until after the election. But they’ll probably cut again in November and December.
But they’re chasing the market down. The Fed’s not leading the economy. The Fed’s chasing the economy in a very bad way. Gasoline prices are coming down. You’re like hey, isn’t that a big victory for Kamala Harris? No, because they’re coming down because we’re going into a recession. If they were coming down because they were pumping more or had fixed the supply chain or stopped government spending or done something constructive, that’s one thing, but that’s not what’s happening. Prices are collapsing because demand is collapsing, has very little to do with supply, everything to do with demand, and it’s another sign of recession.
I don’t want to turn this into an economics lecture except to say that we may see a stock market crash and we’re already seeing sure signs of recession. So my expectation is by, pardon me, by mid October, the economy will be, it’s already in bad shape, but it’ll be apparent to voters in ways it already is. But it’ll be more apparent to voters. Unemployment’s going up. People are losing their jobs. People are worried about their jobs. So between Russia rolling over Ukraine and the economy collapsing in front of our eyes, those are things that are happening now that are going to be more apparent by October.
Bigger than, you know. We’ll be talking about the debate a couple of weeks from now. They’ll be talking about the unemployment rate. Yeah. Yeah. That’s one thing that in the debate it didn’t really, Trump might have missed a little bit on just making sure that everyone knew that Kamala’s the vice president. Biden and Kamala, like this entire economy is under their watch right now and things aren’t looking that great. And yeah, you know, whether we’re in a recession right now, are going to be in one. That’s a big topic. Sorry to interrupt, Matt, but I thought that was his strongest point.
I said his weakest point was when he didn’t have a good answer on his plan for affordable healthcare. He said where he’s acceptable plan. That was a weak moment. His strongest moment was at the very end when they gave each side, I think, two minutes to summarize. And he said, you have all these plans. Why haven’t you done it already? You’ve been vice president for three and a half years. Why haven’t you done it? Why dont you walk off the stage, get on a plane, go to Washington and sign a bill right now that will actually do some of what youre talking about? I thought that was powerful.
Its like, yeah, talking is a good, but you could actually, you are the vice president. You could do something and you didnt. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So one more question for you. And again, this is, I know it sounds like from your major outlook and big prediction for the election it sounds like and you still see Trump as the winner there in November. I do want to only because Im starting to see it, its the mainstream and whatever. But were getting that feel that things are changing. So I want to get your opinion on what happens if we wake up on November 6 and Kamala does win.
Or I know you have another theory, its more of a meltdown theory which this ones terrifying that Trump wins the election. And then there’s some things, there’s some tricks that the democrats could do that she ends up becoming president anyway. So I want to go into that for just one more update. What happens if she wins? What would you be looking at from an investment standpoint or doing what should american families be doing if that’s the case? Because I think the mainstream is pushing this out that oh, she won the debate. So now I think you’re going to have a lot of people worried like, oh no, what if she wins? So whats your answer to that question? What should people, if she happens to win somehow, what should they be doing with their investing or what should they be doing personally? Jeff? Well, great question.
Okay. Lets look at her platform. She doesnt have much of a platform. They just actually put something on the website like two days ago. And some tech maven you can go into, you can get whats called metadata which is actually you can look behind the curtain of whatever they posted and they found out that was cut and pasted from Biden’s platform. So they literally took the Biden platform, cut and pasted into her website and that’s her platform. So some tech admin or whatever didn’t know what he or she was doing because that was pretty easy to figure out.
So no substance at all. But let’s look at what she said. She has come out with a few positions. She wants to increase corporate income taxes. She wants to increase capital gains taxes. She wants to raise tax rates. By the way, she says we’re not going to raise rates on anyone making less than $400,000, which that’s a lot of money. But I’m sorry, if you live in New York City and marry a couple and 400,000, okay, you’re not on the street, but it’s not quite as much as it sounds. Rest of the country. Well, by the way, what I said is in certain pockets of the country, I’m not saying it’s not a lot of money.
I’m saying it’s not as much as you might think if you live in one of these very expensive east or west coast cities. But here’s the thing. They’re taking a married couple who make 200,000 each and then combine them and then that’s 400,000. They’re going to get whacked. Those individuals say, hey, I make $200,000. Yeah, but if you file a joint return and they’re combining them, so when they say they’re not raising taxes on anyone making less than 400, it’s actually less than 200 if you happen to be married and filing a joint return. So that’s a much lower threshold than they’ve admitted.
But just take what, and then we’re going to pursue price gouging. I guess the supermarkets work on a 1% margin. Okay, let’s go after Walmart and other Whole Foods and other trader Joe’s and other departments, grocery store chains, and let’s whack the heck out of them. You know what you get when you put on price controls? Because we know, because we’ve seen this for 100 years. You get shortages, you get empty shelves right away, you get lines and you get a black market. People are like, okay, well, I can’t sell at a fair price in a normal venue, so find me on eBay or find me at a flea market, find me somewhere.
But I’m going to, to basically work outside the system. So if you actually want certain things, you’ll have to go to a black market. Or if you go to the store, the shelves will be partly empty because nobody wants to sell stuff at a loss. Nobody wants to lose money. So it’s kind of like East Germany in the 1950s. People get up at six in the morning and line up and hope to get a loaf of bread by 05:00 at night. And so they spend their day in line trying to get one loaf of bread. Thats an extreme example, but its not an uncommon example.
It is what happens when you start putting on price controls. Nixon put on price controls in 1971, but look where we were by the late then. That led right into a very bad recession in 1974, the worst since World War two, sorry, since the Great Depression at the time. And then look where we ended up in the late seventies, where the dollar lost 50% of its value in five years. So thanks, Kamala, but if I were stock market investor, I’d sell ahead of her election or ahead of her administration. Because why not? If you can get 20% capital gains instead of 25%, if you can get, again, 22% corporate taxes instead of 28%, I think that’s the level.
She wants to go, that’s very bad for stocks. Very bad for corporate earnings. Lower corporate earnings are bad for stocks. So you’re going to see the stock market turn on a dime and say, hey, I’m getting out of here before she becomes president. So you could be looking at shortages of goods, black markets, higher taxes and lower stock prices. That’s the Kamala plan. She doesn’t say that. She says, we’re going to raise all these taxes. Well, I spent the first ten years of my career as international tax counsel, the Citibank. I have a graduate law degree in taxation.
I know a little bit about it. And I can tell you what’s going to happen, which is stock prices are going to go down. So, yeah, I’d be very concerned about that. And I think the market will figure that out. Maybe they are already. Let’s look at, by the way, today, to the extent that she got a bump from the debate, and I think she did, at least in the minds of observers, you’re going to see stock prices go down now because, hey, she’s going to ask the same, investors are going to ask the same question you asked Matt, which is whether she wins.
The answer is its terrible for stocks. Yeah. And that all fits with your meltdown thesis. I mean, we could see a major market move. I mean, we’re seeing it just from inclinations that she has a little bit more chance of winning if she actually wins. I think we could see a major market move downward. And on your other point, on the meltdown, that’s not far fetched. That’s happening. So now, different question. Trump wins. Trump wins on November 5, when they count the votes, even though they’re voting now, gets whatever, 260 or maybe as high as 300 electoral votes.
You have to go to January 6, 2025. Everyone’s talking about 620. 20, go ahead to January 6, 2025. Same scenario. You’re in Capitol Hill. The House and the Senate can mean they got to count the electoral votes. Now, on November 5, Russell is going to vote for members of Congress, for the House of Representatives. So whoever counts the votes on January 6, 2025, is not the existing House, it’s the new House. Whoever wins on November 5, they get sworn in on January 3, and then on January 6, they count the votes. Now, there’s a good chance, it’s hard to put a stake on the ground.
There are 435 seats, but there’s a good chance that the Democrats could take the House. Even if Trump wins the White House House and the Republicans take over the Senate, which I do expect the Democrats could take the House. So you get to January 6. That’s the new democratic controlled House. They’re going to introduce a resolution saying that Trump is an insurrectionist because of January 6, 2020. They’ve already written it. Jimmy Raskin, the democratic congressman from Maryland, de facto communists, he’s already written. He’s already talked about this. This isn’t like, I didn’t break into a safe and steal this.
This is kind of out. And I. So what happens then? If the House adopts that resolution and if they’re democratic controlled, they will, then Trump’s electoral votes are disqualified. He got them. He won, let’s say 300. They need to get 270. But he’ll be disqualified under the section three of the 14th Amendment. By the way, people say. Didn’t the Supreme Court say that that doesn’t apply? No, the Supreme Court said a state cannot do it. Colorado and Maine were trying to kick Trump off the ballot as an insurrectionist. The Supreme Court said, no, you can’t do that.
States don’t have that power. But they also. And I read the opinion, but they also said. But the Congress could. Because section three of the 14th Amendment, I think you have to go down to section four, says, by the way, the Congress can write laws to implement section three. The resolution would be in that category. So now you throw out Trump’s electoral votes. What happens then? Well, Kamala Harris doesn’t have 270 in this scenario, because Trump got more than 270. So the most she could have is 200, 2230, whatever. She doesn’t win because she doesn’t have 270.
Trump doesn’t win because he was disqualified. So what happens next? The answer, this is all the 12th Amendment, by the way, which was passed in 1804. The 12th Amendment says that election goes to the House of Representatives. And the House of Representatives does not vote by individual. They vote by state delegations. So Texas gets one vote, California gets one vote, New Jersey gets one vote. It doesn’t matter how many members you have in the delegation or what the population of your state is, each state gets one vote. You could have the case, probably will be the case where the Democrats control the majority of the individual votes, but the Republicans control majority of the state delegations.
But you can’t vote for Trump because he’s disqualified under the insurrection clause. You can’t vote for anybody who didn’t win a state because the constitution says, take the next three electoral vote getters, and you can choose among those three. Well, in what I’m describing, there’s only one because assuming no one else wins a state. RFK junior, Jill Stein, Cornel west, none of them are going to win a state. So if you disqualify Trump and you say, well, who’s left? The answer is Kavana Harris. She’s the only one that they can vote for regardless of who you are.
So she becomes the president in that scenario. But JD Vance, who is not disqualified, becomes the vice president. So one outcome is you could have a situation where Kamala Harris is the president, JD Vance is the vice president. And that has happened before 1800. Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, they hated each other. Two different parties, but one was president, one was vice president. So you could have a Harris, JD Vance administration. Now, I’m going to take it one step further, Matt, because I read that, I am a lawyer, I did take constitutional law. I’m a good professor, and I read the 12th Amendment carefully.
Everything I just described only applies if there’s a quorum. So now let’s take it a step further. The republican state delegations in the United States House of Representatives pitch a tent and leave that, leave the House floor, and they don’t have a quorum. What happens now? The 12th amendment says the vice president becomes the acting president until you guys figure it out. So JD Vance could be president. Well, to say that, there’s plenty of things to keep an eye on. Yeah, we’ve got, I mean, just in between now and the election, you said it. We’ve got Ukraine, we’ve got the economy.
We’re going to keep an eye on that. Then we’ve got the election itself, which could take a few days to count the votes and all these different things, plus your meltdown theory where if they disqualify Trump, we could see some big time sparks fly. I’ll give you one more quickly, which is, all right, do it. If Trump wins on November 5, the meltdown scenario is January 6. But what happens on November 6, the day after the election, you’re going to see riots from coast to coast. The antifa, BLM, goon squads are already mobilizing. Yeah, absolutely. Because if you get this wave, at least in the base on the Democrat side thinking, oh, she won the debate and they’re super happy, and then they don’t win and Trump wins on the land side, there will be some anger across the country there.
All right, Jim, well, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule right after the debate here, just so we can get your take on it. We appreciate everything you’re doing at strategic intelligence. If anybody has anything or wants to learn more about strategic intelligence, you can look at the comments below and give us a subscribe. Give us a like and we’ll see you next time. Jim. We’ll keep you posted. If we can get you back on. If there’s anything big happening in between now and November 5, we’ll want you back on soon. So thanks a lot and we appreciate it.
Thanks.
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