TRUMP: HIS OWN WORST ENEMY AGAIN
Summary
Transcript
Hello, everybody. This is Gerald Salenti, and it’s Wednesday, September 20, 2023. And once again, on every Wednesday, we have with us a man of men, someone that knows the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So those are things that they used to have in America that are gone now. Judge Andrew Napolitano and as I say, put anybody up against him to talk about realities and the facts about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.
And let’s hear it, because nobody knows them better than he does. And as he also makes clear week after week, we’ve lost those rights. And, Judge, thanks for being on. And you have an article that’s coming out tomorrow, and it’s about former President Trump, and the headline is His Own Worst Enemy Again. And you write that on Meet the Press. Last week, former President Donald Trump made a compelling case highlighting the differences between his years in office and President Joe Biden’s.
He also substantially and irretrievably undercut his principal defense in the four criminal cases in which he is a defendant. So Trump I wrote this with hesitation and with no glee, because of this relationship I’ve had with him. We’ve been friends for almost 40 years. He interviewed me twice for the Supreme Court of the United States. He consulted with me many times, including after January 6 and right before his term in office was over.
Many times while he was President of the United States, but after the fourth indictment came down. So the first one is bookkeeping in New York City. The second one is espionage in Florida. That’s the mar a lago documents. The third one is conspiracy to prevent the transfer of power in DC. That’s January 6. And the fourth one is conspiracy to undo an election. That’s Georgia. He dispatched that very articulate, very well respected, very telegenic lawyer, John Lowrow to go on national television to say, look, this is not bank robbery.
Everybody knows what’s right and what’s wrong. These are complex areas of human behavior that the government has regulated. He sought the advice of counsel, and he relied on counsel. And that is a defense, while relying on counsel is a defense when the government has to prove that you knew what you were doing was wrong. If your lawyers told you it was okay, that negates the government’s proofs. Except that last Sunday on Meet the Press, the interview was actually taped a few days earlier.
He said, I rejected the advice my lawyers gave me. I didn’t respect them. I didn’t follow what they told me to do. He’s undercut his only defense, which is that I didn’t understand the law and I was relying on the advice of counsel. So now his lawyers, his present lawyers, not the ones in the White House in December of 2020 and January 2021, who he just denounced, his present lawyers have egg on their face because they’ve been all over the press saying he relied on people representing him at the time.
We then find out that he didn’t even pay the legal bills to those lawyers representing him at the time. I wrote this to explain a complex area of the law so that people can understand it the defense of advice, of counsel. But when you publicly denounce your lawyers, you don’t have that defense. And when that’s your only defense, you’re in hot water. And when you do this on your own, without consulting your present lawyers, you’re making life miserable for everybody around you.
That’s why I call him with deference and respect, because we’re friends. His own worst enemy again, really? Why did he go on Meet the Prostitutes to begin with? Because he somehow believes I mentioned this at the end of the article, that his popularity in the public will help him in the courtroom. It won’t. These are two different battles. He’s winning the popularity battle. He’s up at 50%. Chris Christie and the others are down in single digits.
Every time DeSantis talks, his numbers go down. He’s got a lock on the Republican Party, which is his battle right now. He doesn’t need to wage this PR war, which should be waged in the courtroom. You’re right. Is it’s unbelievable what he said? He said that last week on Meet the Press, trump revealed that his legal team in the White House told him that he lost the election and there was insufficient evidence to challenge or overturn it.
Then he said that he opted to ignore their advice, quote, because I didn’t respect them. It was my decision to do what I did, not theirs. And then he said, and this is ridiculous, Gerald, but this is vintage Trump. They’re rhinos anyway. Rhinos? Republicans in name only. Again confusing the political sphere with the courtroom sphere. The personal politics of the lawyer has nothing to do with the legal obligation that the lawyer has to defend the client.
I don’t even know who he was talking about. Giuliani may be in that crowd. Who’s his co defendant in the criminal case? I don’t know. According to Giuliani, Trump owes him 6 million. And according to Giuliani’s lawyers, giuliani owes his own lawyers a million and a half. So what do you think is going to happen here? I think he won’t have the advice of Council Defense. And I think he’s naked before his enemies.
I think the Feds are just rejoicing silently because they’re not supposed to boast about this. They’re rejoicing at his indiscretions. And his legal team is scrambling prediction he will fire this legal team and hire another legal team in an effort to delay the trials. But the courts won’t allow that change in lawyers to delay the trials. He’s also confronting a potential gag order in the DC case, and she’s very close to imposing that gag order on him.
You also write, My interest in the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is the hope that whomever is elected president will be faithful to the Constitution and respectful of the national rights of all persons. Sadly, no president in my lifetime has met those standards. None. None. They don’t recognize the chains of the constitution to restrain them and they think they can take away life, liberty and property without due process, even to conservatives.
My friends, our friends. Even the sainted Ronald Reagan was in that category. Ronald Reagan unleashed the intelligence community to begin its massive, unbridled, warrantless, suspicionless spying on all of us. I don’t know if he did it wittingly or unwittingly, but he did it. So what you just said about that, no President in our lifetime has really obeyed the constitution or the Bill of Rights. You ready for this now? I didn’t know you were going to write this and you didn’t know what we were going to put in the trends journal this week.
Okay. There’s an article in the Trends journal this week. Most Americans have no clue about the constitution or their rights. There were polls just came out, they don’t know anything about nothing. Nothing. The majority don’t have a clue of even the first amendment. Wow. Well they know who Taylor Swift is. Oh and don’t forget Beyonce. And again, you can’t make this up because again, this is another article we have in there.
Ganette news has the big news that they’re quote hiring journalists to cover Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Journalists. They call it journalists. This is how stupid the news has become. This is how desperate Ganette is to sell newspapers. I guess. Yeah. And against the whole decline like you said, whether it’s having these clowns that play president, robbing us of our rights or what they call journalism is dead. And it’s nothing more than I call them prostitutes, media whores that get paid to put out by their corporate pimps and government whore masters.
And I don’t have to tell mean you were on the other know, you were with Fox a lot of years and you know the control that they try to put on people to say what they want to say and not to say what they want to say. Right. And so now let’s look at what the media is doing with the Ukraine war. Well, the media has been beating the drumbeats of war since before the war started.
The media has been of the view that the war was unprovoked. Yet last week, Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, acknowledged that Russia was aggravated by NATO’s expansion. And who did he blame? This is the Secretary General of NATO. Who did he blame? NATO’s expansion on the United States for pushing, pushing, pushing more countries to join NATO. I’ve detected a little bit of impatience in the press lately with the western support of the war.
Just a little hint and it makes me wonder if the press is saying it, that means the government wants to hear it. Old Joe might be looking for an off ramp. I wouldn’t be surprised if in his personal meetings with Zelensky at the United Nations this week, he you can’t help you much longer. I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s going to go. Is he going to run for reelection? And if he does, he wants to be a wartime president.
Is he going to announce in December that his health issues prevent him from running for reelection? He’s asking for another 28 billion. Kevin McCarthy and Chuck Schumer are like this, hand in hand in favor of that 90% of the Congress is in favor of another 28 billion. It just seems to be getting worse and worse. Gerald, even though I’m detecting a little bit of Western impatience with the absence of Ukraine movement on the battlefield.
You mentioned that arrogant guy, Jen Stoltenberg. And if you go back to listening to what he said to NATO head, another arrogant guy that’s been sucking off the public tit his whole life, and you go back and he kept saying, we’re going to support Ukraine. We’re going to keep supporting Ukraine. We’re going to do everything we can to get them to win. So you mentioned what he just said about the United States and NATO.
Again, another article in this week’s Trends Journal, NATO Chief acknowledges that alliances expansion led to Russian invasion. So Ukraine’s people have no idea that the deal made between Gorbachev and Bush SR. It’s right there in writing that NATO would not move one inch further. Right. And there were 16 NATO countries back then. Now there are 31. And they want Ukraine to be number 32. Yes. And you ready? Stoltenberg another article in this week’s Trends Journal, get ready for a long war in Ukraine.
Yes. So he spews out of one side of his mouth and then the other one he’s saying, we’re going to keep this thing going for as long as we can. Well, they can’t. I mean the west has run out of artillery and Putin is not. So it’s just a matter of time. That’s why we’re giving him those weapons that are illegal in about 95% of the planet, the cluster bombs.
So I don’t even know there you only you could say it that way. I don’t even know if Stiltenberg knows what he’s talking about. He is right that Western expansion provoked NATO. Would we want Russian missiles along a 2000 miles border of the United States? Let’s say along northern Mexico, not New Mexico, but the northern part of the country of Mexico? Would we want Russian missiles there because that’s what NATO is doing to Russia? Do you blame Russia for not wanting that? Do you blame Russia for not wanting it closer and closer to Moscow? Do you blame Russia for wanting to stop Ukraine? For bombing Russian speaking peoples in eastern Ukraine, bombing its own people because they speak and are culturally Russian.
That’s what’s going on there. And you don’t hear that in the New York Times. Sadly, you don’t see it on Fox News either. No. And again, we wrote about this in the Trends Journal back in 2014, article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan about the United States overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine overthrowing Viktor Yanukovych, Victoria Newland, and John McCain handing out cookies and stuff in Maiden Square, on and on and on.
People have no clue about any of this, and it’s only going believe, you know, a couple of things that you said that I want to comment on about Biden. I don’t think he’s going to run. Well, I agree with you. I think there’s going to be a moment like when you and I remember this, when Barry Goldwater and Howard Baker went to the White House in August of 1974 and said to President Nixon, we’re confronting a constitutional crisis.
The impeachment is a tidal wave. You won’t be able to govern much longer. And Nixon, whatever you think of him, said, you’re right. For the good of the country, I’ll resign. Leading Democrats are going to have to go to Joe not to ask him to resign, but to ask him to withdraw from the Democratic race because his presidency is indefensible from the Democrat perspective. Well, it’s not only that.
You look at the polls and again, detail in your Trends Journal, his popularity rating is way down and most people saying he’s too old to run. Yes, and the only reason why, when you’re looking at the polls that Biden’s trump could beat Biden, or it’s a 50 50 deal, but when you look at the other polls that people don’t want either of them. Right. But if you look at the two of them together, I mean, Trump is filled with energy and vim and vigor and could talk for an hour and a half.
Old Joe, he can’t go for more than two or three sentences without having looking for some sort of guidance on a teleprompter or the words in front of him. That is very obvious. A school child would looking at the two of them, would notice that. So who do you think that they’ll put in to run if he doesn’t? Hillary. I’m only kidding. They’re not that crazy. I don’t know.
Everybody, my Democratic friends tell me Gavin Newsom, but California is such a mess. His stewardship of California is utterly oh, what an arrogant guy. He correct. Correct. Same with Phil Murphy in New Jersey. I’ll tell you who’s thinking about it is your former governor Andrew Cuomo. He’ll go nowhere. And they also talk about Mrs. Obama, but apparently she couldn’t stand eight years in the White House and doesn’t want another four, even if that were to be feasible.
So I don’t know what the Democrats are going to do, but it can’t be somebody from the Biden administration. It’s got to be someone from the Democratic perspective who is not saddled or burdened with having to defend Joe Biden’s presidency because it’s utterly indefensible. So then could RFK Jr. Become the person whether they want him or not? RFK Jr. In my view, is the candidate most faithful to the Constitution and would stand a great chance of shaking up the country the way it needs to be shaken up.
Two people arrested last night at a rally which he was speaking in California with. Yep. One with a fake US marshals badge. And the government doesn’t want to give him any protection because he’s not a viable candidate. Can you imagine that? Yeah. I asked Chris Christie if he and the other Republican candidates have protection, and he said no, that DeSantis may bring Florida state troopers with him, but the rest of them who are not office holders now, do not have any.
You know, it’s a very sad future in front of us. And again, when you look at the polls, as we mentioned, the people have no idea of their rights. The constitution, the Bill of Rights. And unless we have someone like a Kennedy, as you said, that could honor what the Founding Fathers fought for and brought us, it’s just going to continue to get worse. Well, Bobby understands the Bill of Rights.
I know that. And you know that from our personal communications with him. I don’t agree with him on everything. No. But he would be the most faithful to human liberty of any president in the White House, probably since Thomas Jefferson, if he’s elected. Well, it’s up to either people to make it happen. Judge, thank you for coming on. Thank you for all that you do. And everybody check out the Judge’s channel over here.
The people that he puts up there day after day, week after week, they’re phenomenal. Judge our dinner companion today. Gerald Scott Ritter, 330 Eastern. Wow. Yeah. Boy, there’s a man of men. He does everything he can in the fight for freedom and is fearless. Fearless. Judge, thanks for being on. We’ll see you next week. Thank you, Gerald. All the best. .
