Trump is in... now he governs (01-20-2025--Hour3)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] Joe Biden is out, Donald Trump is in, and changes are already afoot. An hour ago, the government shut down the app that the Biden administration was using to grant mass asylum status, asylee status, to everybody that used the app, CPB1, it was called. They shut that down at one o'clock.

[00:00:58] Also, I'm seeing a video here from KFOX14 News. The port of entry in downtown El Paso, temporarily closed Monday morning, moments before Trump's swearing-in ceremony. Trump announced, I mean, and they've got, they got, like, they're all fully kitted up, they got the riot shields and stuff, and they just, like, blocked off the whole entrance.

[00:01:25] Trump announced in his inaugural speech, he's declaring a national emergency at the border, reinstating the remain in Mexico policy, and ending catch and release. Matthew Contenetti over at the Washington Free Beacon.

[00:01:45] He wrote a couple days ago, under a piece called Apex Trump, which I think is a reference to, like, Apex Predator, like, top of the food chain kind of thing. Trump has spent nearly a decade in presidential politics now, remade the Republican Party in his own image.

[00:02:05] He won the GOP nomination three times, defeated the Bushes, the Clintons, Kamala Harris, and by extension, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. I did write, I wrote down when I was watching the inaugural ceremony, that Trump was celebrating among a decade's murderer's row of foes. That's what I wrote down.

[00:02:31] But you see him up there, and he is surrounded by these political opponents that he has just laid waste to for over a decade. And it all began, do you remember where it all began? I know he made comments on, like, the Oprah Winfrey show back in the 90s or something. I'm not talking about that. I mean, he may have thought about running for office at some point.

[00:03:01] But where did it all really begin for his run in 2016? Do you remember? The Washington, or sorry, the White House Correspondents Association dinner. Or as the journalists like to call it, nerd prom. That's what they call it. Nerd prom. It's like, first off, y'all ain't nerds. Okay? Nerds are smart. So you don't qualify.

[00:03:31] Barack Obama got up in front of the press corps. And Donald Trump, private citizen, right? Although he had been, you know, doing some public stuff about, you know, Obama's birth certificate and all of that. Which, you'll recall, the whole Barack Obama birth certificate thing started by the Hillary Clinton camp. One of her supporters started that whole thing during the primary in 2008.

[00:03:59] 2008, right? And the Obama administration and his campaign and he himself could have killed that story immediately. When it first started gaining traction, they could have killed the story immediately. But they did not. Because they knew that when people would promote it and keep promoting it, you would essentially decredentialize people.

[00:04:30] People who repeated the birther stuff. And look, I remember being at this very table, sitting in this very spot, speaking into this microphone in the 2008 election cycle. And we were talking about the facts and the evidence about the birther issue. And had Obama come out, as he did later, and just produced the birth certificate, it would have been over. But he wanted it.

[00:05:00] This was part of a strategy that they employed, which we covered here also at the time, the stray voltage strategy. Which is, real quick, at any given moment, this is what his own campaign people said. After the fact, they're strategists. They said this is what they would do. And this persisted through his administration. Which is, at any given moment, there's a bunch of political energy that's just in the atmosphere. And much like static electricity will hop, you know, when you go touch a doorknob or something.

[00:05:30] And it surprises you. Right? That then prompts problems. Because you can now make a mistake in the way you respond to it or something. So, if you can direct the stray voltage someplace. Right? Then you get people talking about that. But you know it's coming. So you already have something for it. So you allow this story to fester. And then you can dismiss everybody as conspiracy theorists and all this.

[00:05:56] And you never directly address any of the issue, any of the claims, any of the evidence. And then eventually, when you do, you then delegitimize everybody that said anything about it. Anyway, Donald Trump was into the birther, not movement, but the issue. Right? He, remember, he was, I think he did. He may have actually, I don't remember if he did or not. But he at least said, maybe even did, hire investigators to go look into it and all of that.

[00:06:27] And so Obama gets up in front of the White House Correspondents Association dinner. And it's a roast. And people make fun of each other and tell jokes. And you're supposed to be funny and all of that. And Obama just starts savaging Donald Trump. And if you ever go back, you really should go back and watch it. Because you can see the point at which Donald Trump realizes that these people are laughing at him. They're mocking him.

[00:06:56] Like, at first, it's like, okay, you know, it's a joke or whatever. And despite what people may think, I believe Donald Trump does actually have a pretty good sense of humor. He just is, he has a very dry delivery. And the way he comports himself, he's not slapstick, you know. So anyway, he is a funny guy. He has a sense of humor. But Obama just starts going after him.

[00:07:24] And when the whole room is laughing and laughing and laughing and mocking and ridiculing, it's like you could see the moment when Trump is like, okay. And that's what prompted him to run. And ever since then, right? Now, granted, the first round was a little rough. All right? He didn't really know politics very well. But now he does. Now he does.

[00:07:51] And as he has done in business, as he has done in marketing and his branding campaigns and his products and all that stuff, with some obvious exceptions, like the failed casino. But in many other cases, he is very, very astute. Very astute at this kind of stuff.

[00:08:14] And as Continetti writes, he clawed his way out of the political wilderness after 2020 by capitalizing on flawed opposition, the personal and policy failures of Biden and Harris, and prosecutorial lawfare. By the way, have you seen his official presidential portrait? Not the painting, the photo. Have you seen that thing? Like, it is the image of his mugshot. He's like taking it back, I think Megyn Kelly said.

[00:08:44] I think it's what she called it. He's reclaiming that photo for himself. That image. And the lighting on it, it's like it's uplit to give this like, like this menacing, like you would, like this menacing look like you would if you're sitting around the campfire telling ghost stories with the flashlight under your face, you know, make you look scarier.

[00:09:10] In 2024, he wins the popular vote, brought Republicans an electoral trifecta and assumed the powers of the presidency in all but name. Trump forms his administration at warp speed. Wall Street swoons. The world holds its breath. His tariff talk inspired Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum to float a plan to reduce Chinese imports.

[00:09:33] His desire for U.S. territorial expansion as a means of gaining leverage over China has excited this columnist and rattled Canada, Panama and Denmark. His threat to unleash hell in the Middle East if Hamas doesn't release hostages prior to Inauguration Day produced the first ceasefire deal in Gaza in over a year. Oh, and by the way, the the leaders of Hamas say that they intend to do more.

[00:10:03] October 7th now take more hostages. Not only have Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos made peace with the president elect. Much of corporate America has interpreted Trump's reelection as the beginning of an American glass nose from the old Soviet Union openness. You know, tech censorship, DEI, climate hysteria, the a historical mentality behind The New York Times is 1619 project. They are all weakened. Legacy media is hobbled.

[00:10:32] The Democrats are dazed. In fact, the former now former White House Press Secretary, Corrine Jean-Pierre, was asked last week who's going to lead the Democrat Party after Biden. And she didn't have an answer. She had no clue. And like, to be fair. I mean, it is it is Corrine Jean-Pierre. And like that is usually the case.

[00:10:57] But this time it was it was justified because Democrats are kind of rudderless, he says. The opposition, he says, behaves as if the world began on November 5th. The election during the campaign, Biden, Harris and Obama said Trump was a fascist who would end democracy. But now Biden is cordial. Their teams collaborated on Gaza. Harris presided over the certification of the Electoral College.

[00:11:25] Obama and Trump chatted amiably at Jimmy Carter's funeral. The Democrat surrender is widespread. Senator John Fetterman visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Oh, I bet I know what he wore. Forty eight House Democrats joined the Republicans to pass a bill making it easier to detain illegal immigrant felons. Thirty one Senate Democrats joined with Republicans to advance a similar piece of legislation. AOC even dropped her pronouns from her Twitter bio.

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[00:13:08] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Let's go over and talk to Gigi. Hey, Gigi, how are you? Hey, Pete, how are you? Hey, I'm good. Very quickly, two things. I saw a video, someone had posted a video on Twitter of Fetterman running into the Capitol in board shorts and a hoodie, and a hoodie, and I tweeted, please tell me he's going to be wearing a suit. And lo and behold, he went into the inauguration in his hoodie and his board shorts.

[00:13:38] Yeah, not a surprise. Well, and I tweeted, Senator Thune, I think it's time, you know, someone needs to read him the riot act because that's kind of beyond the pale. I don't think he should be in Congress anyway, but that's just so insulting. It's so disrespectful. The other thing, I tried to call before, Pete, when you were talking about the pardons, and I screwed up the timing and everything.

[00:14:03] Very quickly, do you know if giving the pardons at the end of the administration is tradition or is legally stipulated? No. Or... No, it's tradition. They do it at the end so they can't suffer any of the political ramifications for their decisions. Right. So now that Biden set the precedent, I think I would love to see President Trump give everybody in the cabinet,

[00:14:30] once they're confirmed, give everybody in the cabinet a preemptive part. And then cash can go after everybody, and Hegseth can go after everybody, and Pam Bondi can go after everybody. I just, I think that would be a riot. He should take the... I know what I'm going to say. He could take the document. He could take the official document where it lists the names, and he should just cross out the Biden names and just write in all of his cabinet members right next to them, and he, okay, well, I'm going to do this, too.

[00:14:59] So if Joe did it, I'm going to do it, too. Right, and then when they start to scream it's an oligarchy, yeah, you guys showed us the way, and now we're going to do it. Yeah, see, here's the problem. And I get the humor in which the comment is intended, although there's probably an element of truth there. But when we become monsters to fight monsters, the world just has more monsters, you know?

[00:15:25] And this is one of my beefs with a lot of people that are like the most fervent Trump supporters is that there is an abandonment of principle in order to get revenge. And what I keep warning against is that, just like with Joe Biden, that once you set these precedents, these slippery slopes become evident, and you're not going to be able to get people off the path. People are going to go, and the next one's going to be worse, and the next one's going to be worse,

[00:15:55] and the next one's going to be worse. I understand. And, you know, Pete, that's the same argument that a lot of people make about Israel going after terrorists and trying to negotiate with them, trying to come to a solution with them that would improve the lives of their, you know, supposedly the people they care about, but we know what that is. They don't. I mean, it doesn't work. And so, truthfully, once all of the hostages are home and the bodies are returned,

[00:16:24] I would like to see Israel decimate them. Well, and that's the same thing. Right. You know, I understand, and I understand that view as well. And in war, like, the objective is to win, is that they surrender. And the way you get them to do that is to, you know, either kill more of their people than they kill of yours, right, or to get the leadership ousted somehow. And then, you know, the people say, we don't want to keep fighting this, and they oust their own leaders or whatever. But that's it. One side wins, one side loses.

[00:16:53] You know, ceasefires don't last, especially over there. So I understand that argument as well. I just don't know if people have the self-restraint to then say, okay, good, we have banished these people from power. We have won at some point in the future. Like, we have won. And so now we'll go back to the way things were. I don't think that people will—I don't think they have that kind of self-restraint. I appreciate the call, Gigi.

[00:17:23] Good to hear from you. All right. I hope you had a happy holiday season. But tell me if something like this happened at your house. Your family and friends are gathered around. Maybe y'all are in the living room. You're laughing, swapping stories, reminiscing. And then somebody says, hey, Dad, remember those old VHS tapes? Did you ever get them transferred? And then the room gets all quiet. All eyes are on Dad who says, oh, you know, well, I've been meaning to, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

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[00:18:18] Talk about a memorable gift. So do what I did. Trust the experts at Create A Video, conveniently located in Mint Hill right off I-485, and online at createavideo.com. Got a message from Eric on the Twitter machine at Pete Callender. It's a Pete tweet. Eric says, Trump should directly cite the pardoning of the entire corrupt January 6th committee when he pardons everyone involved. All right. All the J6ers.

[00:18:47] Trump War Room account tweeted out that Trump takes his first official actions, cabinet and sub-cabinet appointments, acting designations and appointments, commission chair and acting chair appointments, and a proclamation ordering flags to be flown at full mast on all inauguration days. Because, yeah, this year it was just because of the coincidental timing of Carter's death.

[00:19:14] Flags ordered at half-staff for, you know, 30 days. And then it would have, like, given this image of, like, here's Donald Trump and the flags are at half-staff. And you can imagine what the left would have done with that iconography. So from now on, flags at full-staff. And I'm fine with that. So Matthew Continetti says,

[00:19:59] Which I endorse, by the way. As one who is fluent in sarcasm. He seems to have a sense of purpose, and he trusts his lieutenants. He often displays the Buddha-like half-smirk, half-smile he had throughout the RNC, the convention, in July. So here's the problem, though, that he's going to be faced, right? Several, actually. But one is, when you look back over history,

[00:20:27] second terms are usually not great for incumbents, okay? They tend to be consumed by either scandal or hubris, or both. Reagan had Iran-Contra. Clinton, Monica Lewinsky. Bush, overreaching on the Social Security and immigration. And then he got bogged down in Iraq. Obama made the nuclear deal with Iran. He went left on immigration, race, terrorism, same-sex marriage, transgender rights.

[00:20:54] Trump's challenge isn't winning power. It's wielding it. If Trump wants to succeed and enable his successor to carry on his legacy into the 2030s, he'll have to avoid the fate of his predecessors. And Continetti offers up some suggestions. Don't overreach. Use power wisely. Focus on numbers, like market indices,

[00:21:20] jobs, inflation, income, border crossings, crime rates. Throw America an unforgettable 250th birthday party in 2026. That's good. Like, that alone I am psyched about. Like, celebrate America, right? Have a great 250th birthday for the country. And I just don't think it would have been the same with Harris. I really don't. I think the party would be a party I would not want to attend.

[00:21:49] You know, help Los Angeles recover in time for the Olympics in 2028. Help Western North Carolina. These are the tests of a successful second term. And Donald Trump has four years to pass them. Now, Fox News Digital got an exclusive look at more than 200 executive actions that Trump is fixing to take.

[00:22:17] Border security, energy, reducing the cost of living, ending DEI programs in the government, ending catch and release, pausing all offshore wind leases, terminating the electric vehicle mandate, abolish the Green New Deal, withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, take several major steps to assert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy. A Trump official that talked to Fox News about this

[00:22:44] said Trump's going to sign multiple omnibus executive orders that each contain dozens of major executive actions. So this is what is probably going to dominate the news cycle for the next week, I would say, as people begin reading through the actions. And I'm sure lawsuits start getting filed. Declare a national border emergency.

[00:23:11] Direct the U.S. military to work with the Department of Homeland Security to fully secure the southern border. Establish a national priority to eliminate all criminal cartels operating on U.S. soil. Trump will also direct designations of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which the official said will unlock new authorities to achieve the Trump homeland security mission. Reinstitution of the Remain in Mexico policy. Direct the military to construct a new area of border wall.

[00:23:42] Trump is also going to, quote, fully unleash Alaskan energy, which this official described as essential to U.S. national security. Axios has an article on this. And it talks about, like, to create conditions that facilitate investment, job creation, yada, yada, yada. But they mention here the power to fuel AI requires energy-thirsty data centers.

[00:24:11] And this is what is refocusing attention around this issue. You need a lot of energy to run AI. It's super energy-intensive. So, one incoming energy advisor told Axios, we are in an AI race with China as well as other nations. Trump's team aims to ease construction of fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines.

[00:24:39] They're going to overturn a bunch of Biden-era policies, like the slowdown of oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of America, a.k.a. Gulf of Mexico. EPA greenhouse gas regulations on power plants, vehicles, and oil and gas infrastructure. That's going to get reversed. Overturn a pause on new LNG, liquid natural gas export licenses to major markets. Restrictions on oil, gas, and mineral projects in Alaska will be overturned.

[00:25:08] Back to the Fox News story. Trump will fully reform federal bureaucracy, or at least he's promising to, by reestablishing presidential control over the career federal workforce and make clear to federal workers that they can be removed from posts for failing to comply with executive directives. This is the, quote, deep state. These are the people, the bureaucrats that work through any administration. And if there's an administration in there that they don't like,

[00:25:38] they know all the ways to slow walk stuff, to throw sand in the gears, to prevent the executive that was elected by the people from fixing things and doing things by the throwing of the sand in the gears. Right? And he wants to strengthen presidential control over senior government officials and implement new merit-based hiring reviews

[00:26:05] and force federal workers to go back to work in person. What was the story we did a couple of months ago where they did some audit or something and they found out like two-thirds of all the federal employees weren't even on the job? They were all remote work. It's like, well, then why do we have all these buildings? Right? Are you even working from home? Also, he wants to sign an executive order to establish biological sex definitions.

[00:26:35] All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check.ground.news.com

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[00:27:32] Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. So what is Trump going to do? He's got to govern now. Clock is running. He promised a whole bunch of executive orders. They're calling it a shock and awe campaign that we have never seen before, which is a little bit of marketing there, but we'll see what they do. One of them is an executive order to establish biological sex definitions.

[00:28:03] It's called the Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government Executive Order, or as I call it, the DWGIERB TFFG. Or the... Yeah, I don't even know what that would be. The executive order establishes government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female. The free press...

[00:28:32] The website is thefp.com. They got the exclusive here on what the executive order will say. It says, All radical gender ideology guidance, communication policies, and forms are removed. Agencies will cease pretending that men and women... That men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination. Woman is defined as an adult human female. I don't know who needs to hear that,

[00:29:00] but apparently a very large chunk of the population still does. So that is what a woman is. It is an adult human female. The executive order directs that government identification, like passports and personnel records, reflect the biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity. It ends the practice of housing men in women's prisons and taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for prisoners.

[00:29:30] Or not just surgeries, just all transition for the male prisoners. The executive order ends the forced recitation of preferred pronouns. And this includes protection in the workplace and in federal-funded entities like schools. In reading the order, it's clear that lawsuits challenging the new directives will start stacking up quickly. The order, for example, asserts that, all radical gender ideology guidance, communication policies and forms are removed. End quote.

[00:29:59] This is far from mere symbolism. U.S. passports will revert to offering exclusively male and female options. Right? This was changed, by the way, under the norm-protecting Biden administration in 2022, where they let citizens choose X as their gender, which we all know it's not X, it's Twitter. But the proviso is stipulated that what people select must reflect biological reality

[00:30:28] and not self-assessed gender identity. So expect a lawsuit on that. But the policy, or the administration rather, says it is ready for the litigation. It's a fight the new administration seems to relish. Both officials that the free press talked to said the executive order has the potential to broaden the president's support. Because they say, look at the polling on this. This is just going to make us stronger.

[00:30:57] We have come so far from HB2. I'll tell you what. The executive order does not address one of the most contentious areas of transgender activism, though. Gender-affirming care, quote-unquote, for minors. Meaning, putting gender-distressed young people on a fast track to transition and a lifetime of medication. The Biden administration supported those treatments, ardently so. Even as other Western nations began to restrict them

[00:31:26] and dozens of U.S. states began to ban them. Asked about why the new executive order doesn't deal with this, the senior official said, quote, this executive order is the first of many. The order ends with a sweeping statement about the fundamental issue the White House believes is at stake in this order. It says, quote, men and women are equal but have obvious sexual differences. If federal policies promote such an obvious falsehood that men can become women,

[00:31:56] the government will forfeit all credibility. The government must maintain a commitment to recognizing biological reality to maintain the trust of the American people. There was an old line, I forget who said it, I think it was Solzhenitsyn talking about the Soviet Union. He said, you know, we know they're lying, talking about the government. We know they're lying. They know they're lying. They know that we know they're lying. And they know,

[00:32:25] we know that they know they are lying. Everybody is aware of this. They just want to make you say it. That's the point. Everybody knows it's a lie and everybody is going along with the lie knowing that the people, everybody is lying. That does not a high trust society make. What else? End all DEI programs across the federal government. Establishing the new DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.

[00:32:56] Hiring freeze. Gain control over foreign aid and NGO funding. That's non-government organizations. That's a huge problem. These NGOs that make millions in some cases billions of dollars. James O'Keefe just got another one of his sting operations with somebody out of the government. I forget. I think maybe the EPA who was talking about the billions of dollars that they have been just like pushing out the door in the final hours of the administration under Biden.

[00:33:25] And he talks about how, you know, we've pushed out like $50 billion to these NGOs. So it'd be good to be able to go there after I'm out of a job here. Like, that's the game. Sign a presidential memorandum directing all agencies and departments to remove all federal actions that increase costs for families and consumers. I'm not sure what kind of limiting principle there is on that, but I will say I am hopeful today, as Trump said, that the golden age of America begins right now. All right,

[00:33:54] that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone. Thank you.