Larry Schweikert

You couldn't just put a bag of blazed potato chips on a shelf someplace.

So I began to see Trump as a transitional figure away from the classical Republican Party of a strong foreign policy, a very interventionist foreign policy, and one, a Republican Party that didn't pay any attention at all to the lower middle class or the blue collar, truly middle middle class, that they were really more of an upper middle class party.

And I saw Trump hitting all of these buttons.

And I said, well, you know, if the thesis doesn't fit the evidence, you better change your thesis.

And so I started to see Trump's value, which Lenin would never do, by the way.

I started to see Trump's value, and I began to predict well before the election that he not only would win, but he would win fairly easily.

Yeah, I lost some friends, or there's a number of people I can't discuss politics with on the right.

A number of people, especially a lot of those at NRO that I used to correspond with,

to me just simply went nuts.

They went crazy.

You know, I had the privilege of introducing William F. Buckley at a speech in Santa Barbara.

and me and the female president of the Young Republicans there.

And Buckley came on stage and he said, well, Mr. Zweigart proves that the term young intellectual conservative is not an oxymoron.

And people, of course, are flipping through their dictionaries to figure out what he meant.

But yeah, there were a number of people who I thought

Surely they would just look at the evidence.

And it wasn't whether or not you agreed with Trump's policies, which I did, but I was trying to convince them, look, all you have to do is look at the polling, look at the voter registration, and you'll see he's going to be the candidate.

I said this over and over in 2015 and 2016.

even when Trump took the lead there, I think it was in June or so, and never gave it up except for one, two or three week period to Ben Carson in October, he never lost the lead in the entire Republican primary the rest of that time.

And it was usually a very big lead.