Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome, everyone, to Truth in the Barrel Unfiltered this week. I have a special co-host, Rick Wilson. Rick is a longtime political strategist, former Republican, author, very distinguished career working in and around the political arena. Welcome, Rick. Are you coming to us from Florida?
I am coming to you from Florida today. We're about to get winter again here, where it plunges down into the 50s.
Into the 50s. Oh, my gosh. Do you even have a coat in Florida?
Oh, I have coats. I mean, I travel so much. I have to sort of be equipped for everything, unfortunately. Yeah.
Well, we have the big storm coming. We know that. Everybody's hunkering down, going to the grocery store and getting ready for it. Certainly here in Kentucky, we have all kinds of models that show us kind of smack dab in the middle of this thing.
Right. You're going to get ice and everything else. My daughter lives in Nashville, and she's like – She's like, we're going to get two inches of ice. I'm like, run. Come here. Run now.
People don't know how to drive.
No. God, no.
Well, thankfully, Rick, we did not go to World War III this week while our president was in Europe. I first want to start out here. I'm laughing, but I'm sort of crying at the same time. I first want to start out here with Europe. impressions of what happened at Davos. And Davos, by the way, for people listening, is the annual international economic forum in which many world leaders attend.
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Chapter 2: What were the highlights of President Trump's Davos speech?
I mean, I guess I kind of fall into that category. I came into politics after Reagan, but just at H.W. Bush in 88. So I have enough of a foot in that world to know that the disappointment – is extraordinary.
There are a lot of older Republican, you know, activists and officials and, and, you know, former cabinet members, former administration officials who are just like their heads are in their hands. They're, they're, they're just, they can't believe how horrifying this is. And equally, most of them are too chicken shit to say anything.
And I'm like the weird outlier where I can't shut my mouth about it. And I'll accept that role as their public conscience right now because, yes, the horrifying experience we had for the last three days of Trump, first in the cabinet meeting, then at Davos, and now in the aftermath of lying about all these supposed deals, his Republican –
members of Congress and the Senate act like they work for him, not for their states or their districts. And it is just so disappointing and so sad that they won't not only take up their constitutional responsibilities, but their patriotic responsibilities to do something about this guy.
The sort of national security Republicans who are out there, they know that we do not need Greenland for the defense of our country. I mean, this notion that, first of all, the leader of Greenland had to warn his people on Tuesday to prepare for a U.S. invasion. I mean, that should be just shameful to all of us. But this notion that this president says, oh, we need Greenland,
And only the United States can protect the Arctic. It's not true. We have the bases.
It's never been true. Yeah. I mean, the last time I was through that way was still Tula, not the prophetic. But, you know, we always had whatever access we wanted to Greenland. We always had whatever access we wanted to any other part of the Arctic because of our close alliance with Canada. Yeah. We always had access to the Arctic because we have Alaska. None of this –
None of this has ever been about Greenland in my opinion. It's always been about breaking NATO and trying to get into this new world order where Putin gets Europe and Xi gets Asia and Trump gets the Western Hemisphere. Africa is a jump ball, right? And I think this whole thing is just a big – It's a big head fake of Trump's longtime goal to break NATO.
He tried to do it in the first administration and got stopped. He tried to do it yesterday in Davos. And to their credit, the Europeans were like, nah, not this time, chief. Not going to play that game.
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Chapter 3: How did Reagan Republicans react to Trump's speech?
I mean, Donald Trump has said the United States doesn't need anything from Canada in terms of exports. I mean, okay, the majority of our crude oil that comes into the United States comes from Canada, but okay. Kentucky, my state, depends on world markets. We have, in Kentucky, we have the second largest dependency per capita on international trade.
And a lot of it has to do with our bourbon industry, our aerospace industry, our farming. But our state's largest market is, for exports was Canada. Kentucky exported $9 billion in goods in 2024, so two years ago. That's 20% of the goods that we export goes to Canada. And it's crazy. And it just hurts our state.
And then on top of it, there was a new study that came out just this past week that said that 96% of the burden of tariffs So who pays for tariffs? 96% are paid by Americans.
American consumers. American consumers. And look, in Kentucky, as you pointed out, you guys have a bunch of different industrial sectors and ag sectors and goods and services sectors that are being devastated. I mean, you've got – Jim Beam closing up.
You've got everybody else who's making liquor, which once upon a time, Canada and Asia were two giant markets, and they're being cut off for spite. Yeah. For spite. And, you know, this is another one of those things where you get back to looking at leadership, especially in the U.S. Senate. If the U.S. Senate had leaders in it that would stand up and say the Constitution –
does not allow the president to engage in these tariffs, which they don't. This emergency principle he's using is legally flawed and actually legally fake. And if they would stand up and say, I'm going to stand up for the people of my state, rather than letting Trump have his way with his little weird fantasy about these tariffs.
I mean, look, nobody was going to ever expect Mitch McConnell to do that. We were all hopeful, even myself included. Yeah, the fact of the matter is – this is a longer, older Republican thing, but Mitch McConnell hates Donald Trump with the fire of a million suns, but he's the one – who let Trump back into the House because he wouldn't let his caucus vote on impeaching Trump.
He wouldn't whip his caucus for it. He knew the right thing. He said it on the floor, and then he lied and said, oh, it's a political question, so I'm not going to – yeah, anyway. But you know how much – Your state has been hurt. He knows how much it's been hurt. And yet I don't hear elected officials out of Kentucky out there beating the drum every day saying this has to stop, Mr. President.
You're killing us.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of tariffs on U.S. trade?
Exemptions.
Thank you for businesses that he likes or that pay him money or that buy his Bitcoin. But the Supreme Court is set to rule on this. Any minute now. Yeah, so what, Rick, what do you think the Supreme Court will do here?
Yeah, you know, here's the thing. This is one of those black-letter constitutional law questions about the power of tariffs. Only Congress can raise and impose taxes, and only Congress can levy tariffs. That's it. It's not like a if the president kind of wants to have a vibe about raising tariffs.
The emergency declarations that he's been using to do this are facially deficient, as one lawyer put it to me. So on that hand, I think any Supreme Court was going to go, come on, we can't do it this way. This is against the black letter law of the Constitution. However, this Supreme Court has bent itself in pretzels for a decade now to accommodate Donald Trump.
So I – unfortunately, my gut tells me we're going to end up with some kind of Solomonic split-the-baby BS. where Trump, they'll say he's wrong, but that the emergency declarations in this particular case are right. That's where I'm going to guess they go, because they do not operate as an independent judiciary. They operate as a law firm for the president right now.
Yeah, the Supreme Court has been so disappointing. I mean, the fact that they gave him immunity or any president immunity is just – I always thought Citizens United was the worst Supreme Court case in modern history, but now the whole presidential immunity thing I think tops it.
I mean, if you go through at the end of the day – and look, Citizens United was a – Well, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance move ended up being a trap. They were right to want more transparency and accountability. The trap was once you got to the Supreme Court, you get Citizens United, which has F'd our politics top to bottom. And I live in that world. You live in that world.
We all understand how campaigns are run on money. They do not happen for free, unfortunately. They're not just mom and dad in the barn putting up hand-painted signs. The problem is, and you're right, Amy, Citizens United, United States versus Trump, Dred Scott and Korematsu were probably the four worst cases in American Supreme Court history.
There are a few more, but those decisions are decisions that either had to be unwound e.g. Korematsu and Dred Scott, or must soon be unwound, e.g. United States v. Trump and citizens. Both of those cases that have reshaped the landscape of America fundamentally, if you tell a president you can't commit a crime, you're innocent of anything, you can do whatever you want –
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Chapter 5: What is the current state of NATO's resilience?
They bought it in the primary. Yep. And let's be real. Billionaires, they've rallied behind Trump's – they've rallied behind his Republican Party. More than 80 percent of federal campaign spending is by the wealthiest 100 Americans in 2024. That's correct. That all went to Republicans. Yeah. Absolutely.
The old Republican trope of George Soros is – George Soros peaked spending money for the Democrats in 2004. It's been 20 years. Yeah. And yeah.
So money is the root of all evil. Well, and it's one of the reasons – and we should have you back on because I really want to talk to you about reform at some point. I'm somebody that believes in term limits. I know there are some – Push back to that. But we have to I think the system that we have right now is not working. And so, you know, we have to do some of those things.
We have to do things like getting rid of dark money. I know it's hard. I know we have the Supreme Court the way we do, but we've got to keep moving in that direction. We are we are spiraling this this Musk insertion into the 10 million dollars into into Kentucky Senate race. That's real money.
That's real money in Kentucky.
Oh.
I mean, as a Florida guy, that's like table stakes because it's so insane here. But, you know, we will have a race in Florida in my lifetime that costs a billion dollars, a statewide race, I promise you. Madness. Madness.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, well, I want to leave today. We had a great show. I want to leave today with a couple of shout outs. We had two inaugurations for governors this week, this past week. Governor Spanberger and Mikey Sherrill are sworn in. So cheers to them and to all the voters in Virginia and New Jersey. I know both of these women personally. They are public servants. They are good people.
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