On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles discusses how Trump unconventionally manages to accomplish what is impossible for traditional politicians. Video and partial transcript below:
President Trump, just while everyone was looking over here, while everyone is looking at all the tweets and all the “convfefe,” President Trump accomplished a significant portion, of a significant promise, of something that conservatives have been trying to do for [a] decade. We’re seeing this pattern, in 2017, President Trump failed to repeal Obamacare. You remember that … Republicans have been campaigning against Obamacare since 2009.
And they just had failed to do it, in 2010, they didn’t do it, in 2012, they didn’t do it, in 2014 they didn’t do it. 2016, Trump gets elected. He campaigns on it; 2017, they fail to defund Obamacare. That’s mostly because John McCain (R-AZ) changed his mind at the last minute, and [it] really messed us up over an important campaign promise for the American people.
But then what happened? Trump was upset about that; he still can’t even hear the name John McCain without shivers going up his spine. But in 2018 — the following year — President Trump passed a tax bill. [The] tax bill was good, it lowered rates, [it] saved people money at the time. And what people weren’t reporting at the time is that the tax bill repealed the individual mandate, which was the heart and soul of Obamacare… The central problem [with Obamacare] is that it forced you to purchase a product from a private company that you maybe don’t want to purchase, a lot of Americans didn’t want to purchase.
[The mandate was] totally crooked, totally unconstitutional, and that Trump Tax Bill got rid of the Obamacare mandate without anybody noticing because we were all paying attention to the taxes. We were all paying attention to the crazy tweets. We were all paying attention to the cofevve. Meanwhile, President Trump fulfilled a good percentage of an important promise, which no one else had been able to fulfill. He did it while we all weren’t paying attention.
It’s the same thing here. Trump gets elected in 2016. He becomes president in 2017. So, 2017, 2018, and up through 2019, he had failed to defund Planned Parenthood. Now is that his fault? I guess he could have leaned more on the House and the Senate when we still had the House… But the fault is also in the legislators. What happened? Why didn’t Mitch McConnell (R-KY) bring this up? Why didn’t Paul Ryan (R-WI) at the time bring this up? Because Republican lawmakers are total cowards when it comes to Planned Parenthood. They don’t really want to defund it. There’s a ton of squishes among Republicans. They don’t want to make Lisa Murkowski (R-Al) or Susan Collins (R-ME) vote on that, and frankly they like to keep the pro-life issue available. They like to keep Planned Parenthood being funded because it’s a good fundraiser from us conservatives, us pro-lifers. The minute that you get rid of abortion, conservatives and Republicans lose a great fundraising tool, which is keeping all of us pro-lifers eager to defund these abortion mills.
So, I think cynically they moved not to do it. And so what is President Trump do? He doesn’t get it through the normal way, the way that we were all expecting him to do it. And so now — [in] 2019, well into his first term — he changes this rule, Title X. Maybe he didn’t even know that they were changing this rule. Maybe he just appointed good people who are able to fulfill his campaign promises. I mean that’s what presidents do, they delegate.
One way or another this rule gets changed, and what you’re looking at today is the possible defunding of Planned Parenthood by Planned Parenthood’s own hand. This actually gives credence to the idea that President Trump is a dealmaker. That he does the art of the deal. That he does negotiate. That he does get things done, he [just] doesn’t do it in the way that we all expect because we are used to that typical Republican. They know how to talk, they know the phrases, we know what the phrases mean. When they say they’re going to move the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, they don’t really mean that. But it does mean that they’ll do this, and it means they will do that. And you’ve got to play like 7-D chess just to figure out what these people are even saying because they won’t speak in plain English.
Trump comes in and he actually does manage to keep a lot of his promises. I don’t know if it’s most, but more promises than his predecessors at least. And he does it in ways that we don’t expect.
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