Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed former Trump National Security Advisor and author KT McFarland to talk about her new book Revolution: Trump, Washington, and “We the People” to the newsmakers line.
Leahy: We welcome on our newsmakers line once again our good friend KT McFarland, former deputy National Security Advisor and author of the new book coming out publication date Thursday of this week. Revolution: Trump, Washington, and “We the People” published by Nashville’s own Post Hill Press. Good morning, KT.
McFarland: Good morning! It’s a pleasure to be with you today.
Leahy: Well, tell us about this book. It came about pretty quickly. It really caught my attention because you really outline why you joined the Trump Revolution. You say it’s for many of the same reasons you joined the Reagan Revolution.
McFarland: I’ve been a traditional conservative establishment Republican. I’ve worked in all the administrations. I should have been the standard-bearer for the conservative Republican candidates, but I looked around for the last 20 years and the conservative Republicans or the Republican establishment, the Democrats have all gotten it wrong. And the endless wars in the Middle East that we could never win.
The extreme expending, the increased regulation, strangling the government, strangling the American people, and strangling the middle class. And so I abandon it. So I joined the Trump Revolution the same way I joined the Reagan Revolution in that we needed to get back to small government, cut taxes, less regulation, and get out of foreign wars.
We have to stand up to our adversaries and Make America Great Again economically first and then you can do the other things. So I broke with the traditional Republicans. I joined the Trump Revolution. I joined the Trump administration. And that’s the first part of the book I wrote. The second part though is what happened in the Trump administration and particularly the Mueller investigation and how I like General Flynn was caught up in this fake investigation that the FBI senior officials of FBI and the intelligence community and probably the Obama West Wing cooked up to try to sabotage President Trump’s presidency before it even began.
But then the final part of it is actually very optimistic. And I think that what we’re going through now is a revolutionary period. I think America goes through these periods. We’re meant to go through these periods. And we do it about every 40 years when the government gets so powerful that it thinks it’s totally in charge and doesn’t have to report to the American people. And the American people wake up and say hey, wait a minute.
We’ve had enough and we’re going to throw you bums out and we’re going to have a different set of leaders in a different direction. (Inaudible talk) And these “revolutions” don’t happen overnight. They don’t happen in one election. And so I think that’s what we’re seeing now. Trump is a revolution. Biden is the counter-revolution. It’s the old guys coming back, the same that were in charge. And then I think the next movement is the Republicans will take back the House and the Senate in ’22 and in the White House in ’24.
Leahy: So in part one you talk in chapter six about Trumpism before and after Trump. Now, this after Trump thing is sort of interesting. You’re affiliated with CPAC. You are a fellow with the American Conservative Union. This Saturday, I think it’s a Saturday, President Trump is scheduled to speak at the CPAC in Florida. What do you think he’s going to say?
McFarland: I don’t know. I talk to him every month or so. We stay in touch and we both have enormous respect for each other. In fact, when I talked to him two weeks ago he said, thanks for saying all that great stuff you’ve been saying about me on TV. And then he stopped and said you don’t always say a great job about me, but you say great stuff about our policies. And I hope what he does is he’ll go to CPAC and he’ll be the grand finale.
I hope what he does and says is that we started a revolution of lower taxes, deregulation, energy independence, not getting involved in these intractable foreign wars in the Middle East, and standing up to the adversaries we need to stand up to, China and Russia. And I hope what he doesn’t do though is talk all about the election, whatever happened. And I don’t think it was fair all the way around but it’s done.
And I think we need to move on because we can either all look in the rearview mirror and say what should have happened in 2020. Or we can look ahead. And I want to look ahead. And I particularly want to look ahead because if you look at the 2020 election, all across the country even in Democrat districts, they elected Republicans. They elected Republicans in landslides.
And then the landslides you had this year in Tennessee even is indicative of what’s happened. The country is not nuts. The country doesn’t want to defund the police. The country doesn’t want to cancel the culture. The country isn’t woke. But the people who are sort of in the levers of power in Hollywood and the media parts of Washington, yes, they are that way.
And so I think that the public voted to elect overwhelmingly people who ran on Trump’s ticket. And they were young and they were Black and they were Hispanic and they were veterans. And we have people from all walks of life who are now the new Republican Party. And I hope President Trump embraces that. I think he will. And I would even look to his own family and his own children.
That’s the next generation of leaders. So he’s the kingmaker. He started this. And I think with his endorsement we carry it through and with his electoral support going forward and not continuing to look back. It may be terrible news that he lost in 2020. I think it is a great tragedy for the nation. But it’s done now and I think we need to look forward.
Leahy: I hear in your voice the way you’re describing this kingmaker and things of that nature. It doesn’t sound to me like you’re in the crowd of folks that are encouraging him to consider running again in 2024. Do I have that right or not?
McFarland: Let’s just see where the world is. I don’t want to see a former president of the United States in a mud-wrestle in a Republican primary. I want to see him be the man he is who is an extraordinary leader for the nation. A man who battled against every foe domestic and foreign and still stood tall and still went to the Oval Office every morning. And somehow I think in a lot of ways, he’s more powerful not in office than he would be if he ran again and had the slings and the arrows and the media and the hysteria that always seems to surround him on the part of the people who hate him.
I would say that I’d rather see him be the kingmaker and be the power behind the throne and to lead the country forward because I think he’s above that in an odd way. I think he has a greater impact on the nation than not having to be in the Oval Office every day fighting those little squabbles in the media who you know will just assault him at every step.
Leahy: I read the tea leaves a little differently. I think he wants to get in the mud wrestling match again. (Chuckles)
McFarland: I know him pretty well and he does like to fight. (Chuckles) But anyway we’ll see.
Leahy: In part three of your book, you talk about we the people, and the revolution. I’m very curious about that. What are the elements of that revolution to take it back? You said it happens every 40 years. What do you recommend that grassroots folks do to fight against all of this Big Tech oligopoly mainstream media Obama-Biden administration left-wing nuttiness?
McFarland: Just get involved and stay involved. President Trump got a whole group of people who had never voted before and who said well politics that’s not my thing. And they got engaged and they voted. And they showed up at the rallies. 20 to 30 thousand people showed up at rallies and those people never voted before. So I always thought one of the biggest problems America had was 40 percent of the people don’t vote.
But President Trump has gotten a lot of those people to vote. So stay involved and don’t let these guys steal it again. And so the only cure to any of the bad stuff that’s going to happen is just the American people. And if you look at American History whether it was the American Revolution or in the Andrew Jackson Revolution, the 1830s or after the Civil War or in Teddy Roosevelt and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the early part of the century or FDR, Reagan, or now Trump, several things happened.
It’s the political parties of the day that just couldn’t get the job done. They were led by old men who have old ideas. And the new leader comes forward. And it’s usually a leader but not from where you’d expect. Donald Trump wasn’t very expected. Ronald Reagan wasn’t what people expected. Andrew Jackson was a General. Nobody expected he would be the kind of leader in the way he was.
So it’s always somebody unexpected who picks up the flag of freedom and carries it forward. And usually, it’s a time when there is a shifting population and that’s why we kept revolutions political revolutions because we’re constantly changing. Look at our demographics and then look at Tennessee. Tennessee is like a new Florida, right? Everybody wants to move to the free state of Tennessee.
We have demographic changes, ethnic changes, ideology changes, social changes, geographic changes, and yet the government can never be nimble enough to keep up with the constantly changing American people. And to me, I look at when people say, oh my country’s great or exceptionalism, and nobody ever defines that. They just say Americans are exceptional. Well, I think we’re exceptional because we do reinvent ourselves. It’s constant renewal.
Leahy: KT McFarland, thanks for joining us again. Author of Revolution: Trump Washington, and “We the People.” Make sure you buy the book. And KT, come down to Nashville sometime and come in the studio. And by the way, if you want to leave the environment where you currently live in a non-free state we are welcoming conservatives into the income-tax-free, Tennessee.
McFarland: (Chuckles) Sounds like a deal.
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510.
Photo “KT McFarland” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Photo “Revolution: Trump, Washington and “We the People” by Amazon.
