Live from Music Row Wednesday 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 Theodore Wold who is a special assistant on policy to President Trump to the newsmakers line.
At the end of the second hour, Wold discussed the many accomplishments of President Trump that nobody thought were possible in regards to immigration deals with Central America and Mexico that are inevitably leading to a safer America.
Leahy: Crom you know you have written so extensively about innovation in America. Innovation is key. And we have a special guest who focuses on immigration here Crom about to come on. So his name Theodore Wold. He’s a special assistant to the president for policy in the Office of American Innovation. BA from Georgetown and a MA. So he’s a pretty smart guy. Here is what’s interesting to me. Theo, we are going to bring him on right now? He has a J.D. from the University of Notre Dame.
Carmichael: And when did he get that?
Leahy: We are going to ask him. Theo Wold, special assistant to the president. Welcome to The Tennessee Star Report.
Wold: Hey, thanks for having me on gentlemen. I appreciate it.
Leahy: So the big question is when you were at the University of Notre Dame in Law School did you have Amy Coney Barrett as a professor?
Wold: You bet your bottom dollar I did. Yep. No finer legal mind in the country.
Leahy: So we have something in common because as a Tennessean we think Amy Coney Barrett is a fantastic jurist. She attended college undergraduate at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.
Wold: Rhodes College.
Leahy: So she was a good professor?
Wold: She was a tremendous mentor. A tremendous mentor. And the best thing about Professor Barrett now Judge Barrett is in Washington as you bot know is just full of swamp creatures who are always chasing the brass ring their whole life. They are just basically robots. What’s the next office. What’s the next title.
Basically her entire career has been having a good family. Being a good wife. Being a good mother. Being a good friend. And that’s really just a testament to how good she is at her job that she’s been able to raise seven kids and also get to the top of the legal academy.
To be appointed to the Seventh Circuit who is now under serious consideration for the Supreme Court of the United States. Very few people can do that with the decency and the true American spirit that she embodies. So really really just a fine example of the great people are country can produce.
Carmichael: Let me ask you, have often had you had the chance to be interviewed by somebody who is born in South Bend? (Laughter) That’s me.
Wold: This will be the first time.
Carmichael: Your description of Judge Barrett is heartwarming and it’s the same that I’ve read from everyone that knows here. Now there are a lot of people who don’t know her and have never met her with very strong opinions that are the opposite. So it’s nice to those that actually should have knowledge of her as a person speak so highly of her.
Wold: And we saw that at the Democratic Convention a few weeks ago. Whatever that is now. A month ago. They’ve got a lot of weird views on what is normal or what the country should look like. And if your listeners need to know anything about someone like Judge Barrett is that she is a really normal Midwestern mom.
She likes tailgates. She likes college football. Likes bonding with her students. You can’t get more just normal American than Judge Barrett. Despite what they are saying in the press they have no idea what they are talking about.
Leahy: Well Theodore one little comment before we get to the main point of your call talking about the president’s immigration policy record. We have a mutual friend who is my former Breitbart colleague Julia Hahn.
Wold: That’s right.
Leahy: She’s at the White House. I imagine you work with her pretty regularly. She’s fabulous.
Wold: Almost every day. Julia is in the trenches because she has to deal with the fake news. And she has to get the president’s story out there so that people know what is actually going on. So she is right there in the trenches.
Leahy: She’s a superstar. That’s great to know that she’s working there with you Theodore. We want to talk about and we would be delighted to hear about President Trump’s immigration policy accomplishments in the last four years. Why don’t you highlight those for our listeners?
Wold: Is just the president who has had enormous success in immigration policy. And it’s in large part because he did one very simple thing. It’s profound here in Washington but it’s what most people do every day in their jobs. He did what he said he would do.
That’s what makes him revolutionary compared to most of his modern predecessors. And despite opposition really at every turn from folks from the Republican Party and obviously from the Democrats and special interests, he’s done some truly historic things. With the wall, we are at about 400 miles.
We are doing 10 miles a week to about a mile a day. Anyone who’s followed this from start to where we are now knows we’ve been sued by nearly every left-leaning advocacy group in the country. We’ve had injunctions. We’ve had work stoppage orders. We’ve had contracting problems where the Democrats tried to keep the money from us.
But even despite all that, we are at 400 miles. We’ll be probably 600 miles by the end of the year and we’re going to keep going. The president has prosecuted and deported nearly 100,000 criminal aliens including disrupting the largest MS-13 gang in the US. And he deported the last living Nazi in America. So we are getting the war criminals, the gangs, and the rapists out of our communities.
And here’s one that I love that I’m sure your listeners haven’t heard a word about. The president as you know is a deal maker. And he wanted to reach an agreement with Mexico and the Central American countries to help us with their problem which is all these people fleeing their cities and towns coming north. Nearly everyone in Washington said that was impossible. They practically laughed in the president’s face at even suggesting that he could do this. The president got a deal with Guatemala. He got a deal with Honduras. He got a deal with El Salvador.
(Commercial break)
Leahy: Crom, you had a special question for Mr. Wold.
Carmichael: I wanted to follow up on the last comments about the deals that the president has made with countries in Central America and Mexico because those are deals that I’ve not heard of at all. If you could tell us a little bit about those deals and their importance then I’d like to follow up on different questions about immigration as it pertains to innovation.
Wold: It’s one of those just wild pathologies in Washington where success actually produces silence. It’s not a celebration. You are not going to hear about it when the president has successfully negotiated these deals. And we know that they’ve been a success in part because the numbers coming from Central America and Mexico just nearly trickled down to nothing.
The starkest contrast you could have is the legacy of the Obama administration where the migrating caravans. Just wave after wave of undocumented children. Illegal aliens. Gang members. All traveling in these huge waves coming to the United States. As your listeners know that’s not happening anymore.
And that’s in part because the president negotiated these agreements. Those countries agreed to expend resources and their own government bodies to keep people in their towns to assist the United States from criminals coming North. Mexico has put 27,000 Mexican troops on their side of the border to say it’s closed.
Turn around and go back. So a huge success for the president. And as I said that everyone in Washington said there is no way we could ever get these deals before. Not with Bush. Not with Obama. There is no way Donald Trump is going to be able to get those and he got every single one.
Carmichael: What are we doing to try to help those countries make their own countries a better place to live then they are right now?
Wold: Yes. So this is another thing that your listeners can see the president’s success on. The Obama-Biden proposal was to take just a giant chunk of American taxpayer money and dump it into Soros backed NGOs and the governments of those countries regardless of corruption and fraud. Billions of dollars. That was their proposal.
The president’s proposal was that we will work with the American industry, the American private sector, and we will encourage our businesses to open facilities where possible to get them out of China and brought back to our hemisphere so that we can have a strong backyard for America. If private-sector folks are willing to invest in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico, great. It’s not going to be at the expense of the US taxpayer.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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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. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Theodore Wald” by New Media UFM English.
