Live from Virginia Wednesday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia, WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 PM) Hampton Roads, WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke and Weekdays 6-10 am and 24/7 Stream –  host Fredericks welcomed the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump to the show to reflect upon his relationships with federal Intel agencies, bringing back manufacturing to America, the CCP influence on Taiwan, and RINO Republicans.
Fredericks: Let’s get to the intel agencies. You were at odds with a lot of them. You were going to be impeached for making a phone call, which was a perfect phone call.
Trump: Yeah. Perfect.
Fredericks: And the fake news kept saying, Listen to the intel. Listen to the intel. Is there rot in our intel agencies now? Because obviously the advice they were giving Milley and Mackenzie and Lloyd Austin and the Secretary of State Blinken, obviously it was not even accurate. What is going on with their intel agencies?
Trump: Well, remember, I came in and they asked me the question about Putin and our intel. And the Intel I had was Comey and all of that stuff. McCabe. And when you look at that side of it, you look at some of the people at CIA.
Because I have a great relationship with a lot of the people in the CIA. But the people at the top were horrible. And they were saying, who do you trust? We had just gone through the fake dossier and all of the things that they’re asking me, who do I trust?
Well, I can tell you, some people I don’t trust were the people that I was dealing with. When I got there, there was a rot and a stench like I’ve never seen before anywhere in anything. And, you know, all the players and you covered all the players better than just about anybody.
Fredericks: Thank you.
Trump: And if I’m supposed to be saying no, great, they’re wonderful. I won’t say it. I’m not going to say it. But you do have great people in there. You have some very talented people. But when I got there, they were terrible. They were terrible.
They were just terrible, absolutely terrible people. And by the way, where’s Durham? Where is Durham? Can you imagine that Durham has disappeared?
Let’s see what he comes up with if he comes up with anything. When I heard they were going to release this during the Biden administration, I said, you got to be kidding. But where the hell is Durham?
Fredericks: He’s nowhere, just like anything that we try to do. You got 19 Republican collaborators, obviously signing off on this $1.2 billion deal.
Trump: That was amazing. Wasn’t that amazing? That’s Mitch McConnell, the old crow. That was amazing. But it’s absolutely true.
Fredericks: You have a great relationship with Chinese President Xi. Do you believe that Biden’s weakness is going to motivate him and the CCP, sir, to potentially move against Taiwan?
Trump: Well, I had a great relationship. But once the China virus came in, once we saw what was happening, it was hard for me to have a relationship. I didn’t make more of that relationship. I put extra tariffs on them.
I tariffed the hell out of them. We took in billions and billions of dollars from China. Do you notice they really haven’t taken the tariffs off. We’re going to remove those tariffs immediately. They haven’t taken them off because we’ve taken in tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars from China.
China never gave our country anything. And what we got for it was some businesses came back to our country, or they left China went elsewhere. But some businesses came back to our country. But we’ve taken in tens of billions from China.
And honestly, once the COVID came in, COVID, once that whole thing started, my relationship with Xi was like it was with anybody else. It was just too bad. We made a great trade deal. Our farmers are getting rich now because of the trade deal I made with our manufacturers.
It was great. It was a great deal. But I don’t even talk about it. I rarely talk about it. It’s the first time I’ve mentioned it in a long time, because the COVID that China virus is so horrible. And it came from the lab in Wuhan.
Remember when I said that and there was like a firestorm and people were being taken off Twitter and Facebook. And now it turns out that that was right. We were right about a lot of things, John. You and I, we were right about a lot of things.
Fredericks: Mr. President, you were relentless in getting our manufacturing supply chains back to the United States. Steel, aluminum, lumber, dairy, farming, oil, and gas. Right now, the island of Taiwan is producing about 50 percent of the entire semiconductor industry that we need in the United States.
If that gets shut down, our economy collapses. Can’t make an automobile, can’t make a computer, can’t do a washing machine, a dryer, and an air conditioner.
If you take the oath of office in 2025, which I think you will in January, how can you bring our semiconductor business back to the United States where we’re not dependent on Taiwan?
Trump: We were doing that and doing it big in Arizona. We have a plant, et cetera, et cetera going up. And I hear that Biden has pretty much shut it down. The problem is, it’s so perilous. You’re talking about a place that’s right next to China.
And we’re 9,500 miles away, and we have half of the semiconductors. And most people don’t know what that means. It means that your business literally will shut down.
It will shut down because everything you make, from a toaster, it’s incredible the importance of the semiconductors. And you look at intel. Intel has really lost its way to a large extent. They don’t make the product that they used to make.
We have so many businesses, and we were getting them moving. We were getting Intel and all the other companies we wanted to be built here. It’s like steel. I saved the steel industry with tariffs by putting tariffs.
You know China was dumping steel, and so were others. And I put large 25 and 50 percent tariffs on them. And I saved the steel industry. You wouldn’t have a steel industry right now. You wouldn’t have many other industries.
If I didn’t do what I did, you wouldn’t have a lot, But you need steel. You also need semiconductors. And if you don’t have that, that’s really it’s essentially the same thing. You can’t make your military equipment. You can’t do a lot here.
We are giving all that billions of dollars. They do say it’s $83 million worth of military equipment and here we are giving it away. And we’re talking about chips, and we won’t be able to make brand new versions of what we just gave to the Taliban.
But we had a great plan. We were going to be the King of semiconductors again. Having Taiwan making much more than 50 percent of semiconductors is a very perilous situation.
Fredericks: So how do you change it?
Trump: Well, again, you have to give the incentive. And it’s not that much incentive that’s needed, because they are really rich companies. They have to build here. They have to build here. And that includes Taiwan.
Don’t forget, we protect Taiwan. Well, Taiwan, should build its semiconductors in the United States. And I said that to them. I said, well, what are we doing? You don’t pay us an insurance policy. You don’t pay us anything other than you buy $2 billion dollars worth of military equipment every two years.
So we’re protecting you. Well, we want you to build your semiconductors in the United States. We don’t want them built in Taiwan. We want to build. And I was very tough on it. And they were starting to do it.
Then Biden gets in, and they don’t even think about it. They got bigger problems. They have problems, like millions of people pouring through the border, people released from prison. You these countries, and I’ve been saying it for two months, and now they’re finding out.
Guess what? I’m right. They’re emptying their prisons into the United States. And these are tough prisoners there. These are not your run of the mill. They’re emptying their prisons, John, into the United States.
It’s a terrible thing. You mentioned Virginia. But be careful. The election’s coming up, whether it’s California, Virginia. And you know how they cheat in elections. The Virginia governor’s election, you better watch it.
And the California election, you now have the right to make your own ballot. How about that one? They’ve taken it to a new step. I’ll say this, Texas did an amazing job. They have a strong bill. We won Texas by a lot.
But they say we should have won it by much more because they say in Houston and Dallas, a lot of votes were very strange. Let’s put it that way. But with these two elections, a couple of big elections coming up in areas that are very, very suspect.
And you have a close race in Virginia, but it’s not close if they cheat and it’s not close in California if they cheat. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.
Fredericks: I want to get the politics for a second. Mr. President, 19. I’m going to call them Rhino Republican. I call them collaborators that helped Biden and the Democrats secure this $1.2 billion infrastructure plan. I went to New York for your press conference when you were rolling out an infrastructure plan, which was infrastructure.
Trump: Right.
Fredericks: It was roads, bridges, shipping lanes. It was trains. This thing, only 18 percent of is going to infrastructure. But you’ve got 19 Republicans flipping with them. And now Biden says bi-partisan negative, another 3.5 trillion down the pike.
So the frustration of people like me, your deplorables, your base is like, why do we work for the Republicans when they never fight for anything? At the end of the day, they’re stabbing you in the back, stabbing deplorables in the back, and selling us out.
Trump: They didn’t fight for the election…
Listen to the full interview here:
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