Ed Cox, chairman of the New York Republican State Committee and son-in-law of late President Richard Nixon, offered his review of Monday night’s presidential debate on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily.
“I thought that Donald Trump really presented a broad vision for what he wanted, which is what a president has to do,” Cox told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
As for Hillary Clinton, he said she offered a “very detailed, lots of words, very lawyerly kind of brief, but you fall asleep when you listen to that.”
Cox said:
When Donald Trump spoke, you really watch it because he’s going to say something significant, and he did. He’s a real leader, and that’s what came across. She’s not. He’s gotten there on his own. He has amazing political ability, so he couldn’t have gotten to where he is with, really, not raising any funds, no organization – and that ability showed itself on that stage.
“He’s a leader, and he has the ability to make decisions like a leader should make them. I’ve been with him when he has done that, and he knows how to do it,” he continued. “She’s always ridden on someone else’s coattails, either her husband’s, or now on Barack Obama’s, so she comes across as a good adviser who’s got a brief, but not as a leader.”
Asked about his personal relationship with Trump, Cox noted the Republican presidential candidate has had “a very short political career” so far, and said he’s been there “at every important inflection point in that career.”
He recalled a particularly crucial moment, after Trump won the crucial Indiana Republican primary:
He wins Indiana. Now he’s the presumptive head of the party, about a month before he planned it. The other two leave on Wednesday. He is now, Thursday morning, the de facto head of the party. I’m there with him, with the chairman of the Pennsylvania party that morning, and what do you do? He had to unite the party. He had to figure out what was the right next step.
The first step, of course, was to confirm who the chairman of his party would be. At that point, he could fire the chairman of the party. He was the de facto head of the party. He and Reince Priebus got on the phone right away, decisions started being made. A week later, he got together with Paul Ryan – very important, that step, getting with Paul Ryan, who has an agenda for the future that is really very close in the end, a well-thought-out agenda that fits well with the agenda that Donald Trump was giving the vision of to country.
Although it wasn’t apparent to the public, the fact that the three of them were moving together really gave his campaign a lot of force.
“She spent $200 million of advertising, as Donald Trump made clear, negative advertising mostly against him, and he’s got the momentum in the polls, has pulled even,” he said, then predicted, “and probably, when the polls come out over the next week, we’ll find out he has pulled ahead in all the key states.”
As for his own state of New York, Cox said surprises may be in store:
People say there’s no way that Donald Trump is going to carry New York. That’s the cognoscenti. The fact is, it feels like – I was around in 1980, and no one thought Ronald Reagan would carry New York. But you felt, underneath all the commentary, there’s a real brush fire going on among the working men and women of the state. And Ronald Reagan won in 1980, therefore. I’m surprised in New York State.
You feel the same thing now. Look, we’ve got ten really crucial congressional races going on here. We’ve picked up more members of Congress in New York State than any other state, over the last six years, an important part of our majority. As I feel what’s going on in those areas, and how Donald Trump will affect them in our crucial races, even in unexpected areas like the mid-Hudson area, he’s doing very well. He is helping our candidates.
So it has the feeling of 1980 to it, where there’s a potential for him to carry even New York, which means even though it looks like a horse race now, it could be a Ronald Reagan 1980 kind of blowout.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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