Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate, looked at the first one hundred days of President Trump’s administration on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
“I’m extremely pleased, of course, that our new president is in there building the team that he believes he needs in order to fulfill promises to the American electorate, to make America great again, and I’m very, very happy that he’s there,” said Palin.
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She said she found the idea of giving a simplistic letter grade to the Trump administration annoying, preferring to say President Trump is doing “very well.”
“Remember, those of you who maybe still aren’t aboard the Trump Train but know that the Trump movement had to be ushered in, in order to get rid of the status quo that was harming America, keep doing your ABCs and remember what that was: it was Anybody but Clinton,” she said. “So stick with your little alphabet analogy there. Those who are asking for a grade of this administration, just keep remembering it could have been Clinton.”
Palin applauded Marlow’s point that arguing over the fine points of Trump’s policy, and even dealing with some disappointments, should be vastly preferable for conservatives over fighting for their political lives – and even basic constitutional freedoms, like free speech – under a Clinton presidency. She suggested imagining what sort of Supreme Court justice would currently be taking the late Antonin Scalia’s place under President Hillary Clinton.
Marlow noted that Palin has been “quite critical in recent days” of President Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
“She said, ‘Common Core now doesn’t exist’ or something, and you went buck wild on her,” Marlow recalled.
“I sure did!” Palin cheerfully agreed. “She said that, in fact, Common Core hasn’t really existed for the past couple of years. I would ask, do these politicians, do these elitist bureaucrats, do they even send their children or grandchildren, are they in public schools? When our kids and our grandkids come home and we sit down with them each night, still to this day, and we work with them on their homework, the Common Core curriculum is alive and not well in the classroom.”
“If the leader now of the education sector of our country would deny that Common Core is in existence, she needs to try to tell that to our really, really great public school teachers, who still have to explain and kind of apologize to the public school parents – I’m one of them – as to why the curriculum is as confusing and burdensome and less freeing for our teachers, who know what our students need best, as do the parents. Good schoolteachers still have to explain to us that under Common Core, these requirements are quite burdensome and nonsensical,” she said.
She accused DeVos of being “really out of touch” for denying all of this was happening.
Palin followed up with some of the highlights of Trump’s first hundred days, beginning with the confirmation of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
“I’m extremely thankful – we all should be – that he’s in there now,” she said.
She also praised Trump’s commitment to change President Barack Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy, “which made the world a less safe place to be.”
“Trump quashed that. He said no more leading from behind. America is that ‘beacon of hope.’ We are a country … of just this perfect storm, if you will, with the natural resources to be developed, with the manpower, and with the intellect, and with the patriotism, the unity that a country needs in order to be so successful, to be great and to be a leader that other countries would wish to emulate. America has all that, and we can put it into play for the greater good of the world by leading, and not leading from behind, which is kind of Orwellian-speak,” said Palin.
“Leading again on the global stage and the Supreme Court pick, those are two specifics – but Alex, we need to make sure to remind our friends, our supporters, people who are really tuned in to what’s going on today and get frustrated under any administration. Maybe they’re frustrated with what Trump does, some of the wrinkles that are certainly part of the agenda that we’ve witnessed,” she suggested.
“We can never put our faith and our hope in man, in any one man, certainly not a politician,” Palin counseled. “Man is fallible. We’re going to be disappointed if we put all of our hope and faith in one man – a politician, a government that cannot make us happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise. We need to look at the bigger picture here, as you suggested in your opening.”
Another highlight of the first hundred days for Palin was the “quote-unquote massive tax cut proposals that will come from the White House.”
“I’m extremely happy about that. That’s another promise fulfilled,” she said. “We know that to allow us to be solvent and sovereign, we need to see jobs created. The way that jobs are going to be created and people will be productive again in this country is for tax cuts that will really benefit the middle class, especially the working class. More jobs will be created with tax cuts, so I’m excited about that coming down the pike.”
“We have to cut taxes,” she stressed. “Look at that corporate tax rate we have that is, what, second highest in the developed world? Our corporate tax rate certainly is one of the job creation prohibiters that we’re suffering under. So that has to be done, and certainly people with our income taxes, we realize it’s taxation without representation. The government is taking from us the fruits of our labor, and we’re not receiving the services in return that are on par with the amount that they’re taking from us. It’s a given: taxes must be cut in this country, and I would think that everybody knows that.”
“But as for it then contributing to an accumulation of debt – you’re right: it’s semantics, and it’s bogus,” Palin said to Marlow’s point that the left controls the language of tax reform and treats tax cuts as an expensive indulgence that must be “paid for” somehow.
“It doesn’t have to result in accumulation of debt,” she argued. “We can’t just hand that over to those in government who hold the purse strings and keep spending more and more money that we do not have. We need to ratchet down the size of government. This government overreach in every area of our life that’s getting more and more expensive, we can’t just swallow that and say, ‘Oh, well, that’s just the way it is, and wow, we’re going to have to take more money from the people in order to pay for growing government.’”
“It always killed me when I was a city council member, I was a mayor, I was a city manager, I was a governor, and I would watch every 12 months when the government’s budget was due. I’d either help craft it, or it would come across my desk. I would always ask the bureaucrats and the politicians creating these budgets, ‘What’s going on here? Just because 365 days have passed, you just automatically inherently believe that the budget amount has to increase? Why? Are people getting more for the money that you’re taking from them? Has the population grown that much?’” she recalled.
“In each level of government, it’s just so inherent that oh, you know, government grows; that’s just the way it is. It doesn’t have to,” Palin contended.
Marlow asked Palin about the “war on free speech” conducted by masked thugs at universities, prominently including Berkeley, where he was once a student.
“Well, first, it blows me away that you’re from Berkeley. Talk about not drinking the Kool-Aid!” Palin said with a laugh.
“These Berkeley students, bless their hearts, they’re hypocrites on steroids,” she said on a more serious note. “It is amazing to me and anybody else with just an ounce of common sense in their veins to ever be able to believe that those who preach tolerance and diversity, and we’re gonna embrace diversity – but Heaven forbid you say something that might hurt our little snowflakey feelings. You know, we’ll melt there down in Berkeley if you say something that we can’t agree with!”
“In the end, they’re the most intolerant people if they are going to protest someone who is a bastion of free speech. Ann Coulter is on their side! When they are spewing the free speech rhetoric, she’s saying, ‘Exactly! And here, let’s exercise it! Let me prove to you, you guys prove with me, that we’re all for free speech!’ And yet, they’re so blinded by their hatred for anybody who does not agree just down the line with them on everything that they will not tolerate Ann Coulter speaking her mind,” said Palin.
Marlow advised President Trump to resist advice about “moderating” his positions to secure the approval of left-wingers who will never stop hating him – something Palin is well positioned to understand, as the target of an unprecedented campaign of left-wing vilification in 2008.
“Amen. Preach it, brother,” Palin agreed. “President Trump needs to realize he can’t win them over. You cannot. He can learn from our mistakes, those of us who have been in that position on a much smaller scale. We have tried to win them over, and it doesn’t work. It bites you in the butt, and it harms those who you have promised to serve.”
“Right on, too, in talking about the big tent,” she said to Marlow’s defense of an ideologically diverse Republican Party. “You know, most of us, we come from big-tent families. Our social circles even, and our communities, they’re big tents, and really, we’re better off for it. Talk about diversity and learning from other people’s perspectives that are shared and all that – that’s all great.”
“But no, when you are leading an agenda that people have put blood, sweat, and tears forth, to make sure that agenda finally is given an opportunity to be made manifest so that our lives can be made better, you have to surround yourself with people who are obviously going to help the cause and not hurt the cause,” she added.
“You cannot surround yourself, one, with a bunch of yes-men. That certainly harms the cause. You will never grow as a leader. You have to be growing as a leader as your constituents will be growing along with you. So you can’t have a bunch of yes-men. Those of us who have been in business and been in politics certainly recognize that,” said Palin.
“But also, you have to have those who at least will share your vision. Maybe some of the idiosyncrasies, maybe some of the details in how you’re going to get there, you can argue some of the ways to do that, but the vision has got to be the same,” she emphasized.
“Now, do globalists, do big government professional politicians who are in it for a season, not a reason – they’re in politics for a job, for a career, for the money, for the power – do they share the vision of average, hard-working, patriotic Americans who want government out of our lives so that we can be trusted as individuals to run our businesses the way that we know best and to raise our families the way that is best for our families?” Palin asked.
“Government, faceless bureaucrats, they don’t know how to do that. They keep screwing it up. Well, globalists and big government people, some in office today under Trump, they believe in that garbage of big government knowing best. That is the antithesis of the vision that those on the Trump Train have, and that Trump Train roared through this country so powerfully, so loudly and adamantly, that there was no stopping it. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Trump won,” she contended.
“So those who don’t share that vision, who are there, quote-unquote, serving our president and the vision, the mission that he is on, that is shared by the majority of the voters – it’s frustrating to us because we do want to sound that warning bell that you can’t win them over. They’re certainly stuck in their ways, and if they give you lip service that they’re there with you – those are the yes-men that we don’t need around our president,” Palin advised.
In parting, Palin suggested a mission for Marlow: “I wish you would take the opportunity to get down to Berkeley and speak with your alumni. Go down there and talk to the folks down there about what tolerance really is and how healthy diverse opinions really can be. Talk about the Second Amendment. You would be one, Alex – well, they’d probably get really wee-weed up about it – but you could be a great spokesperson for the cause.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the full audio of the interview above.
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