Journalist Reveals What Trump Really Thinks About Republican Politicians

Donald Trump usually doesn’t hide how he feels about his political rivals – and sometimes even his allies – but according to one journalist who spoke with Trump all the way back in 2015, he’s hiding his true feelings. Mark Leibovich says that during a conversation with Trump at the start of his first campaign, the candidate told him that politicians (on the Right) are “saps and weaklings,” and that he would run all over them during the primary. And he did exactly that, but now he’s stuck with that tired old trick that isn’t working anymore. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Mark Leibovich, a reporter for the Atlantic, had the opportunity to sit down with Donald Trump during his campaign for president. But I'm not talking about this year's campaign, and I'm not even talking about the 2020 presidential campaign. I am talking about the 2016 presidential campaign, actually technically the 2015 Republican primary campaign, the very first real race that Donald Trump ever ran in. 'cause again, he did run in 2000. And, you know, that fizzled out very quickly. But in 2015, mark Leibovich had the chance to sit down with Donald Trump, and Trump told him then, which Liebowitz is only now, you know, telling us what he really thought about the Republicans and other politicians that he would be running against in the Republican primary. And it gives us a really good picture as to why Donald Trump is the way he is today. But here is what Lebowitz said. He told him a long time ago, he said.

Um, Trump said that he was used to dealing with quote, brutal, vicious killers, which was his view of people in the real estate and gambling industries, not actually real killers, but Trump. In contrast, he told me politicians are SAPs and weaklings, and then said, I will roll over them. Trump, according to Lewi, understood the mentality of Republican politicians and former critics like Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, uh, becoming his staunch defenders. He then said, uh, liebe witch writes, I'd thought that maybe 2024 would be the year the GOP finally began some semblance of a post-Trump future. At the very least, new voices of resistance had to finally assert themselves. Yet the speed with which Trump had settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable, foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there's one recurring lesson of the Trump era, GOP, it's this, never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going.

And perhaps most of all, a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers. So in 2015, Donald Trump told Liebowitz, listen, these are SAPs, these are weaklings that I'm going against in the Republican primary. Again, people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, all of them SAPs and weaklings. Donald Trump said, I will roll over them. And of course he did. But he rolled over them by bullying them, you know, getting up on that debate stage for the first time in 2015, in the summer of 2015, when they had their first debate just annihilating everybody else. Not with facts, not because he's a better debater, but because he just insulted everybody

On that stage. And everybody watching it thought, eh, that's pretty funny. That's kind of cool. But then he did it again and again and again, propelling himself to victory in the Republican primary. So then 2020 comes along. Trump tries the same tactic. This time it doesn't work. He didn't have to go through a primary fight, but because of how poorly he handled the Covid situation, nobody wanted to hear his bullying. Nobody wanted to hear his bravado, his, you know, steamrolling everybody. We were tired of it. Four years later, he's doing the same thing. And this time the public has seemingly apparently forgotten about his mishandling of covid, which I do believe is what cost him 2020. And so I think more people are buying it today than they did in 2020. But it's still not enough Recently, uh, one of these polling analysts point, or actually I think it was a Republican strategist, pointed out the fact that Donald Trump has never broken 47% support even when Biden's campaign crapped out and he had to