Lee Smith joins The Paul Leslie Hour.
Are you here? Yes indeed! It’s The Paul Leslie Hour, episode #1,046!
We’re pleased to be sitting down with author Lee Smith to talk about his book Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social and the Fight for the Republic from Encounter Books.
45th and 47th President Donald J. Trump commented on the book: “Lee uncovers the Witch Hunts and Hoaxes that have been weaponized against our Movement to try and silence Free Speech, subvert our Elections, and destroy the Country we love.”
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Lee Smith Official Transcript
LEE SMITH: This is Lee Smith, and you’re watching The Paul Leslie Hour.
PAUL LESLIE: We’re here in the Palmetto State, one of the great states in these United States, and I’m greatly pleased to be sitting down with writer Lee Smith. He is the author of Disappearing the President, Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic. Roger Stone on his show The Stone Zone said that this is a book that will take your breath away, and I’m sitting down with the man who wrote it, Lee Smith.
LEE SMITH: Paul, thank you for being here.
“We’ve seen a long story unfolding”
It’s a great pleasure. It’s a real pleasure. We are in some extraordinary times. Your book in many ways reads like a novel. What are your immediate thoughts now just a week after Election Day?
Well, it’s interesting that you say it reads like a novel because one of the things that we’ve happened here, and that’s happened to us here in the United States, is, we’ve seen a long story unfolding, and the election was an important plot point or plot development, right, and a very long story. And we as Americans are used to this kind of heroic story. So look at what’s happened. I mean, it’s a story about a rise, fall, and redemption. You can imagine pitching it to a Hollywood studio, right?
What happened? So after Donald Trump is president, he’s at the height of his powers. January 2021, he loses in November 2020. January 2021, he’s brought to his knees. He’s exiled, banned from social media. He’s cut off from his followers. He’s silenced.
And then the attacks really began. We see the raid on Mar-a-Lago, an enormous lawfare campaign. Donald Trump is shot once in the head. And then he narrowly escapes another assassination attempt and then he talks about having more awareness of God, right?
He talks about, i’m not quite sure he talked about praying, but certainly is more aware of God and he’s more aware you know very he’s nearly killed and so then the the his campaign inquires, I think it’s you know it’s not just the fun where people are going and listening to hear him speak and make jokes and talk about his plans. But there’s also something even warmer about it, right? Like one of the things that people like about the Trump rallies is how he interacts with people.
But here he really goes out of his way. He works at McDonald’s. He dresses as a garbage man. I mean, it’s really a remarkable thing, you know?
One of the most famous stories in the English language, of course, is the story of Henry, King Henry, who has Prince Hal. What does he do? Rather, as the king, he cloaks himself to find out what his soldiers are thinking, what the common men are thinking, what his foot soldiers are thinking about the king. He wants to know what they’re thinking. And so that’s a very important gesture in heroic stories that we tell.
And so what happens? So Donald Trump winds up winning the election. So what you say about novels, stories, what we’ve seen here is a real American story. So it’s reality, but we know how to understand it because it’s the kind of story that we Americans are accustomed to telling. So that, I think, is a really important way to see what’s happened here over the last several years. And I think it’s something, I think it’s a reason why Americans, not all of them, but why many Americans right now are walking with more spring in their step. Why things feel lighter, right?
We like the – it’s not the ending. There’s a lot more left to go. But we like where the story is. We like where the country is. So, yeah. So, that’s how I see right now, the post-election reality. You have a little bit of a breather here after the election and before the administration starts.
And the inevitable struggle between the Trump administration and its many opponents, particularly its domestic opponents.
The changing of power
Yeah. What do you see it looking like with the struggle of the powers changing?
I think we’ll see.
I think that we’ll see what we saw four years ago, or rather eight years ago, when Donald Trump first took office, started his term in January 2017. But it started before that, of course, to started on his campaign and the transition team. And this is one of the things I talk about in Disappearing the President, how the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, under his as you green-lighted a surveillance campaign of the Donald Trump campaign this continued through the transition period so Trump and his circle were still being spied on and then even as the President of the United States Donald Trump was still under surveillance.
So it’s really quite astonishing that happened, but it’s indicative of the larger anti-Trump campaign. And I think that we’ll see at least that, if not more, because I think there may be more urgency at this point to stop Trump from undoing some of the things that happened during the Biden years. And plus, we have to recognize the different institutions who turned against Trump in 2016, in a way, have further hardened, especially if we look at the DOJ, Department of Justice, which has nearly perfected the process of targeting Donald Trump and his opponents, especially all these defendants, January 6th defendants.
So I think that we are going to see a great deal of conflict here. And a lot of it will be public, but it’ll be played out in the press. We saw what happened last time that the press sided.
I mean, the press believed it was part of the anti-Trump resistance. And so I believe that we’ll certainly see that again. And that will be, in some ways, it’s already started and it will kick into even higher gear as we get closer to the inauguration date.
The subject of Barack Obama is a frequent one in this book. What do you think the biggest misconception about Barack Obama is?
Well, I think the biggest misconception of what’s happened in the last several years here, during the Trump years, we learned to talk about the deep state, right, by which we meant the permanent federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., who, you know, the way we talk, well, they think that they really run it, and it’s the unelected officials, it’s not the President and the people that he chose. And, of course, the president is chosen, elected by the American public. And so that’s how we’ve learned to talk about the deep state.
I think that’s been a mistake, however, to talk about the deep state, because what we’re talking about is we’re talking about thousands and thousands of bureaucrats, and the nature of a bureaucrat is not to run things, right? The nature of a bureaucrat is to follow orders, is to put down a paper trail to protect themselves, put down a paper trail to direct certain things. So Washington is a very hierarchical city. Naturally, it’s the national capital. And so people take orders from on high, right? In the military, the orders come down. They go down the chain of command. And the same thing happens through politics. The problem, the attacks on Donald Trump were not waged alone by just, you know, by mid-level FBI agents or analysts at the NSA.
These operations came from on high. And as we understand, as we see, Barack Obama tasked his CIA director, John Brennan, to write an intelligence product claiming that Vladimir Putin helped Trump to the White House in 2016. So this delegitimized Trump’s presidency, first of all.
Second of all, it divided the country, right? If half the country voted for someone who had been compromised for a foreign power, at best that half of the country were unwitting dupes. At worst, they were complicit in a conspiracy to betray the United States to a foreign power. So that was Obama’s doing. That’s what he ordered his CIA Director John Brennan to do.
We also know that John Brennan, Barack Obama, instructed his FBI Director, James Comey, to continue the surveillance of the Donald Trump team. So one of the important things I wanted to do in Disappearing the President was not just to show what’s happened over the last eight years, but to make it clear that Barack Obama was behind this, that Barack Obama was running it. I wanted to show the organizational network that people are really on top.
Again, we’re not talking about 15,000 – 20,000 bureaucrats in our nation’s capital. We’re talking about extremely powerful people, with resources and with money at their disposal, and who are pursuing and advocating specific causes on behalf of other figures. So none of the names are really secret.
American audiences will recognize the name George Soros. Some of the other names might be a little harder to recognize, like election lawyer Mark Elias, who is playing a very prominent role right now on behalf of the Democrats especially in Pennsylvania where we’re seeing they’re trying to push through Elias and his lawyers are trying to push through a whole bunch of ballots that have been thrown out and should have been thrown out.
So again the the point here is to show what that organizational network looks like, who’s on top and what role other people in that network play. And I call them in the “shadow network.” But again, the key is that Barack Obama, the former President of the United States, the only President who stayed in Washington, D.C. since Woodrow Wilson.
However, Woodrow Wilson stayed in Washington because he had a stroke midway through his second term and could not leave. Barack Obama resolved to stay in Washington for other reasons that have nothing to do with his being debilitated.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about the deep state. I was in Europe recently, and I thought that it was kind of going to be an escape from talk about the election.
And as it turns out, everyone wanted to come up to me and ask me about the election. Lots of people were asking me about this deep state. And the deep state isn’t always this dark, shadowy guy. Sometimes it’s someone that you do see. I’m hoping you can talk a little bit about this, the people that we commonly call the deep state.
Well, you know, the Europeans have a very different perspective when it comes to bureaucracy. They have their own national bureaucracies, and in France, for example, bureaucracy is very important. But there’s also the European bureaucracy that spans across Europe. Europeans are always besieged by bureaucracy. Europe is in a very strange position, with remnants of monarchies alongside Prime Ministers, Presidents, and other such figures.
And look, I mean, these are small powers. France is a historic power, but Emmanuel Macron projects very little power, even outside the former French colonies, like Lebanon, Syria, or throughout Africa. No one really cares what Macron says, but that’s not very important.
In the United States, it’s a very different matter, especially when it comes to the President. What are the different ways we refer to him? The Leader of the Free World, the most powerful man on planet Earth. This is real power.
So for Europeans, their perception of bureaucracy is that someone can make their life hell for years and years, somewhere in an apartment in Paris or Rome. Yes, that’s true, and it can happen here too. We’re all familiar with what it’s like at the DMV. But the people who are prosecuting a campaign against Donald Trump are not the people at the DMV. It’s not even the people at the FBI or the CIA. Do they play a role? Yes. They were weaponized to play a role.
This is what happens: powerful people direct subordinates to act on their behalf. That’s what happened. That’s, again, I think, the central or crucial purpose of Disappearing the President—to clarify what has happened over the last nearly a decade and what is likely to continue. The campaign against Donald Trump has not been run by the lower levels of the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security; it’s being run by very powerful people.
Writing is often a discovery tool. We want to find out about something, and in order to write about it, we must investigate. Was there anything you didn’t uncover when writing Disappearing the President?
Interesting. Well, you know the cover features Donald Trump at the Butler, Pennsylvania rally where he was shot in the face. A lot of people want to know—was this simply a function of the Secret Service’s incompetence, or was it malevolence? Did they actually set Donald Trump up for this?
I’m an investigative reporter, among other things, and so I think it’s important to have evidence to make the case. I’m not sure there is any evidence right now to say that the Secret Service and the FBI set up Donald Trump for the attempt on his life. However, the FBI and the Secret Service have been so bad about giving information to the American public. We’ve seen all the different things that the FBI has done to Donald Trump over the last several years.
The agencies, how they have targeted Donald Trump. You would like to think that our federal law enforcement authorities would say, “Look, we understand how important this is. There’s a presidential candidate from one of our two major parties, and there have been one, two attempts on his life. During the course of our investigation, we’re going to make as much information as we can public. And we’re going to continue to brief not only congressional officials, not only the White House, but also the American people.” But, of course, they did nothing of the sort, right? They buried the whole thing.
Unfortunately, one of the things that we’ve learned over the last several years about the FBI and other federal bureaucracies is that when they say, “It’s part of an active investigation,” what that means is they’re burying information. And that’s what happened here. So the people who say, “Well, I actually think that this was an attempt on the life of Donald Trump, and the Secret Service and FBI seemed to me complicit,” may have a point.
Again, there’s no evidence for that, nothing that I found. But I understand why people think that, because the FBI has been anything but transparent. They virtually buried it.
We also have to point to the news media. It’s very strange—very few reporters have approached the family of either of these assassins, either Mr. Crooks or Mr. Routh. That itself is also very strange. We can attribute that to political partisanship and the effort to bury the fact that two Democratic Party supporters tried to take Donald Trump’s life.
Nonetheless, it’s evidence that our institutions are not working to prepare the American people or to provide them with the kind of information they need to make important decisions about their lives, the fates and futures of their families, communities, and country.
So much of this story is related to speech and the shutting down of speech. Truth Social, it’s even in the title. Tell us a little bit about that.
Well, this is very important. You know, we’ve seen the subtitle as well. It’s Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic.
Is the social media company that Donald Trump started. He was banished from social media after January 6th, 2021. Banished from twitter banished from facebook because they accused him of being responsible for what they’ve labeled incorrectly an insurrection of course the evidence on twitter that was buried was the fact that donald trump told his uh told his supporters who were out there rallying that day first at the ellipse which is the park behind the president’s house He told them to act peacefully, patriotically, yet peacefully, that the police were on our side, were on the side of Trump and Trump’s supporters, and shouldn’t attack the police. So social media buried this information. Of course, this was used to target Donald Trump with the January 6th investigations. But yeah, it wasn’t just Donald Trump who was targeted for censorship. It was Donald Trump supporters.
And this went on during the 2020 election campaign. People were thrown off social media for asking questions about the handling of COVID, for what was labeled as spreading COVID misinformation—whether it was simply asking questions about the news, protocols, mask mandates, and such things. Another major reason people were banished was for asking questions about the election procedures, specifically the new procedures like mass mail-in ballots that were implemented due to COVID. These changes came about because people were alarmed about gathering in public places and the potential spread of COVID. It was very important, of course, to keep ramping up the fear so people would feel scared of going to polling places and prefer voting from home.
People who asked questions about the integrity of mail-in voting were also banished from Twitter. And let’s remember that both sides, Democrats and Republicans, had previously agreed that mail-in voting facilitated voter fraud. A 2005 bipartisan report, written by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, highlighted this concern. In 2005, this was widely believed, but everything changed in 2020, when voting by mail was suddenly considered totally fine, with no problems at all. This shift formed the basis for arguments made to censor people.
For what they call stopping misinformation are ignorant and based on misunderstandings of our traditions, of freedom of speech, of the First Amendment. You know, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously talked about the marketplace of ideas, and he was against censorship because he said, “Well, the answer for bad speech is just, you know, more speech. Let the truth flourish. Let all these ideas, you know, compete.” That’s what he meant by the marketplace of ideas, that people will prefer the truth to falsehood. And that’s fine. That’s a perfectly nice argument. But that’s not the reason for the First Amendment. The reason for the First Amendment is that the state is not supposed to have a monopoly on speech. That’s the point. It’s not like we will someday find truth. Truth belongs to, finally, our creator. That’s what truth is. I’m not a preacher.
But the idea of truth, we recognize true things, but a greater truth—again, this is religious discussion. We’re talking about politics right now. This is the reason for the First Amendment: the state, the monarch in the beginning, should not have a monopoly on speech. That’s why people are allowed free speech. And yes, the idea is that if someone is saying something untrue, people will respond, “Well, that’s garbage. That’s nonsense. Here are the facts.” That’s the marketplace right there. “Well, you made this claim, and that’s obviously untrue for this reason, that reason, and other reasons.” But look at how the idea of free speech, freedom of inquiry, freedom of religion intersect. That is what Western society is. You don’t have science, the empirical method, without freedom of speech.
The idea that people want to start banning misinformation, or that there are misinformation boards and bureaus checking people for misinformation and disinformation, is obscene. It’s not just obscene because some of the impostors believe they are uniquely qualified not only to discern truths but to distribute them as well to their fellow man. A lot of these people are plain stupid—Washington bureaucrats, morons, frankly. But the more obscene thing is, don’t you understand why this civilization looks the way it does? It’s because of freedom of speech.
You may not like what I’m saying or what other people are saying, but because we have freedom of speech, that’s how people are allowed to further our society. This is what Elon Musk means when he talks about the importance of freedom of speech. You can’t do these things without the empirical method. If you can’t experiment, if there’s no such thing as trying and failing and working toward truths—not a big truth, but truths—you don’t have a society that looks like this. That’s why Elon Musk bought Twitter, why he defends Donald Trump, and why he’s a righteous opponent of censorship. It’s a very dangerous thing for this country, but I believe, thank God, that most Americans understand it’s dangerous and bad for this country and all of Western society. It’s not just here.
We’ve had quite a few years—storied, would be one way to put it. There have been moments when I’ve wondered, where is this all going? Have you ever thought that maybe America is on its last leg, or that there’s cause for us to lose hope?
Part of this has been purposeful. We have to understand that there’s been an effort to demoralize the American public, to treat us like slaves. This is part of the censorship—part of the effort to silence Americans. We’re told, “Shut up, you have no right to speak, we’re going to take this and that away from you. Shut up and take the vaccine, do what we tell you to do.” I think many Americans feel that their country, liberties, traditions, and history have been yanked from their hands—not slipping away, but yanked. It’s like, “To hell with July 4th, we’re going to celebrate Juneteenth. To hell with American history, it’s all about slavery. Actually, America starts in 1619, not 1776, the Declaration of Independence. America starts in sin.” So, yes, I think a lot of Americans feel assaulted and besieged, and there’s an effort, as Barack Obama said, to transform America.
Some people have been very upset about this, and you can see what’s happened. It’s been a real assault on America. Part of it is aesthetic. You look around, and we’re in a beautiful state, as you said, the Palmetto State. But when you walk around and see what’s happened to some of our great American cities—Washington, New York, Los Angeles—it’s just disgusting. You see things like the trans movement, and it’s garish. The images are awful. Whether it’s sterilizing young girls or the autogynephiles like Rachel Levine and Richard Levine in Biden administration cabinet positions, it’s been a purposeful assault on our senses and our spiritual selves. Nonetheless, we are all Americans, and Americans are by nature optimistic. They understand that the rest of the world may look to America as the cavalry coming to save them.
We’re all we have, right? So either we fight or we lose it. While it’s been hard, especially at many times for so many people, we see how people have been feeling and expressing their anxiety, whether on social media or elsewhere. But the American people are not grounded in fantasy. We recognize what’s happening in our country and around the world.
Yet, there’s a great optimism. And this is one of the most important things about the Trump campaign. It wasn’t just about winning; it was a story about light, life, and love, and it was deeply moving. The people who watched what happened here—it’s just such an important time.
I have a child, and though he’s too young to remember most of it, he’ll be able to say, “I was alive for it. I was around then.” It’s one of the great gifts to us as Americans. It’s part of our history. So, yes, it’s been hard. But we’re Americans, and we’re going to fight because this is our thing.
Yeah. Do you think there’s a change happening? I was in Atlanta not long ago, and there was a young Black guy in a car who drove by and yelled, “Trump 2024, baby.” You know, we went from this being the ultimate stigma—you never saw people in inner-city areas wearing MAGA hats—and now you just might. Do you think there’s a shift going on?
A lot of Americans have lived through the reality of the last few years—the different things that have happened. It’s been very hard, though many people have ignored things like the fact that our borders have been open, crime rates across the country have spiked, American wages have been suppressed, and American taxpayers have been burdened with paying for services for non-citizens.
So, yes, I think Americans are responsive to reality and are saying, “I don’t get it. This is so terrible. This is so bad. They’re trying to lock us down again and make us take this vaccine. I don’t want to take the vaccine. I don’t even get a flu shot. Why should I have to do this? It doesn’t look that bad. I know some people who’ve gotten sick, and I might even know some distant friends or relatives who’ve died, but no, I’m not going to take it.” So, I think that, again, not every American has responded this way, but we all know what’s been going on. The idea that Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk have joined forces with him to say, “You don’t have to live this way. You can live another way.”
Look, what is MAGA fundamentally? MAGA is a movement, I guess, but it’s fundamentally just a bunch of people saying, “I just want to live a normal American life. I want to live like my parents did, like my grandparents did.” By that, we all mean working hard, doing everything we can for our children, and wanting this beautiful country that has provided so much for us— and that we’ve contributed to—to be there for our children too. This is what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents wanted. That’s what MAGA is. It’s not a right-wing movement, it’s not fascist, and it’s not white nationalist.
So, the idea that so many people have caught on to that now, like the African-American cat you’re talking about waving out of his car saying, “Trump 2024,” okay, he gets it. He sees what’s happening in Atlanta or elsewhere. Yeah, I think more people are probably more comfortable now saying, “Wait a minute, I don’t think that what Donald Trump is saying is so crazy. Alright, he’s a New Yorker, and I don’t like the way a lot of New Yorkers put things. But I feel that way about all New Yorkers. I don’t like the way he said different things to different people, but when he’s talking about hard facts, yeah, that totally makes sense to me.”
So yeah, I think many people are coming to their senses.
I saw you on The Stone Zone with Roger Stone, and you were talking about how when Republicans go on CNN or MSNBC, it can be a little disappointing. Why do you think it’s a bad idea for Republicans to do that?
Oh, I think it’s ridiculous when they do it because our media environment has changed profoundly. I don’t know if I said this to Roger Stone, but my father was a journalist—he’s retired now—my grandfather, and even my great-grandfather, was in media. My great-grandfather was in charge of typesetting at the New York Daily News.
So, I’ve been in media for a long time and I understand that media is generally a liberal, left-wing pursuit. But that’s not what we’ve seen over the last decade or so. What we’ve seen is something else. We’ve seen that the media is now part of intelligence operations—political operations. Again, that’s very different from just being liberal. These are political operations. That’s what the whole Russia collusion stuff was: a political operation to target Donald Trump. So, what the media is doing now is targeting Trump and his supporters. For Republicans to go on CNN or MSNBC, it’s just legitimizing that.
To legitimize these operations, I think, is a big mistake. Now, I’ve seen other people get on CNN and make a good argument, and maybe there are people listening on MSNBC who say, “Yeah, okay, that’s good. I’ve heard that argument.” Maybe it works for some people. But for me, it’s like, no—let them suffer. Let them all speak to each other and holler at each other in that crazy soundbox that CNN and MSNBC are. Don’t bring on Republicans and legitimize that discourse. That’s what they do. They say, “Oh, we’re fair and balanced. We bring on so-and-so and so-and-so to have this opinion and that opinion.”
They’re not. It’s not about balance or fairness. It’s an operation. And that’s why they bring people on the right—just to hammer them. You see it all the time: senators, congressmen, very nice people, who get on there and just get hammered by whoever it is. It’s like, “Why are you letting me tell my side of the story? Why can’t I talk?”
So yeah, was it important for J.D. Vance to get on CNN? I don’t know. He certainly made Trump’s case well on the campaign, but when do we get to choke them of air and say, “We’re not going to keep you afloat anymore”?
You can just, again, stay in your own crazy sandbox and scream at each other, and that’s it. We’re not part of it. It’s very important for our people and our side to understand what’s happening in the world. If people want to see what’s really going on, they should be watching or listening to platforms like Truth Social or X. People who want a better picture of the world, well, not everything’s going to be accurate, so they’ll need to do some work to figure out what’s happening. But if you’re going to stay over there and think that’s the truth, forget it.
Was there an interview you did for Disappearing the President that was the most memorable to you?
Well, you know, I spoke with the president, President Trump, and the book opens with an interview with President Trump. Yeah, I mean, he’s just an impressive person. He’s very kind, very generous, and very funny, too. You know, he’s kind of making jokes, sometimes at your expense, but it’s fun.
I’ve interviewed him before, I’ve met him before, and I just get a huge thrill out of it. And I think about how he is in those rallies in front of thousands or tens of thousands of people. His relationship with other Americans is so warm, and his connection with them really comes across. I just think, yeah, I’m so lucky to be here. There are millions of people who would love to sit and ask the president a question or two, hear him explain, and just experience the things he does. I went to Mar-a-Lago, and it was during the Masters. He was just watching the Masters, talking about Tiger and other golfers. It was just funny. He’s like, “Oh, Tiger, he’s just great. He’s terrific.”
So, yeah, I mean, that’s definitely the most memorable. Anyone who gets that interview with Donald Trump has a lot of fun and remembers the experience.
I bet. The way that the left talks about January 6th, it almost seems like it’s a religious holiday for them. And I think they’re afraid of losing that. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Well, remember that even before Joe Biden dropped out of the campaign and was replaced by Kamala Harris, at the core of that campaign was defending democracy. That only Joe Biden could protect democracy from Donald Trump and Donald Trump’s supporters. And of course, the campaign concluded nearly when Joe Biden said Trump supporters are garbage. So there’s this idea that there was a scary core out here, half of America in fact, that did not follow, that was not really convinced by democracy. They’re not really Democrats, and they were led by Donald Trump, who they compared to Hitler, a fascist, a dictator, a tyrant, all these different things.
So January 6th, a lot of it is just hysterical and crazy. But in a very real sense, January 6th represents the core of that regime’s legitimacy. Right? Because without January 6th, again, and I think that January 6th was a demonstration that turned violent in parts, and the people who broke the law, whether they committed felonies or misdemeanors should be prosecuted, but that’s not what happened with January 6th.
The prosecutors turned this around, and they were going after non-violent protesters, and they were getting terrorism enhancements. So it’s terrible what they’ve done. But January 6th is important to them to show that… or because it’s the only piece of evidence they ever had that Donald Trump or his supporters ever encouraged violence.
And of course, remember, this is in contrast to the George Floyd riots of the spring and summer of 2020, which, you know, 19 people were left dead then, caused billions of dollars worth of damage across the country in 600 different protests around America.
So to show that Trump was, you know, dangerous, they had to keep asserting that January 6th represented something deadly for democracy. So that’s what I mean when I say that January 6th is really the core of the regime’s legitimacy, that regime’s legitimacy. That’s why they had to keep pushing it. That’s why they had to keep emphasizing it. And that’s one of the reasons why these prosecutions have been so insane.
The main reason for that, of course, is to punish Donald Trump supporters, to punish opponents of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. So it’s very upsetting. But again, we’ve seen that the left has done this repeatedly over the Trump years. We started off with Russiagate. Russiagate was this information operation, a political prop that posited the nonsensical narrative that Donald Trump had been compromised by Vladimir Putin himself. That was the point of the dossier, that Vladimir Putin himself was overseeing the Donald Trump compromise.
t was garbage, but that’s what they had to do. Donald Trump had to be portrayed as fundamentally anti-American, un-American, and not a part of our thing. But look at what they mean by American. It’s tragic. What they mean by American is opening our borders, monetizing the trans movement, which involves the sterilization and maiming of children.
To prop up their beliefs, Donald Trump had to be depicted as something entirely alien to the country. Hence, January 6th became the only thing the regime’s legitimacy rested on for years. We certainly hope the January 6th defendants, who faced horrible enhancements, will be released. Remember what happened after the George Floyd riots—almost none of those people were prosecuted. And many times, people who protest at the Capitol are not prosecuted and often do much worse than the January 6th defendants.
God willing, all these people will be able to go home, and I believe they are owed restitution. We’ll see.
I don’t necessarily recommend watching the late-night talk show hosts, but one of the things they’ve been saying lately is that we voted against our democracy, which could be a line from a Woody Allen movie or something. What do you make of that? And what’s something we can succinctly say to serve as a rebuttal when somebody says something like that?
Yeah, this has been one of the stupidest and most dishonest things that the press and entertainers have done. They all know who Donald Trump was. They’ve known, you know, as I told you, Paul, I grew up in New York City, and I’ve heard Donald Trump’s voice in my ears for, you know, about half a century now. And so, you know, there are plenty of people in New York who didn’t like Donald Trump, thought he was crass, whatever, or thought he was funny or liked him. But everyone’s known, especially in the entertainment capital of the world, in the media capital of the world, New York, they all know who Donald Trump is.
So the idea that eight years ago they turned him into this threat where he’d actually been compromised by Russian intelligence services is absolute garbage. And so now the idea that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, that he’s like Hitler, that he’s a dictator, a fascist, is just preposterous. They know who he is. They’re making up these stupid stories, and they all know better. They should all be ashamed because what they’ve done is they’ve participated in an operation, not just targeting Donald Trump, but targeting the sanity of Americans.
They’ve known that DonaldTrump – they know or they should know. I’m willing to accept the fact that some of these people, some of the entertainers and some of the media are so damaged and so broken. They’ve actually allowed themselves to believe that Donald Trump is really a threat to democracy. But what’s really been hurt is they’re the ones who have hurt our processes. That’s what our democratic processes, right, by accusing Trump of these outrageous things, which are absolutely untrue and grounded in nothing like fact.
Well, for anyone who reads Disappearing the President, is there something you ultimately want them to get out of that experience?
I wanted to tell it like a story so that people, you know, as I find it, you throw facts at people. It’s very hard. It’s very hard to digest and understand.
So I wanted to tell it as a story, unfold and use this part. Here’s that part. Here’s what happened here. Here’s what happened then.
I wanted people to be able to understand what’s happened the last eight years. I wanted people, a lot of people have a general sense of things that have happened, but I wanted to put it all down, record it.
Document it, because, for instance, Russiagate, I mean, tragically, you know, to come back to places like CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they still tell a made-up story about Russiagate, you know, that Donald Trump colluded and trump officials colluded with Vladimir Putin which is garbage. They’re still saying that.
And so look what’s going to happen for the foreseeable future. I mean, this is a great shame for the country, but that in blue cities across America, students will be taught that the 45th, now 47th as well, President of the United States colluded with Russia to become the 45th President. I mean, it’s shameful, but that’s going to be accepted fact in these places.
And so I wanted to get down: what are the real facts? And so that’s what the book is about. And that’s what I want people to come away with, what really happened. Who did what to whom? who’s in charge?
And that’s why it’s so important to attribute leadership of this plot to Barack Obama. And interestingly, I’m not the first one who pointed that out. The first one I pointed out was that man, Donald J. Trump, in a March 2017 tweet when he remarked that, “wow, just found out Obama had my phones wiretapped at Trump Tower.”
And remember, you’ll remember that people made fun of, oh, this wasn’t wiretapped, oh, he’s paranoid, he’s lying, Obama’s… Well, that’s exactly what happened. And this book explains how that happened.
So it was Donald Trump who identified very early who was leading the campaign against us. And it was Barack Obama. It still is Barack Obama.
All of this gives me hope about the legacy media maybe dying.
I mean, people are turning away from it all the time. And this is one of the reasons for the hysteria. This is one of the reasons where you turn on MSNBC and you see four people in boxes hollering.
Right, going further and further, I think Trump is blah blah, I think Trump is X, I think Trump is Y, you know, I mean it’s just madness. There’s no news, there’s no information that’s useful for people. And CNN may appear to be a little more moderate, but it’s the same garbage.
I certainly hope because it’s dangerous for our minds, dangerous for our souls. But also, there’s nothing there that people can use insofar as real information that will help you live your life and understand the world around you or your own country or even your own community.
So in closing here, you are writing about China now?
Well, that’s what my next book will be about. I hope to have that finished very soon, and that will be coming out next year.
I always like to give my guests the stage, so to speak. Very open-ended question for anyone who’s joining us, anyone who’s watching, anyone who’s listening. What would you say to them?
About anything?
Totally open-ended.
“I think they should also be optimistic about what’s happening in America now. I really do feel, walking around my neighborhood and interacting with other people, that people are breathing more easily again and are happy. One of the exciting things with the Trump campaign was what it talked about for the future—here’s what we’re going to set right. What was the Harris campaign about? It was about Trump being blah blah blah, all nonsense—fascist, Hitler.
The Trump campaign was focused on what we’re going to do. Like Elon Musk in the Department of Efficiency, which sounds really good—making government work for the American people like it should. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked about making food healthy again and addressing the unhealthy nature of some pharmaceutical products. People were like, ‘Yeah, okay, that makes sense.’ So really, we’re going to have better food, healthier, tastier food. That sounds great.
Now that we’re at that point and looking at the future that’s been promised, I think a lot of people feel optimistic, ambitious, entrepreneurial. What can I do? What’s my part? I think it’s a fantastic time in America.
How can I join my efforts and energies to all these great things that are happening around me, inspired, amazingly, by this real estate mogul, billionaire, celebrity TV star? I don’t know where it came from, but it’s America. It’s a strange country, and that’s what happens here. So, I’m just going to enjoy it. I think a lot of people feel that way. You never know where your blessings are going to come from, and I think a lot of Americans feel blessed right now.
I know, by the way, I feel blessed to have gotten to know you over the last couple of weeks, Paul. That’s been very nice.
Well, thank you.
That’s very kind. I feel blessed to be able to interview you and get to know you like this. I should say, the word that has been going around in my head the most these days is ‘blessed.’
Yeah that’s nice.
It’s a good feeling and it’s a good thing to focus on. Lee Smith.
Thank you, Paul.
Thank you so much.
