To the newsmakers podcast, I'm Billie Hollowell, and this is a show where we go behind the headlines every day to bring you an interview with a pastor, entertainer, politician, or other notable news figure. And this is a show, again, it's daily, but it's based on our weekly TV show, which is also called Newsmakers. You can watch it on the CBN News channel and also on our YouTube page. And on this show, every day, we dive deep. It's a little more longer form with one of the people who you will often see on our Newsmakers show or across the CBN News platforms. On today's Newsmakers, Mike Huckabee joins the show to talk Trump, politics, and plenty more. Here is Mike Huckabee. So Governor Huckabee, lots to talk with you about today. I want to, I want to start with the current political dynamic in America. This is a very general question, but you have been around the block on all of this, both in politics, commenting on politics, in government. What do you make of our current situation right now in America politically? Well, it's very polarized, I think, to say the least, Billie, and I've never seen it quite so filled with rancor and contentiousness. But part of that is because people feel very passionately about their beliefs, their country. And we have a divided country because, quite frankly, we have a very divided country. And what we have is a divide between those who want to lean toward socialism, where the government gets stronger and bigger, where many people think the government is God. And then there are still many of us who believe that, no, the government is at best a tool of God, but it needs to be in the hands of people of integrity, people who will use it fairly and justly. But it should never become our God, and we should always remember that freedom individually and corporately as a country is the foundation of America and without it, we become an all-so-ran. So part of the passions that we see are passionate feelings that come from what is now a big divide. And let me just add this. It used to be that Republicans and Democrats, we would call them the "maybe the right of the left," but they weren't that far apart. You had Democrats who leaned left of center, you had Republicans who leaned right of center, you had somebody leaned far more to the left of right. But overall, even the political parties, they weren't so far apart that they couldn't find some common ground. We're living in a time now where it's hard to find common ground with people who believe that we're an evil country, who believe that we're a racist, who believe that America was built on stealing land from people to whom it belonged, and therefore we should give it back. When you have that much of a fundamental difference, it's really hard to find common ground and find that sort of center of governing. Well, yeah, and you have the social issues, right? You have abortion, which has always been there, but I think those fissures have gotten deeper because with, you know, with Roe being overturned, with Dobbs, you have that, you have the gender issue. There's so much going on right now where these are deep divides that are not easily healed or agreed upon on even those big social issues as well. You know, when you look at Donald Trump, and obviously you've been a supporter of President Donald Trump, when you look at him and the dynamic around him, what do you make of it? Because he's a very uncommon candidate and individual in so many ways. Just talk about, talk about that a little bit because that dynamic is intriguing. Well, Billy, that's an understatement in saying that he is unlike any we've ever had. The best way to say that Donald Trump is he defies all sense of gravity in the political realm. And he does. He does things that most of us would scratch our heads and say, "Well, that won't work, but it does for him." It wouldn't for me. There are many things that he has done that he has said. I couldn't do it. I couldn't say it. And most of us who have engaged in the political realm for a long time, and part of the reason it wouldn't work for us is because it wouldn't be authentic. With him, it is authentic. He's a very different kind of person, comes from a totally different background, sees the world differently than most of us. I tell people all the time, because people say, "How can you support Donald Trump? You know, there are times he can be vain, he can be vulgar, he can be all these things." I said, "Okay, I get it. I understand. I've always said to people, Donald Trump is probably not the guy you're going to be sitting on the front row of church with this coming Sunday. When I introduced him back in 2016 to a packed house at the Marriott Marquis in New York, Ben Carson and I hosted an event for Donald Trump, pastors and most of the evangelical leaders across the country had come to kind of see, because it was at this point evident he's the nominee. So how can evangelical people support him? My introduction of him with him sitting six feet away from me was this, "Folks, Donald Trump is not one of us. Let's not pretend that he is, because he isn't." And I said, "The truth is," again, I said this with him sitting there. I said, "I'm not sure he could find John 3 16 in a Mark New Testament." I said, "But we are not electing him to be our pastor, our our priest, our rabbi. What we are looking for is someone who believes in religious liberty, freedom of speech, and whose attitude toward those of us who are evangelical Christians is, just leave us alone. Let us be who we are. Don't have the government come in and tell us that we're terrorists because we happen to believe in the right to life and think that the sanctity of human life is something that is from above." So that's how I have and continue to approach it, but I've also found that there are things about Donald Trump's presidency that exceed any of my expectations. I'll give you a couple of examples. He has been the most pro-life president in all of American history, surpassing Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, any other Republican, Democrat for that matter. Nobody has been more pro-life than he has in his policies. Nobody has been more pro-Israel than Donald Trump and who didn't just talk about it but actually carried out policies that showed the relationship between the United States and Israel. I could go through others. The economic policies certainly have been beneficial to most Americans. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of Hispanics and black voters say, "I'm going to vote for Trump," because they look at the difference. But quite frankly, as much as I care about those issues, those are not the issues to me that will transform America. What should the tax rate be on people to make $500,000 a year? I have an opinion on that. I believe in the fair tax, which is a tax on consumption rather than income. So I can go into all of that. But besides that, it is not the tax rate that causes me to want to support one candidate over another as much as it is. Because he believed in the Constitution of the United States, and in believing that, free speech, freedom of religion, free right to assembly, right to criticize the government without fear of the government coming against this. And over the past four years, what we've seen is a very heavy-headed government that does go after Christians, pro-life people, Christian organizations, Christian schools, and not just go after them from the sense of saying, "We're going to threaten you with maybe losing your tax exemption." No, we're talking about people who are going to prison because they protested at an abortion clinic. And we're not talking about people who committed violent acts or blew up an abortion clinic. We're talking about people who sang and prayed, and some of them are going to go to prison for 11 or 12 years over that. That's a serious transition in this country. Yeah, I mean, these are issues too we've talked about for years, right? These First Amendment issues, the fear that these things were sort of coming, and now you have a law, it's not just one or two anecdotal. You have a number of examples of these things happening, even the Supreme Court battles. I mean, you look at Joe Kennedy going all the way to the Supreme Court with his battle to prey on the 50-yard line. I mean, it's insane almost that that case went that far. And I think we're going to see more of that. What is your biggest worry, you know, let's say November comes and Trump doesn't win from your perspective. What is your biggest fear if he does not win? If he does not win. Well, I think what we're going to see is an accelerated effort on the part of the government to go after those of us that have been the targets already. A mother goes to a school board and protests that their child is being subjected to pornography in the classroom with textbooks and library books that are genuinely obscene. And so obscene, in fact, Billy, that they can't be read in the school board meeting. I mean, you know, they shut them down saying, you can't say those things, but they're saying in the classroom. So if that mother is labeled a domestic terrorist because she spoke up at a school board meeting and that's already happening, what happens in the next four years when a government thinks that it now has unbridled right to go after all of its political enemies? What happens to people who dare oppose the government, whether it's in an election process? Are they going to be prosecuted as we're watching Donald Trump get prosecuted for things that you scratch your head and say, these aren't even crimes. This is absurd. That's like Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams and Nancy Pelosi all questioned the 2016 election. They said Donald Trump was not the legitimate president. Nobody prosecuted them for that. Donald Trump is being prosecuted because he dared question the election results of 2020 and quite frankly, with good cause. What happens in the next four years, I think, is disturbing. The courtroom then becomes the new public forum, and that's where we're going to find increasing numbers of pro-life people, Christian people, pro-Israel people, pro-freedom people, finding themselves taken in chains. When I say that, Billy, I don't mean it figuratively. I've talked to some people just recently. Peter Baker, who is a reporter for the blaze, was taken in shackles across the federal courthouse lawn in Dallas, Peter Navarro, former White House economic advisor to President Trump, was arrested at the door of an airplane in Washington. He was on his way to Nashville to be on my television show. They waited until he got to the door of the plane. Then they put him in handcuffs later in the leg shackles and made him sit in the jail cell all afternoon. Now he is in prison. He is in federal prison right now. What did he do? Well, he believed that under executive privilege, he shouldn't be telling personal conversations that he had with the president, because he didn't think that that was in keeping with the separation of power, so he refused to tell Congress about private conversations in the executive branch. I think he's right. I think most legal, true constitutionalists would agree that you can't somehow violate that executive privilege, but it was violated by Congress. They held him in contempt, and now he's in prison. Here's what I don't find at all consistent. You have people on the left, whether it's Alexandro New Yorkis, he was in contempt of Congress. He's not in prison. He's still getting a federal paycheck every week. How come it's only one side that ends up getting in serious trouble for thumbing their nose at Congress, and that's what's happening? It will only accelerate and get to the point that it will be disturbing, and I think what the ultimate goal is is not just to put a few people in prison, but by doing that, silencing the rest of us and causing us to be afraid to speak up, speak out, and to take a stand for righteousness, for biblical issues, for us to say that boys and girls are the two genders, and that's the way God made us, and that's all there are is two genders. How many people are willing to do it in prison for stating that? Could that happen? You better believe it could. There's definitely a move to restrict speech, and I think we see this again and again and again. Even the Harrison-Butker situation, people putting together a petition. 227,000 people to sign this petition is wild to me, to have somebody fired from their job over something you didn't like that they said. This is sort of the culture we're in right now, and all this leads me to Huckabee Live because your relationship with TVN, you're expanding that, you're speaking here about these issues, you're going to be doing that a lot more. Talk a little bit about how you will not be silenced, how you're going to be speaking out in the days and weeks and months to come. Well thank you, Billy. I hope I'm not going to be silenced. It won't be by TVN. They've been very, very wonderful in giving me an extraordinary platform. For the past six and a half years, going on seven, I've done a weekly television show. We do it in Nashville before a live audience in a dedicated theater and it's just been a fantastic experience, I've enjoyed it. But starting this week, starting June the third Monday, I'm going to be doing a new television show every weeknight, 6.30 central, and that show will be called Huckabee Today. It won't be in a big theater, it won't be with a live audience. It'll be more of what I would call a traditional kind of current event talk format. I'll have guests, I'll be giving commentary on the news of the day. The guests that I have, I'll give them really more time, we'll open up a conversation, give it more breathing room, and we'll talk about the key issues of the day. But I want to talk about them from two perspectives, one, the big picture. I don't want to just hammer home, okay, today in the news there was this one, two, three thing that happened in Washington. I want to talk about what does it mean to you sitting at your kitchen table having dinner tonight. And the second thing, I want to focus on solutions. How do we fix this? What are some ways that as an individual citizen of the United States of America, what are some ways that I personally can help to move this country in a positive direction? So those are the, what I call the two fundamental things that I'm going to focus on. Well that, that is incredibly exciting. People will be able to catch you there daily. I appreciate you taking the time today to break down some of these big issues and looking forward to having you back again very soon. It's been a pleasure always an honor to be with you. Thank you very much for having me today. That's all for today's Newsmakers podcast. Be sure to tune in for the next episode of the show and also head over to the CBN News YouTube channel and the CBN News channel to watch Newsmakers every week. We'll see you soon. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
