Roger Stone | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union

[Music] [Music] thank you very much I can't wait to hear what I have to say it is a great privilege for me to be with you here at the historic Oxford Union where you are committed to debate and free speech something that is lacking in the United States these days I salute you and I am deeply gratified and grateful for your invitation I am reminded of course of the four stages of Fame those being who is Roger stone get me Roger stone who is Roger stone pardon me get me a Roger stone type who is Roger stone it is been my pleasure to work for four American presidents to be involved in ten presidential campaigns one of them for a Libertarian Party candidate governor Gary Johnson the others for presidents Richard Nixon Ronald Reagan my great friend and that great Patriot Senator Bob Dole George Herbert Walker Bush of which I had some regret and of course Donald Trump but I must say that the 2016 election was an election in which all of those things that I thought were absolutely necessary and true about American politics about modern politics in the age of mass communications all proved not to be true or at least to be suspended at least for the time of this most recent election Donald Trump was successfully elected president without benefit of sophisticated professional polling focus groups message testing hundreds of millions of dollars of paid broadcast advertising he was a candidate who operated solely and completely on the basis of his instincts on the basis of his gut he had no speech writers he had no press secretary he had no one preparing talking points for him he is very much his own man there is no Karl Rove in Trump land there never has been and I suspect there never will be certainly not Roger stone and most definitely not Steve Danon yet despite the fact that he was massively outspent very hard to get precise numbers because of the intersection of hard and soft money but a reasonable estimate would be that the forces supporting his opponent Hillary Clinton spent somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion dollars perhaps a bit more those supporting the election of Donald Trump although not down from himself spent about two hundred and thirty seven million dollars additionally I would make a case to you that the old media and the new media were both actively working against his election the old media which I define is the three US based television networks and then kind of later the two cable news networks while they certainly gave him a disproportionate amount of coverage during the primaries they did that not to boost Donald Trump but because somebody this free willing somebody this ones did is interesting and being interesting in politics is the most important thing the only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring and Donald Trump as a candidate was never boring and that drove ratings and ratings drove their ability to charge more for their commercial advertising but I would also argue that in the general election phase of the campaign that coverage turned a net largely negative I would also make a case to you that the new media was rigged against him in the sense that for example at Google when the Trump campaign put out a press release it was marked as promotion but when the Hillary Clinton campaign put out a press release it was marked as update that is the difference between literally millions of people reading it and others not and that's just one example of the bias I'll talk a little more about that later so I think it would be a mistake to view his election solely as the rise of an interesting and flamboyant populist I think far more than that it was a rejection of a two-party duopoly who although they endeavored to sound different at election time really were bringing the country one set of policies the Republicans and the Democrats the elites of both parties working together the bushes and the Clintons whose policies in truth were largely indistinguishable brought us endless foreign war where our inherent national interests were never clear the erosion of our civil liberties the reading of our emails the reading of our text messages the monitoring of our phone calls the collection of metadata on Americans in violation the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution borrowing and spending in debt that my grandsons children will end up paying for immigration policies that are unfair that that do not reward those who wait their turn and go through the process that have rendered some of our neighborhoods and streets unsafe international trade policies that we were promised by both the bushes and the Clintons were the economic panacea which instead saw the jobs out of America as a populist independent candidate Ross Perot once said and economic policies that brought us devastation of our central part of our country leaving the Rust Belt destitute these are the policies of the Republicans and the Democrats working together these are the policies of the political elites these are the policies of the bushes in the Clintons so how for example could Barack Obama promised us that gun kwant animaux would be closed but it's still open why could they promise us that the war in Afghanistan would be ended but it's still going on why did we marched off to war in Iraq where our inherent national interest was never clear why did those Wars have the bipartisan support of the elites of both parties I believe Donald Trump's an election was a rejection of all of that now I also having worked for a number of presidents and spent some time in Washington recognize that when the establishment cannot defeat you they first try to discredit you when they can't do that they seek to co-opt you yes I am disappointed that we are still in Afghanistan yes I think sending more troops as we have done the large troop deployment today is an era yes I do not think Donald Trump can accomplish everything in one year but it is interesting to me that that we were told that if he was elected our stock market would collapse our economy would go into deep recession under this president we have created almost two million new jobs the stock market has roared to unprecedented levels unemployment has hit all-time lows african-american unemployment one of the most intractable problems in the country is that the longest period ever yes I want to see his plan to rebuild our urban centers he promised us to it in the campaign but he's only been president for one year and now you have multinational corporations who had left repatriating money back to the United States coming back to the United States companies like Apple hardly Trump supporters announcing that their repatriating 250 million dollars and they're going to spend three hundred and fifty billion dollars in a us-based expansion Ford and others by any stretch of the imagination the president has had a successful first year now the reaction to his election is is something that is worth looking at first there was an argument that his election should be overturned by the electoral college and mr. Podesta the manager of Hillary Clinton's campaign a man who spent 2 billion dollars to get his brains beat in suggested the electoral college should be briefed on the Russian collusion well it would have been a very short briefing because so far the claim of Russian collusion has to be a delusion there yet despite the fact that we've had multi-million dollar taxpayer financed investigations by the House and the Senate we do not have any evidence of any effective action of anybody in the Trump campaign or the Trump family or Trump associates who successfully coordinated or colluded or conspired with the Russian state we do know that the handful of aides around Hillary Clinton made millions of dollars from the oligarchs around Latimer Putin there's the gas deal the uranium deal which you may have heard of the banking deal and so on and the president has the intractable opposition of what we call the deep state now some people say well Stone you're a conspiracy theorist for example you said that maybe Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill Kennedy and didn't act alone well perhaps we learned in the documents just released that the government has lied from the beginning about their knowledge of mr. Oswald where he came from and his various movements I wrote a book about this which is a New York Times bestseller no I am NOT a conspiracy theorist I'm a conspiracy realist I say we go where the facts take us now there's also up the second phase of the opposition to trump since the Russian collusion delusion has essentially collapsed down around their ears you may have seen some of the seeds of this I suspect you'll hear more of it the president's crazy he's out of his mind he's non compos mentis he's not able to discharge his duties I've known him almost 40 years he's the same person he's ever been is he eccentric most definitely so was Franklin Roosevelt so was Theodore Roosevelt go back and read what they said about Teddy an egomaniac a lightweight a braggart one of our greatest presidents Lincoln was considered to be eccentric slept in a bed with a man all of our presidents have changed the presidency within their own image Trump has a unique style is not a cookie cutter blow-dried polling fueled career politician he's a force of nature he is a natural phenomena he has his own leadership style if that style gets you 200 more points in the stock market and 2 million new jobs well I like it but the seeds of this entire narrative that the president is mentally unbalanced I believe be manifestly untrue based on all evidence both anecdotal personal and now medical is based on a 25th amendment strategy being promulgated by some that he be removed now this is based on the intractable opposition as I said of the deep state Dwight Eisenhower called them the military-industrial complex how can it be that Robert Gates would be a cabinet member and Secretary of Defense for both George Bush and Barack Obama if their policies are so different why is as I said earlier Guantanamo still open why do we have the same people at the second and third levels of the Central Intelligence Agency now that we had under the two previous presidents no it's very simple and I can explain it to you you see Hillary Clinton promised these folks an expansion of a proxy war in Syria I'm sorry but I see no winners in Syria Assad propped up propping up Hezbollah Hamas and being propped up by the Russians is certainly no friend of ours or of human rights Isis on the other side propped up by the Saudis whose involvement in 9/11 is the subject of legislation in which they don't want to be sued they're not our friends you have a hundred or more small subs ax X of terrorist fanatics no I'm sorry this is not worth one drop of American blood not one borrowed American dollar we have seen graphically in Libya what happens when you topple a regime with American bomber planes without thinking through the implications if you can look at the videos of the slave markets in which African Americans are being sold as slaves well they are chilling to say the least so the intractable opposition to Trump is based in many cases because of his unwillingness to expand the war Trump was not only the law and order candidate from a rhetorical point of view certainly but he was also the peace candidate does he have any illusions about the evil of the Russian system does he think vitomir Putin is a good guy absolutely not but when the other folks in the world such as the Russians have thermonuclear weapons a dialog with them is probably a good idea a war over Syria which is much closer geographically if one will look at a map is probably not a good idea because our inherent national interests there are not clear and now what you have going on before our very eyes is the beginning of the collapse of an illegitimate effort to reverse what they could not do in the 2016 election we now know almost certainly and will certainly get more information shortly that the entire claim of Russian collusion and the unconstitutional and illegal surveillance of the Republican candidate for president and his top associates including yours truly is based on a lie it is based on a fabrication a dossier that is not based in truth because Donald Trump did not daily with prostitutes and watch them urinate on a bed in Russia it didn't happen but that document you've got to give those guys at fusion GPS credit they sold the same information three times the three different buyers first the Republicans Paul singer the hedge fund manager Marco Rubio his candidate for president and then Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee and finally sadly incredibly the FBI and it is that document under which this administration the previous administration went to the FISA Court and asked for permission to surveil Trump and his associates and in July of last year they they were stunned when initially their request was rejected now it's important to understand that under the FISA Court rules there need be no probable cause the government doesn't say we want to spy on John Smith because we have evidence that he's involved in treason or we could believe he's involved in corruption they can spy on you simply because they want to and ninety-nine percent of the government requests that go to the FISA Court are rubber-stamped and the surveillance is undertaken we now know that the highest level officials in the Obama NSA would back to the FISA Court to a different judge never acknowledged to the second judge that the previous judge had turned down their request because these proceedings are all secret and they got illegitimate permission to surveil Trump on the basis of fake evidence of the dossier this I think will be proven shortly so what you had was a collusion by the highest levels of the intelligence community in the United States interested in an expansion of the war in Syria convinced that had they had a choice between Hillary Clinton and say Jeb Bush that that expended proxy war would have been in the bag desperate to dislodge this president who they're shocked one to begin with this is a coup d'etat and the idea having failed with their Russian argument as I said is a 25th amendment proceeding now now how does the 25th amendment work well you would need a majority of the president's cabinet and the vice president to agree that the president is no longer mentally capable of discharging his or her duties and then the president would have under the Constitution the right to take that to either result either leave office or to appeal it an appeal that goes to the US House of Representatives under the control of speaker Paul Ryan such a strategy may sound far-fetched to some but it cannot work without a backdrop of hysteria built up by the folks at oh I don't know CNN that the president is mentally unbalanced and it will be the next phase of the efforts to dislodge this president who threatens business as usual but a more chilling aspect of what we see going on in direct contrast to the tradition of debate and free speech here at the a union is an effort to put the toothpaste back in the tube because as I say 2016 was the year in which the mainstream media lost their monopoly stranglehold on political dissemination of political information and the the attention of the internet opened the door to a broader and less controllable means pardon me alternative media left right and center so now what you see is an effort to censor those on the Internet left Google Facebook Twitter Amazon this I think flies exactly in the face of American tradition if you're going to be the town square well then everybody has to have access to the town square I'm opposed to censorship of any voice right left and center it doesn't matter where you are the wackiest far-out leftist or whether you are a right-wing nut you ought to have a chance to speak and be heard I am one who has been banned for life at Twitter I like to sue them but they may be out of business before I can get there is it coincidental then that they shut off the president's Twitter feed for 11 minutes was it coincidental that the journalist Julian Assange is Twitter feed went down and suddenly popped back up more recently was it an accident to somebody spill coke on the keyboard and that's what made Sean Hannity's Twitter feed disappear or are they playing games with us they have First Amendment responsibilities they have what I would consider to be antitrust responsibilities and then they have the other problem which is people who want to have a robust dialogue will pick up and go elsewhere they'll go to other net alternatives where you can have a dialogue one of the things that I think is most interesting that we have just gone through is a fight in our country over net neutrality almost everything you've been told about this is wrong yes we had net neutrality under Barack Obama for the providers Comcast AT&T Verizon they had to give equal access to everybody but never for the content providers they can defame you they can block you they can ignore you and they can censor you they can literally erase you from history and they were unfettered true net neutrality requires that everyone have an equal voice and the new rules will lend themselves to that now we have mr. Pompeo the CIA director saying well the Russians are going to interfere in the 2018 election having been able to produce no evidence whatsoever that they interfered in any meaningful way in the 2016 elections I wonder on what he bases this information now some of you may not know but I'm being sued in the District of Columbia courts by a group named project democracy which is a front group for the Barack Obama folks and Obama based group and the nature of their allegation against me is that I worked with the Russians to hack the Democratic National Committee's emails and give the information to WikiLeaks not only is there no evidence of any of that none of it is true there will be very hard-pressed to prove it in court if we get that far but what interests me is this most recent week president's lawyers filed a motion in court in essence saying that given the New York Times versus United States case the famous Pentagon Papers case the publication of classified information by a journalistic organization is not a crime that's what journalists do if you're going to bust Julian Assange well then you've got to bust the New York Times and The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and many others who have had enormous scoops by obtaining from sources from whistleblowers classified government information and publishing it it is the role of a free press it may be inconvenient it may be embarrassing to the government but it is most definitely not illegal but how can it be that Donald Trump was being sued whose campaign is being sued along with me in this courtroom his lawyers assert to the court that there is no violation of the law and therefore there can be no conspiracy if the you can't conspire to to commit a crime at the same time mr. Pompeo and mr. sessions the attorney general are arguing that a son should be extradited to the United States and tried for the crime of publishing classified information no you cannot have it both ways assertions that I knew in advance that Julian Assange would publish Hillary Clinton's emails are false other than to say I can read and he said it in a dozen interviews and I did retweet what he said the idea that I had advance knowledge for example of John Podesta is email I never said that but I did read the Panama papers in January of 2016 outlining his shady business dealings in Eastern Europe including Russia and I did say that his time in the barrel would come meaning those would come under public scrutiny as the business dealings of my longtime associate Paul Manafort did so there is no evidence whatsoever on the other hand this lawsuit is a great fundraising device for these folks which is why I think it is alive on perhaps a fishing expedition which will lead exactly nowhere the point I guess is to bring it all back is to say that censorship is the last step in this effort to discredit and destabilize a president who is revitalizing the American economy I don't think the 25th amendment narrative will work I don't think in the end that censorship will work because free men and free women like free speech I don't think the toothpaste will be put back into the tube we like our Twitter feed or our Facebook posts or our presence on gab or mines or any other number of coming social media outlets gone are the days when if the three networks said something didn't happen or they just didn't cover it well it didn't happen then it was like a tree falling in the forest no I think we're going to have a robust debate and I'm ready to have it and now I am more than happy to take any and all of your questions thank you well thank you so much and that incredibly thought-provoking speech just before we open it up to questions from the audience I'll ask a couple of questions myself if that's okay so you're known for saying that it's better to be infamous than never be famous it's all in the current era of social media and hashtags where a reputation really is permanent do you think there's ever a time when this wouldn't be the case I think they didn't you're fast-paced mass media of today in which cable television alone brings you hundreds of stations where there are magazines about every single discipline whether it's go-karts or crochet that there is an enormous competition for our attention if you cannot be interesting if you cannot be flamboyant if you cannot be plunging then you won't be noticed at all and you can have no impact whatsoever if you're not entertaining if you're not engaging I'm mindful of the criticism of my good friend Alex Jones I don't agree with Alex on everything and he certainly doesn't agree with me but he's not an actor he's a true believer and he uses drama and sarcasm and a parody to make his point and the fact that he uses them allows him to get literally millions of viewers there are more people watching him online without the expensive overhead of a cable news network than some of the very best names in cable and is about having an audience if you want to have an impact so have I had an occasional shall we say three martini tweet that I regret yeah probably but on the whole I think as I said earlier the only thing worse than being wrong is being boring fair enough okay so those who've watched in that fix documentary get me Roger stone will know that you have a tattoo of Nixon on your back I do which you've said remind you of his resilience what do you think the American people today and people around the world today actually can learn from Nixon well I I still continue to believe that Nixon was both very great and very flawed he got us a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Russians he ended the war in Vietnam and a much faster pace than the Pentagon wanted he opened the door to China but more importantly then skillfully played the Chinese and the Russians off against each other in the interests of peace he desegregated the public schools in the United States without bloodshed or violence no was not Lyndon Johnson nor his predecessor John F Kennedy he launched the war on cancer he desegregated the the trade unions he gave us federal revenue sharing whereas our tax dollars rather than being spent in Washington would be refunded back to the local levels for local governments to fund he also launched the ignominious completely failed and racist war on drugs he also closed the gold window and took us off the gold standard he also gave us wage and price controls there among his most egregious mistakes he was not a man with a fixed ideology he had some issues on which his views would be considered to be to the left he had other issues on which his views could be considered to be to the right he had an uncanny ability to sound like a conservative when it was time to get nominated he had the ability to sound like a centrist when it was time to get elected the 1958 Civil Rights Act the first major piece of civil rights legislation in our country would not have passed had Richard Nixon not gone out and rounded up a few Republican vote at the request of dr. Martin Luther King he tripled the amount of money we spend on black colleges he he increased by 700 percent the amount the Department of Justice spent for civil rights law enforcement but in that crucial moment in which dr. King was arrested in Alabama in 1960 when he was suggested that he call the judge and call mrs. King he failed to do so in the great John F Kennedy who I also believe was a very great president for different reasons did make that call and history turned out to be quite different because of it but the point to come back to Nixon is that what I admired in him and he was in this very room almost 20 years ago I listened to every word of it in preparation for tonight was not an ideology or a political philosophy in fact the fact that he is on my back a tattoo about the size of a grapefruit right between my shoulder blades making me the only man you know with a dick on the front and the back is a personal reminder every day when I get up that in life when things don't go your way when you lose something you were counting on winning when your plans collapse and you are defeated when you are disappointed and dejected and you hit a low you have an obligation to get yourself up off the ground can get back in the fight the story of Nixon is one of persistence it's one of resilience it's one of indestructibility he did great things he made great mistakes but he never quit a man he said is not finished when he is defeated he is only finished when he quits thank you and say moving on from the politics of the past the politics of today at the start of your speech tonight he pointed out false claims that have been made by former presidents what do you make of Trump's claim that he will build a wall well I think you well I think he will build a wall the wall has become symbolically far more important than the actual wall itself but he believes and I agree if you do not have a border you do not have a country just the enforcement of our current immigration laws just the enforcement of our current border laws have cut illegal immigration across our southern border by almost 70 almost 80 percent seventy eight percent prior to that we were just not enforcing the law we do need comprehensive immigration reform we do need to figure out a way that those who have been waiting their turn those who have been going through the steps are not cheated by those who seek to run ahead of them but this wall will be built in my opinion I think that one of the things about him that is surprising conventional Washington is the notion that actually does what he says he's going to do it's kind of unheard of in politics many times politicians of both parties make all kinds of terrific claims but then nothing really changes things stay pretty much the same Trump is not like that and I think people will hold him to that standard therefore I believe the wall will ultimately be paid for and built I am one unlike say my friend Ann Coulter who would work out something for on the daca issue in return for greater border security and an end to chain migration and other immigration reforms politics is at its best about compromise and public policy we have reached a point in Washington where people say they want to make a deal say they're interested in some kind of trade off but they really aren't I'm still hopeful that that can be done thank you so one final question for me before we open up to the audience you've recently claimed that you want Hulk Hogan to run for US Senate in Florida is that true and on the flip side how do you feel about liberals lobbying April Winfrey to run for president well as I said in my remarks I think that any time a candidate can come to a race for public office from a discipline other than politics whether it's entertainment in the case of Hulk Hogan because what he is is an entertainer I can think of two other entertainers who'd become president one was Ronald Reagan the other one of course was Donald Trump Trump had 15 seasons of a network television show and that network television show not only drove his identification but if you come back and think about it look at the way he looks in The Apprentice perfectly lit perfectly coiffed high back chair being decisive now I know elitist will say oh that's reality TV a lot of folks I know look at the news and they don't think that's reality TV they just see it all seamlessly as information Trump was in the beauty pageant business he was in the television business he was even in the wrestling promotion business so he too was an entertainer now I don't know whether Hulk Hogan whose real name is Terry Bollea who is a registered Republican lives in my home state of Florida has any interest in running for public office but I did see an interview with him on TMZ and when they said to him well this fellow Roger stone thinks she should run for the Senate are you interested his answer was won't he tell you this if I ran I would win that's a guy with the future and just going back to the second question then how do you feel about April Winfrey look Oprah has enormous national name ID and she has a following and there are many many Americans who admire her at the same time her perspective candidacy at this point would be at my point in my view at a high-water mark she has come under no criticism for the things that she has said and done that and that is part and parcel of a campaign I continue to believe and I'll say it here yet again today that Michelle Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2020 that she'll be a very formidable and viable and tough candidate that she and her husband are far more popular in the Democratic Party and have a much greater hold on the US Democratic Party than the Clintons and if she should become a candidate I think she would be their frontrunner thank you okay I think now is the perfect time to open up to some questions from the audience so if you have a question that you'd like to ask my sustained please raise your hand and wait to be selected and could we go to the question just over here Thanks thanks for coming I just want to ask Brett something you just said in that last question you mentioned as entertainers Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan but Reagan of course was the Governor of California before he was the president he had you know political government experience so I guess the question is do you think there is any value to government experience I mean you know Donald Trump as an outsider you know that has helped him in some ways but it seems to be hurting him and actually passing major legislation and working you know with Congress whereas Reagan you know had that government experience had a good relationship with you know Tip O'Neill and other people so do you think that is valuable in any way well of course the more career politicians are discredited the less political experience is a commodity that is necessary if our politicians of both parties had produced greater economic growth greater prosperity greater opportunity greater freedom well then I think there would never have been an opening compartment for someone like Donald Trump in Reagan's case interestingly enough after only a year as governor he was a viable candidate for president people don't do not recognize an airbrushed from his biography is the fact that he did run for the 1968 convention nomination against both Richard Nixon and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller this was based on both of his stature in the public and the fact that people knew who he was what I would predict quite differently is what you will now have in 2020 is a spate of billionaires who have no government experience Tom Styer comes to mind as an example maybe even Mark Zuckerberg although don't think we're electing a president who only wears a hoodie it could be wrong about that but I do think that this is the new model and therefore all the rules as I said the beginning that I held to be absolutely true may not be true at all on the other hand it's hard to judge the Trump presidency on the basis of one year so far very good and I think he is well-positioned but the success of other outside politics candidates in many ways they're going to rise or fall on Trump so the real answer is it remains to be seen well so if I could just answer one of the questions you had about why Guantanamo Bay is still open and my impressions that's because this is a Republican opposition and fear-mongering that prisoners would escape if they are brought back to the United States you know mainland sorry you said you know why Oh in your examples of political elites not got anything done you mentioned the or in there you were like Oh why's Guantanamo Bay still open I would say that was because of Republican opposition over eight years of Obama's presidency trying to do that from day one they wouldn't let him because of you know fear-mongering and race baiting in certain instances saying that oh if these prisoners were brought back to you know the mainland they would escape I don't think he I don't think he really made any effort I think what happens is for any chief executive is the folks in your security apparatus and your intelligence apparatus come in and tell you why that was a great campaign plank but why you can't do it I am as disappointed in Guantanamo under the bushes as I am under Obama and as I indicated the the our continued presence in Syria is disturbing to me the fact that we're sending more troops to Afghanistan I think these are errors now how do you explain it the president has surrounded them with a large number of people who do not support his policies did not support his worldview and probably didn't vote for him that's what I meant when I said they seek to co-opt you I also mean what I meant when I said it's amazing how much he's gotten done given some of the intractable opposition among the elites of both parties and even some in his own administration I gave you the example of obsessions and Pompeyo on the question of Assange which I'm happy to talk about the other one which is pardon me a burning issue in the United States not so much here is state legalized marijuana twenty-nine states in America have legalized some form of medicinal marijuana the president who's never even seen marijuana in my opinion a man who literally has never taken a drink not even a glass of wine has never had alcohol in his life largely based on the fact that his brother who was really his idol and to the he was very close star athlete died early of cirrhosis and therefore Donald Trump has never either taken a drink nor is he countenanced drinking and drunkenness among the people that works for them for him he's not a fan that said he made it very clear in the campaign that this should be a decision left to the people in the States and if the states decide they want to have some form of medicinal marijuana that that he would support that incidentally marijuana is now being used to treat PTSD and other illnesses quite successfully by governments as diverse as Israel and others and now suddenly you have Jeff Sessions who has reversed one of the policies of the Obama administration that I supported which was the notion that the federal government would stand down in those states where the state had legalized marijuana and set up a system for its distribution and taxation and so on this in my opinion is an egregious mistake and I'm hopeful both from a public policy point of view and from the political point of view that the president will tell jeff sessions to cut the okay if we can go to the hand just over in the corner of that hi there I'm what advice would you give Michelle Obama to beat Donald Trump in a presidential election well you really are trying to get me fired the country I think is fairly evenly divided but to game plan a presidential campaign three years in advances it's a virtual impossibility in politics a month is a lifetime for example we didn't know that there was an effort in which the Russian government bribed people in the United States in order to get approval for the sale to a Russian state-owned energy company of 20% of our strategic uranium we didn't know that the Clinton Foundation took a hundred and forty five million dollars from the directors of that state-owned company we didn't know that Bill Clinton got a half million dollars speaking fee all prior to the approval of that transaction we didn't know that the Justice Department was actively investigating those bribes and was aware of them at the time the deal went through we didn't know that mr. it's right that mr. Comey actually brought the uranium samples to the to the Soviet the former Soviet Union for inspection which in my view was a symbol that the bribes would not be prosecuted and that this transaction would go through all of that has been very controversial and newsworthy and in many ways began to shift the balance in this epic political struggle were having but none of it did we know six months ago so what the election of 2020 will be about and what the issues will be and how strategically you would defeat Donald Trump or you would defeat Michelle Obama it's it's almost impossible to know I do think that she can command the Democratic nomination I do think that the idea of a woman president in the United States is a popular idea just not that if we can go to the hand in the corner over that thank you for your talk you discussed the issue of co-option of presidents by certain advisors that surround them you also talked about particularly an issue of Jeff Sessions pushing for the prosecution of Julian Assange you also talked about Donald Trump having been president for only a year but achieving success and despite of that but I would argue that that are certain issues Donald Trump formed as cornerstones of his campaign which he could have enacted on day one without any real opposition legal or otherwise which instead have turned into protracted battles I'm thinking of the repealing daca in particular so my question really is that Donald Trump based his campaign on an idea to drain the swamp do you think that the swamp has drained him I think that it is an epic struggle I think the fact that he came to office not a career politician did not give him a vantage point that previous presidents have had Richard Nixon had served as eight years as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president he could tell you the hundred most important jobs in government what they did and why they needed to be filled first Lyndon Johnson had been the Senate Majority Leader and John Kennedy's vice president he understood the machinery of government one of the dangers now in the modern presidency is the cocoon our presidents get in and it is sometimes hard to know what they know and when they know it so I am disappointed in some appointees I make no bones about that there are people in this cabinet who I would not have appointed but I think that given that and this active campaign of co-option I still think he has achieved much I'm not prepared to declare you know that he has failed on the basis of a year in fact I think he has largely succeeded let's as he would say let's see what happens I think we've got time for one more question before we have to wrap up see if we can go to the hand just over there thank you very much my question is because you like I work at several decades in the campaigning and then especially in viang you also mentioned about the current like a new media versus the traditional media using the campaign see so the current like technological advancement and the bigger data and then also the usage of the new media how would you I would like to know your perception about it is it like an you think is a advancement or is it like a positive thing or you also be it's very definitely a positive thing here's why one we had a monolithic and totally centralized media three major television networks unless you were a person of enormous wealth or unless you could tap into enormous wealth you couldn't possibly be elected to public office because you couldn't afford the cost of communications broadcast television is extraordinarily expensive cable television which was more targetable was still very expensive you could run for Congress today in the United States by geo-targeting social media spending a fraction of what you had to spend twenty years ago and still win it's efficient it's extraordinarily efficient you can target the voters not only geographically but based on what they're interested in based on how old they are based on their other previous social media activities and therefore if you're running on a a particular issue regardless of what it is you can pinpoint and target it this is a this is a revolution that has been that has changed everything so previously when and I don't do that much candidate work I've written five books and I do a daily broadcast for Infowars I have a website the stone cold truth and I prefer to analyze politics now I will help candidates who I like or who I think are outstanding but it used to be when people would come to me who I thought were highly qualified and attractive and articulate and who would be great in public office but they told me they could only raise a quarter of a million dollars I would tell them forget about it cannot be done that's now changed and if the system remains as it is if we have unfettered access to social media then I think it the the revolutionising of our politics will continue thank you so unfortunate that's all we've got time for this evening but if you could all join me and saying huge thank you to mr. or just staying [Applause] if I don't do this people get really upset thank you very much you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Length: 58min 12sec (3492 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 13 2018