Point of View August 6, 2026 – Hour 1 : Election Fraud

[00:00:04] Across America, Live, this is Point of View. And now, Dr. Merrill Matthews. And welcome to Point of View. I'm Merrill Matthews, sitting in for Kirby Anderson today. And we have got a good show for you. We're going to be talking about two of the most important topics that we face, elections and taxes.

[00:00:34] So going in our first hour, we're going to turn to John Fund. He is the National Affairs columnist for National Reviews, been there for several years. Prior to that, he was with the Wall Street Journal for many years. He is one of the country's election experts and has written several books on elections and fraud in elections and just elections in general. But he covers politics for National Review. John, thank you for joining us. A pleasure. Thanks so much, Merrill.

[00:01:00] Okay, we got to start out with the stuff that we've been talking about for the last couple of days. And that is the election, especially in Michigan and what's happening there. Tell us your take on it. Well, we have seen in this country in the last decade, a complete revolt against the party establishments, both Democratic and Republican. It started in 2016 with Bernie Sanders almost beating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Yes.

[00:01:31] And Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination and then the presidency. Well, we've now reached the next level, which is that Democratic voters who increasingly, the younger they are and the more that they don't have study civics or American history or economics in high school or college, they are moving to the left.

[00:01:55] And as a result, driven by young people and driven by the Democratic Socialists of America who are brilliant grassroots organizers in low turnout primaries, they were slowly taking over the Democratic Party.

[00:02:09] They've won in New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan, Colorado. And the biggest success they just had was in Michigan. They won two key congressional primaries defeating a Democratic incumbent congressman. And they also won the Senate nomination with this guy, Abdul El Saeed, who's a piece of work.

[00:02:33] Next week in Wisconsin, Francesca Hong, who is a radical socialist member of the state legislature, is the front runner for the Democratic nomination for governor. And she's favored to be the Democratic nominee. And the capture of the Democratic Party, which is largely saying to these victories, well, it's a big tent. We'll have to accept them rather than fight them.

[00:02:57] As John Fetterman and James Carville and others mentioned, the Democratic Party is basically succumbing, is knuckling under to these people. I've heard some comments say, well, if I did not win by the as large a margin as he as was predicted in the polls. And so they sort of use that as kind of a pushback. On the other hand, it allows the Democratic Socialists to continue the narrative of saying we're on a roll and we're winning elections.

[00:03:27] Well, look, every Democratic major official in the country endorsed El Saeed's opponent. And he spent seven million dollars in the primary. His opponent spent 70 million and they still lost. So I don't think that the Democratic establishment should take much more than cold comfort from the fact that it was close. Mm hmm. You know, you had a piece in National Review, which we're going to have posted on our Web site at point of view dot net.

[00:03:55] Socialism is on the march. Talk to us about that. Well, we, in retrospect, should have realized that the end of communism and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s wouldn't mean that it would go away. It would just go quiet and wait for people to forget what communism and socialism was all about. And then it would come back in different guises.

[00:04:20] First, it came back in the form of environmentalism, the church of the of the holy climate change. And then it came back in the form of trans rights. And now it's come back in the form of socialist economics and pro-Palestinian extremism. You know, we just recently had President Trump just a few weeks ago had a primetime speech where he talked about election interference.

[00:04:48] And he has never accepted that he lost the 2020 election. He still believes he won that. But he talked about that. And some of us, as we were watching it, a number of us, because he's he's promised for six years now that he's going to provide the evidence of why he actually won the election. So I know I and a lot of people were sort of curious. Are you going to provide that evidence? There really was no evidence provided. But what do you think about his discussion on election?

[00:05:16] He primarily talked about he talked about election interference, but he was also talking about election influence and seems to sort of conflate the two terms. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I've written several books on this subject, so I think I can speak with some authority. This falls into three baskets. The first basket is there was evidence, for example, in Georgia that a lot of people voted who shouldn't have voted.

[00:05:42] The bailout applications for votes ballots were not improperly approved. There were dead people who voted. There were college students living out of state who voted. I think there were enough votes, for example, in Georgia that Trump probably did win that state. But the evidence in other states wasn't as clear.

[00:06:02] And what was clear, though, is that the dramatic expansion of mail-in voting brought in a whole set of rules that basically made it very, very easy to vote if you were not eligible or you wanted to vote twice or you didn't exist. We saw this in Nevada where every person in the state got a ballot if they were registered to vote. Those registration rolls were notoriously inaccurate.

[00:06:25] They were ballots that were literally strewn around the lobbies of apartment buildings. Anybody could have picked them up and mailed them in. There were serious problems with the bail-in voting, which was brought in in a rush, in a hurry, without proper guidelines because of COVID. That's a serious problem with the elections.

[00:06:47] But the evidence that enough votes were cast to change the result in all of those states and give Trump the election never transpired because it's hard to collect that. The problem with our election system is it's so sloppy and so loosey-goosey that you can't tell where the incompetence in the election process begins and where the fraud begins. And the third thing is we had a series of exaggerations by Donald Trump.

[00:07:14] He jumped on every possible anomaly or problem in the election and declared it as proof that he had won the election. I think he did the cause of election integrity, I think, a slight disservice because a lot of us have been working on this, trying to build an evidence-based case. So I admire the president's consistency and demand that there be election reform. I support the SAVE Act, which is bogged down in the Senate now.

[00:07:41] But I don't believe that Donald Trump's exaggerations help because a lot of independent voters simply tune out when he talks about this issue. Yes, I think you're right. When we come back from the break, I want you to talk a little bit about other countries trying to influence the elections, whether it's Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or maybe some non-state actors, because there does seem to be evidence that they have tried to influence it in various ways.

[00:08:09] And I'd like to get your take on what they're doing and to what extent they're successful in doing that. My guest for this hour, John Fund. He is a national affairs columnist for National Review magazine, been there for many years. He writes regularly for National Review. I'd encourage you to go to National Review, or I think we'll have his pieces up on pointofview.net, two of the recent pieces that he's done, which highlight some of this, including one on voter ID in California.

[00:08:34] So when we come back, we're going to ask the question, are other countries having some influence in our elections? Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson.

[00:09:06] We know that college students are using AI tools to help them research projects and write papers, but the problem apparently is much worse than we might imagine. For 34 years, Robert Serrano has taught economics at Brown University. In one of his classes, he typically draws 30 students that produce midterm averages between 65 and 80 percent. When there was a tragic shooting on campus, he decided to give the students a take-home exam. Enrollment nearly tripled to 86. Then the grades came back.

[00:09:35] Nearly half scored perfect or near-perfect scores. He and his assistants noticed the students' responses matched Chad Chibiti phraseology. He told the class that the final would be in-person and closed book. If the scores were similar, he would count both. If not, the midterm grade would be dropped. More than two dozen students dropped the course immediately. Among the ones who stayed, the final exam average dropped to 48 percent. Many of the students failed. He had proved his point, but there's more.

[00:10:04] The professor submitted the evidence to Brown's Standing Committee on Academic Code. He heard nothing. Therefore, he went public with his findings. The press picked up the story, and it went viral. I realize this is only one story, but I suspect it could be repeated hundreds of times in the classes of the thousands of universities in this country. Now that AI tools are available, students are letting these computers do the thinking for them. They aren't learning. They are punching numbers into their laptops and asking questions of chatbots.

[00:10:34] I am encouraged that this professor did what he could to stem the tide of AI cheating. We need professors and colleges to deal with this problem. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my Point of View. Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net.

[00:11:00] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. And welcome back to Point of View. I'm Merrill Matthews. Sitting in for Kirby Anderson today, and on the phone with me is John Fund. He is the national affairs columnist for National Review magazine. You should be reading his columns because he is the country's expert on elections, elections fraud, and he covers a whole range of political issues.

[00:11:25] And, John, before the break, I mentioned the role of foreign interference in our – let me say influence – in our elections. There was the issue about the Russian hoax and other things, but the Chinese and the Russians have sought to influence our elections, have they not, in some way or the other? Yes, and by the way, for your listeners who would like to keep in closer touch with what I write,

[00:11:51] the Unleash Prosperity, which is the think tank that I work for in part, I edit their hotline newsletter, which is free to anyone who wants to sign up for it. It comes out five days a week. I assume you read it, Merrill. And Unleash Prosperity can be reached at committetounleashprosperity.com. That's committee to unleashprosperity.com. Just hit the red button and you'll be signed up for the hotline. So, yes, the Chinese are a real problem.

[00:12:19] Not so much in direct subversion, although we've seen candidates like a former mayor of a California city indicted as an espionage agent for the Chinese government. We also saw a former chief of staff to New York Governor Kathy Hochul indicted as a Chinese agent of influence. So that certainly happens. But more concerning is what the Chinese do on issues.

[00:12:46] I think a lot of the opposition to data centers, and I certainly understand people's concerns about them, but a lot of the opposition comes from public relations campaigns that are partially funded or influenced by the Chinese. Monterrey Park, California is a city that's about 60 percent Asian, much of that Chinese American. They had a moratorium on data centers on the ballot a few weeks ago, and it won easily.

[00:13:13] And it turns out that much of the propaganda about data centers was both inaccurate and linked to Chinese sources. How do we know that link was there? We have extensive information from FBI records and from the fact that the public relations firms that often were behind the propaganda had links to the Chinese government and to Chinese entities.

[00:13:41] And, of course, in China, no matter if you're a private or a public entity, you're ultimately responsible to and answerable to the government. You know, we can be upset about other countries and other countries and non-state actors trying to influence our elections. But one of the things that's happened really more, my sense is we have tried to influence elections in other countries in very subtle ways. But now Donald Trump is doing it in very blatantly. Very blatantly. Telling people how to vote. So it's interesting.

[00:14:11] I mean, if you're Vice President J.D. Vance and you go to Hungary and you're sitting there promoting Viktor Orban and then Viktor Orban loses significantly, is that a hit to the administration? Does it say maybe you should scale this back on the influence because you didn't – you tried to push one candidate and it didn't work? And that may actually affect international relations? Well, I think the level of intervention in Hungary was unusual because Viktor Orban and Donald Trump were personal friends

[00:14:40] and he felt he owed him one. So I don't think we're going to see that repeated soon. On the other hand, Trump saying that you'll have better relations and better trade deals with the United States if you vote for a candidate, that has worked for Trump all over Latin America. I mean, just look at the countries that have elected conservative or, in the case of Argentina, the libertarian governments because, in part, because Donald Trump has put his thumb on the scale. We're talking Argentina.

[00:15:09] We're talking Chile. We're talking Peru. We're talking Ecuador. We're talking Colombia. We're talking Costa Rica. We're talking Honduras. There's a long line of countries that are now – governments that are more favorable than the United States, in part because Donald Trump has said if you want to have good relations with Washington, there's a candidate I like and there's a candidate I don't like. Does that in some way come back to bite us or is that a good trend? It can. It can. It can.

[00:15:39] It can. And I think it's fraught with peril. It's an approach, though, that is – let's put it this way. There's that approach, and I've had problems with some of that. But there's also the approach of, I think, the Biden administration, for example, which basically ignored Latin America, and when they didn't ignore them, they just sent them foreign aid, which was wasted and squandered.

[00:16:02] So given the choice between the two and given the fact that the Chinese are very interested in rare earth minerals and energy resources in Latin America, I think we do have to do something to combat the Chinese. And at least Donald Trump is trying, even though I don't necessarily approve of all of his methods. You mentioned the SAVE Act, and Point of View has been supportive of the SAVE Act, as you have apparently.

[00:16:27] We have a decentralized election system, and you've talked about the problems that we have there. The SAVE Act would do – I don't want to say nationalize, but it sort of moves in that trend a little bit as you're setting up national standards. Talk a little bit about the SAVE Act, why you support it, and the upside and downside of having decentralized elections at the state level.

[00:16:51] Well, at least the SAVE Act is nothing close to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's attempt to nationalize the elections completely during the Biden administration. That was finally stopped by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who braved Democratic senators, who stood in the way of that. What the SAVE Act does do is it sets up clear standards and incentives for how you cast mail-in ballots,

[00:17:17] how you maintain voter registration rolls, and also requesting that states prove citizenship. And I think that while we do certainly want to keep local control of elections – that's one of the hallmarks of our democracy – we also – the federal government does have some standards that I think are appropriate. I think it is appropriate that states should inquire into the citizenship of citizens, of people who are trying to vote.

[00:17:44] We've seen in New Jersey and we've seen in other states recently that a lot of people do register to vote, either inadvertently or on purpose to vote, and some of them end up casting ballots. So I believe that the SAVE Act's primary enforcement mechanism is this. If a state is going to take federal funds, and many – almost all of them do – to improve their election processes and buy new machines and everything, there's a 25-year-old federal law that says if you do that,

[00:18:14] you have an obligation to clean up your voter rolls. Well, the blue states don't clean up their voter rolls, and the red states do. And that creates an imbalance. And the federal government has occasionally sued blue states that don't clean up their voter rolls, but that takes years and lots of effort. I think what the SAVE Act does is it says you will have to clean up your voter rolls if you're accepting federal funds.

[00:18:38] And, for example, in Los Angeles, California, where we had all kinds of problems with the last race for mayor of Los Angeles there, it turns out that before that election, the county of Los Angeles and the city of Los Angeles had to remove 1.5 million people from their voter rolls because they didn't exist. They weren't proper registrations. They had moved out of state. They had died. They wouldn't have done that without a lawsuit forcing that result.

[00:19:07] And after the election, we found out that many of the names that were still on the rolls still are not properly there. So I think there is a role for the federal government if federal funding is involved. But it should be limited as much as possible so the states do control their elections and do make those decisions on their own. So in the SAVE Act, the first point is voter ID when you're voting, and that gets widespread support, 80%, 83%.

[00:19:35] 80%, including all demographic groups, including all minority groups. And the second one is that you have to prove you're a citizen when you register to vote. I think that's a little bit lower, but I think it's still in the 60%. Then you get to mail-in voting, and we've got something like eight states that are primarily mail-in voting. What are your thoughts about that? I mean, I think Utah is almost totally mail-in voting, and I think my sense is they run theirs fairly well. I'm not sure other states do.

[00:20:05] I think there are problems in states like Washington and Oregon and certainly in California where mail-in voting has become the tool of choice. I think there are many problems with excessive mail-in voting. I think it's limited to people who are legitimately out of town, who are bedridden, who are traveling. That is perfectly appropriate. However, let me just give you one objection to mail-in voting, which I think a lot of your listeners will understand.

[00:20:36] I'll tell you what. Hold on to that just a second because we're coming up to a break, and I want to take that break, and I want listeners to be able to hear that. My guest for this hour is John Fund. He is the National Affairs columnist for National Review and writes regularly for them and is one of the country's election experts. So I encourage you to go to pointofview.net, see the couple of articles that we've posted by him, and you can also go to National Review and find those articles there.

[00:21:02] When we come back, we want to talk a little bit more about what's happening in these elections and John's expertise in that. So stay with us. He also has several books out. You can go to Amazon.com and find those books. Just put John Fund, F-U-N-D, in there. You'll see those books, and I encourage you to get them. So stay with us. We'll be right back on Point of View.

[00:21:33] Who can you trust? Years ago, many of us could probably have provided a fairly long list, but today, well, today it seems we almost can't trust anyone. Educators don't even know what a woman is anymore. Many so-called public servants have shown all they care about is themselves. The FBI has been accused of bias, law-breaking, betrayal, and journalism.

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[00:22:59] You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, Dr. Merrill Matthews. And we're back talking about elections with our longtime friend of Point of View, elections expert, John Fund. And, John, I broke you off there so we could take a break, but take it from there.

[00:23:28] Well, I think that people who want 100% mail-in voting forget one important thing. We've had a big change in our country. It used to be that people used the U.S. Postal Service for a lot of things, and it was very reliable, and people counted on it. That's no longer the case. They're always in the red. They always have management problems.

[00:23:50] And they constantly are delaying and changing their standards of performance so that they deliver mail later and later. And they now have a system that almost guarantees that some last-minute mail-in voting ballots are not going to be counted. Would you trust cash or even a check that was important to the U.S. Postal Service if time was an issue?

[00:24:19] No, you wouldn't. So why would you trust your ballot to the mail? So in Utah recently, this is two years ago, there was a congressional primary, and it was decided by last-minute mail-in ballots. Apparently, the Post Office now has a new process by which, let's say you mail something in Provo, Utah, and you're mailing it to Salt Lake City just up the road.

[00:24:45] Well, because of the way the Postal Service contracts are, sometimes those letters get sent to a processing center in Las Vegas first. Then they get sent back to Salt Lake City, even though the distance from Salt Lake City to Provo is very short. Well, that's what happened in this Utah congressional primary. Something like 500 ballots were sent out of state. It took them a while to come back. They arrived too late. They weren't counted.

[00:25:11] And that decided the election who won and was the congressman for that district. I think we won 100% mail-in ballot. Since the 2020 election, several red states have undergone election integrity reforms, passed laws. Which states are doing a good job now in terms of managing their elections?

[00:25:34] Well, I think your listeners should understand that we have made real progress partly through their efforts and the efforts of the people in Congress they support in the last five to six years. New Hampshire, Georgia, Ohio, a whole range of states have improved their election processes. They've tightened up their voter registration rolls. They've tightened up early voting and mail-in voting so that it's available to people.

[00:26:00] But there's more encouragement for people to vote in government offices early rather than to mail their ballots in. Government offices are far more secure, and it's far more likely that your vote is going to be counted. Other states have been laggards. Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in both cases, they found thousands and thousands of people who had gone to the DMV, gotten their driver's license renewed, but it turned out that they were permanent residents of the United States.

[00:26:30] They were not citizens. Yet the driver's license bureau automatically registered them to vote or allowed them to vote, and many of them voted. And that was – the New Jersey news is brand new. That is completely impermissible. It just shows this symbolic, chaotic situation that some of these states are in when it comes to maintaining election integrity. They don't care. They're not interested.

[00:26:54] They believe that democracy is best served by having as many people for votes as possible cast, and that's not the process. It's a healthy balance between election integrity so people have confidence in the accuracy and outcome of the election and allowing people to vote without any undue burdens or undue constraints. You mentioned voting early, and I always vote early here in Texas. I do that because there's no line. I can go into it very quickly and get out.

[00:27:24] But you do it in person. I do it in person, absolutely. But there have been some conservatives who have wanted to get rid of early voting, and some who say we need to get rid of the machines, we need to go back to something where you're hand-filling out a ballot, and that just doesn't seem to be workable to me. What are your thoughts? I think you have good instincts. Look, we're not going to get rid of early voting. It's very popular.

[00:27:46] I do think we can nudge people more towards voting in person early rather than mail-in voting, which I think a presidential commission that was headed by the late Jimmy Carter and James Baker, a Republican Secretary of State, concluded that mail-in balloting was the most vulnerable way to vote that was possible to encourage cheating.

[00:28:10] And I think that, in addition, we also have early voting that should be limited to a time period that's close to the election so people can hear all the arguments and see the debate. Some states, like North Carolina or Maine, allow people to vote in September, middle of September, for a November election. That's ridiculous. What happens if there's a debate or some candidate falls into a scandal? Your vote is already cast.

[00:28:39] You can't take it back. In addition, what was your second point about your concerns about voting? I think it was just the issue of voting. Oh, and filling out ballots by hand as opposed to using machines. Ah, well, here's the problem with that. The countries that do that, generally, like Canada, have a single race on the ballot. They're a member of parliament.

[00:29:07] So it's very easy to count a bunch of paper ballots if you have one race to count. America is different. I mean, in San Francisco, I used to have 100 things to vote on. Most, I would say the average person that you're listening to this program probably has 30 to 50 things on the ballot. That's much more difficult to count by hand. And, of course, hand involves human error. And human error, the more races that you're counting, the more likely you have to have some errors. And there can be fraud counting ballots.

[00:29:36] I personally have witnessed paper ballots being manipulated in a recount election. That's how we got started on this issue. In addition, you know, if you're blind, if you have problems with languages, and we have a federal law that says that we have to provide for foreign languages for voting, that's not going to change.

[00:29:58] If you have any kind of physical handicaps, machine voting, if it's a machine that actually is powerful enough and sophisticated enough like our ATM machines are, that is very valuable to people. We want to have access to the polls. Paper voting doesn't do that, especially for the people who have visual handicaps. Now, your listeners have no problem using machines to get ATM money.

[00:30:27] That's because banks have an incentive to spend the money on the technology and the modern equipment that actually gives you the cash. Some people, I know, don't even count the cash they get out of an ATM. They trust the amount that comes out of the slot. Well, the machines for voting are done through competitive bidding, and they're often much cheaper, much less accurate. We need to improve those machines. So rather than get rid of the machines, let's have better machines and more oversight of them,

[00:30:55] and let's have open source code so that if you're having code that constructs how the election is conducted and how the ballot is prepared, that should be available to anyone to look at and test and see that everything is out there. We were talking a minute ago about voter ID, and you've written a piece for National Review on, I think, the Attorney General of California, wasn't it, who's trying to stop voter ID in the state?

[00:31:21] Well, it's really sad because, you know, California has a long tradition, starting with Prop 13, of having, you know, innovative reform measures on the ballot that have improved governance in that state. But increasingly, the Democratic Attorney General, whoever that is, who has the responsibility for preparing the ballot summary and the ballot arguments, has been playing games with it.

[00:31:44] In the case of California, the original ballot language they approved so that the vote citizens who wanted to put a voter ID measure on the ballot would circulate it said that, you know, basically this is to require voter ID, voter ID to vote in California elections. So they got enough signatures, 1.3 million, and the Attorney General then paid bait and switch on them.

[00:32:08] He said, oh, I'm going to give a new summary, and the summary shall be voting is prohibited unless you have government-issued ID and meet certain other requirements. So it changes the – it puts a completely different negative spin on what the ballot measure tries to do, and it also inserts other language that was not in the original ballot circulation material,

[00:32:32] and it completely changes the focus and the intent of the ballot measure and will reduce support for it. I think that's preposterous. I think it's an abuse of power, and there's going to be court cases that will decide whether or not the original language is used or whether or not the altered, truncated language is used. Well, you know, you do wonder about some states when they do things that allow voting to continue after the deadline.

[00:33:01] Whenever we get your vote, we'll do that. Ranked choice voting and a number of things that just seem to raise questions in people's minds about how secure and honest the elections are. My guess for this hour? Well, eternal vigilance. Eternal vigilance is required. Let me tell you what Massachusetts just did. Massachusetts, there was a citizen's measure put on the ballot a proposal to cut the state income tax and to get rid of a surtax that the legislature put in.

[00:33:30] The attorney general that prepared the summary for that measure forgot, put that in air quotes, forgot to include a provision that has also affected the capital gains tax. Hold it there, John. My guest, John Funn, will be right back.

[00:33:46] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Back for our final segment with elections expert John Funn with National Review and Unleash Prosperity. John, finish your thought that I had to break you off when we were going on the break.

[00:34:15] Well, it's clear that a lot of elected officials who don't like citizen lawmaking try to stop it. In Massachusetts, there was a proposal to cut the income tax statewide and it qualified for the ballot. But the attorney general, who was a liberal Democrat and hated the idea, she prepared a ballot summary that didn't include the fact that it affected the capital gains tax.

[00:34:43] And it was thrown off the ballot because of that. Now, she, the attorney general, says, oh, it was an inadvertent mistake. But there's a lot of suspicion that this was such an obvious error that maybe it was done on purpose to basically pollute the system with a fatal error. We call this a poison pill and take it off the ballot. So we'll have to wait another two years and they'll have to collect the signatures all over again. And I think it's an outrage.

[00:35:12] I think you can't ever prove the motive, but you can certainly be suspicious. Hmm. So we've got elections coming up in November. A lot of discussion about what's going to happen there. And then the notion that the presidential election for 2028 starts the day after the midterm elections. Give give us your sense of what's going to happen in the election, because there's a lot of discussions of where the Republicans lose the House. Could they possibly lose the Senate? What's your take on it?

[00:35:42] Well, the economy is doing very well if you own stocks. On the other hand, if you're somebody who depends on salary or their income, it's a mixed blessing. And a lot of people are feeling the shock of the Biden inflation. And Trump hasn't curbed inflation as much as he expected to. 80 percent of the inflation that we've experienced since the pandemic has been because of Biden.

[00:36:12] 20 percent has been under Trump. But that doesn't mean much to voters because they always say, what are you doing for me lately? They don't look back. They look forward. On foreign policy, obviously, people are paying more for gasoline in part because, of course, the Iran conflict. I think the president was badly served by some people around him. I suggest Secretary of War Pete Hegseth being one of them.

[00:36:37] They did not properly evaluate or take into account the fact that the Iranians could use the Street of Hormuz as leverage against us in order to try to survive as a regime. And as a result, the president is sort of stuck. He's trapped in this constant never-ending cycle, you know, rinse and repeat, where he negotiates with the Iranians. They seem to come to an agreement, and then they violate the agreement. The president then threatens to bomb them and to take out all of their infrastructure.

[00:37:06] And then suddenly there's a new round of negotiations. And how many rounds have we been through? Six or seven. So there may be some hope, some daylight ahead, because Oman, which is the country just across the Straits of Hormuz from Iran, has negotiated a tentative agreement with Tehran that they will together control and allow passage of tankers and other ships through the Straits of Hormuz. That would eventually lead to a reduction in the price of oil and gasoline in the United States.

[00:37:35] But it's an uncertain thing to depend upon, and it's probably going to happen too late to a midterm election. So I think the midterm elections are going to be rough. They always are for the party in power because people want to send a message they're dissatisfied. And right now they are dissatisfied. And I think the president has a very good bill that he passed a year ago, a tax bill, that is starting to have effects.

[00:38:00] But a lot of that has not trickled down to average people, or at least they don't perceive that it has trickled down to average people. So I think the Republicans will keep the Senate. I think the House is very much in doubt. If the election were held today, they would lose the House narrowly. But the reason we have campaigns is we try to convince people to change their minds or to vote when they're not enthusiastic about voting. That's what the next few weeks will bring.

[00:38:26] And the biggest problem the Republicans have is not necessarily opposition to President Trump's policies. It's that the enthusiasm gap is there. Democrats who hate President Trump, suffer from Trump arrangement syndrome, are really stoked up about voting. Republicans are less so coming out in support of Trump's policies. If that gap continues to be as large as it is, the Republicans are in trouble.

[00:38:51] If Trump can close that gap and convince people that he's doing things that are in their interest, that they can look forward to, the Republicans have a chance of keeping both House. There was some speculation with Trump giving his elections integrity speech a few weeks ago that he was laying the groundwork to, in essence, question the elections if they go against Republicans. Do you see anything to that? And if there is, what could he do?

[00:39:20] Well, I was glad the president addressed the subject in a nationwide speech. But I don't think he closed the sale. I think if he had evidence that the Chinese had actively involved themselves in our elections, he should have specified that. He should have come right out and said that. Instead, I think he pulled his punches, in part because perhaps the evidence wasn't as strong as he wanted, and in part because he didn't want to upset the Chinese in delicate trade negotiations.

[00:39:49] So I think the speech was a lost opportunity. I don't think it convinced people who were not on one side or the other that he was in the right. So I think we're in a situation where I think in most states the elections are going to proceed by the book, and I think that they will have credibility and integrity. But in some states we're going to see problems. And I'm talking about Nevada, which sends out ballots to every registered person on the voting rolls,

[00:40:17] California, New Jersey. These are states where we've seen proven problems with election integrity, and the Democratic legislatures and the Democratic governors in most of those states aren't interested in addressing it. After the midterm election, there will be a campaign for the presidential election in 2028. Trump won't be on the ballot, at least physically. Take about a minute to explain what you think is going to happen there. Will there be a number of Republicans come up?

[00:40:47] Will J.D. Vance sort of get a nod, another step out? On the Democratic side, I assume there will probably be a number of people campaigning. Well, there are two questions here. The first is who's running. And I think that you should presume most people are running. And certainly if the vice president chooses to run, and there's a small chance he might for family reasons not, but I think he will run.

[00:41:12] If he gets President Trump's endorsement, he'll be the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination. If the president hangs back and says, I don't want to choose someone, I think it becomes more competitive. I think that J.D. Vance's chances to get the Republican nomination are directly tied to how popular President Trump is. And if the perception is that President Trump has solved the problems that he set out to address, J.D. Vance will be the favorite to win the nomination.

[00:41:42] Then the question becomes, what about the Democrats? The Democrats have an issue. Will the Democratic Socialists complete their long march through the party in taking the party over and sending it in a much more extreme direction? If they do that and the Democratic nominee can't declare their independence from those forces, I think it gives the Republicans a real chance to say, look, you may not like everything that we've done. You may not like President Trump.

[00:42:12] But it's, you know, the choices between chaos and crazy. And if it's between chaos and crazy, you should vote against crazy. Because that will fundamentally change America. Well, John, thank you for joining us. My guest has been John Fund. He is a he's the National Affairs columnist for National Review and also with Unleash Prosperity. He has got books out on election integrity and election fraud. And I encourage you to go take a look at it. John, thank you so much for joining us. A real pleasure, Merrill.

[00:42:42] Good luck. Thank you. When we come back, we're going to turn to the issue of taxes. We've got new taxes being proposed at the federal and state level. We've got tariffs, which are taxes. And we also have just the tax system that we have right now and whether or not you should be thinking about that as we're moving through the year. So join us. We'll be back with Dan Pella, longtime friend of Point of View. And we'll look at tax system in the country. Stay with us. We'll be back.

[00:43:13] Many years ago, they began saying that we live in the information age. Well, today, there is so much information coming at us from every direction. The hardest thing is to discern which issues are really important and how can I make a positive impact without wasting my time trying to figure out accurate information. Let me give you a suggestion to help with that. Visit pointofview.net. Look at the tabs across the top.

[00:43:42] Find the one named Viewpoints. Kirby Anderson and others on our team are constantly watching for news to identify those issues that you really need to know about. They boil things down in a brief summary. And then you can decide if it's something on which you want to learn more and get involved. Again, when you go to pointofview.net, click on Viewpoints, you'll see exactly what I mean. You'll see the issues that we are covering right now.

[00:44:09] And when you like what you see, I honestly think you will, you can slide on over, enter your email, and get them automatically sent to your inbox each day. That's it. Take a minute now. Be informed. Pointofview.net. Click on Viewpoints. Point of View will continue after this.