Welcome to the weekly standard podcast. I'm your host, Michael Graham with this one with the standard is Fred Barnes and Fred. You have a great piece in the Wall Street Journal about what Paul Ryan can represent and should represent for Donald Trump as he goes forward as the Republican nominee. Does Donald Trump really need Paul Ryan in the evil establishment?
I think he does. Even though, look, so many things have been going right or occurred to be going right for Donald Trump. You know, the polls in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida, Key State show that he's tied with Hillary. Gallup comes out with a poll that shows that he's doing as well among Republicans as Hillary is doing among Democrats.
So things are looking up for him, but he still needs Paul Ryan because Paul Ryan gets sort of the head and the symbol of the other group at the top of the party, not just the elected officials and the members of Congress, but groups like the business community, the intellectual class. And there is one among Republicans, as you know, the think tanks. All these people at the top that really shape the party, that the donors don't matter, but it's more of a really more brainy group that it really matters. And he needs to win them.
I don't think he can have a successful, happy convention without Paul Ryan. But why, and I hear this from Trump supporters, Trump doesn't need these people, he beat them. And this is exactly who he defeated. Why would he go back?
He's going to press on with the people that brought him. He didn't beat Paul Ryan. He didn't beat tank tanks. He didn't beat the business community and the leaders of it.
You know, he beat other presidential candidates who thought that this was just another election where your experience and so on would help and how much money you raised and so on. I thought that too, but they were wrong and Trump was right. But he still needs this particular group that Paul Ryan is the speaker of the House and someone who's been around all these people, the tank tank people, the intellectuals and so on. The writers has been around them since he was a very young man in his early twenties.
What can they do for him, both at the convention and beyond, that's vital for Trump's campaign? They can write favorably about him. They can endorse him. They can have their people, the tank tanks can contribute people to his campaign who can help out.
Can write speeches, come up with policy proposals, write them for him. He doesn't have to accept them, but he can use these people. There are a lot of Republicans who really do have an impressive intellectual infrastructure. A lot of it's in Washington, but not all of it is.
I mean, they've got the group out at the Hoover Institution in the Hartland Institute in Chicago and they're really all over the country. But it's a group that matters, Democrats, and Hillary needs the Democratic tank tank. There aren't as many of them. They aren't quite as good as the conservative ones, but she needs them, too.
There's an argument that goes like this. Donald Trump has never really run on policy other than if you build a wall, take an ISIS kind of thing. He seems either reluctant to engage in it, maybe some people argue he's too smart to get bogged down. He'll be kind of what Barack Obama was eight years ago, a tabula raza that you can project your issues on.
Some people say he doesn't really understand the issues, as we've seen on some of the questions like pro-life in the budget. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is that a key part of his campaign, or is his campaign simply continuing to be the populist in his populist moment? Well, he can be the populist in the populist moment, but he has to do some other things, too. He's going to have to give an acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in July.
He's already his campaign and Trump had talked about a number of the accept of peace speeches that he's going to be giving, the ones where he talks into a teleprompter, reads a teleprompter, and has a prepared text for the speech on serious issues, like did you be sure he had a point to be president to replace Nina Scalia, the famous conservative justice, and many other subjects that he will have, I think, a particular formal speech, he's got to talk about infrastructures one, and so on. And then there are the debates. He's going to, and maybe he'll want to wiggle out of the debates, but I doubt it, but there'll be three debates, probably. That's the normal number now between himself and Hillary Clinton, assuming she's the Democratic nominee.
And what, is he going to just talk about the black guy's a loser and you're a loser and so on? He's got to do better than that. And he needs some help on this. Well, once again, I know a lot of Trump supporters would say he doesn't need to do better than he's doing, just fine.
That brings us to the big question. Let's say Paul Ryan comes on board and says, I want this team of thoughtful people who have an in-depth understanding of budget issues for politicians to guide you. Is Donald Trump going to become the kind of politician and political candidate who will take that guidance, who will embrace these policies, who will connect them together in a coherent framework? Or as many people want him to do, is Trump going to stay Trump?
And let me take one more step for your answer, Fred. There are a lot of people who are looking to support him because they're out of two days, you can sit him down with all the things, you can have Edmund Burke on one end of the table and we have a buckling on the other. And at the end, Donald Trump's going to get up, stand up, go to a microphone and say something crazy. That's when you're losing, just go on.
Trump is never going to stop being Trump. Where does Fred Barnes fall on that debate? Well, I agree with you that Donald Trump is never going to stop being Trump, but he doesn't have to be Trump all the time. There are other times where he needs to get down.
I think this is what he'll do. You'll see the Trump, the Trump who tweets and who calls in the morning TV shows every morning and appears at rallies and speaks ecstemporaneously. You don't know what he's going to say. We'll see that Trump.
But we're going to also see the Trump that does more serious things, it comes out with policy proposals. Look, if a bunch of pinheads come in and talk to him and give him advice, he'll take some of the advice. I'm not going to be able to tell him how to run his campaign, but they're going to help him establish it as a serious campaign as well, as a populist campaign that allows Trump to say whatever he wants and know that he will. But that's not going to be the only thing he needs to do in a general election.
There's not a couple people now that are different from the primaries, which he excelled in. So I think we're going to see the old fashioned Donald Trump and a new one too. I have to object to Fred Barnes, who's saying that I'm not going to know what he's going to say when he speaks ecstemporaneously. Because the fact is, Donald Trump doesn't know what he's going to say when he speaks ecstemporaneously.
I don't think it's fair to burden me in a way that you don't burden the candidate. Fred Trump's made an interesting announcement late Tuesday on the issue of his tax returns, and let's set aside that he pledged that he was going to release them, they were going to come out, et cetera. He's simply saying now that he's not going to release them. From a strategy standpoint, is that a smart move for Donald Trump?
And can a Republican billionaire get away with spending six months saying I'm simply not going to release my tax information? I would say a Republican billionaire cannot get away with that, but the exception of Donald Trump probably can't. He's not your average billionaire. He's not the average one.
There must be enough in there in his tax returns that might be embarrassing that he's figured out that it would be worse for me if I released it rather than phone-walling the press and we're niggying on my promise to release it. He doesn't want it to come out. I know you're reluctant to make predictions. We all are after the past nine months, but do you think that that's going to end up having been the right strategy?
Or is he even Donald Trump going to have to cave if there's a drum beat of ads from Hillary and pressure from the media to say you can't expect people to vote for you without even giving us the basic information on your conflicts of interest. There might be a parent there in your tax returns. Do you think he can make this work? It's going to be hard and we've seen him walk back some of his statements.
We've seen that in the last few weeks. He's walked back what he's said about the federal debt and how you pay it off and so he's willing to do that if there's an outcry against what he said. Now, if there will be an outcry, I don't think average citizens are going to care about it much, but the media will. They will really be relentless about this and we'll see if they have enough muster and can be good enough pressure on him.
You know, when I stop and think about it and here's Trump, he's a tough guy. If there's ever been a presidential candidate who could just dumb his nose at the media and others as well and not release his taxes and get away with it, it's Donald Trump. It also shows that Donald Trump has a heartening confidence in the federal government, Fred, because he's assuming that the Obama IRS hasn't handed all that information to Hillary Clinton already. So there you go.
A flash of optimism. Fred Barnes, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate your time. You've been listening to the weekly Standard Podcast.
Please be sure to check weekly Standard.com regularly for my guest updates. I'm your host, Michael Graham.