Live from Music Row, Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed political reporter for One America News, Neil W. McCabe to the newsmaker line to talk about Donald Trump’s lead in the polls and how the recent verdict in a New York civil trial could affect his candidacy.
Leahy: On the newsmaker line, one of the very best political reporters in the entire country. He reports on politics for One American News Network. He’s the top gov tracker based in Tallahassee, Florida. Mr. Neil W. McCabe, good morning, Neil.
McCabe: Michael, Crom. Very good to be with you, sir.
Leahy: Neil, a couple of things I saw that were of note. Number one, Morning Consult released a poll yesterday. I think it was Donald Trump in the lead for the GOP nomination by 41 points over Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is declining.
Our buddy Vivek Ramaswamy is tied for third only at 5 percent but is tied for third with Mike Pence. Has Donald Trump wrapped up the GOP nomination, or is DeSantis going to be in the game when he announces sometime next month?
McCabe: Michael, I learned the hard way not to celebrate Trump’s victory when he’s in the lead. It’s 10 or 11 o’clock at night.
Leahy: (Laughter) That’s very good, Neil.
McCabe: I would say that the DeSantis people are very talented and very wily and scheming, and Jeff Rowe is no slouch. It’s interesting that the Super PAC that’s called Never Back Down, Never Surrender that is run by Jeff Rowe and Ken Cuccinelli, which is set up, there’s no coordination obviously because that would be illegal, but it’s set up to support a rumored DeSantis candidacy for president.
Jeff Rowe put out a poll by a firm owned by Jeff Rowe that showed that Donald Trump actually hurt Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms. They wrote it up and basically said, yes, this guy Donald Trump was poisoned for all these Republican candidates.
That’s why we need Ron DeSantis. Of course, Jeff Rowe was the campaign manager for a lot of those candidates including Dr. Oz. So the brilliant Jeff Rowe was also running the Oz campaign and a slew of others through this front company called Axiom. And his polling firm is WPA Intelligence.
And we’ll see how it goes. Ken Cuccinelli was the guy who was leading the fight against Trump all the way to the Republican Convention in 2016. And so he’s very smart. He’s tenacious, but they lost, and there’s a reason why he lost. And that’s because even today, Trump is lined up with the voters and there’s just no way around it.
Leahy: Yesterday, Neil a jury in New York City in a civil trial found Donald Trump liable for defamation and assault, but not liable for a rape that allegedly occurred sometime 26 to 30 years ago. Jean Carroll made the allegations; it was so long ago. The New York Legislature opened up a window for a year for these claims to be made. She jumped into that window.
A jury of his peers, allegedly, found that he was liable for $5 million on this. What impact will that jury decision have on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign?
McCabe: None. Interesting. A jury of his peers, really? Like 12 billionaire real estate developers and former presidents. It’s the same that a jury, that any Republican or conservative could get a fair trial in New York City. And I think what Alvin Bragg has done, unintentionally is he has basically muddied the waters, poisoned them, whatever you want to call it, where anything coming out of the New York justice system is automatically tainted.
I had a conversation with our dear departed friend, Pat Cadell when the Access Hollywood tape was released, and I said, Cadell, this is bad. This is really bad. He laughed at me. You know this. It’s very hard to get Pat Cadell off the phone. Okay. I spent hours on the phone with Pat Cadell, and I loved every minute of it.
In all of our conversations, he never laughed at me, but he laughed at me and I was like, what? And he said to me, oh, you just found out he’s a cad? (Leahy laughs) He guaranteed me that Trump’s numbers would be exactly where they were before in a week, which they were.
Leahy: I think you’re right, that this jury trial in the left-wing Manhattan courtroom where 95 percent of people voted against Donald Trump hate him. That will be appealed. It will ultimately be overturned. I believe former President Trump has two other pending lawsuits in Fulton County for allegedly a Soros DA down there trying to claim that he interfered and tried to force Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change election results.
That litigation is pending. And then, of course, Jack Smith, the independent counsel who’s going after him for, I don’t know, moving classified documents around. Julie Kelly from the American Greatness says he’s gonna be indicted and they’re going to try to put him in jail pretrial—your thoughts?
McCabe: Let me just go back to the defamation one last time is they did this against Kavanaugh, the same thing. They accused him of a horrible sexual crime, but they had no time or date. At least with Kavanaugh, there was no place either, right? So nobody even knew where it happened.
So how do you defend yourself? And this is the problem Trump had too. How do you establish an alibi 20 years later when there’s no date or time? Putting that aside, I think Jack Smith is a very vicious guy. Jack Smith has been overturned significantly. He basically has made a lot of mistakes in his prosecution career, and he has always made mistakes on the aggressive side.
And he even was playing games in the World Court when he was running the World Court. Rick Grenell, Trump’s ambassador to Germany, was negotiating a peace treaty between Kosovo and Serbia, and the day before it was to be signed at the White House, Jack Smith released an indictment that was supposed to be held for six months. He unsealed it after two months, just the day before, to blow up the Peace Treaty. And his indictment was the president of Kosovo. And so he does this all the time.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
