[00:00:04] Broadcasting live from atop the Rocky Mountains, the crossroads of the West. You are listening to the Liberty Roundtable Radio Talk Show.
[00:00:17] James Edwards, Donald Trump, Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci, Congress members that are perverted and getting kicked out. It all starts on Liberty RoundTable Podcast. Happy to have you along my fellow Americans. I am Sam Bushman. I've got James Edwards with me.
[00:00:36] Well-known for race, politics and hypocrisy in the 21st century, The Political Cesspool is website and is award-winning broadcast every Saturday night live. You can listen to it live or on demand at The Political Cesspool. Welcome back, sir. Sam, I think I've got a play on your name, Sam Bushman. It is because you are so bright eyed and bushy tailed in the mornings. I don't let's go. My brother.
[00:01:04] I don't even see. You got to let me know what the elixir is out there in Utah, because when I wake up to do your show, I do wake up early, but I still got like two and three dark bags under my eyes, you know, when we get started here on the weekdays. You know, I'm a Saturday Night Live man there at 6 p.m. Central Time on Saturdays for me, and I got a little more pep in my step. But I tell you, Sam, I was thinking about you this morning. I had the most random memory, you know, for completely no reason at all.
[00:01:32] Well, now, I could go in a lot of different directions when I'm talking about my history with you and yours with me. But for some reason, I don't know why it popped into my head, but about 30 minutes before showtime this morning, I was thinking about you mixing it up with the, I think, the Telemundo people at the Republican National Convention. I don't know why that came into my head, but I mean, so there we were with, you know, the full access and all access to the Republican National Convention.
[00:01:58] And that was 2016, and Sam, what I would say is we've done the things, and by that I mean the things that you would want to do in this business, and certainly we can do more. But it's been a heck of a ride, but I look back on that, and I look back on that week in particular, and it was a time filled with so much promise. And now here we are less than 100 days from the midterms of Trump's second term, and it just looks like it's all destined to just sort of go out with a whimper, the Trumpian era in a lot of ways. You know what it reminds me of?
[00:02:29] You know how you get all excited with your kids, or when you were a little kid, and it was the 4th of July, and your family got fireworks, and you're like, okay, we're going to light off the biggest, best one. This is going to be cool. And you light that dude, and it just kind of fizzles and does nothing, and you go, oh. Well, isn't that what it's kind of like, James? I mean, you know, for me, and I'm not going to say there haven't been some meta-political victories over the course of the last 10 years,
[00:02:56] whether they be because of Trump or in spite of him or whatever. I mean, you know, at some point the guy in the White House is going to get some credit, whether it's deserved or not. And it is deserved in many ways, though. Let's be fair and honest. He doesn't deserve as much credit as he thinks he does. That's for sure. But he does deserve more credit than most presidents in our lifetime. Let's say that. It's a hard thing to balance and assess in real time because everything is still so fluid because the book hasn't closed on it yet.
[00:03:25] But I think most people left the first term being a little bit disenchanted. And then when you came back, you're thinking, well, he's going to have learned a lot from that first term. He's going to stock his people with more loyalists. He's going to have learned how the game is played a little bit more. And then, you know, he got in there and there was those flurry of executive orders. And I'm not saying that this has been a loss of that. He hasn't been vastly superior to the alternative that was presented to us from the Democrats.
[00:03:53] But he had that flurry of executive orders that were just so inspiring, Sam, that you and I put together a massive conference with elected officials, both past and present, all the way up to members of parliament, the Senate, members of Congress, aspiring candidates.
[00:04:10] And within about three months of him going into office in January of 25, and since then, I mean, it just – this isn't – I'm just riffing here now. But it looks like, I mean, instead of mass deportations, we've got two corporate tax cuts via budget reconciliation, AI deregulation, a war for Iran, cut Medicaid to pay for a trillion-dollar military budget.
[00:04:40] And, you know, we'll see where it goes. No, it's $1.25 trillion now, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So the problem is that, you know, this could turn into a bash Trump fest if we wanted it to. But I want to look at things a little bit more fairly. What you've got is a divided Democratic Party. You've got the whacked-out, extreme, psychotic socialist side. And then you've got the – I don't know what you want to call them, the traditional Republicans. And that's separate from the yellow dog or the old Republicans.
[00:05:09] So the old Republicans seem to be gone – or, wow, start over. Democrats. The old Democrats seem to be gone. The yesteryear Democrats of the South, many of them were very conservative. They were yellow dog Democrats. They were very conscientious of money. Those guys are gone. Now you've got two factions. You've got the whacked-out Democrat socialist crazies, the Mandamis, the AOCs, the, you know, whatever, Nancy Pelosis, the Maxine Waters. We can go on and on, right?
[00:05:38] Now they're even foreign nation-loving, strange, elected people on that side. And they're crazy. Then you've got the Democrats that are – they're modern-day traditional Democrats. So they're very liberal, but they're not crazy. At least comparatively speaking. But they're not the old Democrats either. So that's what you've got on the Democrat side. The Republican side, you've got MAGA, which MAGA is starting to dissolve and become nothing. You've got the Trump agenda. He still has a lot of control over the party.
[00:06:08] But you've got a lot of people that are undermining Trump behind the scenes, primarily Congress. And so you've got a divide in the Republican Party. And so this midterm elections is looking very interesting. Michigan's kind of ground zero right now because they've got a primary. We're starting to see some very strange stuff out of that. But Democrats are starting to win in some big ways, James. Well, and again, you know, you want to talk about MAGA. And whack that extreme ones, right? You talk about MAGA? Yeah, exactly. Well, Mondami is Exhibit A.
[00:06:37] Of course, you've got this radical socialist who's now, you know, one of the most important figures in the world as the mayor of New York City. But, you know, MAGA has seemed to be redefined as just the people who stroke Trump's ego more than any sort of ideological movement. I mean, because even at the dawn of the Trumpian era, we had our friend Steve King be hounded out of Congress. Now, that was before Trump got in there.
[00:07:03] But then you had, you know, Senator Jeff Sessions and Rep. Mo Brooks in Alabama. I mean, they were tougher on immigration than anyone. They got thrown under the bus. And they've since been joined by Thomas Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And these were the people that were on board with the purported message of Trump. And it seems like MAGA is now defined by people like Lindsey Graham, the late Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin.
[00:07:29] I mean, that is not those weren't the people that were championing the movement that got Trump in there. And so what's that senator now where we don't even know if he's dead or alive? He's Mitch McConnell. What's that guy's name, Mitch McConnell? Look, where is that guy? Do we even know really if he's alive? We were talking about this two weeks ago when I was last on the show here. Nothing has changed. It is true. What's the latest on Mitch McConnell? And the answer is his staff came out with something.
[00:07:54] They came out with a photo of him with a newspaper trying to make it like, you know, I mean, that's what you do when you got a hostage. I mean, it's just very weird. And now I don't even know what what on earth is the latest for them. Do we even have any any update, any knowledge? How can this guy serve and be missing in action to the people for so long and nobody just absolutely lose their minds? There's 100 senators in the world. I mean, these are the most powerful people in the world other than the American president. And and this and this guy was was was was the dean of the Senate.
[00:08:23] I mean, this is the longest tenured senator on the Republican side. And you can't get any sort of verifiable proof of life. And then you've got these midterms coming up. And of course, they never favor the party in power. But now when you've got again, Sam, this has been just such a recurring theme. When I make these twice monthly appearances with you going back to at least before last Christmas,
[00:08:47] the affordability crisis out there right now is just going to, I think, be really bad for the Republicans. And whatever gripes you can have. And again, we want to be fair. We want to be objective. We don't want to be emotional. But whatever gripes you may have with the Trump administration. And there's they've given us material there to have those things there has, yes, still been a lot of good. But it's all going to be made so much worse as if the other side retakes power.
[00:09:15] It's going to be made worse because I think Trump, again, catered more to the people who would just sort of fall in line with this cult of personality rather than anything really ideologically based. And he's not leaving a bench in Congress. And by that, I mean he's not leaving people who share the ideas that propelled his campaigns. And, of course, we understand that there's a difference between the things you campaign on and the things you actually make happen when you're in office. Promote, advocate for, sure.
[00:09:43] But I don't see a lot of people that are in Congress that are running on the Trump platform. Well, the debate now is who's going to carry the ball after Trump. It's a debate between Rubio and J.D. Vance. Because neither of them really seem maggot to me. Neither of them were really Trump supporters in the beginning either. They've kind of come over, I would more say, due to political wins and necessity rather than a desire to back the principles Trump espoused in the beginning. But listen, Mitch McConnell has been missing since June 14th, folks.
[00:10:12] He's missing vote after vote after vote. There's no announced date for his return. No one knows where he's at. No one's seen him. We don't even know if he's alive. There's limited information from his office. Now, here's the problem. You speculate and say, is he alive or not? And then they say we're a wacko for asking that, for wondering that. McConnell has also already announced that he will not seek re-election when his term ends in January 2027.
[00:10:42] So the short answer, he's alive, they say. He's still a U.S. senator. He's going under rehabilitation still. And no firm data's been announced. But I want to know this. How do we know if we're being told the truth? Every day, Americans are told to hate each other while the people in power keep winning. But what if there's another path? What if Americans could come together and take this country back peacefully before it's too late?
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[00:12:28] All right, so James Edwards, I really want to know this. ThePoliticalCesspool.org is his website and his award-winning broadcast every Saturday night, by the way, folks. So I want to know, though, we don't have independent confirmation of Mitch McConnell's present condition at all. What we know is that the office says he's alive and says he's recovering.
[00:12:57] His office released a photograph in July and a statement attributed to him, but analysis found evidence that the photograph was recent because it had a newspaper article in it. But that's not the same as it was appearing live. Even a phone call into a radio show, a TV show, or something where, hey, guys, I'm in my hospital bed. I'm doing all right. I just, whatever.
[00:13:21] As of August 5th today, we don't have any, any live public appearance, live interview, any votes, any direct appearance by McConnell since his June hospitalization. So we can't say that he's really alive and doing well. Now, I say anything about that and they'll go, you're a whacked out conspiracy theorist, Sam. How dare you speculate like that? How dare you? And I'm saying, how dare them literally have a guy since June 16th?
[00:13:51] It's a month and a half, folks. And we have no ideas. Missing votes left and right. Flat out, whether he's healthy or not, I'm not here to attack him when he's down. But I am here to say, you can't just disappear from work for six weeks without an explanation, without any kind of solid reality check in anywhere in any job except for government. Do you want to respond to this? You actually, you actually stole what was in my mind.
[00:14:20] You couldn't do that for any job, no matter how little responsibility that job may entail, much less a United States senator. And the thing is, I mean, we're not talking about some cartoon-level villain, some dictator of a breakaway nation where if his death is proven, it's going to cause mass upheaval. I mean, they already have the template here. We saw it with Lindsey Graham.
[00:14:46] I mean, just put in his sister to run and cast the votes that the donors won. I mean, how hard could it be? All these people do what they're told anyway. Mitch McConnell's certainly not special in that regard. It really does make no sense. It makes no sense. If he's incapacitated, you put another reuben there to cast the vote. Well, and here's my question, though. If he's really, like they say, he's recovering, he's doing well, he's fine, why don't we have a date when he'll be back, number one?
[00:15:15] Number two, if he's really doing fine and well, and even if we don't have a date because the doctors can't say, then why doesn't he at least appear somewhere? I mean, go on camera. You can, I mean, if he's in a hospital room, everybody knows that's okay. You know what Sonny Landon used to do. Why can't he still work out a way to vote by proxy or do something special or at least appear somewhere so that we know he's having it? Here's my fear. My fear is whatever's happened to him, he's unable to communicate properly, and that's the real core problem.
[00:15:44] And you can say that's speculation, and I would just simply respond back very bluntly, boldly, nobly, independently, and say, prove it. But, well, and that's another thing, Sam, you brought up another great point with this, and that is, I guess, first of all, this proof of life picture that they showed last month. I mean, it showed him setting up. He was well-dressed. It looked like he was in a hospital room, but he had a newspaper. He was smiling, had a thumbs up. I mean, it wasn't like he was laying in bed, and it looked a little touch and go, but, yeah, he was still alive.
[00:16:14] Yeah, but don't do a picture like that. Show me a video if that's true. Let's have a video and have him interact real time and talk then. Well, you remember our good friend, the late Sonny Landum, the movie actor with a lot of action movies back in the 80s. Predator, of course, he was the Indian tracker in 48 Hours and a lot of other movies. But he was a great friend of the network. Appeared on the political cesspool many times. Made a lot of appearance on TPC. He was at our kickoff party in 2004.
[00:16:41] I was in his dressing room for one of his weddings anyway. But he was just a great guy. He was literally in a hospital bed about to be wheeled off into surgery. But we had an appointment, and he had an accident. Anyway, I didn't get to note that he was in the hospital, so we called him at the appointed time. They were about to wheel him off the surgery. Buddy, he got her done. He waved them off live on the air and said, wait a minute. I forgot I've got to be on the political cesspool.
[00:17:09] You're going to have to wait about 10 minutes or something. That was live on the air. What a rock star. What a good guy. So this is what I'm talking about, though. What is up with this, though? And my problem is we're not being dealt with honestly. Now, here's my other problem. Why is Rand Paul sitting back and doing nothing? So it seems to me that if you're a fellow senator and you work together, you're two out of the 100 senators from your own same state. Rand Paul could say, hey, I know there's crazy speculation out there, Mitch. You know, we haven't agreed on everything over the years. You know that.
[00:17:39] We're differing on a lot of things. But, you know, we are friends and I'm going to walk in and we're just going to do a little video. Hey, it's Rand Paul and Senator Mitch. And we're going to. How are you doing, buddy? Hey, I'm doing fine. I'm recovering OK. And how come we don't have a little thing like that or a little news? How come we don't have anything at all? And it's not really being talked about very much by people. A little bit, but not much. Right. Not nearly as much as you would think. And I will give you the radio equivalent of that.
[00:18:06] If if Sam Bushman had gone off the grid. Now, Sam is the hardest working man in show business. I've consistently called him that for years. And sometimes, you know, it might take a day or two. But. If if if Sam had gone off the grid, I call Lou Moore, who's also on our network. And that is Ron Paul's, you know, former campaign manager and chief of staff in D.C. Say Lou, go knock on Sam's door.
[00:18:36] Get in the car and tip view and drive from tip view to American Fork. And let's go check on our boy. And yes. Yeah. It's about it's about it's about 11 miles or something. Hit me to my house in 20 minutes or less. I mean, how many days are they working in D.C. between now and the midterms? Like another week over the course of the next. Well, no, they've already taken the house took off like in late July and they're gone to the end of August. They're already gone, buddy. So that's why the Senate. Hold on.
[00:19:03] That's why the Senate passed the continuing resolution to fund everything through December or December or some number before Christmas. But they already. And now the Senate has their version, but they can't reconcile because they're gone. So they can't even they didn't vote on the same bill. And so it's nothing's happening. It's all stalled. Mike Johnson's on vacation again. It's good work if you can get it. Power, money, influence, prestige. And you don't have.
[00:19:28] No, man, I feel like, look, if I don't deliver for my bosses now, I don't count hours to the penny sometimes because I work so hard and my job is flexible where I work at night. And whenever something breaks, I go to work until it's fixed and stuff. But if I didn't really work hard for my pain, I'd feel dishonest. I think these people should feel dishonest before the American people's then you're sitting around and we're paying you good money. A couple hundred grand apiece plus benefits through the wazoo.
[00:19:57] Anyway, I think we need to know what's going on with this clown. And I'm not trying to be rude to Mitch when he's down. All I'm telling you is he owes us. We the people and the people of Kentucky, especially he owes them an answer. A clear guys. I'm here. I'm alive. I'm coming back. And either I have a date or I'm going to have a I'm going to talk to Mike Johnson about having a way that I can vote for my hospital bed because my mind is fine. Prove all that to us and we'll give you some grace. But until then, I feel like you're creating a hostile stonewall.
[00:20:27] And that's not cool at all. He doesn't care because he's lame ducked already because he's not running again. But I'm just saying somebody needs to be bold. Where's Mike Johnson? How come no one's doing anything about this whatsoever? It just baffles me. Anyway, we've talked about it enough, but I'm just telling you, no one else is really talking about it either. Now, AOC has risen through the ranks quickly. Bartender to president is the headline.
[00:20:53] 2028, J.D. Vance says that's going to be his opponent. James? She would be tougher to beat than Kamala because she's younger. She's more attractive. She's more vivacious. I mean, I'm not saying there's any there there. She's not super articulate, but compared to Kamala, she's articulate, too. I'm not saying that she's, you know, the top dresser drawer that you would think, you know, George Washington on this hand and AOC on the other hand. Well, yeah, but it's a relative discussion, James.
[00:21:23] But, I mean, as far as... Are you going to have Maxine Waters and Kamala Harris or are you going to have AOC, see? As far as a relative discussion. And with, I think, a lot of the disappointment that Trump will have left with his more recalcitrant portion of the base, yeah, there's an opening for her there.
[00:21:41] I think J.D. Vance will probably be a decent candidate if they go that way and could be compelling and maybe get some of these people who have been disenchanted over the last two years maybe back on board. But there's going to be a lot of fool me once, fool me twice, fool me thrice. And then I don't think that anybody that we know would vote for AOC, but they may very well set out. And you had some of that in the 2020 election, I think. But I think, you know, I hate to say it.
[00:22:09] I think she would probably be more formidable than Kamala, certainly. Well, she says that you as a conservative man and all the conservative men, you're just infatuated with her. You're in love with her, James. Well, listen, I mean, we won't say in love, but we can say, you know what, as far as Democratic women go, she does look better. And looks matter in politics, let's just face it. Now, a woman has never broken through. That's why Sam Bushman can never run for politics. You see what I'm saying?
[00:22:42] Not true, Sam. You've got to be tall and bald like James if you want to get anywhere. I think you could win something in Utah. No, no, no, no, no. That's why I'm way too conservative. It'd never, never fly. But the Republicans are in trouble, James, for a bunch of reasons. One, MAGA hasn't turned out to be what people had hoped. Trump has been very disappointing. We're in the middle of a serious war and there's no end in sight. We've spent ourselves into oblivion. Congress hasn't cut really any money.
[00:23:11] Doge didn't deliver. I mean, it talked a lot and delivered a lot of, you know, make you frustrated, make you angry stuff, but not real cuts. They're passing spending bills like you wouldn't believe. We're not receiving tax breaks. The economy is in the toilet. And now they call it a financial retreat.
[00:23:30] I don't know if you know who Ronald Lauder is, but Ronald Lauder pauses political donations amid family business turmoil and personal reevaluations. Do you know who this guy is? I do not. But if the billionaire class or multimillionaire class is clamping down on the spigot, then something must be going on. Ronald S. Lauder.
[00:23:57] This guy is a billionaire cosmetics man. Estee Lauder. It's the Estee Lauder guy. Yeah. Okay. That's right. Well, anyway, he's in New York and he's one of the most influential Republican benefactors. He's yanked his money. He's going to spend money on the arts and his philanthropy. He's backing away from politics. He wants no part of it. What's that going to do to the Republicans midterm or 2028? I'm Sam Bushman. Stay there. Hard hitting news.
[00:24:25] The network reviews continues with our dear brother, James Edwards, The Political Cesspool. You can find me on Liberty round table.com or live on rumble and YouTube and truth social and just about everywhere. Spread the word. Share the love. And God save our constitutional republic.