Don’t miss “The Greatest Story Never Told Just Keeps Getting Better”!
This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin and Tom Del Becarro
October 27, 2026
My latest interview with my friend Tom Del Becarro, acclaimed author and former Chairman of the California Republican Party. Sign up NOW for the Politics in Perspective YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!
In this wide-ranging episode, we discuss:
The larger strategy to Trump’s “chaotic” negotiating tactics
The fight to make the federal bureaucracy accountable
How energy, trade, and stronger allies are rebuilding American industry
Containing China without a war
The midterms and the prospects for a long economic supercycle
It’s a full half-hour you won’t want to miss! Like, share, & subscribe!
Our Full Discussion:
Tom Del Beccaro: All right, everyone. Welcome back to “Politics in Perspective.” You know, anytime you’re in the middle of an administration, you’re in the middle of those woods and you want someone who sees the forest. And that’s what I love about my friend Rod Martin. He sees the forest on markets. He’s kind of a — I don’t want to blow his head up too big — but he’s kind of a Renaissance guy when it comes to — he can talk about a lot of subjects, the market, foreign policy, domestic policy. And he’s got a new book out, which instead of waiting and thinking about it in his head, Rod’s a doer.
So I have similar thoughts in my head, I think, than him, but he puts out a book and takes command. So Rod, welcome back to the show. How are you?
Rod D. Martin: Good to be here. Thank you.
Tom Del Beccaro: Congrats on your new book and all the interviews. Thanks for taking time with us.
So, you know, you and I both have lots of friends on the right, who worry about us being involved in foreign policy. You know, it would be great, you know, I posted some comments about wouldn’t it be great if, if the world would just leave us alone. But when you become president, you see a lot of stuff in these national security briefings, and it wakes you up. And Trump, I think you will agree with, didn’t want to kick the can down the road.
And so I’m thrilled to have your book on if we could put the cover up again. And go for it. Tell us what your inspiration was, and say anything as long as you want about this book, because I think it’s important for people to understand the motivations.
Trump’s Negotiating Strategy
Rod D. Martin: Well, you know, honestly, probably the biggest motivation for me to write a book like this was just that I’m tired of everybody claiming that Donald Trump is some chaos monster, which is just not the case. He’s told you his negotiating strategy for basically our whole lifetime.
He wrote Art of the Deal in 1987. He wrote Surviving at the Top in 1990. He wrote Art of the Comeback in 1997. Then he wrote a bunch of other books and had the number one show in America, which was all about negotiating, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t any of these people do the homework?
Donald Trump has a meticulous plan for absolutely everything. What he doesn’t do is tell you. He is absolutely committed to keeping everyone as off balance as possible and making maximalist demands so that he can get what he actually wants.
This has always been true. This is how he got the air rights for Trump Tower. This is how he’s done everything in his career. And it’s all been wildly successful. I mean, there might be a few things that weren’t like Trump Steaks. But in general, I mean, this is a guy who took a small fortune and turned it into an incredibly large fortune.
And then in his first run for public office gets elected president of the United States and then is wiped out and supposedly going to go to prison in four different places and comes back anyway. This guy knows what he’s doing.
So so part of my motivation was just I am so sick of these stupid, stupid takes on Trump. Whatever you think of Trump, whatever you think of Trump, the idea that it’s just all chaos is stupid. It’s foolish. And why are we indulging that a decade into this process?
Now, the idea of the book, as you know, is Trump’s New World Re-Order, as in getting rid of the New World Order. And that’s really fundamental to everything Trump is trying to do. Because in his first term, I think he had a lot of the right instincts. And honestly, those are not new instincts. Those are instincts that you can read about in great detail, except on the life issue, in the final chapter of Art of the Comeback in 1997.
He really hasn’t changed his political opinions since then. And if you look at some of his statements in the 1980s, it’s the same thing. This is a guy who imbibed deeply from Reagan, saw the benefit in how Reagan conducted foreign policy, saw the things that prevented Reagan from doing some of the things he wanted to do domestically, and then was president for a full term in which the entire Deep State came against him nonstop.
So, okay, he spends four years in exile, and he basically choreographs every moment of the next four years. And that’s what we’ve been seeing. That’s why he’s gotten more done in a year and a half than any other president ever did in four years. It’s really, really remarkable, and it is on two very different fronts.
The Deep State and Accountable Government
The first one, domestic. You have this unconstitutional fourth branch of government that was created under Franklin Roosevelt that has dominated American politics ever since. Elections, in some senses, just don’t matter because there is a permanent bureaucracy. There’s one elected president, there are 5,000 political appointees, there are nearly 3 million federal civilian employees who make policy and carry it out every single day.
Those guys are unaccountable. Those guys are unfireable. And only Donald Trump has taken a meat cleaver to that. So, that’s the litigation strategy with going after Humphrey’s Executor, going after Chevron, going after all these things, so that the federal bureaucracy is actually accountable to one or both of the elected branches.
That is vital. That’s a sea change. That is an epochal transformation. And we know that because just in the case of Chevron — which, if you’ll recall, prevented you from having the right to appeal an administrative law court’s ruling to a real federal court for half a century — just that alone is breathtaking. But it also illustrates that the kind of rulings that we’re seeing now could very well last for half a century or even more. Humphrey’s Executor was on the books from 1935 until this June.
So, what he’s doing there is somewhat transformative. And what he’s doing with the federal bureaucracy is transformative, as evidenced by the fact that we’re at the lowest federal employment number since 1966. That’s kind of a big deal. But on the...
Health Insurance, Energy, and the Cost of Policy
Tom Del Beccaro: Wait, before you get to that, just to put a bow on this, the magnitude of what you’re talking about has changed. When Obamacare passed, it was something like 2,300 pages. And the regulations were over 30,000.
Rod D. Martin: Yeah.
Tom Del Beccaro: And those regulations were not written by a single human being who was ever on a ballot.
Rod D. Martin: No. And they have the full force of law. And they affect real people’s lives. I don’t know about your situation, but I bet it’s similar to mine. I was paying about $640-something a month for health insurance for a family of four. Thanks to Obamacare, that went up to $2,600 a month, which is just ghastly. And it forced everybody, you know, you didn’t get to keep your doctor if you liked him. You didn’t get to keep your insurance plan if you liked it.
And there was no political consequence paid for that. Because, honestly, Mitt Romney whiffed in 2012. It was just ridiculous to watch. Consequences for real lives. And you see it at the pump, too. Because where are we right now, if not in a Democrat-engineered energy crunch?
Yeah, we’re pumping more oil than anybody in the world. But we can’t refine it because California keeps closing refineries. And they’re not the only blue state to do it. We’re actually at about half the number of refineries we were at in 1977. And we haven’t built a refinery since 1977. So why do you think gas prices are high? Come on. I mean, this is insanity.
Tom Del Beccaro: And in the first section, I talked about our energy policy. Along with the Great Society, our energy policy is probably the worst policy we’ve ever had by enriching the Middle East and not developing our own. And all we did was make them more provocative and drive up our defense costs and drive down the number of people working in this country.
Rod D. Martin: Well, Obama would actually say crazy stuff like, “it would be better to keep it in the ground.” Really? I mean, is that kind of like saying, “hey, it would be better to have cancer?”
The truth of the matter is, we are better off with more energy than less. Everything that advances human flourishing depends on the expenditure of energy. Every single thing. The reason you’re not a sharecropper somewhere picking cotton or whatever is because somebody had the good sense to invent an internal combustion engine and a tractor.
I mean, everything is about energy. And Donald Trump gets it. So on the foreign policy side, we’ve been reorienting a whole lot of things. And honestly, a lot of what’s going on in the Middle East conflict is redirecting the center of the energy industry from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America. It really is, in some respects, that simple. But it isn’t that simple.
Reordering Trade, Alliances, and American Industry
Because really, the big sea change is the repeal of the postwar consensus. FDR gave us the Deep State. He also gave us this modern globalist order, which is just, you know, “like Topsy it grew.” We have all these multilateral institutions that control everything. And Americans pay for it, both in money and in blood.
We’ve been doing that now for all these decades. And that was fine during the Cold War. It made perfect sense. All our allies were flattened.
We wanted Germany and Japan to be allies. We had flattened them. These guys needed help. So it made sense to let Germany charge us four times the auto tariff that we charged them. It made sense to let India charge 100 percent tariff on Harley-Davidson. It made sense to put up with Canada charging 280 percent on dairy, which is just absurd and obscene. We don’t do that to any of these other guys.
But the Cold War ended. And not recently. It’s been a while. And nobody rebooted. Nobody actually restarted the computer.
And so Trump has to come in. He has to rebalance trade. And everybody freaks out about tariffs because, you know, we’re all free traders. We’re all for that.
But guess what? So is Donald Trump. He put it as plain as day at the 2018 G7 meeting where he said to all these Europeans, look, the ideal trade barrier is zero. I’m a Wharton guy. I get that. We’re not the problem. You are. And until you start treating us right, we’re going to make it harder for you.
So that’s where we are now. And I believe that over a 25, 30-year period, we will see that incentivize a dramatic fall in tariff rates all over the world. I think this is the biggest step toward actual free trade, which we’ve never had, that we’ve ever had.
So that’s a thing. But it’s also part of the defense picture where, you know, Germany was showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t bother to buy enough rifles. The British now have twice as many admirals as warships. I mean, this is just a joke. They’re teenagers living in our basement. And Donald Trump is telling them to move out and get a job.
That’s what’s really happening. So we expect our partners to be partners, not dependents. We expect our trading partners to be fair to our producers. And, of course, in the process, we’re reindustrializing America with that $18 trillion in new investment that Donald Trump has recruited.
So, yeah, that’s a reordering of the world. And the net result of it, more than anything else, is accountable government to our voters.
But our voters also deserve the opportunity to have a middle-class blue-collar job like our parents’ generation did and their parents’ generation did, where they can support a family on one income because we actually have industry here at home and we’re not dependent on China. This ain’t rocket science. This is just common sense.
And that’s really, I think, what is going to define the rest of this century, just as this technocracy, this expert class that is better than us and should rule us, dominated the last 80 years. I think we’re going to see a much more common sense approach that is accountable to the electorate and a foreign policy that serves the interests of the electorate. And that’s going to be the new normal.
Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah. It’s hard to upset these many apple carts. And I think —
Rod D. Martin: Yes, yes.
Tom Del Beccaro: Say whatever you want to say about Trump. He figured he knew how much time he had in office and he wasn’t going to kick too many cans down the road, especially as you point out that many of these things that are hanging around these structures of doing business wasn’t helpful to anyone. You had Tony Blair basically take power away from the voters in England and push it into this, as you call it, the “expert” class. And who was benefiting from that?
Not the average voter. Right. And so Trump’s doing the same.
AI Risks, North American Security, and China
Now, I want to dive a little deeper in foreign policy with you and talk a little AI. We saw this last week in France. Somebody hacked grocery store chains, destroyed tons of food, started fires, and demonstrated how vulnerable things are. And I’ve seen you on TV talk about it. You know better than I do. The risks are potentially significant in the years to come with AI in the wrong hands. And I think, and this is where I want you to take off, I think Trump wants to get some of these bad guys out of the way…
Rod D. Martin: Yeah.
Tom Del Beccaro: before they have a chance to get their hands on it. And so, yes, he said, I don’t want any forever wars. But at the end of the day, when Venezuela is no longer with China or Cuba or Iran or whatever it is…
Rod D. Martin: Panama.
Tom Del Beccaro: he’s going to save lives. And 50 years from now, historians will see that.
Rod D. Martin: It will be obvious, the sea change. We had the Chinese increasingly building their own “First Island Chain” around America in the Caribbean, which is just absurd and obscene. And what were Trump’s predecessors thinking? We certainly know what Hunter Biden was thinking: he was taking lots of Chinese money.
The Greenland thing matters because of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. You don’t need to know more than that. There is more than that. There’s Golden Dome. There’s mining. There’s all kinds of oil. Lots of good things can happen there.
But the truth is, we watched what Keir Starmer did with Diego Garcia. We were successful in blocking it. But we didn’t have any desire to let some future Eurabia or Denmarkistan do something similar to us with Greenland. You’ve got to control the approaches to North America. And you’ve got to do it in an increasingly contested Arctic where the Chinese are using the Northern Sea Route along the north coast of Russia. They’re not just doing that with cargo ships. They’ll be doing that with naval vessels in good time, certainly their growing submarine fleet.
So, you know, Panama was in Chinese hands. That’s crazy. How did we let that happen? Well, Trump fixed it. So you first focus on North American security because without that, you really have nothing. You focus on our supply chains, making sure that we are reasonably self-sufficient. Or if we aren’t self-sufficient, our foreign dependencies are on allies, not enemies. And crucially, you’ve got to actually deal with some of these very real conflicts.
You mentioned Iran. That’s not a forever war Trump started. That’s a forever war Trump’s ending. They have been at war with us for 47 years. Donald Trump is putting an end to it. This is going to be the end. I don’t know if it’ll end in a month. I don’t know if it’ll end in six months. But it will not be another 47 years. And it certainly won’t be 20 like Bush in Afghanistan or Iraq. So you’ve got that.
But ultimately, all Trump’s roads lead to China.
And the reality is they are the existential geopolitical threat of the day in very much the same way the Soviets were. And until you contain that, you have the risk of a global war we could potentially lose. So what he’s doing with Taiwan, what he’s doing in Luzon, what he’s doing with the Japanese, and the Japanese are really stepping up. They are doing a tremendous job all of a sudden, not just in building up their own military, but in arming our allies in Australasia and East Asia.
And it’s really phenomenal what we’re seeing there. There’s a defense structure we need, one of partners, not dependents. And one that contains China such that the risk of war — the risk to China of a war — are too great for them to launch. And I believe Donald Trump looks at that the same way Reagan looked at the Soviets. If you can just prevent them from going to war long enough, communism is going to collapse. And I think it will in China, just as it did in the Soviet Union.
Reagan’s Example and China’s Economic Weaknesses
Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah, I got to stop you right there, because that’s a very underrated statement. It doesn’t surprise me that you would make it, that China has a low — you notice when we took back the Panama Canal, there really wasn’t that big — China didn’t really say very much, did they? They’re not as powerful as they would have the world believe. You have to be careful, but how did Reagan beat the Soviet Union? By revving up the economic engine, right? And that’s what Trump’s doing in a way, do you agree, with China?
Rod D. Martin: And also by eviscerating Russia’s economic engine. They were running the whole thing on oil exports. That was their thing. They were making a fortune exporting oil because they have long been the world’s largest producer.
Well, guess what? They aren’t anymore. We are. That’s a sea change. At the time, we were the world’s largest importer. Now China’s the world’s largest importer, and we’re the world’s largest exporter.
That is a game changer. That means that the oil shocks of the 70s can never happen again. We can never be held hostage by some dippy third world country that hates us. That’s a big deal.
But the Chinese, did I mention, are the world’s biggest importer. So it’s a little different situation. With the Russians, Reagan went to King Fahd and cut a deal to collapse the price of oil, which deprived the Russians of the hard currency they had to have to compete on Star Wars and other things while he was ramping up a military buildup here that was largely unprecedented.
And they simply couldn’t compete, which meant they couldn’t invade West Germany. They couldn’t attack us. And once they were unable to expand, they collapsed.
I think you see the same thing in China over time, but it’s a little bit different problem. They know they need our export market desperately. They don’t have domestic consumption sufficient to maintain their economy. They are also losing people. They have a serious demographic crisis in progress. It will only pick up steam over the next decade. Too few working age people supporting too many elderly and a real estate market in freefall.
This is not the picture of a healthy economy. So if you can just outlast them without having a war, you actually get to a point where they probably do collapse under their own weight. And you get to a free China that is a great partner in the world. But we have to get from here to there. And this is the witching hour.
Tom Del Beccaro: And they killed a lot of those younger generation that they need to support the older generation. You know, one thing, the left will complain about anything. I’ve always said, if Trump gave away the winning lottery numbers, they’d scream that it took them too long to do it.
Rod D. Martin: And it’s corrupt somehow, and he should go to prison. But Omar should not. How dare we raid her?
Markets, the Midterms, and an Industrial Supercycle
Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah. So let’s go to the markets. We were on together. You came on the show a year ago. I said the market would finish at 48,000 last year. The Dow Jones, it did. It’s midterm election year. It goes sideways. So what are your thoughts on where the market is at this stage in 2026 and what you see after the election?
Rod D. Martin: Well, the markets are going to be sideways for a little bit. And, you know, first you have the midterms. If the Republicans somehow pull out a victory in the House, I really think we’re winning the Senate. I don’t think there’s a lot of danger there. You know, we can go race by race if you want, but on the House side, we don’t have to lose, though history tells us we will. I mean, I think the president’s party has won the midterms three times since I was born.
You know, it’s just…
Tom Del Beccaro: No, 96 years.
Rod D. Martin: Oh, well, there you go. I’m not that old, but, you know…
Tom Del Beccaro: I was going to say, what?
Rod D. Martin: You know, very long time. And Trump assumed we were going to lose the House. He knew what our margin was in 2024, and he knows that if the Democrats have a perfectly normal year, they take control of the House. They’ve planned for that. Everything they’re doing is planned based on that.
But that doesn’t mean we have to lose. As you know better than anybody, a midterm is a low-turnout election. If we turn out 1,000 extra people in just 20 U.S. House districts, we win.
And people just aren’t used to thinking in those terms. I hear people talk about, “oh, well, we shouldn’t be exporting oil. That just raises prices here.” Like, okay, so should Ford not export cars because that somehow raises the price of cars? No, that’s nonsense. What that does is it increases production. And if you have more production, you bring down prices.
That’s what we’re seeing in energy. We’re not seeing it at the moment in gasoline or diesel because we closed down half our refineries over the last 40 years. My gosh, what is wrong with us? Oh, wait, we elected Democrats. That’s what’s wrong with us.
So until you deal with that, you’re not going to see gas where it ought to be. But the truth is, if we had the refining capacity we should have right now, gas would be under a dollar. I mean, it’s just nonsense what we’ve done.
Refining Capacity, Permitting, and Venezuelan Oil
Tom Del Beccaro: So why hasn’t he declared a state of emergency on refineries?
Rod D. Martin: I really think he should. I think he should have invoked the Defense Production Act on those newly closed refineries in California. I don’t know why he didn’t. I think he should have.
[NOTE: This interview was taped on Friday, and the very next day, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to re-open those exact California refineries. — RDM]
But at the same time, the biggest thing is just making permitting possible again. We’ve got a big new refinery coming online, but it won’t be till 2029, in Brownsville, Texas. And I love it. It’s literally named the America First Refinery. That’s going to add something between 600,000 and 700,000 barrels a day capacity.
That’s a really big deal. We’re also seeing permitting eased and stupid environmental regulations. There are good environmental regulations, but lots of them were just engineered to destroy fossil fuels and lead us into socialism. We’re getting rid of those. So you’re able to expand existing refineries.
The Venezuela deal is brilliant too. That will start coming online over the next 24 months in a way that really matters. And people don’t realize: America’s Gulf Coast refineries were built to be optimized for Venezuelan and Albertan crude, which is heavy sour, unlike the light sweet crude we produce in the Permian.
So that really meaningfully helps. It also is the logical place for that oil to go because nobody else can provide that refining capacity to Venezuela. And we start seeing that country, and other countries, become prosperous again and move away from socialism and actually contribute to the peace and the security of our friends around the world.
So I think you see markets trend dramatically up over the next 24 months, in a way that’s very similar to the mid-1980s after you got past the recession in 1982 and 83.
Immigration, Crime, and the Long Economic Outlook
Tom Del Beccaro: I’m going to ask you a really hard question. You’ve outlined a ton of stuff that Trump has done. Are you trying to tell me if Kamala Harris had been president, none of this would have occurred?
Rod D. Martin: Literally none of it. Yes. [Laughter]
Tom Del Beccaro: You remember, she was the AI czar. Could you imagine?
Rod D. Martin: Yes. And immigration also. And I don’t know if you caught this, because it was just announced. We just completed the first full year on record in which the Border Patrol released zero illegal aliens into the country. Zero.
Now, we have reduced illegal border crossings 99.9 percent. Honestly, we’ve actually cut legal immigration even more than illegal. We’ve deported 3 million illegals. That’s a big deal.
A lot of them self-deported, but that’s a Trump administration accomplishment, too, because he incentivized that by handing them a plane ticket and some walking-around money: $3,000 cash now, and go home and we won’t trouble you. If you make us arrest you and go through the legal process, we’ll never let you come back. If you do it yourself, you can get in line to return.
This is good stuff, and it reduces the cost of deporting somebody by something between $7,000 and $10,000 a person. Over 3 million people. That adds up. And we’re just getting started.
So what does that do to housing prices? What does that do to fuel prices? What does that do to wage growth? Every single one of those things is positive. Kamala would have flooded the country with even more illegal aliens. They brought in 10 million under Biden. Under Kamala it would be 10 or 20 million more.
Tom Del Beccaro: And don’t forget about crime. Don’t forget the drop in crime that’s directly associated with this crackdown.
Rod D. Martin: Oh, absolutely. And in case you missed it, and I know you didn’t, but some of your viewers might have, we now have lowest violent crime rate since 1900. The biggest one-year drop in murders in history. Unbelievable stuff. And you bet the immigration policy has a lot to do with that.
But it's more than that. You know, deploying the National Guard to D.C. made a real difference. Deploying the National Guard to Memphis made a real difference.
You go around and you talk to people in these neighborhoods, and they’re very clear on that point. You know, my neighborhood wasn’t safe, but now I can walk down the street at night. You know, it’s just a different world. Well, you want to talk about impacting real people’s lives? I don’t know how you top that.
Tom Del Beccaro: How about lowest poverty rate ever?
Rod D. Martin: Lowest poverty rate ever. Yes, that tops it. And also, highest inflation-adjusted median income ever. You know, this is remarkable. Now, I realize not everybody’s feeling it yet, but that’s not the point. The point is the trend line. Trump was never going to wave a magic wand and instantly make everybody happy. That’s not how that works. But you get the right things moving in the right direction, and you create, as I said, an industrial supercycle that could last 30, 40 years like the Reagan boom.
We had been having, since the end of World War II until the first couple years of Reagan, we had been averaging a recession about every two and a half years. And from Reagan to today, we had a recession in 1990 because of the invasion of Kuwait. We had a recession in 2000-2001 because of the tech bust, which honestly is Alan Greenspan’s fault more than anybody’s. We have the 2008 recession. Then we have COVID.
Tom Del Beccaro: Which I blame on regulators, which I blame on regulators. They knew exactly how many of those mortgages that they were going to cause to flip, and you had that housing crisis.
Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. So you have three legit recessions between 1982 and today. There’s nothing like that on record, and none of them were really deep recessions. We talk about the Great Recession. That was politics. It was bad for a few people, no question. It was mostly business as usual for most people, and that’s the thing. We used to have recessions where you got double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation and all these horrible things. Reagan ended that, and he ended it way beyond his own term.
That’s what Trump is doing now, and the tax policy, of course, is key to that. We haven’t even touched on the One Big Beautiful Bill. But I guarantee you, if you want to take care of poor people, you can start by eliminating taxes on tips, on overtime, and on Social Security. Donald Trump did it. It’s done. It’s the law. And this is transformative. He isn’t getting enough credit for this. He needs to.
The Newsletter and the New Book
Tom Del Beccaro: Yeah, absolutely. Rod, we’re out of time, which is unfortunate because I enjoy our conversations like no others. Tell people where they can get the book. And also, if you’re not on his newsletter list, then you’re just flat out missing out. So tell them about that as well.
Rod D. Martin: Well, thank you for that. Everyone should come to RodMartin.org. That’s RodMartin.org. We have hundreds of thousands of followers, we have tens of thousands of subscribers, for daily geopolitical analysis Fox Business calls “absolutely phenomenal.”
The book is coming out next week. You can preorder it now on Amazon and lots of other places. Or you can go to the book’s website, TrumpsNewWorldReorder.com. That’s TrumpsNewWorldReorder.com. I think you’ll have a ball. Everybody who’s read it so far thought it’s, you know, not only a bunch of stuff they hadn’t thought about, but also really entertaining.
So get a book and get three more for Christmas gifts.
Tom Del Beccaro: All right. You’re the best, boss. Thanks for sharing some time with us. And we’ll have you back after the first of the year when things are underway. Hopefully, we’re both wrong about the midterms, but hell, there’ll be impeachment hearings we can talk about. Thanks so much.
