This analysis is free, but with Premium Membership you get MORE. Join today.
Full Transcript Below:
by Rod D. Martin and Stephen Gardner
October 15, 2026
My latest interview on The Stephen Gardner Show. Sign up NOW for Stephen’s YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode! 2,120,000+ subscribers can’t be wrong!
In this episode:
Twenty House races — and just four votes per precinct — will decide the majority
Why Republicans probably keep the Senate
The choice on the ballot: freedom vs. tyranny
Democrat welfare fraud: feature, not a bug
PLUS: The plan behind my new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order
It’s 18 minutes you don’t want to miss. Watch and share!
Our Full Discussion:
Stephen Gardner: Today, I am joined by Rod Martin to help me go through some of the biggest news stories, as well as what’s going on between now and the election. Rod, thank you for coming back on.
Rod D. Martin: So good to be here.
Stephen Gardner: Let me ask you this. President Trump, he’s not on the ballot, but he knows the importance of keeping the majorities. This is an 80-year-old man that does not stop working. He is literally wearing himself out in service to his country. He’s going to hit 35 cities in 32 days. Do you think all of this effort to get out there, show his voters that he is out working like a dog for them, do you think that is going to have a positive impact on the outcome of the midterms?
Rod D. Martin: I do. It’s up to us. I mean, he’s doing his part. I don’t know how he could do more. We have to do our part. And the math is really simple. You know very well, midterms are low-turnout elections. The drop-off between the percentage of voters in 2020 and the percentage of voters in 2022 was about a third. So you’ve got these really low turnout elections. And gee, that means I can do something about it that matters. That means what I do is really meaningful.
So if we get out there and we tell our story, we actually tell people, look, this is what’s really happening. Give it a minute. Stay the course. In a year, the boom is just going to be undeniable. It’s just going to be unbelievable in the same way as the transition from 1983 to 1984.
You know, you still had a lot of economic doldrums going into ‘83. And then all that Reagan magic kicks in. And by ‘84, he’s winning 49 states. Well, it would have been convenient if this midterm election was next year rather than this year, but it just didn’t work out that way.
So we’ve got to go do the work. We’ve got to talk to people. The president’s doing his part. We’ve got to do ours. We’re citizens. We have agency. We have a stake in our futures and our children’s futures. We’ve got to act like it.
And that means not just talk to people, but put them in your car and take them to the polls. No matter how high gas is, you can afford that. And I guarantee you, when the Democrats get control of things, you won’t be able to afford to do that. So it’s worth fighting for. Now...
The House Arithmetic and Senate Battlegrounds
Stephen Gardner: I’m sure you’re watching the different polling. Every day, I kind of feel a little schizophrenic. It’s like, oh my gosh, we’ve made gains. And then the next day it’s like, well, we might lose. Where are you seeing things going? Do you think that we have a chance of losing both houses or keeping one or keeping both? Where do you sit as you research it?
Rod D. Martin: The chances of losing the Senate, I think, are pretty slim. It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s very likely. The chances of losing the House are historically pretty high. But here’s the bottom line on that. If you look at what we need to win the House, 20 key House races, turning out a thousand more conservative voters each wins, period.
Just a thousand more voters in just 20 races out of 435. It’s nothing. And it works out when you do the math to about four voters per precinct. Well, I can put four voters in my car. That is just not a big deal.
All of us can take responsibility for that. So no, I think our chances are good. I also look at these things, you know, state by state. I think, well, first of all, we’re in the margin of error in Michigan. If we pick up Michigan, that’s a really big deal. We may lose Whatley’s race in North Carolina because I just think he’s running a terrible campaign. Good guy. He’d be a great senator, but you know, he ought to fire his entire campaign staff. I don’t know what they’re doing. In Iowa, I think we’re going to pull that out.
The only really solid poll we have of likely voters in that race is Emerson, and they have her up five. So I feel pretty good about that. Susan Collins has been declared dead every single race she’s ever won.
I think she pulls that out. I think Sununu pulls out New Hampshire. I think we’ve got a really good shot there. Jon Ossoff probably wins in Georgia, but he doesn’t have to. It’s absolutely possible to win that. And then you get into stuff like here in Florida. I mean, this is going to be a blowout. Ashley Moody’s going to win that by a stunning number.
But Texas, I just don’t believe that “God is nonbinary” guy who wants to chemically castrate our children and doesn’t eat meat is going to be the next senator from Texas. I just don’t buy that.
And there is a very prominent citizen of Texas named Elon Musk who has said he’s going to spend about 50 to 200 million dollars to make sure that Paxton’s message is just splattered all over all of their expensive media markets. And of course, the president’s playing in that too.
So I think Paxton will be properly funded, which is rare for him. He’s a terrible fundraiser, but he’ll be a great senator. And I think he will be our senator. So all things considered, can we win the House? Yes, it’s harder. Can we win the Senate? We probably do.
And we could potentially even go up a seat. It’s possible. It’s not super likely. But we could actually have a 54-seat Republican majority without crazy things happening. And that’s just not anything that people are hearing.
What the Next Congress Means — and the Larger Choice
Stephen Gardner: Yeah. Man, your lips to God’s ears. Even if we stayed exactly the same, one thing that I’m excited about is next Congress, starting in January, has less RINOs and more MAGA warriors. Even if the numbers stay the same, the quality of person, the fighter, the America First person is a totally different Congress next year.
Rod D. Martin: And people are always talking about how there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. And I honestly can’t remember a time ever when that was true. I mean, that wasn’t even true in the 50s when the conservative movement didn’t even exist yet. That just, that’s absurd. I understand the feeling, but the logic just isn’t there. How much more so is that true now?
When so many of these Democratic nominees are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and we just had the DSA convention, and one of the key leaders of the DSA stands up at the podium and says, verbatim quote, “Our goal is communism.” And the crowd cheered. I mean, he wasn’t booed off the stage. He wasn’t kicked out of the DSA. They loved it.
They believe in this insane radical agenda that we have seen destroy countries all over the world. And not just destroy them. Oh, no, no. Kill millions of their citizens along the way. And they’re just embracing it right and left.
This matters. This is something we actually have to take seriously. And I don’t think enough Republicans are. I hear too many of them kibitzing about gas prices. I’m sorry, guys. I was paying more for gas under Biden, and you weren’t spending all your time complaining then.
So, you know, quit listening to the mainstream media’s talking points. Actually get out there and say, this is what we’re achieving. And this is what they want to achieve. And they’re clear, clear, clear on that point. And I think if Mike Rogers can drive that home, we can win Michigan. I think a lot of these races are very winnable.
But they’re all touch and go. I mean, nothing’s easy. And we need to get over the idea that it is. It’s always going to be hard. You always have a tough opponent. I mean, nobody just waltzes into the Super Bowl and wins. Nobody just waltzes into the World Series and wins.
You’ve got meaningful competition. And we have not done as good a job as we should have of educating the American people on what all these things mean, not just the current story, but the bigger story of freedom versus tyranny. We haven’t done a good enough job of that because we’ve handed over our public schools to the wokesters, who are just Marxists, just plain out Marxists, Maoists even. That is a reality that we’re going to be dealing with for a lot of years.
And so we are going to have to step up our game individually, not just as a party, not just as candidates, but as citizens.
Government Fraud: USAID, Grants, and Accountability
Stephen Gardner: Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite things that President Trump and the Vice President are doing is this war on fraud. The Trump administration is finding record amounts of fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, USAID, you name it, there’s fraud in it.
I love seeing this cleaned up because I know you pay a lot in taxes. I pay a lot of taxes. People that watch my channel, we all are being taxed really heavily. Why do you think it got so out of control? And why has nobody until Trump and Vance really made an effort to clean that up?
Rod D. Martin: Honestly, we’re looking at so much fraud at this point that you have to, you have to surmise that it’s a feature, not a bug, that this was always the purpose of a lot of these programs. The Democrats get to skim off the top. And you see that everywhere.
You mentioned USAID. USAID was a cesspool. It had a bigger budget than the State Department and the CIA combined. And it turns out only 10 percent, maybe 13 percent of what it was spending money on was actual humanitarian aid. All the rest of it is foreign transgender surgeries, foreign LGBTQ parades, color revolutions in various countries.
And what we really see in, oh, and by the way, 300,000 forced sterilizations of native women in Peru. You know, I thought Democrats were against, you know, harming native women, but apparently not if it involves sterilization and reducing the surplus population.
So, so, you know, just thing after thing, these are heinous, horrible things. But wait, we just saw in Brazil, the biggest single thing, USAID was using your tax dollars to tip the scales in country after country’s elections. That’s what they were doing.
And from, from stem to stern, from Tierra del Fuego, all the way through Honduras, we now have all of these elections that are supposed to go permanently left, going right, conservative and libertarian governments in all these countries. And now Bolsonaro’s probably going to win this in Brazil, which is really one of the worst offenders and one of the worst to be in bed with China.
So, so all of this changes the instant that the U.S. taxpayer isn’t paying for socialist parties in foreign countries’ political campaigns. It’s just fraud. It is horrible, horrible fraud. And you see it everywhere. It’s not just there.
I mean, you’re talking about welfare fraud.
We can talk about food stamp fraud all day long. That certainly helps attract illegal aliens. They want to come into the country. That helps, that helps pay off their key constituencies they want to by mail or whatever.
But, but it’s not just that. It’s, it’s things like the $2 billion EPA grant. Folks, that’s the Environmental Protection Agency, a $2 billion grant to a one-month-old NGO started by Stacey Abrams in Georgia. How does this help the environment? How does $2 billion of your tax dollars help the environment in the hands of Stacey Abrams? What is her environmental experience?
What is her knowledge base on that? And we all know where that was going. That’s just going to boost her, help her win her next governor’s race, and help make it easier on Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
That’s all it is. It’s about flipping Georgia blue. And, and that’s your tax dollars at work. No, all this fraud has to go. Just cutting the budget isn’t enough. You’re going to have to go after the fraudsters. A bunch of these guys are actually breaking laws. It’s not just bad in theory. It’s actually criminal in a lot of these cases. If I were, if I were anybody in government in Minnesota right now, I’d be very, very concerned. And California and New York are coming right up.
The Book: Trump’s New World Re-Order
Stephen Gardner: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got a book coming out not too many days from now, called Trump’s New World Re-Order versus new world order. What is the book going to tell us?
Rod D. Martin: Well, the first and foremost thing is that no, Trump isn’t actually just a chaos monster and everybody thinks he is. It’s just random stuff here and there. No, no, this actually all fits together. All of these different policies fit together in a way that is far superior to anything we’ve seen under the beltway elites for most of my lifetime, where everything has been compartmentalized. Nothing touches on anything else. Trade policy is distinct from alliance policy or energy policy or all of that’s nonsense. All of that’s nuts.
So first and foremost, yeah, there’s a plan, and I show you the plan in Trump’s New World Re-Order.
The second thing is it is a multifaceted plan first and foremost at home, making elections matter again because elections really don’t matter if the government never actually changes course. This is why they say there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties.
It’s not that the parties aren’t different. It’s that one party controls the permanent bureaucracy. If you’ve got one president and you’ve got 435 congressmen, only half of whom are our guys, and even that’s a little sketchy, and you’ve got 5,000 political appointees, but you’ve got nearly 3 million permanent federal workers who are unaccountable, unfireable, and absolutely impenetrable.
They have the opinions they have. They were all hired by Democrats. They will all hire Democrats to replace them, and they just keep doing the same things no matter who wins an election. Donald Trump is dismantling that at home. That’s what this litigation strategy is: that gets you to Chevron being overturned, Humphrey’s Executor being overturned, all these landmark cases that I know most people’s eyes glaze over.
But what he’s doing is he’s restoring Article II of the Constitution and eliminating the permanent, unelected power of this illegitimate fourth branch of government that FDR gave us in the ‘30s.
Overseas, it’s kind of the same thing, because we created an order under FDR that was designed to be multilateral. That all sounds really nice, and if you’re a liberal internationalist, that sounds highly moral. But in reality, what it means is the Lilliputians are forever tying down the American Gulliver. We pay the bills. We provide the security. We police the sea lanes. We make global trade possible, and they call the shots.
No, thank you. Not anymore.
So, you know, from trade policy where we’re rebalancing things so that we have the same access to their markets that they get to ours, to energy policy where we’re shifting the center of gravity of global energy from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, to revamping our alliance structure where we expect these guys to be partners, not dependents.
It is ridiculous that Britain has twice as many admirals as warships. It is ridiculous that Germany was showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t buy enough rifles for their army. It’s absurd. It’s a joke. It’s a Saturday Night Live skit, it’s subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, and Donald Trump called halt.
So it is a new world re-order. We’re getting rid of the new world order. That’s history. And if we can see this through for the next couple election cycles, this becomes the new normal for the rest of the century. An America run by American voters and a world order that actually is run by the people who pay for it. And that is as it ought to be.
Stephen Gardner: Okay. Sounds amazing. I mean, I try to cover this stuff regularly on the show where, you know, he’s taking back America’s power. He’s getting South America and Central America realigned with us. He’s now captured 60 percent of the world’s oil. He knows that the most powerful thing in the world is oil and the American consumer, and he’s got both of those operating at high capacity.
So I’m excited about your book. I’m going to definitely pick up a copy of that. Rod, thank you very much for coming on and spending time with me today. We will have you on again in the future.
I’ll make sure to put a direct link to your X page as well as your book at the top so that people can find that. Thank you very much. We’ll have you on again in the future.
Rod D. Martin: Thank you. Looking forward to it!
