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Full Transcript Below:
by Rod D. Martin and Stephen Gardner
October 12, 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:
The lowest poverty rate and the highest median income in history: the data is there, the Enemedia is just lying.
Trump’s incentives bring manufacturing and good jobs home.
How the Iran blockade strengthens Trump’s hand more than renewed bombing.
Refinery closures keep gasoline expensive despite abundant oil.
California’s energy policies reveal the Left’s agenda.
It’s 14 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: I want to jump into something with you. I know you have a background in finance. You’re the founder of Martin Capital. You’re a Christian. You helped get PayPal off the ground. So you have a unique insight to economic stuff.
Every day, I see CNN, MS NOW, and others telling millions of Americans how terrible the U.S. economy is, how terrible Trump’s economy is. It’s the worst that we’ve seen in decades. No one can afford to live. Yet, when I go out to restaurants, they’ve got lots of people in there eating.
When I go to the grocery store, I see shopping carts full of food. Unemployment is low. Government jobs are down. Illegals working in the U.S. market is down. Americans back to work is up. Poverty is the lowest it’s been. The middle class is finally getting ahead of inflation since 2022. Help me make sense of what’s really going on in this economy.
The Economic Data and the Manufacturing Comeback
Rod D. Martin: Well, you know, the truth is the mainstream media is just an adjunct of the Democratic National Committee and has been for decades. They’re just a little more open about it than they used to be.
But you said the most important thing just a second ago in pointing out that the census data we just got a couple weeks ago shows that we are at the lowest poverty rate in American history. Lowest in history, for heaven’s sake. And wait, there’s more. Because median income, inflation-adjusted, is higher than at any point in history.
So lowest poverty, highest median income. By the way, also lowest child poverty. That’s kind of a big deal. Some of us care about that. And yet you’d never hear it on MS NOW. That would just never pass their lips. Just like the CapEx boom we’ve had all this year, which is just extraordinary.
You know, we talked last time we were on here about the $18 trillion in investment Donald Trump had recruited from outside the country into America. Most of which is slated for manufacturing. Well, we were promised by Clinton and Bush and Obama and Biden that there was no chance that we would ever see manufacturing come back to the United States.
Well, it turns out if you change the incentives, you change the outcome. They incentivized everybody to go to China or Vietnam or India or Mexico. And Donald Trump flipped it around. If you don’t want to be tariffed, the easiest way to ensure that you don’t have to face tariffs is to build a plant in the United States. Where, by the way, we just made permanent the 2017 tax cuts. We just made permanent full business expensing. We just made it easier to write off the equipment purchases necessary to build a plant.
We just made it cheaper to be able to train skilled workers. If you want to get back to an America where, you know, bear in mind, most people don’t go to college. Most people don’t get a degree. And a lot of the people who do get a degree these days are getting degrees in gender studies or basket weaving or something. I mean, it’s just all hooey. And the truth is, most Americans, for most of history, didn’t go through that process, didn’t get all that student debt.
And now it’s very, very hard. It has been for 30 years to get the kind of blue-collar work that used to support entire families. Not just, you know, the families we have now, large families, four kids, a husband, a wife, maybe a grandmother living, you know, somewhere on property. All of that was supported on one income for decades. It can be again.
Making Things Again: Jobs, Security, and Energy
And when you look at this new Anduril plant in Baltimore, we’re going to be significantly increasing America’s ability to build Virginia-class submarines. When you look at this new $15 billion steel mill going to go into Iowa, biggest steel mill in American history.
Look, America has to start making stuff again. We can’t afford to depend on China for 92% of our rare earth elements. We can’t afford to depend on China for our pharmaceuticals. That’s insane. And we’re just not going to do it anymore. So mining, manufacturing, all that stuff’s coming back.
Energy is off the charts. We’re outproducing Saudi Arabia and Russia put together. We’re the world’s largest exporter of LNG or liquefied natural gas. That means the Europeans and the Japanese are buying from us instead of the Middle East and Russia. That is better for everybody. It’s certainly better for them because now they have secure supply. All of these things add up to American jobs. And no, they haven’t all kicked in yet because it takes a while to get a plant permitted. It takes a while to then start construction.
It takes a while to then start the hiring process. But it is well underway. You were exactly right to point out federal employment is down dramatically. Lowest rate since 1966. But a million private sector jobs created in that same time.
This economy is raring to go. And Republicans have got to start telling their story instead of hiding behind, oh, we can’t talk about Trump. Are you kidding? This is the most amazing politician of our lifetime. Get out there. Tell what we’ve achieved and promise more. The Democrats put us in the hole.
They’re not going to get us out of it. They’re going to dig it deeper. So get out there and tell the story.
Iran, the Blockade, and Gasoline Prices
Stephen Gardner: Yes, I saw something that said, everyone knows that Democrats dug the hole that we’re in. Why would we hand them back the shovel? Like they’re going to just continue to dig, right? I want to be sensitive. I know that a lot of people are, you know, these high gas prices because of the war and, you know, Ukraine blowing up, you know, refineries and Russia.
At the same time, that aside, it does seem like this economy is going really well. And if wages are up and jobs are up, that’s really good for seniors on Social Security that depend on Social Security because that’s not printed money.
That’s money coming in from somebody working to take care of someone who already works. So it’s a really robust thing. But where do you see the gas prices going once this war is ended? For example, President Trump announced from the Oval Office, I’m not going to attack Iran. I want a deal. I want a deal. And the oil prices dropped, just like he had predicted. Where do you see those going? Because that seems to be the thing that’s really got people a little bit on edge.
Rod D. Martin: Well, and when you’re talking about Iran, the president knows better than anybody that you can’t really make a deal with these people. The only deal you can really make with them is a surrender. And we’re strangling them. This blockade is pretty much 100 percent successful. They don’t have any means to use overland routes to make up the difference. The railway from Iran to China at most could carry 6% of their oil exports. That’s a drop in the bucket. That’s not going to help them pay their IRGC thugs to shoot people in the streets.
So they are on their last legs. Now, last legs might be three weeks or three months or who knows. But at some point, you’ve got to be able to pay your people. And they can’t. So we are at that point. Donald Trump is very wise to stay out of the headlines with resumed bombing when the blockade is doing more good for us than bombing would. So he’s dead right to do that. We want Paxton talking about Talarico, not Iran. So that’s all good.
Now, as far as gas prices, you’ve got two different strands there. You hit one of them. The long-term strand is actually really positive because, as you know, we are now shipping as much oil through the Strait of Hormuz as we were before the war. So global oil prices are going to go down.
Additionally, we’ve de-risked the Strait in that we now have all this pipeline construction across Saudi Arabia, across Oman, across Syria, possibly even across Israel. We can redirect about 70 percent of the Middle East oil that was going through the Strait overland once those pipeline projects are complete.
And by the way, a lot of that work is going to U.S. companies like Chevron in Syria. So that’s more U.S. jobs, more money coming home. But that’s one piece of it. You hit the other piece, and there’s a twist even on that. You mentioned Ukraine.
Russia’s Refineries and California’s Closures
The Ukrainians are just taking the fight to Vladimir Putin in the smartest way possible. They’re not randomly attacking neighborhoods and office buildings the way the Russians have done in Kyiv. They’re attacking oil refineries, pumping stations, all of the means by which the Russian state pays its bills.
They can’t pay for this invasion without those sales of oil and refined product. And it’s so bad. They’ve lost 58 percent of their capacity just this year. It is so bad that they’re actually having to import diesel from Belarus, where they used to be one of the world’s biggest exporters.
That’s a big part of why the price of diesel is high. It’s unavoidable. And the people who are screaming the most about those prices are the people who scream the most to send stuff to Ukraine. So pick one, guys. Just pick one and stick with it.
But the other real factor that must be stressed, California shut two major refineries just since the war started. Don’t talk to me about gas prices when you’re shutting down the plants that produce the gas.
It’s absolutely insane. So California is stuck importing a bunch of gasoline that they were making even just last year. That does affect the national average. That does affect the local averages. And that’s on them. And I guarantee you, the surest way to see the $10 or $15 a gallon gas that lots of the Green New Deal Democrats have promised is where they want it to go so they can force you into an electric vehicle.
If you want that, just elect them nationally and let them have it at the refineries in Texas and Louisiana because those are on the list for next.
Electric Vehicles and the Energy Agenda
Stephen Gardner: Yeah. You know, I remember when gas got really high under Biden and there wasn’t a war, you know, they basically made fun of the American people and said, well, just get an electric car, right? And then as soon as Elon Musk, the electric car genius, starts helping Trump, they start attacking Tesla dealerships, bad-mouthing electric vehicles.
And as you just mentioned, I don’t think a lot of Americans understand this. The Democrat Party literally talked about the way to make us have clean energy in America is to ensure that big oil is put under and that gas is $10 a gallon.
They literally openly talked about this as one of their plans. I don’t think most Americans know that story.
Rod D. Martin: And it’s a marvel to me that they don’t. If I were running for the U.S. Senate right now in Michigan or in Iowa or in Texas or in Georgia or in Maine or in New Hampshire or North Carolina, I would be running those clips nonstop. If everybody’s upset about gas prices, let’s see what the Democrats want gas prices to be. They’ve been perfectly clear. Hunt down that Obama clip where he says, if we enact my policies, your electricity prices will skyrocket. And he’s proud of it, because he wants to destroy fossil fuels.
Well, okay, if you don’t want nuclear and you don’t want natural gas and you don’t want oil and you don’t want coal, how are you going to power all those electric vehicles? And, of course, this is the thing they never answer. California wants to force everybody into an EV, but California wants to shut down power generation, shut down refining. How are you going to square that circle?
And, of course, we know the answer. They don’t want you in an electric vehicle. They want you in public transportation. And to make that work, they want you in public housing in a handful of cities. This is the real aim of socialism. And they’ve honestly been really clear on that point.
Stephen Gardner: Yeah, they really have. 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.
