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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin
October 20, 2026
Don Ma and I discuss my new book, how Trump is dismantling the Deep State and rebuilding American power, and what it will take to make the transformation lasts.
Don and I discuss:
Why an unelected, unfireable bureaucracy makes elections (almost) moot
The negotiating strategy behind Trump’s seeming chaos
Why the midterms — and 2028 & 2032 — matter for lasting reform
Containing the CCP through American strength
Why the race for the Moon could decide the future of Earth
It’s 18 minutes of the in-depth analysis you need: watch it, and pass it along!
Our Full Discussion:
Don Ma: And we’re welcoming back Rod Martin. He’s author of the new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. So Rod, let’s talk about your book now. So you’re talking about in this book, how we’re witnessing a realignment of the American political order. What exactly is being reordered?
Rod Martin: Domestic and global. It’s really quite remarkable. It is an epochal transformation, if it lasts. And we have had that happen before in American history, the American Revolution, obviously, but the Civil War, the Depression and World War II, which have to be understood as a unit. And we have been living under the order created in the 1930s and 40s ever since.
On the domestic front, that involves what is frequently called the Deep State. That’s this permanent, unfireable, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy that fuses legislative, executive, and judicial power in specific agencies with jurisdiction over specific subject matters.
You basically have a group of subject matter dictatorships, and they’re not susceptible to elections at all because they’re not fireable by a president, or at least they weren’t until Donald Trump’s litigation strategy got Humphrey’s Executor before the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court overturned it. That’s a 1935 decision. Two years earlier, they had overturned Chevron. What that did was it actually allowed you to appeal from an administrative law court to a real federal court, which had been prohibited for half a century.
So you’ve got to make elections matter again. You’ve got to actually get to a point where when the people decide to change their government, it actually changes because the new president can fire people and replace them. That’s crucial.
But globally, you also have an order that was built on the idea that the world had been flattened in the war, and America had to give its allies, and actually its former enemies as well, certain trade advantages, certain multilateral controls over things to allow them to resist the temptation to fall under communism. And that was great. And that worked brilliantly.
And then the Cold War ended, and we didn’t change anything. So, you know, it’s completely crazy that Germany would charge us four times our auto tariff, or India would charge us a 100 percent tariff on Harley-Davidson, or Canada would hit us with 280 percent on our dairy farmers. We don’t do any of that to them.
So Trump has rebalanced trade. He’s rebalancing our alliances. They actually have to be partners, not dependents. Germany can’t show up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t buy rifles anymore. That’s got to stop. And it really is an America First order, but it is not America Only. We want all our friends to be strong.
An Epochal Turning Point
Don Ma: Okay. And you’re comparing what we’re witnessing now to major, major turning points in American history. Can you just help us understand why this point in history currently is comparable to past turning points? Help us understand that.
Rod Martin: Well, it very much is. You know, the revolution produced an era of very limited, decentralized government, but enough central government to be able to operate, which was a difference from the Articles of Confederation era.
The Civil War made the country into one nation, which was kind of a radical idea. Before the Civil War, people spoke of “the United States are.” And then after the war, it’s “the United States is” — one coherent thing after the war.
The Depression and World War II reforged America in a technocratic way. The idea that experts should rule us, that we really shouldn’t allow elected people to have anything to do with telling an expert what to do. That’s how you get Tony Fauci. That’s how you get two years of masks and lockdowns. That’s how you get a vaccine that is just absurd. I’m sorry. Brilliant effort: good on them. But we’re going to give billions of people a vaccination that we actually haven’t conducted a clinical trial for? That’s just crazy, especially if you force it on them.
So people have lost faith in the expert class because the expert class turns out not to be that smart. And they certainly aren’t accountable.
So just here at home, you’re talking about a tremendous shift from the system of government that we have had, which I would contend is unconstitutional, for 90 years.
Abroad, just reordering our foreign relations in a way that puts the interests of the United States first is crucial because for the first time in a very long time, the people paying the bill, both financial and in blood, actually get to be considered. And we’re not just a charity case helping out this or that wayward friend. This is just a complete reordering of everything.
And again, we’re going to have to win the 2028 election to make it stick. We’re going to have to win 2032 to make it stick. I think we can. I think we will. But if we do, this is the new shape of the entire 21st century.
The Negotiating Strategy Behind the Seeming Chaos
Don Ma: You know, there are some voices on the left who are saying that President Trump is unpredictable, sometimes perhaps using the word “chaos.” What is your response to that? Is there a governing pattern behind Trump’s policies? What’s the guiding principle?
Rod Martin: Well, that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. Honestly, everybody thinks he’s a chaos monster, which is just silly. Did you not read Art of the Deal, Art of the Comeback, Surviving at the Top? I mean, he’s been telling you his negotiating strategy since I was a teenager. And then he had the top-rated show in America for however many years. I mean, he told you what he would do.
So his negotiating strategy is always keeping his opponents off balance, constantly making them wonder what he’s going to do next, constantly asking for way more than he actually wants.
I mean, you certainly saw that with the Panama Canal. You saw that with Greenland. He got exactly what he wanted. But by making it big and bold and crazy, he sucked the oxygen out of the room. He got attention in global media and he forced them to actually confront the issue. They would not have made the deals that they made if he had gone at it the traditional way.
So no, he’s not chaotic. He has a very, very thought-out plan from beginning to end. He just gives the appearance of chaos, which helps him win. And he was good at it as a real estate developer. He’s good at it as a politician.
Dismantling the Deep State
Don Ma: And you brought up the term Deep State earlier. What is President Trump doing about the Deep State?
Rod Martin: Well, that is the heart of the litigation strategy. Overturning Humphrey’s Executor is a massive, massive deal. It’s the first time since 1935 that the president has actually been allowed to make major personnel changes in the permanent bureaucracy. That is a huge deal.
Overturning Chevron, same thing. You were prohibited from appealing a case that was ruled on by an administrative law court to a real federal court for half a century. That came in in 1984.
Trump has gone after those things partly by crafting litigation that would get us there, partly by putting the judges in place who would actually be willing to hear those cases. And so that’s part of it.
But the other part is we’re now at the lowest level of federal civilian employment since 1966. It’s really remarkable. And we’re seeing a lot of streamlining and other things.
You know, one of the stories on NTD this morning was Project Agincourt, which is just extraordinary. And part of what is encompassed in that is reducing the number of general and flag officers. We have way more generals and admirals than we need. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculously top-heavy, and it’s not at all efficient.
The procurement process is not efficient. If you actually want to rearm America, you actually have to be able to get weapons sooner than 15 years after you start a program. It’s ridiculous. Trump is fixing that. Hegseth is especially brilliant at this.
Also, our Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent — honestly, I think he’s the best Treasury Secretary we’ve ever had.
Lockdowns, Mandates, Censorship, and the Loss of Trust
Don Ma: So before Trump, or in between Trump’s first term and the second term, what did we see the Deep State do? What has been the impact of this so-called Deep State on the American way of life?
Rod Martin: Well, the Biden years are possibly the worst example of all. I mean, not that we haven’t had bad things happen before, but during the Biden years, you have the lockdowns. I mean, obviously, we had a little bit of that under Trump, but then it continues under Biden.
You have mandatory vaccination policies where I personally know a lot of senior officers in U.S. military branches that were forced to resign or get vaccinated. Okay, so career-ending if you don’t do what we say. It’s just authoritarianism. You should have bodily autonomy.
And the same party that tells you constantly, “My body, my choice,” on their favorite issues, don’t think you have a choice on anything they want you to do.
So you see these abuses, you see an expert class decide your fate without your input and without an election having anything to do with it. And that’s where I think most Americans lost trust in the expert class. I think that’s where they realize that the experts aren’t really that expert. They’re really highly credentialed by other leftists who gave them, you know, all of this position and authority. And they’re really just political hacks.
And you know what? If we’re going to have political hacks run things, we should actually elect them. And that’s the biggest change.
We spent four years seeing the opposite. We saw censorship. We saw government coercing social media to prevent any voices from being heard that government didn’t want.
How is that different from Communist China? It differed, if it differed, only in extent. And that’s where we were headed. If Kamala had won, that’s where we would be. So Trump has just dismantled that, and it’s going to be hard to bring it back.
The Midterms and Making the Changes Last
Don Ma: Okay. I’m glad you brought up China. What would happen if, after the midterms, Democrats took control of the Senate and the House in the context of China? What would you expect to happen?
Rod Martin: Senate and House is tougher. I honestly think we’re in pretty good shape in the Senate. Just race by race, I think Talarico loses. Moody’s clearly going to win. I think we’ve got a shot in Minnesota. I think we’ve got a shot in New Hampshire. I think Susan Collins wins. I think Mike Rogers wins by five in Michigan. I think we’re going to win Iowa. I feel pretty good about the Senate.
The House, odds are we lose. I mean, historically, the president’s party always loses the midterms. That’s a given. So we could win. We absolutely could. We probably won’t.
The House is going to have a very hard time preventing this president from carrying out his foreign policy with regard to China. If you lost the Senate too, it gets much messier.
Don Ma: Yeah. Well, I had a guest a couple of days ago who said it would be very beneficial for China if Democrats took control after the midterms. What would it mean also for the administrative state if Democrats took control of Congress?
Rod Martin: Makes it much harder to curtail it. There are a lot of things the president has done that are brilliant and impressive and kind of breathtaking in scope that haven’t been legislated. They’ve been done through executive order. They’ve been done through litigation.
We need some of this stuff to actually be enacted into law — not all of it, but some of it. And with a Democratic House, none of that happens. Absolutely none. So then you’re kicking off into 2029 or something. You’ve got to retake the House and you’ve got to retake the White House.
As far as the China threat, the biggest problem is that I would expect the Democrats to do what they normally do and block appropriate defense expenditures to curtail missile defense in particular, which they have been against since before I was born. And it’s just inexplicable at times. Some of the insane arguments that they have made to keep our people defenseless against Soviet and then Russian and now Chinese nuclear attack.
And the president is committed to deploying Golden Dome. That can get done in his term, but it’s going to be a lot harder if the Democrats have the House.
Trump’s China Policy Is Reagan’s Cold War Strategy
Don Ma: Okay. And I think you touched on this as well in your book, the China issue. Is China the long-term concern for the United States? Is China becoming too powerful?
Rod Martin: Absolutely. I mean, China itself is wonderful. The Chinese Communist Party is evil beyond compare.
This is a malevolent force preying on the earth, starting with its own people — who, we must recall, are still committing genocide against the Uyghurs, but long before that murdered 65 million of their own people. This is just a horrifying regime.
And them with something approaching nuclear parity, which you were talking about a little bit earlier, this blows all of the arms control calculus out of the water. It makes the world much less stable.
China with nine aircraft carriers, which is what they’re building toward. They’re going to have more submarines than we do by 2030. And no, they’re not as good as a Virginia-class boat. They’re not all nuclear. There are lots of things you can say negative about them, but quantity has a quality all its own. And Donald Trump’s taking it seriously. And the Democrats absolutely fiddled while Rome burned.
So yes, Donald Trump sees them as the geopolitical threat. They are the existential threat to freedom everywhere. And we mean to contain them sufficiently that they have to play nicely with others, that we have to trade peacefully because war just isn’t workable.
And ideally in time, the CCP collapses under its own weight as the Soviet communists did before.
Space, the Moon, and Astropolitics
Don Ma: Okay. Just one final question here. And I hope you have some good news for us, but by your assessment, since we’re talking about the title of your book, the reordering of the world, is China going to leapfrog the United States?
Rod Martin: The only way they do that is in space. Or we give the government to the Democrats for 12 more years or something stupid. But barring that, if you continue down this course, their only door out is space. I know this will sound crazy to some people, but guys, we’ve brought down the cost per pound to orbit from $10,000 to about $200.
You’re going to get a lot more space travel. You already are. Elon Musk has launched more stuff into space than all of humanity combined in all of history. No, you’re going to get a lot more stuff in space. You’re going to get a lot more people in space. And the Chinese know it perfectly well.
If they capture the lunar south pole, they have control of all of near-Earth space. That could give them an economic advantage that is overpowering. It could also give them a tremendous military advantage.
So Donald Trump is right to prioritize—and of course he created the Space Force. He’s right to put real effort into that. He’s right to try to get back to the moon first.
These things are not toys. These are not games. This is not a prestige project like in the sixties. This is the new geopolitics. Honestly, it’s astropolitics.
And I do talk about that in the book, but the truth is we’re going to talk about it a lot more and I’ll probably have a book out in a couple of years on astropolitics.
Don Ma: And then we’ll have you back on to talk about it. So let’s leave the conversation here, but I want to tell you: yesterday I actually took a day off, and then they told me you were coming today. And then I said, “Well, I’m coming to work because I want to meet you in person.” So Rod, it’s good to have you here. Thank you very much.
Rod Martin: So good to be here.
