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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin and Kevin Freeman
November 9, 2026
My latest interview on Economic War Room with Kevin Freeman. Sign up NOW for Kevin’s Rumble channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Kevin and I discuss:
Trump’s dismantling of FDR’s permanent one-party Deep State
How Trump’s tariffs pave the way for real free trade, for the first time ever
Why energy dominance and stablecoins will entrench dollar dominance
Space: a new frontier for American prosperity
How China’s demographic collapse changes the strategic balance.
It’s 24 minutes of analysis you won’t get anywhere else. Watch and share!
Our Full Discussion:
Kevin Freeman: Welcome to the Economic War Room. I’m Kevin Freeman. For more than 80 years, America has lived inside an order built by Franklin Roosevelt, a permanent government at home and a globalist system abroad. Our guest today argues that order is ending and that what looks like chaos is actually a plan. Stay tuned.
Show intro
Kevin Freeman: Rod Martin is the founder and CEO of Martin Capital, the author of the Rod Martin Report at RodMartin.org. He was part of PayPal’s pre-IPO startup team, serving as special counsel to Peter Thiel, and he served as policy director to Governor Mike Huckabee.
He serves on the board of the Center for Security Policy and on the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and he’s a long-time friend of mine and of this program. Rod last joined us for episode 192, where he laid out the case for a gold-backed Digital Texan, real money for everyday transactions, and on September 1st of this year, gold and silver became law in Texas as legal tender.
Rod saw it coming. His new book is Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. The foreword is written by our mutual friend, Eric Metaxas, who has joined us here in the Economic War Room as well as on our sister show, Pirate Money Radio. Eric calls Rod’s new book “the map we needed.” And a personal thank you: Rod wrote a very generous endorsement for my new book, The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse.
Rod, thank you, my friend, and welcome back to the Economic War Room.
Rod D. Martin: So good to be here.
Accountable Government and an American-Led Order
Kevin Freeman: Rod, you’ve written in this new book that almost everyone misunderstands Donald Trump, including many who love him. They mistake his style for his strategy. So what is his strategy?
Rod D. Martin: The strategy is to create an American-led order, and not just America in the sense of the country, America in the sense of its people. So what we had for the last 80, 90 years, because of the New Deal, because of the things that we did during World War II, is this unelected, unaccountable, unfireable fourth branch of government at home, which is just a collection of subject-matter dictatorships.
They have incredible authority over specific areas of American life, not all united into one horrible thing, but pretty horrible actually. And until the overturning of Chevron a couple years ago, for half of that time, you couldn’t even appeal from an administrative law court in one of these unconstitutional agencies to a real federal court.
So the president is trying to make elections matter again by making the executive branch accountable to elections. That is a phenomenal and important front for the restoration of our constitutional order.
But overseas, in some ways, it’s even worse. We created an order that made a lot of sense at the beginning of the Cold War, when our allies were flattened at the end of World War II. They needed a hand up. We gave it to them. We gave them lopsided trade deals where, you know, they didn’t have to give us full access to their markets, but we gave them pretty full access to ours.
They got all kinds of advantages that long outlasted the need. And really, for the last 35 years, there’s been no such need. So on the international front, the president is systematically revamping that entire system so that it’s fair for American producers, and it’s fair for American taxpayers on the defense front.
We actually expect our allies to be partners, not dependents, and create a chokepoint strategy — à la Alfred Thayer Mahan, who wrote about this at the end of the 19th century — create a chokepoint strategy where we control global commerce in a way that helps contain China and the existential threat we face from it.
The European Union and National Sovereignty
Kevin Freeman: You know, as I look at it and all the things you just said, the European Union is everything bad about what you just said. And it’s almost like they copied what FDR here did in America. What are your thoughts on how we interact with the European Union?
Rod D. Martin: Well, the EU is a disaster. And you don’t have to look further than this statistic to see it: fifteen years ago, as you know, the EU had a combined GDP greater than that of the United States. Today, it’s just two-thirds of the United States.
The country that wants so desperately to join the EU, Canada, has the same population as California, where we’ve both lived. After decades of keeping up with America, since the socialists took over a decade ago, it has half of California’s economy. And California, my goodness, it’s the worst-run state in America. And yet it’s got twice the economy of giant Canada, which is resource-rich and supposedly one of the freest countries in the world, although we see that it isn’t.
I mean, it’s just gotten progressively worse for the last decade. So these countries have taken what Roosevelt did and put it on steroids. They are ruled by elites and elitists who go through the motions of elections but really don’t submit to them, really don’t have any need to do so. And that’s the exact opposite of what Donald Trump stands for.
This is part of why they oppose him so much. Donald Trump actually thinks that nations matter: that a nation is not some scary thing, but a discrete group of people that gets to rule itself and not be ruled from some foreign capital somewhere. That’s how you get an independent India. That’s how you get an independent Kenya. That’s how you get an independent Poland. And 250 years ago, it’s how you got an independent United States. This isn’t crazy talk. But it requires that the people of each country actually get to say how they are ruled and how their tax dollars are spent.
And the EU stands against all of that.
Gandalf the White: What Changed in Trump’s Second Term
Kevin Freeman: You know, we’ve only got about a minute before the break, but I’ve got an interesting question here for Lord of the Rings fans. You wrote that Trump returned in 2025 as Gandalf the White. What did he learn in the first term that changed everything in the second?
Rod D. Martin: Well, the beauty of Donald Trump in the first term was that he was an outsider. And the problem was also that he was an outsider, because he didn’t know what those people were going to do to him.
Well, he had four years of having everything done to him that any president has ever had done to any president. Then he had four years in exile to think about it. So he came back, obviously, with the entire four years of a second term scripted in minute detail.
And it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen.
Kevin Freeman: Well, I love the analogy because he was powerful before. He’s even more powerful because he’s better informed. He’s Gandalf the White.
All right. We’re going to have to take a break, Rod. When we come back, I want to talk about the economic war. I want to talk about tariffs because you’ve had an interesting perspective on tariffs. Energy, the debt, and the future of the dollar. And all of this is in your new book. And you can find information about Rod Martin and his new book at RodMartin.org.
It’s Trump’s New World Re-Order. Fantastic book. I’ve read it. I think it’s important for every American to understand what he’s saying. We’ll be right back.
Commercial break
The Free Trader’s Case for Trump’s Tariffs
Kevin Freeman: We’re talking with Rod Martin about his new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, which is an incredible concept. And Rod, in this book, you actually make an argument from a free trader’s perspective. Because I know you. I’ve known you for two decades. You’ve always believed in free trade. But from a free trader, how do you make a case for Trump’s tariffs?
Rod D. Martin: Well, the thing is, Trump is a free trader, too. He made some really fascinating remarks at the G7 in 2018, where he said, “Look, I’m a Wharton guy. I know that the optimal trade barrier is zero, but you guys won’t play ball. So we’re going to take it to you.”
Okay, what is that? That’s a recognition of the fact that there has not been, nor has there ever been even the hint of free trade anywhere, except within the boundaries of the United States. Florida can freely trade with Georgia.
But the United States cannot freely trade with Germany, even after the new trade deal, because they’ve got all kinds of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers. Whether you’re talking about the Common Agricultural Policy, or before the new trade deal, Germany was charging us four times our auto tariff on them. I mean, are you kidding? India had a 100 percent tariff on Harley-Davidson. That’s just a ban. That’s an embargo.
Same thing with Canada. 280 percent on our dairy farmers. Guess what? If a Canadian dairy farmer sells into the United States, we don’t do that to them. But they do it to us, which hurts American taxpayers.
We’re not going to put up with it anymore. So Trump’s approach is not about, you know, going back to the law of the jungle, as Macron was saying. That misses the point. The point is to get some fairness into the system, where you have equal access to each other’s markets, and the tariffs help create that by matching what they’re doing. As a result of that, they want to negotiate them down.
And I think Donald Trump is the first president to really put us on a path to getting to some real free trade, because all these countries need the American consumer market a lot more than we need theirs. And they're going to increasingly see the value in reducing trade barriers, which we will match.
That is a boon to the world.
Gold, Energy, Stablecoins and Dollar Dominance
Kevin Freeman: Well, I appreciate your perspective on this, because you pick up any conservative pundit or any mainstream media source, and you get the same thing, you know, Trump is destroying the global economic system and so forth. What I hear you saying, and what I read in your writing, is that Trump is just demanding fairness for the American people, which is a powerful thing. And he’s using the tools that he has at his disposal to make that happen.
Now, here’s another one. You write that our dollar is a strategic weapon and that Trump and Scott Bessent are building permanent dollar dominance. Now, I spent years warning about the attack on the dollar and the case for gold. I believe having more gold in America strengthens our dollar. So where do we agree, and what should our viewers watch?
Rod D. Martin: Well, what you have pulled off in numerous states now, you mentioned Texas, but Florida also and several others, creating a gold-backed currency option that can be electronically transmitted and therefore fractionalized virtually infinitely. And all you got to have is Apple Pay or a debit card or something. You know, that’s phenomenal. And that does tremendous good for the global economy. Possibly, you know, actually moves us in the direction of good money driving out bad, which is certainly a turnaround.
But at the same time, the dollar is the dollar. The dollar remains dominant. And it’s very, very difficult for anybody to displace it, or they already would have.
Now, your concerns about that are spot on. We don’t disagree on any of those. But as a practical matter, the petroyuan becomes — I’m sorry, the petrodollar. You know, we keep talking about the petroyuan. This is not a real danger to us if energy production shifts dramatically from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, which is happening right now.
This is not a big threat to us if Saudi Arabia and the UAE and all of these countries that sell oil are even more dependent on the U.S. alliance system, which is happening. That’s part of what you see happening when the UAE pulled out of OPEC earlier this year. They were one of the two pillars. Without the excess capacity in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, there is no room in OPEC to meaningfully reduce supply enough to affect prices. UAE’s out. Why?
Because they have decided to bet on America, and they have particularly decided to bet on the dollar. So when you see these currency swap lines that Bessent is instituting, you know, with the Argentines and with the UAE and others, and he’s talking about creating dollar centers in various parts of the world, you’re seeing the shoring up of the dollar because that liquidity is transformative for some of these countries, and it leaves them with very little reason to go looking elsewhere.
That’s on top of things like stablecoins, which I think are going to so democratize dollar dominance. It’s just incredible. Why on earth would a normal person in Luzon or Khuzestan not use dollars if he can use them in the form of a stablecoin that is 100 percent backed by U.S. Treasuries and has no transfer fees worthy of mentioning? Oh, wait, and there’s more. So now you’ve got billions of new dollar users. And because the issuers of those stablecoins have to back them 100 percent with Treasuries, we just created a vast new buyer of U.S. debt.
All of this shores up the dollar and reduces our dependence on the goodwill of foreign central banks, and all of this works together. Every detail of this and more works together to establish an American-led era through the end of this century.
The 1492 Premium and the New Space Economy
Kevin Freeman: You know, that leads me to my next question. We’ve got just about a minute. You say the future is underpriced. You talk about a 1492 premium. What do you mean? What does that mean for investors in this last minute before the break?
Rod D. Martin: Yeah, we need more than a minute for that. But truly, we’re looking at data centers in space. That’s going to be a massive increase in GDP. But that’s just the beginning. You’re going to see mining in space, manufacturing in space, settlement in space. The president is talking about this directly. Putting Jared Isaacman at NASA is a big step in that direction. What Elon’s doing is unbeatable. Nobody in the world can compete with it. He has personally launched more mass into space than all the rest of humanity combined in all of time.
This is a transformative thing for the global economy and what will increasingly be an inner solar system economy.
Kevin Freeman: Well, let’s carry this over to the break. And I want to ask you a really tough question. What is happening to the Star Trek franchise? We’ll be back with Rod Martin right after this break.
Commercial break
Kevin Freeman: Welcome back. I’m talking with the great Rod Martin. He’s got a new book out on Trump’s New World Re-Order. And right before the break, I gave him — it was unfair — I gave him a minute to explain the space economy, why we are in 1492, and there’s so much great future ahead. Rod, pick up where you left off.
Rod D. Martin: Well, we’ve heard all our lives that NASA’s just shooting money into space. That was never true. All that money gets spent here on Earth. That goes in the pockets of American workers. But it’s about to get a lot more tangible, because what Starship does, by reducing the cost per pound to orbit from about $10,000 a pound to about $200 a pound, and going south of that, it means you’re going to buy a lot more access to space, and not just space.
It’ll start with AI data centers. Morgan Stanley completely affirms Elon’s case on that. It will move toward replacing intercontinental transportation. And you’re going to have as big an economic boom from that as you did from airliners replacing ocean liners. But you’ve got to understand, we’re talking about New York to London in 26 minutes. We’re talking about New York to Shanghai or Singapore in 40 or 49 minutes.
This is going to shrink the world like nothing else before, and the U.S. military is going to be a particular beneficiary of that, because we could, with 1,000 Starships, we could move everything that we sent to Saudi Arabia in 1990 and 1991 in an hour. Not six months, an hour. It is transformative for American power.
But when you get past that, all of those things make everything cheaper. Every additional use brings down the marginal cost. And what you’re going to see is a lot of mining in space, which means we’re not polluting streams. We’re not tearing down rainforests. We’re doing good stuff. And that increases the abundance of every major resource by an order of magnitude, at least, within the next 25 to 50 years. That goes a long way toward eradicating global poverty and also to making the United States crazy rich.
Now, the Chinese understand that that needs to happen, that that’s going to happen, and they want to be the ones who make it happen. So they’re in a race with us for the South Pole of the Moon, where there’s water. And water, of course, can be turned into rocket fuel and atmosphere and drinking water and all the different things that you need in space that you don’t want to have to lift up from Earth’s surface.
That Lunar South Pole is going to be the Azores or the Madeira or the Canary Islands of the rest of this century. It’s absolute strategic real estate we must capture. Jared Isaacman, the president, Elon, all get it. We’re on it. It’s happening. I think we win that.
But what happens now is going to presage an incredible amount of settlement. All this new economic activity is going to need people. And there are going to be more and more people. And those people are going to determine the future. We are deciding the next 500 years right now. And we finally have a president who gets it.
China’s Demographic Collapse and Strategic Constraints
Kevin Freeman: Well, it’s important that we keep that. And it’s also important that we understand that China is actually wounded. You warned of the demographic collapse years ago ahead of almost everyone else. But their economy is in trouble. They’re shutting banks. There are a lot of problems with China. So please address that.
And then I also want you to address something else that I’ve seen that’s very weak these days. And that is the Star Trek franchise. All the space dreams that you’ve outlined were the old Star Trek. But the modern Star Trek, not so great.
So take it away.
Rod D. Martin: Well, in brief, the Chinese demographic collapse that we’ve been predicting for a very long time is coming to a critical mass. We’ve got about another decade before it just becomes so painfully obvious that nobody can miss it. And a lot of the mainstream sources that were pooh-poohing us on that five years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago are now finally on board and seeing what’s happening. Because you have way too few young people to support way too many old people.
And not only that, they cannot possibly consume all of the overcapacity that China has built. And so China is grossly dependent on foreign markets just to be able to sustain its economy. That only gets worse from here. So there’s a reason that we aren’t maybe in as great of hostilities with the Chinese as we would expect right now. It’s because they really need our market.
And the more we control their chokepoints, the more we build up military forces in the first island chain, the more we take this seriously while giving them that access to our market on reasonable terms, which we didn’t have before, then, you know, we can probably contain them until they crack up like the Soviet Union.
But that is a process that’s ongoing. And it’s one of the main reasons I’m optimistic about the dollar. Nobody can really use the euro as a global reserve currency. If they could, they would have. Nobody’s going to be able to use the currency of a country that’s in demographic freefall in place of the dollar either.
So we’ve actually got an amazing opportunity, if we don’t blow it, to actually entrench dollar dominance for another century. And the president and Scott Bessent are all about that.
Star Trek and Optimism About the Future
Now, of course, as to the most important thing we’re discussing — which of course is Star Trek — you know, Skydance just bought out Paramount. I think that’s going to be a good thing. I actually like some of “new Trek.” Some of it’s dreck. Some of it’s just so awful you can’t watch it, like the new Starfleet Academy show.
But a lot of it’s been really good. I think it’s been beneficial. I love Strange New Worlds. I loved Picard. Oh, my gosh. That was just the best. And actually Lower Decks as well.
But the new guys appear to be bringing out a new cinematic movie slated for late 2027 or sometime in 2028. There’s talk of this new Star Trek: United show, which would star Scott Bakula as, you know, having been captain of the first Enterprise, NX-01, now he’s president of the Federation when it’s very, very new. That looks like it’s probably going to get greenlit.
Sadly, I don’t think we’re going to get Star Trek: Legacy with Kurtzman out. But I think the future is reasonably bright for Star Trek.
And it’s certainly bright for America, even if Star Trek goes bad on us.
Kevin Freeman: All right, Rod. That’s an incredible optimistic viewpoint. I agree with you wholeheartedly on America. And we’re hoping for that. And I’m hopeful on Star Trek. Where can people find your book and where can they follow your work?
Rod D. Martin: Well, come to TrumpsNewWorldReOrder.com, or Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or wherever you buy books. I think it’s a great book, if I do say so myself: everybody who’s read it so far has just loved it. I think it’s really worthwhile. So come to TrumpsNewWorldReOrder.com.
Kevin Freeman: All right. And get your free economic battle plan at EconomicWarRoom.com. It’s Kevin Freeman from the Economic War Room. Thank you.
