A libertarian in Brussels

A US election interview

‘White Boxes on the Table Near American Flag’. Photo by Edmond Dantès via Pexels.com

The US Presidential election is taking place on Tuesday, November 5th. I find American politics reliably fascinating, so I wanted to talk through the issues with an American voter.

To that end, I organized a chat with Alan, a retired Brussels-based military contractor and a rare Trump supporter in my life. We had a fun talk about American politics and what he sees as the case for Trump this November.

A transcript of our conversation follows.

James: I've been writing a newsletter for almost exactly four years now. We're just starting our fourth year. I write about politics, I write about culture. My own politics are pretty boring, centrist, not particularly left, not particularly right, but I'm very interested in different views and I try and platform different views on my newsletter.

I'm interested because there's so much hatred of Trump. And certainly fear, I'd say, in a lot of people. I'd like to get a different perspective, because I've worked a lot with Americans, and I've worked with a lot of Americans who are pro-Trump, or don't vote Democrat, or vote all kinds of things.

And I just wanted to talk to someone to give me a bit of a different view, if that's okay.

Alan: Yeah, it makes sense.

James: Tell me a bit about yourself. About your career and how you ended up in Brussels.

Alan: I joined the military when I was 18 years old, the U.S. Air Force. I spent the next 20 years working for the U. S. Air Force. I spent the entire time outside the United States on military bases around the world, primarily in Europe, a lot in Germany. After I got out of the military, I worked as a government contractor for a year, and then the U. S. government, Department of Navy, picked me back up, and I worked for them for another seven years.

At that point, due to the regulations, I needed to come back to the States for at least two years. And my wife’s job at the time, that wasn't really what her job wanted or what her job needed. So I decided to resign from my position and follow her career. And that brought us back to Brussels.

I like Brussels. Brussels is a bit chaotic for me. I prefer the structure of Germany to Brussels, but it's interesting. There's always something interesting going on here.

James: I lived in Germany for a long time. It's a very organized place.

Alan: Yeah. I tend to like to live in the organization and go visit the chaos. This has me in the opposite situation now, but it’s a vibrant city. There's always something interesting going on.

James: What I like about Germany is the fun is organized too. So it's like the fun starts, ‘You're going to have the fun now. You've got five hours. Here, it's a bit, I don't know, when's the fun happening? I dunno. You tell me. You've been here longer than I have.

Alan: Yeah, it's neat. But in Germany you know when something fun is going to happen. Here there are reports of it after it happened, but there's no real consolidated place to find out what's going on.

If you wanted, if you had the day off and you decide, I want to go do something today, there's no like central point in Brussels that you can go look and see what events are going on. But there's tons of events going on all over the place, just nobody thought that it'd be good to maybe put a list of them somewhere.

James: It really feels like there's too much politics in a very small country in Belgium for me.

Alan: Oh yeah. There's too much, their entire system is just layer after layer. And that's why we pay so many taxes here.

James: That brings us onto politics. Is it fair to describe your views as quite libertarian?

Alan: Libertarian would probably be the best way to describe it. I hate using that term because within the libertarian community, you tend to have two types of people, the type that are fairly constitutionalists, and then the fringe that are just there because they want to be something other than normal.

So you get a lot of rather eccentric people in the libertarian party. Libertarian, Constitutionalist, would be pretty much how you would describe me.

James: What do you mean by Constitutionalist?

Alan: I believe the Constitution is what we should be following. And nowadays we seem to be drifting away from that. The Constitution was a very well-written document.

It includes within itself the ability to adapt it and adjust it. We seem to be getting away from that in the United States.

James: There’s like an originalist view, isn't there? That you've really got to interpret everything through the constitution in a legal sense as well. Would you go along with that as well?

Alan: In some ways, some people take that to extremes. Like anything else, if you take it to an extreme, it becomes bad. But in general, yes, they formed this document because they were leaving the British government that they felt was tyrannical. They had a chance to set up a whole new system and they purposely set it up to avoid the pitfalls that they saw with governments in the past.

The people who wrote it were extremely cynical. They expected everything to fail. They expected human nature to take over and try and corrupt things. And they tried as best they could to put safeguards into it. But now we're seeing those safeguards... It's very obvious that the 25th Amendment of the constitution is the method to remove a president if he's incapable of doing the job.

And we see a president that we have currently that, as is obvious to anybody who's watching, is not fit for the position right now. Yet the Vice President, who should be invoking the 25th amendment, and having him removed, is covering for him. And she's running for president of the United States now, even though she's not doing one of her most fundamental functions as Vice President. Who's president right now?

James: So would you say that creates, for you, a lot of cynicism when you hear people say on the Democratic side say Trump's not fit to serve and then you've got Biden as President. Because I agree, I don't think Biden’s up to being anything more than the president of the local golf association at the moment. Would you say that's a double standard you're seeing?

Alan: Very much so. It's hypocrisy beyond belief and the fact that you still have the mainstream media covering for them and acting like nothing's wrong. Yet in all honesty, the question should be who is currently running the country? The country's still running.

James: Yeah.

Alan: It's very obvious that the person who's supposed to be running it is not the one doing it. We had, just the other day, a cabinet meeting, which he hasn't had in extreme long time. Who's sitting at the head of the table? Jill Biden. Running the meeting. Jill Biden's not an elected official. There's nothing within our constitution that says that if the president's incapable, his wife steps in, that's not how it's supposed to work. We're not following the constitution as it's written.

If we were following the constitution as it's written, Biden would be set aside. Kamala Harris would be the president to fulfill the rest of the term, and then we would have elections.

James: And also because of your system, you have that lame duck session where the president stays in, right? That's a very unique feature of the American system, that you lose power but you stay in office for three or four months afterwards. It's actually something very different in the UK, when you lose, you're out the next day, right? Along come the moving vans.

Alan: This is to allow any potential discussions on whether there was a problem with the election and also to allow for the new president to come in to get established and get his team together to have time to actually form his team so when they walk into office, it's not day one for everyone. They've been working and functioning as a team during that period during the transition period to put the team together.

When you're dealing with the United States, you're dealing basically with 50 countries grouped together into one federation, so it's a much bigger enterprise that you have to deal with. It's much more complicated than any of the European countries would be.

James: Absolutely. And is part of your politics then, because something often on the libertarian side is a strong belief in states rights. That the states are a bit more like a different countries and they should have the right to decide. Is that something you'd sign up to?

Alan: Very much. The federal government was never supposed to have the power that it has now. Right now, the federal government overriding state laws in the way that they're doing it is unconstitutional. If you look at the constitution itself, it states, any power not specifically granted to the federal government by this document is inherently a power controlled by the states.

That's the end statement of how you determine whether something is federally mandated or state mandated. If the constitution doesn't specifically give the power to the federal government, it is by default a state power.

James: So when we look at the election coming up then would your instinct be to vote for the Libertarian candidate or, do you feel that, given that candidate doesn't have a chance of winning, the priority should be to get the Democrat out?

Alan: Could you even tell me who the Libertarian candidate is?

James: I could from a previous time, because there was Ron Paul, who had a bit of a following in Europe as well. And then there was Gary Johnson, was it?

Alan: Gary Johnson I was very interested in. He was competent, he was a governor, and he was a governor where the opposition was in control of the state and he governed the state and he managed to balance the budget. His running mate was the exact same. He was ran as a Republican in a state and ran the state, got the budget under control, had the state running very efficiently while the opposition was controlling the, just use the term Congress, the state legislature, I guess would be the correct term. And the two of them were going to work together as a team, not as a typical president, vice president.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate for President in 2012 and 2016

The problem you had with that is Gary Johnson was not a good public speaker. His running mate was a very good speaker.

James: Who was his running mate?

Alan: That's a name that, as we were having this conversation, I was trying to pull that name up out of my head, but that, I would have to look that up.

James: I can look that up.

[In 2016, it was former Massachusetts governor William Weld - ed].

Alan: Basically he was a very good public speaker. But having been a Republican and not a long term Libertarian, the Libertarian Party would not put him at the top of the ticket. Had they done that, they'd have made a much better showing if he could have been the front man handling the press. Because the press ate Gary Johnson alive. Because he is the type of person that when he's asked a question, needs to stop and consider the question. Think about his answer and then respond. And if you have the press corps going at you like a pack of rabid dogs, it's difficult for a person to answer that. You have to have a certain personality.

It's very quick on their feet, very quick to be able to handle that type of thing. And Gary Johnson, his speaking ability wasn't there, but his policies and his thoughts were very much there.

James: What do you think of Trump as of now? Not the 2016 model, not the 2020 model, the guy who's running for election right now.

Alan: I just actually watched an hour-long interview with him on what is basically a political comedy show, the Gutfeld show.

James: Fox, isn't it?  

Alan: He's on Fox. He's one of the few things on Fox that's worth watching because I find Fox to be just as bad as all the other stations But Gutfeld, I find him funny. And like I said, you see a bit of news with it, but you can't take what he's saying as news. It's a comedy show.

It's like any of the late-night comedy shows that deal in politics. They're exaggerating things, they're very biased, they're very one-sided, you have to take it as comedy. But it was a nice, casual conversation with him. And it seems he's toned down quite a bit, possibly because he's been shot, and there was an attempt to shoot him a second time.

James: Yeah, he's really packing in the assassination attempts.

Alan: He might have toned down his rhetoric a little bit, or he might just be looking at things a little different after something like that happened to him. But he still talks too much in hyperbole. With Trump, I like his policies. If you sit down and you look at what he's saying, I like it.

If you look at how he's saying it, I don't like it. He still talks as though he's on a reality game show or still hosting the World Wrestling Federation. But what he's doing, I like. And if you see the people that he's currently surrounding himself with for possible cabinet memberships or just for the transition team to help him decide who should be in the cabinet, he's much more organized than he was the first time.

I honestly believe he did not expect to win the first time and he was caught off guard. He had to bring people in that he didn't necessarily know and trust. He had to take recommendations from people in Washington who may not have had his best interest at heart. They were probably trying to make sure that they were covered or any past indiscretions that they did would not get uncovered by somebody coming in claiming to want to ‘drain the swamp’.

If you start disrupting things, you start turning over rocks in Washington DC, people are going to start going to jail. There were probably a lot of people advising him whose goal was to make sure those rocks didn't get turned over. I believe coming in this time, he's got more like-minded people that feel that the corruption in DC has gotten too bad and that somebody needs to do something about it.

He's bringing in people that are from other parties to be closer to his inner circle. And I think that's a good thing.

James: When you look at his first term, what would you say were the successes? And what would you say are the things which, as you hinted at earlier, would need to be better in the second term?

Alan: Of course, the obvious things are he got the border situation under control, which was getting out of control and now is extremely out of control. It's out of control now because they specifically removed the things he put in place. Like a lot of incoming administrations do, they take the previous administration's signature thing and destroy it because they don't want that success for their predecessor.

He did it when he came in with some of Barack Obama's things. So it's not just him that they did it to. But in doing that, they dismantled what he had put in place at the border, and they seem to be purposely trying to bring as many illegal people across that border as they can, which makes no sense.

That's not how any civilized country works. So his work in doing that, I thought, was really good. His deal making abilities with major corporations in order to get plants built and jobs secured in areas that need them, rather than just, yes, all the carmakers are in this city, put another carmaker in this city.

Trump’s inaugural parade. Photo public domain via the Department for Homeland Security

He tended to sit down with the CEOs and say, ‘Okay, you want to build another plant. But we don't have unemployment in that area. We have unemployment in this other area. What would I have to do to get you to put a plant in this area? There's skilled workers there that can be trained up to what you need, but we need the jobs to be here.’

And he seemed to do that very well. A lot of people don't really talk about that. But I'd watch him, he'd go into negotiations and he was talking shit. He was just smack talking so bad. He would take the negotiation standard where you think, here's one position and here's the other position, and then he'd move his position so far to the outrageous it wasn't even funny.

So to come to the table and talk, the other one would have to move their position up. And then when they negotiate rather than winding up in what would normally be the middle between the two normal positions, he shifted the goalposts way over and then brought it to the middle which basically went more to his side.

It's a very obvious tactic, but it seems that he does it well and everybody falls for it. I see that happening over and over again, and you look it and say, ‘They don’t see this?’ And yet seems to be able to pull it off. They go into the room yelling and screaming each other and talking smack in the media. Then they walk out of the room shaking hands and everybody's got a good deal that they like.

James: Would you say he did that in foreign policy as well?

Alan: Foreign policy not as well as he did dealing with CEOs, because dealing with CEOs and dealing with businessmen is more his forte. It's something he's more comfortable with. But he used the same type of tactics in foreign policy, and that shook things up because diplomats don't do that. And he was not a diplomat.

He's a New York businessman. That's a very different mentality, and I think that really shook most of the diplomatic world up because they didn't know how to handle him. And then you have the media taking whatever's happening and spinning it to try and make him look in a bad light. Like the whole NATO thing.

Because NATO is something that I'm a bit familiar with. We have been supporting Europe ever since World War II. We gave them really good deals after World War II because they were desolate. They had been destroyed. They needed to rebuild. And it was in our interest for Europe to rebuild itself. So we gave them very good deals, but nobody ever renegotiated those deals.

We've been handling their security, the main force of their security, ever since World War II, ever since the end of the Cold War. We've been funding it. The United States has been funding the security of Europe. But Europe's not a poor country. The countries in Europe aren't poor countries. The EU's not poor.

They have the means, yet they're spending so little of their budgets on their own defence and the United States is spending a large amount of our budget on Europe’s defence.

James: Yeah.

Alan: So he came to the table and he said listen everybody agreed, gentlemen's agreement a few years ago, that everyone's going to spend this percentage of their GDP on national defence towards NATO. And you guys aren't doing it.

So you're not living up to your end of the contract. What if I didn't live up to my end of the contract? Seems like a legitimate statement to me, but it hits the news cycle, and the news cycle is, ‘Trump threatens to leave NATO’. That's not what he did. He was just pointing out the obvious, that everybody in NATO knew for decades, that European countries were taking advantage of the United States’ good nature, and the deals were in place, and nobody wanted to rock the boat.

He came in and said, I have no problem rocking the boat. This needs to be addressed. And if you look at what the outcome of that was, all these countries started putting more into their defence. And guess what? Right now, they probably all wish they had been doing that all along. Because now all of a sudden you have Russia starting a war with Ukraine.

Right on Europe's doorstep, and Europe's scrambling to try and take care of things. If they had taken care of that back when he pointed it out, or even before then, they probably wouldn't be scrambling as much as they are.

James: How do you think Trump would approach that war in his second term? Because there is a lot of fear, I think, from Europeans, isn't there?

Alan: Everybody keeps on saying that. ‘Oh, but Trump, when he gets into office, he's going to do this.’ But everybody seems to forget he was in office for four years. And when he was in office for four years, we didn't get into wars. He went and talked to the people that we would get into wars with face to face and sat down across the table with them and made sure that there was an understanding that we aren't going to war.

This is not going to happen. And when he leaves power and we have a new administration in, they don't do that. They don't go meet with these people. They don't talk to these people. They appear weak to these people. And what do they do? They attack because they know they can attack now. With Putin, he took Crimea. When did he take Crimea?

James: It's ten years ago.

Alan: When Obama was in charge of the United States. When did he take, try and take Kiev?

James: Two years ago now.

Alan: Yes, exactly. While Biden's the President of the United States. But you don't hear people saying, ‘Oh, what's Biden going to do when he's in office because he's not strong and he's going to start war.’

You don't hear people talk about that. They all say, Oh, what's Trump going to do? Trump was there for four years and did a good job of handling it and keeping everybody from starting wars. So he has a track record. So what is Trump going to do when he comes in? Probably pretty much the same as far as his claims that he's going to be able to stop the Ukraine war on even before he gets into office.

I think that's a little more bluster, but I do believe he'll be able to stop it. He has the ability to do it. He can walk in and give them two options. Either fully back Ukraine, and we destroy Russia, or I stop backing Ukraine, and Ukraine falls. He has the power to do either one of those, pretty much. So when he walks in the negotiating table, he's in a very strong position to possibly dictate terms, and they know he's not bluffing.

James: I'm sure you've picked up that Europeans generally don't like Trump at all. Why do you think he's such a kind of bogeyman figure in Europe in particular?

Alan: In Europe, and in the United States, and to the mainstream media in the United States, the reason is that Trump wants to shake up the status quo.

The status quo is moving towards this liberal, one-world government. And there are a lot of very rich people in the world who think that they should be running the government and that the elected officials should answer to them. And whether they're bribing them, whether there's blackmail going on, there are a lot of decisions being made that don't seem to be in the interests of the constituents that elected the person.

They seem to be more in the interests of these large corporations. And he wants to break that up. He wants to get America to be able to stand alone again. Rather than getting strategic parts from our enemies in China, or requiring some other country to give us minerals that we would need if there was a World War III.

He wants to get all the manufacturing done in the United States. He wants the United States to be basically more like Switzerland. Switzerland is fully self-contained.

James: Switzerland has also never been in the EU, and it was a very late joiner of the United Nations. Would you think that maybe that kind of, I'm not using this as a pejorative, isolationism might be a better way forward for the United States, to withdraw some of these international organizations?

Alan: Isolationism, not necessarily, but more nationalism. More making sure that the money that the people are paying in taxes in the United States is used for the taxpayers of the United States.

We spend so much money all around the world while neglecting ourselves. And just common sense says you don't do that. If you live in the suburbs and you have a lawn and your neighbor has a lawn and your neighbor breaks his leg, so your neighbour can't mow his lawn. You don't go and mow your neighbour’s lawn first and then come back and if you have gas left over mow what you can of yours. You take care of yours and if you have extra resources at the end, if you have time and you have gas left in the tank, you go over and you help out your neighbor.

But that's the order you're doing it. So why aren't we doing that as a country? Why are we so worried about taking care of people illegally entering our country and giving them a place to live and make sure they're okay and they're all comfortable? When we have citizens that have paid into the tax base their entire life, that are being left behind.

James: Would that view count of things like dealing with the amount of drug addiction you've got in America, dealing with poverty - that those people are American citizens should have the support too?

Alan: As a priority, because the money that you're spending on it is money that they put into the system.

Most of these people that need the help right now, they didn't start off at birth needing this help. Sure. Something happened along their life. They got down a bad path, something went wrong, and they need the help. If you're going to be using taxpayer’s dollars to help somebody, those are the people you should be helping.

Not people that have just decided, ‘Oh, it's not good in my country, I'm going to go to the United States, and they're just going to give me a place to live, they're going to give me welfare, they're going to give me all of this.’ That makes no sense. That makes no sense to me.

James: Another thing which people are quite worried about Trump, and I think this is definitely within the United States, they're worried about this kind of antidemocratic agenda. Some people are saying that if Trump loses, there'll be problems accepting the result, or even that there might not be future elections. Do you think that's all hyperbole, or do you think there's something in that as well?

Alan: If you look at the last election, the last presidential election in 2020, there were a lot of things about it that were mathematically impossible. There were a lot of places that broke the rules and procedures.

Basically, the only reason that you would do some of the things that they did during that election is if you were trying to cheat the election. You have a movie that was put out called ‘2000 Mules’. They used actual footage, That was their surveillance footage of the drop boxes. And they got hold of that footage.

They made the request. They got hold of that footage legally. And they spliced that together showing people going and dropping off 20, 30 ballots. People showing up in the middle of the night dropping off 20, 30 ballots. And they  could track them. They had a team that actually does tracking data. A professional team they got involved with.

And you could see these people going back and forth to this mailbox multiple times during the day to this drop box. And where was this drop box? All over the United States. They concentrated on a couple small areas just to be able to keep the story. But this was going on and they have this footage and they put it out there and nothing's done.

Everyone says there's no evidence of fraud in that. There is no court that has heard the evidence. Because every time they tried to bring it to a court. They either say it would have had been brought before this time, or it had to be brought after this time, or you don't have standing to be able to bring this.

Because no judge in the United States wants to be the one to have to reside over and say yes, that federal election was rigged.

James: So you think that Trump was right to contest the result?

Alan: I believe he was right to contest the results, and I believe this case is correct. As far as I know in the United States, a signed, sworn affidavit is still legal evidence.

Yet they say there's no evidence. There was tons of people that swore in an affidavit under the rules of perjury, if they were wrong, of what they saw that was done illegally in these polling stations. Yet nobody ever got that into court. They did in Arizona, they did a full-scale investigation into it there.

And the findings in that report are damning. Yet nothing happened.

James: Do you not have faith in the process for this November then? Are you worried that it's not going to be a fair election?

Alan: I believe there will be cheating, I believe there's always cheating. I just hope it's not on the level that it was the last time. Or that if it is on the level that it was the last time, that people are watching more carefully because nobody expected anybody to do anything like that.

When you have video surveillance of trucks pulling up and unloading ballots after the counting is done, that should be looked into. I'm not saying it's necessarily a fraud, but I'm saying the fact that we didn't, we weren't allowed to look into it. And anybody who says that the election was fraudulent is shut down immediately, sometimes even arrested for saying it, has their social media accounts blocked.

If you want to make it look like you're guilty of fraud, first thing you would do is make sure no one's allowed to question you. If you're not guilty, you should want an open investigation of it to prove you're not guilty.

James: We’ve had Democrats in office for four years. Is there anything Biden's done you liked?

Alan: Anything that he's done that I've liked? There's probably some things that I've liked. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any of the things that he did that I like. Although, I'm sure if I gave it proper thought and looked back at things, nobody can be wrong on everything.

Nobody can be opposite of me on everything. There's probably some things along the line, but off the top of my head, no, I cannot.

James: Because they have been quite an active administration, which has passed quite a lot of legislation.

Alan: I read your article on Biden about the fact that you felt that he maybe passed his prime for this. The things that you quoted as him being good things that he did were mainly his administration passing extremely large funding bills.

Now you have to ask yourself, What did they do with that money after Congress allocated that money? Where did that money go?

And if you start following that, you start finding some discourse, disturbing things like the broadband infrastructure they were supposed to put in place. They didn't. Where's the money? I think it was like 42 billion or something like that. And I believe Kamala Harris was in charge of that particular project or as much in charge as she would be, she was given the figurehead position for that. But, as far as what I read and what I can find, they never installed any.

All you would have had to do is go to Elon Musk and say, ‘Hey, that Starlink system that you're putting up, can we light that up?’ You don't have to go put broadband in across 15 miles to get to some farm out in the middle of nowhere when you can set up a small satellite system. So why would we and where did this money go?

James: Do you think it's generally the case when kind of government does big investment that it tends to go for older technology?

Alan: It does because government moves slow. But still, the money I worked in government, I used to run projects for the government with very large budgets. I know how that money is supposed to be accounted for.

On the lower level, where I was, that money is accounted for. You have to show where every dollar is spent, but on these large projects, it seems like they don't.

James: Interesting. So just in terms of like your values your kind of political values, obviously libertarian, the first or libertarian leaning, the first would come to mind is freedom, right? What values are important for you in politics? What would you like to see in a better politics?

Alan: Basically the people that are elected to these positions are our representatives. They aren't our leaders. They aren't above us. They are there to represent us. And when they're not representing what their constituents want, I find that to be a problem.

You have all these people saying we have to keep Trump out of office no matter what. What if he gets all the votes? What if the people vote him into office? Then why should we not have him in office? If that's what the people vote for, this is how the system is supposed to work. You may not like him, but if the majority of people want him there, then he should be the one there.

James: Although I guess one of the things with your Electoral College system is that you can finish behind on the popular vote. That’s happened a couple of times.

Alan: That would happen most times. Because if you didn't have the electoral college, California, basically Los Angeles and New York would dictate federal politics completely, if you went by the popular vote.

James: So the Electoral College is also a states’ rights thing?

Alan: Very much so. That's the entire reason that was put in place. We would not have the Federation without it. The states would not have joined without that.

Just think, if you're a small state, and, the larger states around you always vote for what's good for them, which may not necessarily be good for you. And there's nothing you can do about it because they will always override your vote. Why would you join a system like that? You may as well just merge the two states together at that point. It wouldn't be a federal republic at that point.

James: So for you the fact that, like, Wyoming's got the same number of Senators as California is a good thing.

Alan: Yes.

James: Balances it out, right?

Alan: Basically, the situation that this gives you is, you have 50 different experiments going on at any one time. And you have the ability to move to any of those experiments you want. If you realize hey, the people over here think more like me, they want really good schools, and they don't mind paying extra tax to make sure they have really good schools.

Grand Teton Mountains with River and Forest, Wyoming. Photo by William Oyen via Pexels.com

I want my kids to go to good schools, so I'll move to that state. And then my kids will have good schools. It'll cost me a little bit tax in dollars. But then you have somebody else that says, I'm not going to have kids. Why am I spending that much in tax dollars to have really good schools when that's not a priority for me?

So why don't I move somewhere that doesn't tax me as much because I don't need to have a school nearby. And you have the choice to move around that way. If we got away from that system, and the federal government just ran everything. You'd have one cookie cutter thing across the entire United States.

And if we got something wrong, it would be wrong across the entire United States and you'd never see a different way that you could have done it, but with 50 experiments going on at once, you can look next door and say, Hey, their system's working better than our system. Why is that? Go sit down and talk to them and find out how they're doing it and see if we might be able to adapt some of their ideas.

James: And when you, when, within the United States, are there states you look at and you think, yeah, I really like the political culture, I really like the way they do things in this state or others where you're like, this isn't so much my thing?

Alan: For me, I haven't spent that much time in the States since I've become an adult. There are some states that I look at that I would not want to go to because of the way they run their politics in those states. Illinois is a perfect example of that because, That would be one of the options for me is to go to Illinois because of my wife's job, but I would not want to do that.

Pennsylvania, I go back and visit in Pennsylvania and at least central Pennsylvania where I'm from is a nice area for me. I like what Ron DeSantis is doing down in Florida right now. He is, as far as if I was only looking at the politics, I really like what he's doing there.

James: What do you like?

Alan: That he is doing what the people want and he's not being pushed around.

Somebody who will take on Disney Corporation was given a sweet deal. They basically ran their own country or their own state within the state. And part of that deal was that they stay out of politics. When Disney started getting into politics and started trying to sway politics, he removed that status from them.

That's standing up for your values. And not being afraid to go after someone just because they're big.

James: Would you have preferred to have DeSantis at the head of the Republican ticket?

Alan: No. I think he's where he should be. You have the Peter Principle involved. You can be very good at a job, and then you get promoted, and you're good at that job, and you get promoted because you're good at that job.

Eventually, you get to a level that's beyond your skill, and you do poorly in the job. And I think he is, at least now, that's where he's at. He's really good at the job of running a state. And I think if you threw him into the cesspool of Washington, D. C., he would be eaten alive. I don't think he would be able to manage at that level.

James: You say you've spent most of your life in Europe, which is obviously not an experience every person from the States has. From what you have experienced, what do you find the difference between how Europeans think about politics and how Americans think about politics?

Alan: There's definitely… Most of my life, I've been around military and military tends to be a little bit more conservative, whereas Europe tends to be very liberal just across the board.

Western Europe is extremely liberal, so that's one big difference that I find. They seem to be more, they accept socialism a lot more here, as far as everybody pitches in and we take care of everybody and, everybody's tax dollars going in, everybody pays a lot in taxes to make sure that the government takes care of a lot of things for them.

That's something that I tend to disagree with. I want the government less involved in things. There should be safety nets, of course, but governments tend to be inefficient at making a system work. So if you give the healthcare to the government, It tends to be get bloated and inefficient because governments just have tendency to grow.

Bureaucracies have tendencies to grow, whereas corporations, they're trying to maximize efficiency. There's pros and cons on both of those, but I've just seen if you let the government run things, it tends to get run over budget and it tends to get keep growing larger and larger unnecessarily.

James: I do keep thinking that for a libertarian, Belgium's a bit of a nightmare.

Alan: Those are your words, not mine. Don't quote me on that one.

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James: Do you think Trump's funny?

Alan: Yes. I think he's hilarious.

James: He's very funny, isn't he?

Alan: He is an entertainer. Yeah. He very much is an entertainer. Much if you look back, we had, one of my favourite presidents in my lifetime was Ronald Reagan. And the thing I liked about Ronald Reagan is he was a good face. He was an actor. Yeah. He got up there and he played the part of president very well, but he was not, as far as I can see from any of the history that I've read and what I watched while he was president is he gathered everybody around him that was smart on all the subjects that he needed to be smart on.

And he said, okay, you guys figure out what the best action, the best course of action is. You feed me that information, you make me smart enough to talk about the subject, and I will go and tell the American people what we've decided to do. And that is how I like that. He's in charge, he knows he's in charge, but he also knows that he has to get information from other people.

He's not the smartest person in the room. But if you get other people some presidents we've had in the past Bill Clinton for one example. He always wanted to be the smartest person in the room. He wasn't an idiot from what I understand, but he didn't want to have smarter people than him around him.

And with Trump, although the bravado that he gives out and the ego that is his persona, his public persona, I really don't believe from what, when I read things from people actually talk to him and work with him. That he's not really like that when you get behind closed doors that he's, ‘No you're the expert. Talk to me, teach me, tell me things.’

And when you see some of his more famous blunders where he says something and he says, it's like wrong in the press. Like that whole thing about drinking bleach and injecting light. If you actually listen to what he said and you know a little bit about the science behind it, you can tell that he was sitting down talking to people.

Very good experts on these subjects on what possibilities there are, brainstorming, basically, let's throw it all out there. When he said it, he minced words a little bit, he jumbled a little bit, and they took that completely out of context, because he's basically saying, hey, It's a virus.

We can kill viruses. You can use bleach to kill viruses. You can use ultraviolet light to kill viruses. Sure. And he was talking about injecting ultraviolet light. And I looked that up. There are actually medical studies on this. There are companies working on the ability to do that, to inject ultraviolet light internally into the body. In order to kill off certain viruses, tho it's not something that's developed and ready as far as I know. But it is something that there are people working on.

So when you hear him say something like that, if you think about it, and you just don't immediately jump on the bandwagon that everybody's making fun of him. It's like that means that he was sitting down with some very high end experimental type scientists having brainstorming sessions of what we can do, and that's what I think the president should be doing.

James: One worry is we saw how much Biden declined from a similar age to Trump is now over the four years. Would you be worried about that for a second Trump term, that he wouldn't be quite as sharp?

Alan: Slightly, but not seeing that the condition that Joe Biden was in at the start of his presidency and the rapid decline from there, he had already declined.

He was already impaired when he started. And you look at Trump now and Trump's still out on the golf course every day. He's still sleeping like five hours a day and doing these major rallies, and he's all over the place. He's not like hiding in his basement. He is out there day after day.

He's under immense stress from all the attacks on him. The literal attacks on him. And all this. Like I said, I just watched him on Gutfeld on an unscripted just sitting with a bunch of people and people throwing questions at him that he doesn't know what questions are coming and handled it beautifully. I think there's four years left in him.

I think if you were talking eight more years, yeah, I'd have huge reservations.

James: I think he actually said today he's not going to run again.

Alan: Okay. You can only be elected two times.

James: So you think he's going to win?

Alan: If it's a free and fair election, he's going to win in a landslide.

I don't believe it'll be a free and fair election. I believe there's going to be a lot of shenanigans going on. There was in the last one. I'm hoping he'll win. I really am. I cannot imagine what would happen if we have to continue with whoever's running our government right now.

Because as I said, it’s pretty obvious that it's not Biden. Because he's been on vacation most of the four years. He's taking more vacation time than anything. And right now, where is he?

James: Your state, Pennsylvania, is going to be really crucial in deciding this. And what's your feeling about how that's going to go? Because you do have a very popular Democratic governor, don't you?

Alan: Shapiro, yeah. Talking to people from Pennsylvania, the people that aren't normally Democrats seem to think he's doing a good job. I don't know. I haven't been following Pennsylvania politics, the only thing I follow there are my representative and my senators because those are the only ones I'm allowed to vote for, living over here.

I still am allowed to vote for both houses of Congress and the president. But those are the only positions I'm allowed to vote on. And so I don't follow that so much. But yeah, some of the people I've talked to from Pennsylvania, I was surprised to hear them talk well about him.

James: Yeah, I mean he's got like a 70 percent approval rating, which is do you think it might have been an idea for Harris to go for him as her running mate? Because that was a big choice, wasn't it?

Alan: The problem is, if she goes with him for her running mate, he's going to overshadow her completely. He would have been better off as the candidate.

They should have actually had, I don't know, maybe a vote on this. Maybe their constituents in the Democratic Party should have had a chance to actually vote for who their candidate is going to be rather than the party just inserting her. You talk about destruction of democracy and who's going to be bad for democracy.

The people that are saying that are the people who just took the people's right to choose their candidate away from them. So you want to talk about the hypocrisy we were talking about earlier. There's a really big one that you don't have the mainstream media talking about that very much.

They just allowed that to happen. Wait. The people that allowed that to happen are the ones saying that Trump will destroy democracy. Okay, easiest way to get away with something is to accuse your opponent of what you're doing.

James: So if Trump does get back in - we'll wind this down now because it's been a really good chat - what would you like to see him do?

Alan: Big picture or little picture?

James: Give me both.

Alan: Immediately the things that he's saying he's going to do. I would like to see the people that are still in jail awaiting trial for January 6th that were non violent I'd like to see all of them pardoned immediately and then I’d like to see all of them sue the US government. There were some who were violent, that's another story those that have to be looked at on an individual basis But there are non violent offenders locked up without parole ever since January 6th or close to January 6th in DC prisons. That's ridiculous. I would like to see them pardoned immediately.

I would like to see him reinstitute the agreements we had with Mexico in order to allow asylum seekers to have to apply in Mexico.

And once it's granted, yeah, if they need asylum, and it's been proven that they aren't just trying to game our system by all means. But we need to vet them outside the United States because the people who are trying to take advantage of the system and come across will stop coming across if they know they aren't getting any further than Mexico.

And that's how he did it in the past. And he had Mexico take care of that for him, and it was a simple matter of just threatening them, saying, ‘See that border? I'm going to put a 14 percent tariff on everything crossing that border if you don't stop this flow of people coming across.’

Because they aren't Mexicans coming across for the most part. These are people coming from south of Mexico, traversing Mexico, and the Mexican government's allowing it. It was a very simple thing for him to go in there and say, no, this will stop today or here are the consequences and the consequences are too much for the Mexican government. So they said, we'll do what you want.

Stop that, find the ones that are here illegally and remove them. I'd like to see him do that. Vivek Ramaswamy says it perfectly: It's like you can't be a citizen, you cannot have a path to citizenship in the United States if the first act that you did was breaking our laws. So those are things, the economy and stuff like that, I believe he will inherently fix that.

That's just where his background is. That's what he knows. I'm pretty sure that will fall in line. And with that falling in line, the stock market will stabilize and start going by predictable rules instead of the rollercoaster it's on at the moment, which would be good personally for me.

As far as big picture, I would like to see him take Vivek Ramaswamy under his arm and show him all the ins and outs of it, how things work, all the good players, bad players, and everything going on in DC to make sure that he's poised for 2028.

James: So you think would be a good successor?

Alan: Vivek Ramaswamy? Yes. He has the same policies as Trump. While being articulate. If Trump was more articulate, I could get behind him stronger than I am. I’m looking at him because he's not going to damage things. He'll fix some things. He'll be a decent president. The current situation is untenable.

James: What is it about it that's untenable? The economic aspect?

Alan: We don't know who's running the government. We really don't. They're doing things that are blatantly illegal. Using the Department of Justice to go after Trump. The charges that they're bringing him up on, judges are saying no one would ever bring those charges up. If he wasn't running for president, they wouldn't be charging him with any of these. They took misdemeanours and turned them into felonies. They threw away the statute of limitations. They changed the rules so that they could charge him with something that was beyond the statute of limitations.

They're trying to say that he took documents, classified documents from the White House. The man has the ability to declassify anything. He's the ultimate classification authority in the United States. He can declassify any document he chooses to as President. Joe Biden, as Vice President, holding classified documents at his personal residence. That’s illegal, but they aren't going after him.

James: Trump was a bit of a shift, wasn't he, in the Republican Party. He was a different kind of politics.

Alan: Yeah, he was a huge shift.

James: Do you think that's permanent? Do you think what we call this more America first populism, do you think that's going to be the permanent Republican pole now?

Alan: Either that or we're going to finally get a third party in.

James: And would that be a libertarian third party?

Alan: Probably not libertarian. More a patriot type party, something like a MAGA party that breaks away. Because you still have a lot of Republicans that are caught up in the system.

If the system goes down, they'll be going to jail too. It's not just the Democrats doing shady things. There are Republicans doing shady things. You look at these people coming in, and their net worth is, say, half a million dollars. And they take a job that pays them 120,000 dollars a year, and eight years later, they're worth 15 million.

And nobody's investigating that. It's rampant throughout our Congress, on both sides. It's the IRS is worried about people like me because there's a slight error on it. They're spending their time going back and forth to me to get a small mathematical error fixed. Yet nobody's auditing this.

That's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see that corrected. Just the whole of it, as far as I can tell, it's bribery and money laundering going on. Everybody gets a book deal when they leave. What's a book deal? A 15 million book deal for somebody's book. Do you think that company that's publishing it is making a profit on that?

They're not making a profit, but it's an easy way to hand somebody 15 million that nobody can say it's illegal.

James: So in summary, you don't think people in Europe should be worried about a second Trump term.

Alan: It's nothing cataclysmic. It will not be. It will not be great for them because he's not going to let them walk all over him.

Right now, they, all these backroom deals and stuff like that, people are, people in Europe are getting rich off of things going on. He's not going to be as easy to walk all over. He'll stick to his principles more and he'll negotiate harder for the American people. As opposed to looking at what's best for the world government, how can we help you, how can we take care of these people over there, and these people on the other side of the world, and how can we do everything for you guys?

He's gonna be more like, I gotta take care of my house first. Once my house is taken care of, we can talk. But he's gonna concentrate on taking care of his house, so that wouldn't be the best for Europe, because Europe's getting a lot of benefits by the current system.

James: So last question. What is something from what we'll call Belgian political culture that you'd like to see more of in the United States?

And what's something from the United States you'd like to see more of in Belgian political culture? Difficult one, I know.

Alan: Wow.

James: That's a tough one to finish.

Alan: Something from Belgian political culture that I'd like to see implemented in the United States. Probably something with the healthcare system. I'm not saying that Belgium's healthcare system is perfect, but at least they're trying to have more of a universal healthcare. And I think that would be nice, to have just a base level of health care that everybody can get. The way we have it set up in the States, that's not gonna happen right now.

Although, if President Trump does get in, that means that Robert Kennedy Jr., is probably going to have a large say in the health matters and that's something that he feels very strongly about and that will give him a mandate to push a lot of things through that might curtail the mass amounts of money being funnelled to the pharmaceutical companies and the mass amount of influence that the pharmaceutical companies have.

So we might be able to get a little bit closer to something with that. That actually could happen.

As far as the Belgian political system and what could be brought in from the United States. Yeah, streamline the thing.

I don't know Belgian politics that much. I'm not a citizen, I try to stay out of Belgian politics. But, having been a project manager, the thing that I see that is one of the biggest problems is they solved their unemployment system a long time ago by rather than putting people on unemployment hiring them into the government But when they did that they did it in such a way that the positions cannot be removed. Even if so somebody retires out, they have to still fill that position even though that position is not needed. So they have to build inefficiencies into their system to give people something to do and that should be fixed. They should streamline their government. Drastically.

Their civil servants and stuff like that. Because there's just so much overlap. Not just in between having the three different the Flemish, the Wallonian, and the German, and then the Belgian on top of it, and then the EU being here, and then each of the communes having their own. Not even just with that, just in any individual department. There are just more employees that need to be there, and they have no incentive to be efficient at what they're doing.

James: It's just a very bloated bureaucracy, isn't it?

Alan: Yes. So being able to eliminate positions within that bureaucracy.

James: Music to my ears. Thank you so much for taking the time.