Interview with Psychology Expert Dr. Gina Loudon Diagnosing the Left, the Media and Trump

Today my guest is Dr. Gina Loudon, a good friend of mine. We met first in LA in 2011 at the TALKERS Radio Conference and I have been so excited to watch the impact that she has had in politics. She has a beautiful family. I loved seeing her in Palm Beach a couple weeks ago when I was down there. Dr. Gina is a member of the Trump 2020 Campaign Media Advisory Board. She’s a popular guest analyst on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, HLN, and she’s co-host of America Talks Live on Newsmax TV. She holds two master’s degrees (Counseling, Human Development), as well as a PhD in Human and Organizational Systems. She and her husband are the parents of five children. Her new book is, “Mad Politics: Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy.”

In our interview, we discuss:

How the liberal media inflates the credentials of people they agree with but deflates the credentials of those they oppose
Why the media want to discuss the WHAT but not the WHY–the psychology/motives behind actions
Why the human behavior element needs to be taken into consideration
Liberals argue on an emotional level; conservatives on reason, but people respond to the emotional
Why it’s easier to walk through life being a leftist/liberal (hint: you don’t have to think)
Why it takes more courage to be a conservative, especially a conservative woman
Looking at the motives of the presidential candidates (their desire to step forward in their careers, the money, the power, the accomplishment); why she decided to support Donald Trump because he didn’t need any of these
Trump risked it all to put himself in a middle of a war for unselfish reasons with nothing to gain
Why not being owned by special interests makes Trump independent of the political establishment and why that scares them
What Trump is like as a friend
How Trump is able to deal with such unprecedented harsh treatment on a daily basis just for wanting to serve his country
Trump’s faults: he is too honest and too loyal
Psychology behind the Rex Tillerson tweet
How the media weaponized George H.W. Bush’s death and funeral against Trump
Why the media opposes civil discourse for monetary reasons
Desire for page views (= money) and competition creates outrageous click-bait headlines that fuel society’s anger
The unprecedented attacks on free speech and why this requires a counter-puncher like Trump to lead us through
Why the media longs for a weaker president who can be controlled
Why the media want to define who we are and not allow people to politically evolve and change their views
Why the media would be the biggest losers in their war against the First Amendment
How the Second Amendment changes the balance of power for women
Why criminals and mass shooters are drawn to “gun-free zones”
The story behind Gina’s adopted son with Down’s Syndrome and why it’s such a tragedy that babies like this are aborted
The left trying to take down her book on Amazon by false ratings
The need to follow the truth even though it costs you

Website: https://drginaloudon.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/realdrgina
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/realdrgina
New Book: Mad Politics: Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, this is Gayle Trotter, host of Right in DC. Today my guest is Dr. Gina Loudon. She is a good friend of mine. We met first in LA in 2011 at the TALKERS Radio Conference. I have been so excited to watch the impact that she has had in politics. She has a beautiful family. I loved seeing her in Palm Beach a couple weeks ago when I was down there.

Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Gina. She’s a member of the Trump 2020 Campaign Media Advisory Board. She’s a popular guest analyst on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, HLN, and she’s co-host of America Talks Live on Newsmax TV. She holds two master’s degrees, as well as a PhD in psychology. She and her husband are the parents of five children.

Dr. Gina, thank you so much for joining us today on Right in DC.

It’s good to be with you. Just one thing I can note is that because the Left has so attacked me since my book when I had the unmitigated gall to say that the President might actually be sane, and so they’ve been parsing details, as they love to do. My two master’s degrees and my PhD are all in behavioral/psychology fields, but they’re all in different fields. They’re not all in specifically psychology. I always like to clarify that, just because they like to attack me on it.

I find that to be so absurd, and I am glad that you made that clarification. It’s always good that conservatives make sure that they are as out there and avoid the attacks and the calumny of the Left as much as they can. But I can’t help but think of Dr. Blasey Ford, who was testifying in the Judge Kavanaugh hearings before the Senate. There was certainly discussion about whether she was a clinical psychologist, and what she had put on her college website as identification. For some reason, the Left seems to always inflate the credentials of people who are like-minded and agree with them.

Yes.

And somehow likes to attack those who have excellent, superb credentials, because those people don’t agree with them. That seems to be a trend.

It is a trend. What they force you to do, in my particular case, because all of my degrees are in different things. One is something called human and organizational development. I’m going to say that, with two other degrees, that have just as long and ridiculous-sounding, and, by the way, I think pretentious descriptions. That’s really what they’ve forced me into, which is just funny. The Left doesn’t do a lot that makes a lot of sense to those of us who are sensible and reasonably minded. That’s why we’re conservatives and they’re not.

Right. I suspect most of those people criticizing you don’t have PhDs in anything.

Precisely, precisely. If they do, they made a decision to maybe sit behind a desk their whole entire life, which a lot of people do. I have no problem with it, but maybe they’re not so happy about the decision they made. They’re like, “You don’t sit behind a desk and listen to people’s problems 24 hours a day.” I’m like, “No, there are many different kinds of ways to study human behavior.” You could do it by research. Certainly politics is a rich, rich world to study, right? I guess it’s not good enough for them.

I had many things I want to ask you about, but that’s such an interesting point that you raise. When we have these national discussions about neuralgic topics, such as foreign policy, presidential character, presidential leadership, discussions about how to make schools better, it seems like there are economists who are on television and on the OpEd pages of the Wall Street Journal and other places, talking about the economic effects of different policies. You have politicians who are out there talking about it, probably to try and persuade people so that they can get their policies passed or implemented in some way.

We don’t see so much of the psychological discussion of these very important national debates. You wrote this book called Mad Politics: Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy. I think a lot of people on the Right and Left can agree that it seems like the world has gone crazy. How are you able to bring your psychological training and background — even if it’s called a different thing, but for laypeople like me, it is definitely a psychological understanding of these national debate topics. How do you bring that in, and how do you think that it should be brought more into this conversation?

I really think that the behavioral aspects of everything that goes on politically is the only thing that makes it understandable, predictable, preventable, and duplicable. I think it’s something that we really have to consider. If you don’t consider the human behavior behind the actions, then you’re just looking at basically rote activity, and it’s not going to make any sense. There’s no way to clarify it. There’s no way to cluster it together. There’s no way to look at pattern.

You’re exactly right. These news programs that want to always talk about the what, but never want to discuss the why. I’ve always felt like they’re missing something that is really, really critical to the person who’s out there trying to watch this and make sense of it. We all understand story. It’s very difficult to understand linear facts: that this happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. We want to know the story behind what happened because we want to know, hey, if this was a good thing in our body politic, how can we duplicate it? Right? If it was a horrible thing, such as, for example, Nazi Germany or something, we want to make sure that never happens again.

You can’t reduce it to knowable, preventable equations unless you consider the human behavior element. So I’m always trying to bring that element in and to get the news media to talk about it. You’re right. It’s an uphill battle. They’ll bring in economists, they’ll bring in medical doctors, but they don’t want to talk about the human behavior behind the story.

That reminds me, in your book, you reference Professor Jonathan Haidt, who has written a lot of interesting books on essentially the psychology of politics and conservatives versus liberals. It’s been a while since I read his book, but I remember he made a point, essentially, saying that liberals are really engaged on the emotional level on these national political debates, and conservatives tend to be less engaged on the emotional level. He says that’s how people really understand things. That point you were making about whether people understand stories or if they relate better to linear facts presented in a way that’s more clinical. You talked about how he impacted your views of the free market and understanding conservative principles.

Yeah, I love Dr. Haidt’s work and I’ve spoken with him several times on the phone. We even, once upon a time, talked about doing some work together on something. He’s another one of those who has taken such endless ridicule for his honest opinion, that I think he’s kind of shied away from some of his work, sadly. I can’t know his motivation, but that’s sort of my take on what’s happened. I don’t think he’s as engaged as he was once upon a time in writing about these matters. That’s the truth for a lot of people.

I know a tenured professor at UCLA whose tenure was actually removed for him pointing out that the carbon emissions along a highway make for better vegetation and plant life, because obviously they have a better food system, because that’s the way God designed (very intelligently in my opinion) plant life to thrive, is based on emissions. It destroyed their whole global warming theory and climate change theory. They don’t like it, so they ripped his tenure from him.

That’s science. It’s all science.

Exactly. We see this over and over again with people being intimidating for being on our side of things. It takes a lot of courage. I think that that’s something we need to remember as we march down this road. It takes a lot of courage.

I know that there have been days where you’ve woken up and wished that you could be a leftist. I do just about every day. Not only do I think it’s such a much easier walk through life, and literally one of fantasy. Things like global warming could be your number one issue when it’s actually just a mental construct theory at best. It seems to have been disproven over and over again. Also, because my own father is my only living nuclear relative and he’s a leftist activist. I, my whole life, wanted to please my dad, just like every daughter, but especially every only child daughter, and I’ve always wished that I could believe what he believes. I simply cannot.

It does leave those of us who are thinking individuals with a really difficult row to hoe if you’re going to be an activist. It would be so much easier to either not be an activist at all or to be a leftist. You’re exactly right. That emotional part of it, while it does matter to me, I have to do what my brain says. I have to go through reason and deduction and logic and the things that my brain says are true. Unless I could lie to myself, I just can’t be a liberal.

I was really amazed at how authentic and honest and revealing you were in your book about your relationship with your dad. I want to hold that topic until a little bit later in our conversation. I want to pick up on something else you said right now. You talked about how it takes courage to be a conservative now. I think particularly as a woman and particularly as an educated woman, a PhD. You talk in your book about how you were involved in Republican/conservative politics, but, at some point, your husband said you need to make sure that if you put yourself behind any candidate, you better make sure that he wins.

When you decided to throw in with Donald Trump, you would go to these conservative women’s groups, conservative Jewish groups, and a hush would fall over the crowd. Even in what would be safe spaces for conservatives, to borrow a phrase from the Left, you suffered for your embrace of Donald Trump’s candidacy. I would like to know how did you become friends with President Trump? What did you see in him, despite his harsh language sometimes? You talk about his tweets in your book in a very funny way. How were you to become friends with him and to support his candidacy? You turned out to be right. He won.

I think it’s really important to note, Gayle, that I was not friends with him. I did not know him during the campaign. He’s the only candidate I did not know. He’s the only candidate I had never interviewed. He’s the only candidate whose family I didn’t know. I’ve been very engaged in conservative politics for a long, long time. As such, I’ve gotten to know most of the people that were initially on that primary ticket. It was hard for me to support this president.

For me, again, it goes back to the psychology of the matter. I always look for motives. I could understand why everyone there was running. It was a great step forward for every one of them. I could understand why all of them wanted to be president. I could understand why all of them wanted the power, or wanted the money, or wanted the accomplishment inside the bubble that they subsisted in, in most cases, for decades. That all made perfect sense to me.

I could not understand why a man who had the world quite literally by the tail, who could be in any one of his beautiful properties, could be golfing, could be enjoying his golden years, with his amazing family that he loves, his children he’s crazy about, his incredibly beautiful wife. He could be enjoying them, watching Barron grow, watching his grandchildren grow. Instead of that, he was going to risk it all, bend a lot of it, lose all sorts of credibility with everyone who disagreed with him, and put himself in the middle of what is essentially a war on him.

I could not understand why he would do that unless it was for love of country. Nobody does anything like that for selfish reasons. There was just no selfish reason for him to do it. There was no self-gain that I could see, other than the satisfaction of knowing he did best by his family and his country and his legacy. When I figured that out, I thought, okay, this is the right reason for him to run, and I have to respect that.

That was where I jumped on board. I didn’t know him until well after he was elected and I met him a few different times. Then he immediately recognized me from my work on television. He chooses people and he picks them and he brings them into his circle. He is so gracious and loving and warm and gives so much more than you can give him. It’s an amazing thing to know a man as busy and as powerful as President Trump, and yet when you’re with him, you’re the only person in the room. You really truly feel like somebody that has been his friend his whole entire life. That’s who he is.

I’m super proud to be his friend. A lot of media will say, “Oh, well, you’re his friend.” I want to say that I was never his friend during that campaign. I worked for him because I thought his motives were pure, and because I knew he could win, and I knew he would win. Those are the reasons I stayed on board with him. So my friendship with him has developed subsequent to that.

That is a great distinction. I would like to start by saying that I agree with you, that a huge part of candidate Donald Trump’s appeal was that he was not reliant on special interests. He funded so much of the campaign by himself. He was able to use his resources and invest them. If I remember correctly, he’s not even taking a salary right now.

That’s correct.

Isn’t he donating it to veterans’ causes? I don’t remember the exact details, but there is not much reporting of that. But I am going to play devil’s advocate here. This is Right in D.C. There are tremendous privileges that come with being president that Michael Duffy has written about in The Presidents Club when these men leave office – and they’ve only been men so far – when they leave office, it is a hard adjustment, because to be the leader of the free world, to have the motorcades, to have the attention of the entire world, that is a heady thing.

To play devil’s advocate, you have the level of power, the ability to affect change, number one. Number two, the attention of the world. Your response probably would be that “It’s negative,” and I understand that. The third is the financial piece. You and I both agree that the Clintons were a crime family, essentially. They used the benefits of public office to enrich themselves, to enrich their family, to enrich their friends. While the law doesn’t seem to hold them accountable, certainly that had to be part of why she was not elected.

But you see even from, I would say, somewhat conservative media outlets, like Forbes, you see articles saying, “Well, President Trump is trying to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family. He’s just bad at it and he’s not doing a good job.” Forbes acknowledges that Donald Trump and his family, they have lost money since he has been president. But they make the allegation that it’s not for lack of trying, which I disagree with.

I’m curious what your response to those types of criticisms of President Trump to your rationale for supporting him as a candidate?

Let me be clear, I supported him as a candidate, because I knew that he could have no real conflict of interest in terms of lobbyists that I’d seen. I knew that somebody like, for example, Ted Cruz, who I was initially attracted to before the president got into the race and Marco Rubio and others, I knew that by the time that they could actually make it through the primary, just the way the system works, the way that political cookie crumbles, they would be owned by certain lobbyists. For the entire duration of their presidency, they would be bound by the commitments they’d made, for the money that they had to have to win the primary, and then to ultimately win the general.

I was very concerned about that, just knowing the inside of politics. As I mention in Mad Politics, my book, my husband was a state senator, I knew that this sort of corruption I saw in the state level only gets worse as you get into the federal level. I knew what I was watching there. I knew that the president was the only one who had any possibility of not being corrupted by the process.

I would submit that although there is a lot of attention, and you even pegged it negative attention, the rest of us thinks the president pretty much had already, only it was all in good ways. He had everybody wanting him at every party all over the country, all over the world. He had international fame and acclaim and pretty much was above criticism. I mean, who’s going to criticize the billionaire that they’re hoping will come to their next party or their next fundraiser?

He had all of that, so he really didn’t have a lot to gain in terms of attention and acknowledgement, feeling loved by people. At this point though, I would say, what we watched this president and his family endure have been nothing short of pure hell. We ‘ve never ever in political experience, in America, seen such harsh treatment of a person and his family simply for wanting to serve their country. It’s been amazing to me to watch how this president has compartmentalized the criticism and been able to deal with it so well. Not just him, his family deals with it very well, as I would say, also.

They didn’t have to have this. Again, they were going to have all the money that they have, which is really more money than most of us would even know how to spend in a lifetime. They were going to enjoy their wineries and their golf clubs and their beautiful mansions, literally all over the world. They never had to worry about a thing other than if they wanted to show up for work on Monday or if they didn’t. Now, they have to worry about a lot of things. The motorcades might sound fun. I’ve traveled in a motorcade with a family. I can tell you, it’s a lot of security. One time in particular, I won’t say where I was or which family member I was with. I was with a family member in a town, and we accidentally walked in one door of a particular building, and then we were having fun, playing in this one particular store, and we accidentally walked out of another door.

Right. Easy to do.

Yeah, exactly. About two stores later, we realized we had completely ditched the Secret Service and that they probably had no idea. All of a sudden, I’m seized with panic, realizing, oh, my gosh, you can’t live a normal life. You can’t do the most normal of things, having fun with your friends. There is none of that. There is always, always security detail trailing close behind. There are times where you just want to take a walk alone with your husband on a beach, or there are times where you just want to go for a run. They don’t have any of that anymore.

I don’t think it bothers the president that much, because I think he always had some degree of security, just because of who he was and how much money he had. But for him to have to watch his family have to go through all of this and the consistent death threats. I’ve many times wanted to hand the president something one on one, and I have if I happen to be in exactly the right place, but even here Mar-a-Lago club with him, I can’t just hand the president a thank you note.

Wow.

Or a letter from a veteran that the veteran may have asked me to send.

Wow.

I can’t do that. The Secret Service will descend on me.

For like anthrax concerns or something, touching something that might be a contaminate?

Probably all of the above. I just know that his life is very different from how it could be, and he has sacrificed a lot to be the president for us, and so has his family. Like I said, for him, I think the part about him having the inconveniences is not hard, but as a family member of someone who has held political office, I can tell you, knowing that his children and grandchildren have to go through these sorts of security measures, that’s hard. That is hard.

Right. You talked about when your husband was serving as a state representative in Missouri. You were pregnant and on bed rest and your young daughters were having to make food and make sure you were okay and take care of you, which is just the sweetest image ever. Just even at the state level, your husband had to be at the capital in order to make sure that he met with the governor about bills that were very important to be passed, and the families, they do pay a very heavy price. There are some benefits. Mac Miller did the song about Donald Trump long before he was a presidential candidate. It seemed like everybody, like you said, wanted to get their picture taken with Donald Trump. People who never thought he was a racist before he came out as a Republican candidate suddenly were screaming loudest from the rooftops the worst insults they could possibly make against another human being.

You reference this in your book. You talk about how when he descended the golden elevator at Trump Tower, he made comments. I have gone on NPR and said that the comments are completely taken out of context by the press about Mexicans and who Mexico was sending to us. You make that point in the book, too.

Why do you think the press, for example, they have these articles that say, “The President has lied 6,000 times.” Psychologically, why do the press think that that is an effective strategy against him when, first, they never do that to Democrats or liberal Republicans? Why do they think that that is a successful tactic against him? Because I would think when you get to 6,000 things that are misspoken, like maybe normal people would understand that that’s obviously an exaggeration.

Yeah, I haven’t had heard that statistic. That’s outlandish. If the president is anything, it might be too honest. If I were to make a criticism of him, I often say, I think he might be a little too honest sometimes, and I think he might be a little too loyal sometimes. I’ve seen both of those things and I think that those are more accurate criticisms of this president, if I’m trying to be in my rational mind, than saying that he’s dishonest. Everybody says, “Oh, the President shouldn’t tweet.” Well, why do we not want the President to tweet? They don’t want the President tweeting because he relates to the American people and he says things that are so honest that sometimes they come off as not politically correctly arranged. Politically correctly arranged, I don’t know if that’s a word. But they’re not arranged the way that the consultants would have someone arrange them. That’s the whole criticism of him. You can’t have it both ways. Either he is too brash and honest or he is a liar. Those two things don’t really work very well together. The press is going to have to make up their minds as to which criticisms they’re going to give.

My experience with him is that he is loyal. He’s incredibly loyal, sometimes to a fault. We saw that with Omarosa. I’m not sure she ever deserved the amount of loyalty that the president gave her, but we did see that. We’ve seen it in other examples where he’s kept people for too long or he’s been too gracious to people just because he knows them and hopes and believes the best in them.

The president has a fascinating birth order. I think that’s something that is not taken into account, hardly ever, except in my book. In that he has a double birth order, it’s called, but he’s kind of the baby, but he’s also the oldest, because of this spread in years between he and his next oldest sibling, and then the same thing in his next youngest sibling. Those two things made him have this incredible confidence, like all babies of all families do, where they think everybody just loves them and they think the best of people all the time. They just don’t even hardly stop to realize they’re critics, because they feel so loved, because they were so loved as the baby of the family.

With that, he also has this very unusual quality. I have a son that has the same exact quality. That is being the oldest while he’s the youngest. In my son’s particular instance, my youngest son has Down’s Syndrome, actually, my second-oldest son. It puts my son in the position of being almost parental, even though he’s the baby, puts him in a position where he’s almost parental with his brother that we decided to adopt, who happens to have Down Syndrome. So as the youngest brother and the brother of a child who has special needs, my son also has this unbreakable confidence and strong leadership ability. Those two things don’t usually come together. Usually if you get a strong leadership ability, you’ve got an oldest child. That’s why so many past presidents are oldest children. Very rare for a youngest child to be president, but if they are, it’s that gregariousness and everybody-loves-me assumption that makes them a good president or a good leader.

Our president happens to have both of those qualities, which is an amazing dynamic for such a time as this, because he has to got be able to use the criticism to fuel him to continue to succeed. That’s precisely what this president does with the negative that comes out of the press.

I found this article very quickly. It’s Washington Post. “President Trump has made more than 5,000 false or misleading claims.” Really? 5,000? It’s just astonishing to me that they think that that is an effective attack against him. Then on the tweets, there was a Tweet about Rex Tillerson I think over the weekend, maybe it was Friday. That’s gotten a lot of blowback. You are a Christian, and I think there have been a bunch of OpEds over the weekend talking about how Evangelicals are not going to support President Trump anymore because of tweets like that against Rex Tillerson.

What do you think the psychology of that is?

This goes back to me thinking that the president sometimes just goes ahead and says exactly what he thinks, and this is an indicator of guttural honesty. Mistaken or not, it’s still I don’t know how else you interpret that. Most presidents wait for their consultants to pass through all of their comments before any statements are given to the press and so on and so forth. Not this president. He thinks something, and he’s going to say it.

Again, they’re going to have to make up their mind whether they’re going to call him too honest or not honest enough, because you really can’t have it both ways. Every time they criticize him on something like this, I see this exact same problem with your criticism of him. Did he run the traps on this? Did he send this past on Tillerson and every single advisor he had and all the high-paid consultants or did he not?

Perhaps not.

Because you just can’t have it both ways, yes.

What did you think of George H.W. Bush’s funeral last week? Did you follow the commentary about George Herbert Walker Bush? There’s a lot of discussion about President Bush, pro and con.

I think that you have to realize that God raises up presidents for the time that he raises them up for and there’s just simply no way that H.W. could’ve been elected president in this particular time. When we are truly watching the erosion and the attack on what is essentially our entire Bill of Rights and Constitution. There have never been this sort of unprecedented attacks our free-speech rights and on our Second Amendment rights, and the list goes on, that there are today.

Only a counterpuncher, like the president we have today, could possibly lead us through such disarray. When the conversation is literally where the media is opposing civil discourse, where we are literally in a place and time where the media itself opposes civil discourse because it doesn’t concur with their clickbait that they need to make money these days, because of the way that media has changed. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Mad Politics, as you know, Gayle. Because I believe clickbait media is to blame for where we are right now. I’m not putting it on any one particular entity or anything. I think it’s just where we found ourselves.

Media has a lot of competition, because they weren’t doing their job very well. All of a sudden everybody’s competing for eyeballs and ears and that means they’re going to write salacious headlines. Civil discourse is their worst enemy, because as long as we’re having a civil conversation, Gayle, they’re not going to be selling newspapers and they’re not going to be getting eyeballs on their national news networks, that before there were only three of and now there are thousands of.

What do they with that? They have to write the craziest, most spectacular, most ridiculous headlines, and then try to get you to believe it, like the president has lied 5,000 times. That’s utterly ridiculous. They do not document that. That’s an obvious lie on its face. Even if it were true, the chances of them actually documenting 5,000 lies is utterly absurd. Yet they’re going to go ahead and write those sorts of headlines, because they are so very desperate for the clicks. That’s precisely where we find ourselves, but civil discourse is their greatest threat. You and I having a conversation, especially if we disagree, is the greatest threat of all right now to all subsisting media. That’s the reason why we needed a counterpuncher. We needed somebody that would formulate his own identity in social media. We needed somebody that would not lay down.

You remember, when this president came down that escalator that day, no one was even discussing illegal immigration. It was a non-topic. Republican candidates, like Rubio, like Cruz, who should’ve been the first as families from legally-immigrated status, they should’ve been the first to line saying, “Hey, no, wait your turn. We waited our turn. Our families waited their turns. Please wait your turn and I’m going to stand for that as president.” It was unspeakable in that moment. This president is fearless. We have never seen a president like this in the modern era.

He really is just such a special personality for exactly this time. That’s what I tried to point to in Mad Politics and then to give people the reassurance, too, that he’s the right person for this time. I believe he will go down in history as the best president ever in our history, because I don’t think anyone has ever taken us from truly the brink of full disaster and the annihilation of our own country, from within, like this president has the opportunity to do and I believe he will.

That’s such a great point. People forget that Romney did not as well as President Trump among Hispanics and the African-American community. After Romney lost, there was an autopsy commissioned by the Republican National Committee and out of that, they said that the Republicans needed to be laxer on immigration, move towards a more liberal position on immigration. Like you’re saying, candidate Trump was the only one talking about that, even among people who should’ve been talking about it.

Back to George H.W. Bush –

Oh, yes, sorry, I think I got totally away from that.

That’s okay. I’ll bring you back. In part, a lot of the coverage focused on his character and his personal style that he was kind and gentle, that he was a kind and gentle man. How do you think that relates to our current political climate? Why are the media so big on pushing this narrative of former President Bush as being kind and gentle?

They weren’t when he was president. It’s very convenient now that they suddenly have this love affair with the Bush family, because they’ve never treated the Presidents Bush well. They certainly weren’t as mean to them as they have been to this president, but it was a different time. I think that they used the death of this president — I believe, they weaponized his death, in fact, which is perhaps one of the cruelest, most inhumane things you could do, to try to turn it as a weapon against the current President Trump. I don’t think it works. They can sit back and talk about civil discourse all they want and this ability of President George H. W., but they were not civil to him when he was president.

I think you really pointed this out in our short conversation prior to this interview. They celebrate a sort of weakness, because they long for a weaker president that they could manipulate and that they could threaten or say the word “racist.” Then the moment the word “racist” is uttered, they scramble to the corners, like little cockroaches, scared to death, hiding in the dark crevices of the political establishment.

I think that this president has never done that. He kind of goes, “Rawr,” and bursts out and puffs up his chest and puts on his cape and says, “You’re not going to call me a racist. I’m not a racist,” or whatever. Of course they long for a day when they had a president that they could get to crawl back into the echelons of the elite. That’s not who this president is. He doesn’t need the elite. He doesn’t need the establishment. He doesn’t need the consultants. He doesn’t need the lobbyists. That is a very confusing thing for those them who have only ever functioned within that apparatus. I think it’s hilarious to watch sometimes.

That’s the thing. The subtitle of my book is Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy. You really can, if you can just apply humor, a little tip of humor over the top of watching some of this go on. It really is not as enraging and becomes quite comical.

I took a stand-up comedy class this fall because I thought it’s good to inject a little comedy into political discussions. You need to keep things light. We are so blessed and we have so many responsibilities, but it’s very important to keep an optimistic, a humorous attitude towards some of this stuff.

Speaking of that, you attended and, I believe, spoke at a conference this weekend in D.C. I think it’s called the American Priorities Conference. There was a hit piece, surprise, surprise, in Politico, detailing how this was not a good conference. I’m curious, not on the specifics of the conference, but whether you think it’s better to have more speech or if the media and the people in the Democratic Party who want to shut down speech from college campuses, to what people say on Twitter, to what people say just in their conversations with their neighbors, or any interactions between humans.

Is that something that is driving us all crazy? Because you going to this conference and speaking at it, you don’t necessarily agree with anything anyone says at this conference or they’ve said in Twitter ten years ago. If we have that kind of standard of purity of association and speech, isn’t that part of what is driving our society absolutely batty?

Definitely. We should just let the media define us and never, ever really stand up for what we believe. By the way, none of us should ever be given an opportunity to politically evolve. We should all come into politics exactly where we are and have it held against us absolutely forever, no matter what, and not given a chance to change or grow based on, I don’t know, civil discourse, dialogue, any of those things. Then we should just let the media define us and go ahead and tear down our country.

No. Is this really the point they’re making? I mean, it’s ironic to me, Gayle, that this media who is wholly dependent on our exclusive rights as Americans to have our First Amendment.

Amen.

There is no one more dependent on our First Amendment right than the media. Yet the so-called media is fighting the First Amendment at every single turn. The irony is delicious and comical, if you think about it, because they literally are fighting to chop their own heads off. I know even Biblical truth reveals, even going back to the whole Torah, you read about whole groups of people fighting for things that ultimately were their own demise. That’s precisely what we’re watching here. Yet it’s like they’re too ignorant to even recognize the error of their own ways. I don’t know what they think they’re going to do once they accomplish their outcome of making it so that they can’t exist anymore.

If the First Amendment is abolished, let’s consider that for a moment, which is really what they’re saying should happen. Who do they think is going — right now it’s the Trump era. If Politico goes away and all the other leftist regressive outlets go away, who do they think the president is going to put up as the state news. Quite obviously, thank God, our president has never even considered. He would be repulsed at the idea of a confined or limited media. He wouldn’t do that. Thank God for him standing up for the rights of those who are too ignorant to even catch on to the fact that they would be the first losers in all of that. It’s the most ridiculous thing.

It’s like the people that advocate for the abolition of our Second Amendment. In almost every instance, it is the very people advocating for the abolition of our Second Amendment that would be the first to be killed. I’ve never understood this. It’s just astonishing to me. I just look for the humor in it for right now, because I don’t know what else to do but laugh that people can literally be that devoid of common sense.

You discuss that a little bit in your book, talking about the Second Amendment in the context of bullying that you experienced. You had a rock, a rock, thrown at your head by another student.

Oh, yeah.

You and I have very strong principled opinions on why the Second Amendment is vital and particularly important to women, because it changes the balance of power in a situation where a woman is generally at a disadvantage. I found that part of your book to be really interesting, because I think most people who have these strong opinions about this have some sort of experience where they have had personal experience of this. Like you said, a lot of the people who argue against it would be the first who were harmed.

When you think about women living in dangerous neighborhoods, that they are at the mercy of those – I keep citing this statistic and I think people don’t really understand it or they could understand it, but they’re not aware of it. Over 90 percent of violent crime in the United States occurs without a firearm. That means over 90 percent of the times that someone is a victim of violent crime, the attacker does not have a firearm. So I found that very interesting in your book. I hope people buy your book and read that part, because I think it explains the passion that you have for the Second Amendment.

I think you just said that so well. I always have said I’m a 5’2″ petite female. My gun is my equalizer. I said that when I was on a reality show. It is absolutely true. The more they try to portray me as some sort of crazy person for wanting to have a gun, the more I know I actually need my gun.

It’s frustrating to me that every single time there is, for example, a mass shooting or something, often without any facts to back themselves up, they go fight again for more gun control, when gun control is often precisely what causes it. Most crimes that are mass shootings are committed in what we call gun-free zones, which is basically a welcome mat for a criminal to take his gun in and know good and well there will be no guns there to protect anyone, so he’s going to get away with it, at least for a period of time.

If you really looked at data and you took the emotion out of every one of these instances, we could prevent a mass amount of shootings. Instead, what we do is we act emotionally, we act in a moment, and often that means they’re going to be more mass shootings because there are fewer guns. That’s really where the reality lies. Until people are willing to look at facts instead of feelings, we’re going to be stuck in some of these circular patterns. It’s sad, because there’s going to be a human cost in that.

Yes. This is the final topic that I would like to speak with you about for today. We hit so many highlights. We’re going to let President Trump keep his Twitter account. We’re going to not give in to the media’s attempts to define our public discourse. We touched earlier about your relationship with your dad and how you want to be a daddy’s little girl, like most girls want to be, aspire to that, and how difficult it was growing up with a father who was very liberal, to the point where he had a bumper sticker talking about population control on his car. I almost dropped the book when I read this part about how your dad, when you were young, told you that he wished – it’s just astonishing for me to say this – he wished he had been aborted, that he had not come into the world.

Yeah.

You were an only child. Your parents were divorced. You attended a Catholic school. As a person who joined the Catholic church as an adult, I was so upset to read about how unkind the nun was to you in your Catholic elementary school when you said that your parents had not been married in the Catholic church. She called you a bastard. Oh, my gosh, I don’t know how you can even remain a Christian anymore with that kind of – it’s kind of like Gandhi said, “I love Jesus. I don’t like his followers.”

I think this all ties back into the abortion issue. You worked at a camp with Down Syndrome kids. You realized that most of these Down Syndrome babies were now being aborted because of genetic information that were given to mothers and this broke my heart. You would write letters to Planned Parenthood clinics trying to get them to let moms who had Down Syndrome babies know that you and your husband stood ready to adopt one. You came to understand that Planned Parenthood clinics were not in the adoption business. They were in the abortion business.

You have five children now, one of whom you adopted. You drove to Florida to pick him up from the hospital. He wasn’t supposed to live. I’d like you to tell a little bit about that story of how God changed what had been heartbreak for you into a new way of giving you that beautiful family.

It’s probably the most prevalent thought in my mind every day when I consider my faith and I consider the reality of it. Maybe aside from my recent trip to Israel, which made my faith all the more profound as well. There was a point where I just lost twin babies. Long story, but it all resulted in amazing miracles and twin baby boys, and my friend said to me, “Don’t worry, God will restore what the locusts have eaten away.” I remember being absolutely enraged that my best friend from high school would say that to me. How could she be so insensitive as to say that God would restore twin boys? But he did. It was amazing how He did it. It was the most outlandish, roundabout way.

Ultimately, I did end up with one baby that was not supposed to survive, that was my own natural childbirth. Then my other child, Samuel, who was born to me through the miracle of adoption. His birth mother and I, to this day, are extremely close. I keep her identity very well hidden, but she’s a close friend of mine, at this point. She doesn’t have any desire to be public, but she definitely wants me to tell our story, because she tried to abort him many times. God just put His hand up in ways that were absolutely beyond miracles. For the first year of his life, we exchanged letters. I really wasn’t comfortable with her knowing where we lived and things like that. Ultimately, none of that mattered. It all melted away and all I wanted was just to know this woman that had given my son life.

Today he is very happy, very healthy, very funny. He is, I always say, the belly laugh of our family. Everybody who meets him loves him. Anyone who thinks that a child with Down Syndrome will not enrich and give a depth and a breadth to their life that they can’t possibly understand ahead of time, you’re so missing it. I’m so sad for that. I am sad that so many of them are aborted today. I literally had to get – the only way I got my son was because he was actually from a foreign country and parents were here on a green card. That’s the only way I ended up with him. She was working multiple jobs. She was a recent green card recipient. She was here working multiple jobs and had no idea how she was going to take care of this special needs’ child.

That’s how I got him and it’s a miracle. It really is. I would love people to read that story in my book, because to me, it just tells so much about the hand of God in our world and in our lives very personally. I thank you for bringing that up. That’s one of my faves.

Mine too. There are many people who support abortion and will say, “Well, if you really believed it, why wouldn’t you go adopt someone?” This story is just so, so inspiring. I think the discussion in the book about your relationship with your dad and how you had to go follow truth, even if it cost you his approval. I think that’s a great lesson for all children and all adults who need to understand that truth costs something. It’s costly, but you can have the benefits of it as well.

Dr. Gina, thank you so much for joining me today. If people want to learn more about you, what is your handle on Twitter and where can they follow you?

Yeah, it’s RealDrGina pretty much everywhere. That’s how they can follow me and find me. My book is available on Amazon. I’d love also if your listeners would be willing to rate it, because the Left did a concerted effort to try to keep me off of the bestselling list and bring my rating down. They ended up taking my Amazon listing down for a couple of days because of the Left’s very organized attempt to destroy my book.

Terrible.

The president Tweeted about it.

Yes, I saw that.

Said it a couple times and he said to buy a copy. It makes a great Christmas gift. It’s more a story than a political book. hope that people will get their copy of Mad Politics.

It is a great Christmas gift. I will be giving it out this year, too.

Thank you so much.

This is Gayle Trotter. You can like me on Facebook, you can follow me on Twitter, you can follow me on Instagram. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel and support this show on Patreon. This is Right in DC.

Interview with Psychology Expert Dr. Gina Loudon Diagnosing the Left, the Media and Trump

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Gayle Trotter

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Gayle Trotter

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