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WHAT? Donald Trump Thinks He Invented the Phrase 'Priming the Pump'

May 11, 2017
Staff

WRITER

In an interview with The Economist, President Trump claimed to have invented the phrase "priming the pump." The rippling effect of the shockwaves made it to The Glenn Beck Program.

"'Priming the pump' is an expression that you'd never heard before? You'd never heard 'prime the pump,' and you claim to come up with it a couple of days ago?" Glenn asked incredulously on radio Thursday. "What the hell do you think 'quantitative easing' is? What do you even think 'helicopter money' is? What do you think 'tax cuts' are? You're priming the pump!"

In actuality, the phrase has been around for awhile --- a long while. First in the 1800s as related to water pumps and later in the 1930s as a liberal economic policy.

"Priming the pump is Keynesian," Glenn said. "It's been out since the Depression."

How is it possible that a man of Donald Trump's stature, a man who has been in business for decades doesn't know the common phrase "priming the pump?"

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

GLENN: This is from The Economist. There's a story in The Economist now about what is the economic plan of the president?

And I just want to quote this. This is just -- this is all in verbatim, okay? So this is question, answer, question, answer. This is not somebody writing this. This is verbatim.

ECONOMIST: But beyond that, it's okay if the tax plan increases the deficit?

TRUMP: It's okay because it won't increase it for long. You may have two years where you'll -- you understand the expression prime the pump.

ECONOMIST: Yes.

TRUMP: We have to prime the pump.

ECONOMIST: Well, that's very Keynesian.

TRUMP: "We're the highest taxed nation in the world." Have you ever heard that expression before, for this particular type of event?

ECONOMIST: Priming the pump?

TRUMP: Yeah, have you heard it?

ECONOMIST: Yes.

TRUMP: Have you heard the expression used before? Because I hadn't heard it. I mean, I just -- I came up with it a couple of days ago, and I thought it was good. It's what you have to do.

GLENN: "Priming the pump" is an expression that you'd never heard before? You'd never heard "prime the pump," and you claim to come up with it a couple of days ago?

Priming -- what the hell do you think "quantitative easing" is? What do you even think "helicopter money" is? What do you think "tax cuts" are?

You're priming the pump. Priming the pump is Keynesian. It is -- it's been out for -- for -- or, Keynesian. It's come out -- how do you say it?

STU: Keynesian.

GLENN: Keynesian.

It's been out since the Depression. And before that, it was used for actual pumps.

STU: Yeah, I mean, it's obviously a phrase that's about actual pumps from the mid-1800s.

GLENN: So he's talking to a guy from The Economist that can talk deeply. And our president thinks he came up with the term, the economic term, "priming the pump."

Now, here's why this is a problem. It shows you haven't thought about this at all. If you have been in business, how do you not know priming the pump? How do you not know -- do we have that clip from Vice President Biden? Can you play that, Sarah? Do you have it?

BIDEN: Now, people say -- when I say that, people look at me and say, "What are you talking about, Joe? You're telling me we've got to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?" I answer, "Yeah, that's what I'm telling you."

GLENN: That's called priming the pump.

JEFFY: Priming the pump.

STU: Yeah. It's usually used by the left.

GLENN: Correct. So he's never -- he's never thought of stimulus. So when he was talking about a trillion dollar stimulus package, he didn't really understand the concept of priming the pump.

STU: Which is -- I believe an incorrect concept.

GLENN: I do too.

STU: However, if you're going to spend a trillion dollars, you should probably know it.

GLENN: So he didn't...think of that. It didn't connect to him that, yes, we're going to spend a trillion dollars, but that will get the economy starting to role.

Now, how is that even possible? More disturbing is, I think, how this happened. He wasn't just in bed going, you know what, it's like the old pump. And remember, you had to -- you had to prime it a couple of times. Push it a couple of times to get it going. And then it would -- he didn't say -- he wasn't laying in bed thinking about that. I mean, Viagra, I would imagine, is what he thinks of as priming the pump. But he wasn't sitting thinking about an old water pump and priming the pump and then tying that to economic theory. Here's probably what happened: He's sitting in a meeting and they're talking about the economy and what they're going to do. And somebody says, "Yeah, I mean, that's priming the pump." And he probably thought, "You know what, what you just said, you're all wrong about. Because you're probably all talking about the water, Viagra, something. But if we use money instead of water, priming the pump." And probably everybody in the room was too afraid or whatever to say, "Yeah. That's what this is. Priming the pump. That's what we were talking about. You don't think you just came up with that." They didn't say anything. So he goes off thinking, "I am a freaking genius. I heard some guy talking about priming the pump. And I thought to myself, wait. We're in an economic meeting. Let's tie that principle to money. You got to get that water flowing. Once you get that water up to the top, then one little push, and it all starts to -- I'm a genius."

That is --

STU: Yeah. It's not -- it's suboptimal, I would say.

JEFFY: Yeah.

GLENN: Can you give him the benefit of the doubt, I mean, for this?

STU: Again --

GLENN: This is The Economist, verbatim.

STU: Yeah, no, I think you're probably right on how that's happened. Merriam-Webster today has been tweeting about how the term was first tied to economic principles in 1933. But I think honestly -- and correct me if I'm wrong here, Glenn, because it's scary that he -- you know, it's a ridiculous moment, right? But, I mean, it's sort of Trumpian. And maybe you're like, well, you know, he has these moments. And he takes credit for everything. He invented everything. He's always had the highest ratings. Like, maybe you could brush it off from that perspective, where he's just kind of bragging about what he does.

But in the -- what he's talking about is a liberal economic policy.

GLENN: Yes.

STU: He doesn't reject Keynesianism. He sticks with it. In fact, he doesn't -- well, he doesn't comment on it at all. Whether he knows what it is or not, I don't know. But the concept of priming the pump is very clearly a left-wing principle. It is -- it's Paul Krugman central. Right? Remember when Paul Krugman said --

GLENN: It's what we've been doing.

JEFFY: Yeah.

STU: -- remember when Paul Krugman was like, well, if we just had aliens coming down. If we thought aliens were going to attack, even if it wasn't a real attack, this economy would go crazy because we'd start spending and it would get all the spending going.

That is a left-wing principle. And the fact that, not only is that not offensive to me -- he doesn't stop the interview and go, whoa, whoa, that's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm not talking about Keynesianism here. That's not what this is.

He doesn't stop him because he doesn't either know or he does believe it. And the second one is worse.

GLENN: No, no, no. I don't think it's either of those.

We have to prime the pump. It's very Keynesian. We're the highest taxed nation in the world. Have you heard that expression before, this particular time of event? Priming the pump?

Yeah.

Have you heard of it?

Yes. I heard the expression used before -- or, I've never heard the expression used before. I hadn't heard it. I mean, I just came up with it a couple of days ago.

I don't even think he's listening to the guy.

JEFFY: No.

GLENN: His answers don't matter. The answers of, yes, it's very Keynesian. Priming the pump. It doesn't matter. He's just monologuing, and the answer could be anything.

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: He's so convinced -- and the reason why I bring this up is, was anybody in the Oval Office saying, "Mr. President, do you know what you're going to do by bringing -- you're going to bring hell down on all of us?" There are obviously 30 people that are talking to the Washington Post that don't feel like they have -- they're being listened to at all by this guy. And they're saying these things -- I mean, his friends are -- are saying these things.

Is it because they feel like he's not listening and this could be trouble?

I mean, there is a problem when you have 30 people in and around the West Wing that are leaking on something that could be the end of a presidency. That's -- that's not good.

STU: No.

GLENN: And I think it's because, is there anyone that is around him that is saying, "Mr. President, you can't -- no. Stop."

STU: It's funny. The only two I've seen that have been reported as to opposing the Comey firing. Not because they loved Comey, but because they thought it would be this disaster of a PR issue. The only two that I've seen: Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. Apparently they were like, "Eh, this isn't a good idea. It's not going to look good."

Everybody else was like, "Well, it might not look good, but it's worth doing." At least that's the reporting. We'll see how that fleshes out.

From Pharaoh to Hamas: The same spirit of evil, new disguise

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.

We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.

That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.

Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.

Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.

Ancient evil, new clothes

But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.

Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.

When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

A time for choosing

So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.

The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.

Will you join it, or will you stand against it?

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The great switch: Gates trades climate control for digital dominion

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump’s secret war in the Caribbean EXPOSED — It’s not about drugs

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.