Veteran journalist and author Lee Smith joined Trumpet Daily host Stephen Flurry on January 16 to discuss Donald Trump’s win in Iowa, the Barack Obama agenda and other subjects. Some key quotes:

Lee Smith: The issue is the people who are voting for Donald Trump or supporting Donald Trump. … The president they elected was not allowed to govern because he had to fight off this RussiaGate garbage. Then look at all the other things that went on during the Trump administration. Look at the way the corporate and political establishment hurt not only Donald Trump but the American public. Let’s remember everything from mask mandates to Joe Biden’s famous covid mandates. Let’s look at all the different lockdowns. Let’s look at how people have been hurt. Let’s look at the censorship. Let’s look at the lies. Let’s look at the weaponization of the federal government, targeting January 6 defendants, using the fbi to go after pta parents, using the fbi to go after pastors, to go after Catholics.

I reported from the Middle East. I lived in the Middle East for several years. It’s the language of the Middle East. It’s the language of Third World regimes, what Barack Obama was doing. … It was obscene. It was absolutely un-American. … That’s who Barack Obama is. He is an alien. He is alien to America.

Here’s one thing I got wrong. I thought the purpose of destabilizing Donald Trump was simply to get rid of Donald Trump. It wasn’t. The purpose of destabilizing Donald Trump, as we now see in the Biden years, the purpose of destabilizing the United States under Donald Trump is because Barack Obama is an agent of chaos. Look at the instability he’s brought to the United States. … Barack Obama is an agent of destabilization.

People are using a lot of different … phrases and words to explain what the Obama faction looked like—looks like. Is it Marxist? Is it Communist? I don’t know. Maybe it’s socialist. Maybe it’s oligarchic. [In truth,] it’s pathological. That’s what it is. … It’s an extraordinarily dangerous political faction. Believe what you feel: It’s pathological. Demonic, if you will. … We see the pillars of the constitutional republic laid to waste. We can … see how many of the Bill of Rights have been abrogated, including freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. This is what January 6 is about. … But certainly, it was Barack Obama who really led the assault against the pillars of the constitutional republic. [W]hat we’re seeing is a Third World-style pathological regime.

We’re well past the partisanship of the media. What we’re talking about is an intelligence operation. That’s what the press is. That’s what msnbc is. That’s what the Washington Post and the New York Times are. We’re joining the intelligence apparatus—past and current intelligence officials—to the media. That’s the Third World right there. And that’s what we’re seeing happen: A corrupt pathological regime means to replace the constitutional republic.

The Iran nuclear deal was not only the central foreign-policy initiative of the Barack Obama years, it was also an instrument that he used to transform the United States. A lot of people wonder and they look now at the pro-Hamas stuff: Where did this come from? … So now this is a popular cause? Yes. This is Barack Obama’s deal with a terror state that embodies Jew-hatred. That’s what it was meant to do. It was meant to legitimize these different pathologies. So this was very important, not just in terms of our foreign policy, which was to degrade traditional allies, especially in the Middle East, like Israel and Saudi Arabia, and elevate Iran, again, a terror state. It was also meant to transform the domestic arena as well. …

What did the nuclear deal do? It empowered not just Iran, but Iran’s allies. And people are looking right now at what’s happening in the Red Sea …. Well, let’s imagine what this is all going to look like if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. Iran is going to have the ability to set the prices and all sorts of global markets, including energy. But this was the plan of Barack Obama. And this is why Joe Biden, of course, still wants to reenter the nuclear deal with Iran that Donald Trump wisely withdrew from in May 2018.