Larry Elder was the first Republican candidate for President to share the stage with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for her “Fair-Side Chats” on Thursday. Elder shared his background and said he is running for President to discuss issues that neither party seems to be addressing.
Elder, talked about his father. At 13 years old, his dad, who never knew his biological father, was kicked out of the house by his mother. Elder said his dad was a “13-year-old black boy with an eighth-grade education in Athens, Georgia in the Jim Crow south” at the beginning of the Great Depression.
His dad joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor and, despite struggling due to hurdles involving racism, eventually found work cleaning toilets in Los Angeles. At 47 years old, his dad had saved enough money to start a cafe near downtown Los Angeles.
Elder said his dad was a lifelong Republican and his mother was a lifelong Democrat.
“You should’ve heard the arguments on the kitchen table,” Elder said. “But nobody called anybody a fascist. Nobody called anybody a Nazi. Nobody said you only care about the rich, you don’t care about the poor.”
On Day 1 of an Elder presidency, he said he would pardon President Donald J. Trump.
“These prosecutions are just outrageous,” he said.
He also said he would resume construction on the border wall and reverse the “anti-Trump” border policies and put Trump policies back in place.
An important task is to address the grafting of government officials and their families, Elder added. He said he would sign an executive order to stop all the Hunter Biden situations.
He paraphrased a former President, saying if you go into office poor and come out rich you are stealing.
Spending should be tied to a certain percentage of the GDP, he added, noting that the debt ceiling will always be raised by both parties because neither wants to have that tied around their neck for an election.
A politician’s number one job, he said, is to get elected. And the number two job is to get re-elected.
“You don’t get elected running to reform major programs or take stuff away from people,” he said.
While he shares President Trump’s “America First Agenda,” he is running because candidates are not discussing some of the most important issues.
Among those issues is fatherlessness, which Elder said is the number one domestic problem. Elder noted 40 percent of American children enter the world without a father in the home who is married to their mother. That applies to 70 percent of black children.
In 1965, he said, it was 25 percent of black children. Now it’s 25 percent of white kids.
Elder tied that statistic to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” being launched.
“Since then it has incentivized women to marry the government and incentivized men to abandon (their responsibilities),” Elder said.
He made sure to say he isn’t demonizing single moms who are working hard to make things work, but said kids raised without a father are five times more likely to be poor and commit a crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in jail.
“Democrats don’t talk about it because they caused it,” he said. “Our side doesn’t talk about it because they’ll be called racist.”
Elder was labeled the “black face of white supremacy” for discussing the topic by a major media outlet, he said.
Ironically, the “nonsense” regarding America being systemically racist and diversity, equity and inclusion has led to black and brown people being hurt the most, he said.
It has led to police no longer being proactive and instead have pulled back and in the last few years thousands of people have died or been victimized by violent crime who wouldn’t have suffered if police had done their normal, proactive policing, he said.
There is also a tragedy in urban education. Elder said in half of the public high schools in Baltimore either 0 percent or 1 percent of students can do math at grade level.
“Yet Democrats oppose school choice,” he said. “Even as their party elites — whether it’s Barack Obama, Gavin Newsom or Joe Biden — have their own kids in private schools. It’s an absolute tragedy.”
