There's been this attempt to block Donald Trump, in primary candidates and Democrats, that - to try to make everything he says some sort of extreme overstatement.
My parents, both of them had teachers in their family and were pretty well read. So my father voted for [Dwight] Eisenhower.
I would acknowledge that [Paul] Ryan has some really good ideas about things, and I think they'll get together, like taxes. Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore, they've been supportive of Ryan's tax view and now they're very supportive of [Donald] Trump's. So I think that's got potential.
[My father] was interested. He read the newspapers and read Time and U.S. News and World Report and people in stores would come along, you know, and they would talk politics.
Winston County was a pocket of Republicans. Even in the depression days, when Democrats dominated Alabama, Winston County remained a Republican county and all the elected officials were Republican.
Frank Johnson was recognized as one of the great federal judges of American history, I suppose. He was a law-and-order judge. He was a classical, I think, conservative. But he believed that civil rights provided in the Constitution applied to everybody.
Basically [I become a Republican], pretty early. I had an English teacher that got me to subscribe to the National Review.
The Republican Party, in many ways, grew up as a reaction to that [ segregation], and a lot of people have misunderstood that.
In my family, we were not involved in politics at all.
We were segregated throughout the community, and it was pretty brutal, actually. It didn't appear to be, on the surface.People got along and we had great relationships, but there was discrimination that impacted adversely the ability of the African-American community to progress. People did not - were in denial about that fact.
We were just country people. All my grandfathers had farms. They had chickens, cattle and tried to get by farming, for the most part.
[Ronald Reagan] appealed to that group of [working American] people and we can do it again, because they've had, now, eight years of [Barak] Obama. Things have not gone well.
My father had a country store and then later, when I was 10 or 12, sold it and bought a farm equipment dealership in nearby Camden.
Hybart is a little community I grew up in, so it was just a wonderful time in those years. I was the youngest of about nine boys in the neighborhood and we played ball all the time, and I looked up to them and they let me play around with them, and we just had a good time.
When I came up as a United States Attorney, I had no real support group. I didn't prepare myself well in 1986, and there was an organized effort to caricature me as someone I wasn't. True. It was very painful. I didn't know how to respond and didn't respond very well.
I understand the lifelong scars born by women who are victims of assault and abuse.
I think if a candidate ran for office in most states in the country, if his opponent, or her opponent was an effective advocate against the TPP and could show, as I think we will be able to show, it's detrimental to working Americans, I think they would have a hard time getting elected.
We'll have a national dispute - debate about it, and the goal should be to bring in - to help respectfully appeal to those voters that can make the difference, the ones who are not going to be entrepreneurs, are never going to be - run a - be a CEO in some big business, and they know it, but they would like to have their Social Security, they would like to have Medicare as they paid for all their years, and they'd like rising wages rather than falling wages.
Donald Trump believed that the whole history of trade agreements, most of which I've supported over the years, have not been effective, and I've come to believe he's right.
I concluded that the trade agreements weren't working as promised, and was depreciating the wages and the manufacturing base, and the jobs of Americans, and that both needed to change, and Donald Trump was out there. So I went to his rally.
We can never go back.
Voters are saying "I like this guy [Donald Trump]. He just might shake this place up."
Thirty years people have been asking for a lawful system of immigration to end this lawlessness, and government on both parties have refused to give it to them.
I had met [Donald] Trump once before, when he testified before a committee that Tom Coburn - Senator Coburn - and I hosted, to deal with excessive expenditures to refurbish the UN building in New York.
I supported the Korean Trade Agreement in 2011. They promised - when it was signed, President [Barak] Obama said it would increase our exports to Korea by $10 billion a year.That creates jobs in America.Since - last year, 2015, there was no increase, like instead of billions of dollars there was like a $100 million increase in our exports to Korea, whereas as their imports to us went up $12 billion, and our trade deficit increased 240 percent.
