The populist talk show host is taking Trump’s message to battleground states by buying up radio stations

The hotel parking lot is deserted except for the red, white and blue bus decorated with the giant features of Donald Trump.

It’s still dark outside, but through the window a lone figure, impeccably dressed in a red tie, white shirt and navy blazer, sits hunched over a microphone at seven in the morning.

“If you look at what’s ahead for a Trump administration, cost cutting…inflation will come down,” John Fredericks tells his listeners in battleground states across the country.

‘We are going to curb spending. He has already said that they are going to close the border, that they are going to deport the illegal immigrants. They’re going to get the criminals out.’

Democrats are now in desperation mode, he says. Everything they do is desperate because they know they are going to lose.”

A night earlier, he watched Donald Trump hold a town hall event in a Philadelphia suburb.

After sleeping in his giant RV (decorated with a giant picture of Trump), he now broadcasts over the network of radio stations he owns or operates in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania and Georgia (as well as Virginia, where he started, West Virginia) . , Tennessee and nationwide via the Internet).

It gives him the ‘Godzilla of Truth’, as he calls himself, an outsized voice in elections, reaching voters who can determine the outcome

That fact is not lost on team Trump.

Fredericks has interviewed Trump at least 75 times, as has his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance. Campaign workers and former government officials are regular guests.

It’s an extraordinary position for a 66-year-old who only found his way into broadcasting after going bankrupt in 2011, when he lost his family home in the wake of the financial crisis.

His swing state strategy came from a business model, he told DailyMail.com after wrapping up his show.

“Because you now have the ability to get into swing states, you get immediate access to a number of things: the major political movers and shakers in the area, because it’s an important state, and then you get an audience, because they are going to bring an audience,” he said.

But first came the low point.

He and his wife Anne launched a newspaper, The Beacon, in 2007, covering the Atlanta suburbs. A year later, it was rocked by the financial crash and stopped publishing in 2011, leaving Fredericks bankrupt.

When he’s on the road, Fredericks broadcasts via a microphone, mixing console and laptop in the RV where he sleeps (he places staff, including his driver Larry, in hotels)

Fredericks says he has interviewed Donald Trump more than 75 times and chaired his Virginia campaigns in 2016 and 2020. He is pictured here in the Oval Office

He lost his home and his family lived out of their car. He realized things had to change when he had lunch with a former Speaker of the Georgia House.

“I was really excited because we were going to Subway, which meant I could eat and take the other half home,” he said.

The low point came later when he signed on to announce high school basketball. He missed the team bus because he was filing a race report and had to walk 12 miles home.

His Republican, protectionist instincts took a populist turn when he realized that while there were bailouts for Wall Street, there were no bailouts for former newspaper owners who were limited to buying supermarket chickens at a $5 discount at 8 p.m.

Salvation came first in the form of a job at a Virginia newspaper running op-ed pages, which then became an opportunity in radio. Just one catch: It was a pontificate gig, which would require Fredericks to sell ads if he wanted to meet the $6,000-a-month buy-in.

He was a natural at selling, as is anyone who has heard his easy-going radio charm.

His show was picked up in Richmond, Virginia, and then in Washington, DC. But every step forward was followed by two steps back, when an affiliate would be sold.

‘We realized that our business model was doomed to fail because I wasn’t big enough. “I was always the second or third radio guy in a talk market, and we had no control over the affiliates,” he said.

Team Trump is a regular guest on his show, including Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate

A change of ownership and he would be out again. The answer was to change the business model by scraping together the $250,000 to own a station and its frequencies in Virginia, where he was based, and insulating himself from the whims of the owners.

The real revelation of the power of the frequencies came in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. Fredericks was driving home from Washington in the early morning hours, convinced that Trump had won, when he called his wife Anne who asked him what was going on the hand was in Georgia, where they lived and where the first complaints of fraud surfaced.

‘She says: I don’t want you to come home. Just keep going,” he said. “Just go, get over there and tell me what’s going on.

“And I’m like, I have no money, I have no clothes. She says stop whining. Just drive there.’

He started broadcasting from a hotel in Atlanta and the phone lines lit up.

“We had all that traction there. And Anne said: we have to buy a station. And I said what? In Georgia?’

They bought a station in Georgia.

Now the network has expanded into Pennsylvania, where they bookend the Commonwealth, with stations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

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In addition to the previous evening’s town hall (abbreviated after two people got sick and turned into a music listening party), Trump will return for a rally on Saturday, and a day later man the fry station of a McDonald’s in Philadelphia. followed by another town hall and a stop at the Jets-Steelers game on Sunday night.

The race is deadlocked. In the latest DailyMail.com/JL Partners poll, the candidates were deadlocked, each with 47 percent of the vote.

Fredericks, who was a delegate from Pennsylvania to this summer’s Republican National Convention, is all in on a Trump victory here.

But he’s wary of some of the voices circulating elsewhere in the MAGA radio universe. Winning in Pennsylvania, he says, means dropping some of the hyperbole about election fraud.

“Trump needs to get his voters to vote early. “If we vote early, that’s it,” he said.

“The clickbaiters who still vote on game day based on algorithms and servers on the moon and drones that hack machines and change votes in the middle of the night. This is the stuff that’s killing us.”

Trump held a town hall in Oaks, just outside Philadelphia, on Monday evening

Two people got sick and Trump turned the event into an impromptu dance party with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem

Fredericks has little time for the conspiracy theorists and he is notable for welcoming Democrats to his show. There are plenty of possible policies, he says, without having to rely on gimmicks.

Earlier, Florida’s Anthony proved the point. After talking about the final voting numbers, the caller dropped a landmine.

“Kamala has Diddy… oops,” he said, referring to the disgraced music mogul who has been accused of conspiracy and sex trafficking, in addition to a series of sexual abuse lawsuits (all denied by the star).

“I have to go,” Fredericks says hurriedly, tapping his finger against the laptop he uses to run the show, interrupting the caller before he can say anything else.

His show ends at 9am and is handed over to a series of other presenters, and Fredericks has time for a cup of oatmeal before picking up the phone and working his way through advertisers’ call lists.

“Do we want the opportunity to take the populist message to more of America? Yes,’ he said.

‘Is that part of the vision? Absolute.

But without having a profitable business, you can’t do it. You’ve got to get the ads, you’ve got to get the sponsors. You have to give them something back. You have to take care of them. And if you do that, you can get the message across.”