The hotel parking lot is deserted but for the red, white and blue bus, decorated with the giant features of Donald Trump.
It is still dark outside, but through the window a lone figure, impeccably dressed in red tie, white shirt and navy blazer, is hunched over a microphone at 7am.
‘When you look at what is ahead for a Trump administration, cost cutting … inflation is going to go down,’ John Fredericks tells his listeners in battleground states around the country.
‘We’re going to rein in spending. He’s already said that they’re going to close the border, they’re going to deport the illegals. They’re going to get the criminals out.’
Democrats are now in desperation mode, he says. Everything they’re doing is desperate because they know they’re going to lose.’
Radio show host and Trump confidant John Fredericks operates a network of radio stations broadcasting to some of the states that will decide the 2024 presidential election
A night earlier he was watching Donald Trump hold a town hall event in suburban Philadelphia.
After sleeping in his giant RV (decorated with a giant image of Trump) now he is broadcasting via 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 all across the nation via the internet).
It gives the ‘Godzilla of Truth’, as he styles himself, an outsize voice in the election, reaching voters who could decide the outcome
That fact is not lost on team Trump.
Fredericks has interviewed Trump at least 75 times, as well as his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance. Campaign staff and former administration officials are regular guests on the show.
It is an extraordinary position for a 66-year-old who found his way into broadcasting only after declaring bankruptcy in 2011, when he lost his family home in the wake of the financial crisis.
His swing state strategy was born out of need and a savvy business model, he told DailyMail.com after wrapping his show.
‘Having the ability to go into swing states … it gives you access to a couple of things immediately: The key political movers and shakers in the area, because it is an important state, and then you’re going to get an audience, because they’re going to bring an audience with them,’ he said.
But first came rock bottom.
He and his wife Anne launched a newspaper, The Beacon, in 2007 to cover the Atlanta suburbs. A year later it was rocked by the financial crash and ceased publishing in 2011, leading Fredericks to bankruptcy.
When he is on the road, Fredericks broadcasts from a microphone, mixing desk and laptop in the RV where he sleeps (he puts up staff, including his driver Larry, in hotels)
Fredericks says he has interviewed Donald Trump more than 75 times and served as chairman of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia. He is pictured here in the Oval Office
He lost his home and his family was living out of their car. He realized things had to change when he went out for lunch with a former speaker of the House of Georgia.
‘I was very excited, because he we were going to Subway, which meant that I could eat and take the other half home,’ he said.
Rock bottom came later when he had signed on to announce high-school baseball. He missed the team bus because he was filing a match report and had to walk 12 miles home.
His Republican, protectionist instincts took a populist turn as he realized that although there were bail-outs for Wall Street there were none for former newspaper owners reduced to buying supermarket chickens discounted to $5 at 8pm.
Salvation came first in the form of a job with a Virginia newspaper running its opinion pages, which then became an opportunity in radio. Just one catch: It was a pay-to-pontificate gig, which would need Fredericks to sell advertising if he was to meet the $6000-a-month buy in.
He was a natural at selling, as anyone who has heard his easy-going radio charm.
His show was picked up in Richmond, Virginia, and then Washington, D.C. But each step forward was followed by two steps back, when an affiliate would be sold.
‘We realized the business model we had was destined for failure because I wasn’t big enough. I was always the the second or third radio guy in a talk market, and we had no control over the affiliates,’ he said.
Team Trump are regular guests on his show, including Sen. J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate
A change of ownership and he would be out again. The answer was to switch up the business model by cobbling together the $250,000 to own a station and its frequencies in Virginia, where he was based, and insulate himself from the vagaries of owners.
The real revelation of the power of the frequencies came in the immediate wake of the 2020 election. Fredericks was driving home from Washington in the early hours of the morning convinced that Trump had won, when he called his wife Anne who asked him what was going on in Georgia, where they used to live and where the first complaints of fraud were surfacing.
‘She’s like, well, I don’t want you to come home. Just just keep going,’ he said. ‘Just go, go down there and tell me what’s going on.
‘And I’m like, I don’t have any money, I don’t have any clothes. She’s like, stop whining. Just drive there.’
He began broadcasting from a hotel in Atlanta and the phone lines lit up.
‘We had all this traction there. And Anne said, well, we need to buy a station. And I said what? In Georgia?’
They bought a station in Georgia.
Now the network has grown to include Pennsylvania, where they bookend the commonwealth, with stations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
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As well as the previous night’s town hall (abbreviated after two people were taken ill and turned into a music listening party) Trump is due to return for a rally on Saturday, and then man the fry station of a McDonald’s in Philadelphia a day later, followed by another town hall and a stop at the Jets-Steelers game on Sunday evening.
The race is deadlocked. The latest DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners poll had the candidates in a dead heat, on 47 percent of the vote each.
Fredericks, who was a Pennsylvania delegate at this summer’s Republican National Convention, is all in on a Trump victory here.
But he is wary of some of the voices circulating elsewhere in the MAGA radio universe. Winning in Pennsylvania, he says, means dropping some of the election fraud hyperbole.
‘Trump needs to get his voters to vote early. If we vote early, that’s it,’ he said.
‘The click baiters who are still driving game-day voting based on algorithms and servers on the moon and drones hacking into machines and changing 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 were taken ill and Trump turned the event into an impromptu dance party alongside Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota
Fredericks has little time for the conspiracy theorists and he is notable for welcoming Democrats on to his show. There’s enough policy to go around, he says, without having to rely on gimmicks.
Earlier, Anthony from Florida proved the point. After chatting about the latest polling numbers the caller dropped a landmine.
‘Kamala has got Diddy… oops,’ he said, referring to the disgraced music mogul accused of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, alongside a string of sexual abuse lawsuits (all denied by the star).
‘I gotta go,’ says Fredericks hurriedly, his finger punching at the laptop he uses to run the show and cutting off the caller before he can say any more.
His show wraps at 10am, handing off to a string of other presenters, and Fredericks has time for a cup of oatmeal before picking up the phone and working his way through call sheets of advertisers.
‘Do we want to have the opportunity to bring the populist message to a larger segment of America? Yes,’ he said.
‘Is that part of the vision? Absolutely.
But without having a profitable business, you can’t do it. You got to get the ads, you got to get the sponsors. You got to give them a return. You got to take care of them. And if you do that, then you can get the message out.’
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .