Russ Vogt, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget for President Donald Trump, joins War Room host Stephen K. Van Zandt to discuss the ongoing war on Western civilization and the deep-rooted corruption that fuels it.
00:01:24.000And he's someone that we are, frankly, blessed to have had in public service and hopefully will have again.
00:01:32.000Look, Russ is uniquely situated to talk what I've been wanting to talk about in this show, which is this continued war on the West, war on Western civilization, war on our way of life.
00:01:44.000The extent to which people are trying to minimize what they want to just dismiss as a radical new right or, quote, MAGA Republicans and all of these things.
00:01:52.000When what you have are Americans who are tired of having their way of life destroyed.
00:01:58.000And it's being destroyed on multiple fronts.
00:02:00.000Open borders is being destroyed on multiple fronts in terms of endless wars and endless conflicts and turning over sovereignty to the United Nations and these international organizations like the World Health Organization.
00:02:10.000And all of these ways in which we're tearing down our society with woke policies, there are a lot of different topics you can cover about this attack on our way of life.
00:02:18.000One of which and I want Russ to respond to that generally, but one of which is also the extent to which weak Republicans, uniparty swamp dwellers have been fueling this war on our way of life from right here in the nation's capital, from right here in the halls of Congress, from right there in the executive branch for years.
00:02:40.000Republicans who campaign on fiscal responsibility and campaign on limited government and campaign on freedom and all these things and, you know, low taxes.
00:02:48.000And they campaign on all these things.
00:02:50.000But at the end of the day, they've been racking up debt to fund a radicalized and growing tyrannical government that is now being used and fully weaponized against the American people.
00:03:02.000It's why you have people that are in jail because they want to pray in an abortion clinic and all the things that I talked about earlier.
00:03:07.000So I know, Russ, you know, when I came here to Washington, I believe I recall the debt was, I think, $21 trillion when I ran for Congress in 2018.
00:03:21.000Now, those are numbers that most Americans don't understand.
00:03:24.000But I know you understand how this matters.
00:03:27.000And I wonder if you might be able to talk a little bit about that in that context, my friend.
00:03:31.000Well, I mean, we are fueling the bureaucracy that is aimed at the American, half the American people at least.
00:03:39.000The side of the American people that has great concerns with the regime in power that is fundamentally anti-democratic, that has constructed an administration that puts things on autopilot like spending so that for 10, 15, 20 years, you don't even have Republicans thinking about what we're spending on because they're all focused on something that they don't have a vote on, which is entitlement spending.
00:04:08.000And so when you look at what they're spending on, you then begin to be horrified because you think, you know, it's just big government.
00:04:48.000And Mike Benz has done incredible work in helping us understand when foreign aid is and the national security establishment is talking about democracy promotion, they are generally talking about regime change.
00:05:01.000So when you have a country like Hungary and they're like, why is your USAID funding NGOs that are making our life miserable because they don't like the nation in power?
00:05:14.000Or why are we funding LGBT activists in Senegal?
00:05:18.000Why are we funding gay pride events abroad?
00:05:21.000And you're like, no wonder the rest of the world hates us because we're funding all of this.
00:05:27.000And so, you know, it's agency by agency, Chip.
00:05:37.000And it's why over time we developed the notion of it's woke and weaponized because we wanted to provide a framework and a paradigm to help people understand it's not just big government anymore.
00:05:49.000It is a government that's aimed at us and Western civilization.
00:06:07.000The West is now increasingly just the United States.
00:06:12.000And half the United States is bought into that and trying to preserve it.
00:06:17.000And you and I both know Rafael Cruz, who came from Cuba and persecution there.
00:06:21.000You know, he used to always – every time I see him, he says, look, if we lose this country, we're done because there's nowhere else to go.
00:06:30.000So this election, the fight on a host of issues this year and next is about preserving Western civilization.
00:07:55.000Like, the artist was acknowledging that it was purposeful.
00:07:57.000Now, that rant aside, to your point, and we get back to the spending front, you know, you put together a budget, I think, with your Center for Renewing America, that you identify billions in savings by cutting woke and weaponized programs.
00:08:11.000So what I want to try to do is tie for the American people who are listening the ability for us, if we lead and do the right thing, to constrain spending and not just say that there's, oh, just go cut taxes and don't worry about it.
00:08:34.000We all want to free up the American people and create economic growth by leaving more money in their pocket.
00:08:39.000But when you just blindly cut taxes, and you particularly blindly cut taxes for mega corporations at war with our way of life, and you do that without cutting spending, then aren't you just further taxing the American people with inflation?
00:08:53.000Aren't you further making it harder for the average hardworking American family and small business to survive?
00:08:58.000And then aren't you simultaneously funding by printing money and borrowing the very bureaucratic state and tyrannical government that's undermining our way of life?
00:09:08.000So if you could talk about that a little bit, I think that would be useful.
00:09:12.000No, I think you're really getting to it, Chip, in the sense that inflation is, in fact, the left's strategy.
00:09:25.000They don't actually think they're going to be successful, generally.
00:09:28.000They think that they're going to be successful by having the Federal Reserve print money to continue to monetize the debt, to buy the bonds of the Treasury Department.
00:09:40.000And over time, to do it at such a level that we see what occurred over the last several years.
00:09:46.000It's why they were so resistant to doing anything, to call it anything but transitory, because they wanted the gravy train to go on as long as possible.
00:09:58.000And so, you know, this is something that you've got to—one of the ways I think you stay sane in this township, and you and I have known each other for a long time, is to look at what you've worked on over time and occasionally say, you know what, we had a bad strategy.
00:10:18.000And I think when we came to this town, there was a view in the conservative movement that you could just starve the beast.
00:10:24.000That if you cut taxes, it would force—at the time we had surplus under Bush for a few years—it would force there to be a restraint on spending.
00:10:34.000Categorically, that has been a failure.
00:10:37.000I didn't necessarily come up with the strategy, but it was in the water when we got here.
00:10:41.000That—starving the beast didn't work.
00:10:44.000And it has caused an entire Republican Party that doesn't like to cut spending, doesn't know how, and as a result, hasn't done it.
00:10:54.000And they've been forced to then become kind of—I call them spreadsheet warriors, where they look at where the numbers are.
00:11:00.000And they say, if it's not at Social Security and Medicare as a reform, then we're not doing it.
00:11:05.000And lo and behold, they've allowed 20 years of the bureaucracy to be funded where they don't look at anything in terms of what it's going to actually fund and spend money on.
00:11:16.000And then we wake up and we're on the precipice of tyranny.
00:11:20.000We have a situation where just because you're an effective general in the conservative movement like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, you're going to jail.
00:11:29.000How is after 40 years of a conservative movement built up with all these institutions and many different Republican presidents and many different Republican Congresses and we're on the verge of tyranny?
00:11:44.000And that's what we've tried to reorient the country around, which is we have to unite the fiscal battle with the battle to save the country from this woke and weaponized administrative state.
00:11:55.000It's the number one issue in terms of where we are in addition to getting control of the border and the inflation that we're seeing right now.
00:12:03.000We've got to return self-government to the American people.
00:12:08.000In your 2023 budget that you guys put out, you noted that the annual cost of interest payments will exceed the Pentagon's budget within the next 10 years.
00:12:16.000Now, that's happened sooner than expected because interest costs $892 billion are expected to pass the Pentagon's budget this year of $886 billion.
00:12:26.000I point that out just so the American people can understand the context and how bad this is getting.
00:12:32.000On a good note, and I want to see what your thoughts are on this because I agree with you, this point about the star of the beast.
00:12:49.000Let's constrain the amount of taxes and let's stop the money flowing into Washington.
00:12:53.000But the truth is all they did was go print money and borrow money and leverage our kids' and grandkids' future.
00:12:58.000So if we were extending the current tax rates, right, and extend a lot of the great pro-growth tax cuts under President Trump, which we had R&D cuts and expensing.
00:13:08.000I mean, you know, R&Ds and expensing as well as lower personal rates for hardworking families.
00:13:15.000But there's a lot of other, you had the corporate rate reductions and other things.
00:13:18.000All of this stuff, if we extend what we have in place, I'm told that over 10 years, that's north of $4 trillion, upwards of $4.6 trillion, that you've got to figure out where that's going to come from.
00:13:31.000Now, you either have to cut spending in order to offset that, or you've got to deal with the tax rates.
00:13:36.000So for me, I think we ought to be talking about, look, how are we going to pay for this stuff?
00:13:40.000One way to do that is to pay for it with all the corporate subsidies that went to the Green New Deal, about $1.2 trillion that Goldman had.
00:13:48.000We could deal with the tariffs, right?
00:13:51.000The president talks about tariffs, and you and I have talked about that.
00:13:54.000That could bring in upwards of a couple of trillion dollars, depending on what model you look at.
00:13:58.000And then we could cut the woke and weaponized bureaucracy that's attacking the American people.
00:14:03.000I believe that would be a three-pronged approach to say, let's reduce the taxes, but let's recognize you've got to cut some spending and get rid of some subsidies and make sure that if you're going to do that, well, let's go tariff some of the bad guys.
00:14:15.000What are your thoughts on all of that?
00:14:16.000Yeah, I think it's going to be really important to present a fiscal agenda to the American people and to the financial markets that are going to be looking at these deficits and wanting to know how you deal with the cost of a tax cut that occurs.
00:14:31.000And so I absolutely think that that fiscal agenda should include spending cuts and going after the Green New Deal and that trillion dollars.
00:14:38.000So absolutely would be supportive of that.
00:14:43.000Keep doing the great work over there at the Center for Newing America.
00:14:46.000I'm deeply appreciative of your friendship and all the hard work you've done for the American people and your position in public service in the past.
00:14:53.000And I look forward to keep working with you going forward, brother.
00:14:56.000The petrodollar is crumbling before our eyes.
00:15:02.000Saudi Arabia just declined to renew the 50-year-long petrodollar agreement, which means the U.S. dollar's global dominance is now riding on fumes.
00:15:12.000How much longer until the dollar crashes in value?
00:15:15.000Nobody knows for sure, but it's always best to be prepared.
00:15:18.000I believe owning gold is the best solution.
00:16:05.000Well, it's great to be here with you fine patriots listening to War Room.
00:16:11.000Again, I'm temporarily sitting in the chair that we know Steve Bannon will be sitting in soon enough.
00:16:15.560He's out there fighting for you and me by sitting in a prison cell because you've got a woke and weaponized government
00:16:22.000that has been targeting American citizens from Peter Navarro to Steve Bannon to all of the people I articulated before being targeted by the FACE Act.
00:16:29.880A 75-year-old grandma who's sitting in prison or will be reporting to prison next week in Texas simply for praying an abortion clinic.
00:16:36.800And one of my good friends, no stranger to this show, is my colleague from Florida, Matt Gaetz.
00:16:42.100I'm delighted to have him join here in just a second.
00:17:56.080And I know you and I often hear directly from service members about these bizarre pronouncements
00:18:02.000that come down from the Pentagon that get in the way of building the capabilities for our military that matter so much.
00:18:08.780And in this case, there's a memo circulating that if you tell someone in the Air Force to man up or that they are savage or that they've got to toughen up,
00:18:20.620that these are actually microaggressions that we need to stay away from.
00:18:23.800Now, I don't think the Chinese and the Russians and the Iranians are worried about their microaggressions.
00:18:30.180Frankly, we know the Israelis are worried about their microaggressions.
00:18:32.780They were possibly taking out the Hamas leader in Iran, which good for them for doing so.
00:18:38.040But the fight that we see in the House is, I think, crystallized by these segments.
00:18:43.500Yep, I know our buddy Eli Crane's coming up.
00:18:48.560And I think the House of Representatives has been infected with a Wizard of Oz mentality in our leadership.
00:18:55.040First, we had Paul Ryan, who had no heart.
00:18:58.540Then we had Kevin McCarthy, who had no brain.
00:19:01.240And now we have Mike Johnson, who has no courage.
00:19:04.900And so I guess the converse of that is what we see with some of our friends in the Freedom Caucus,
00:19:10.360where Andy Biggs is the heart, Eli Crane is the courage, and everybody in the posse needs to know that Chip Roy is the brain.
00:19:20.300And that's kind of how we function against a system that lacks some of those core principles and values.
00:19:26.860And I know you were pissed about this, Chip, when we left town.
00:19:29.860And the posse might not really grasp what an abdication this is.
00:19:35.700But between now and the November election, we have three voting session weeks in Washington, D.C.
00:19:42.300Now, if you and I were in charge, if we had committee gavels to be able to haul folks in on the border, on the censorship industrial complex, on what we see with these spending programs that go unauthorized, that have now driven us past $35 trillion in debt.
00:20:01.620There is something to hammer every day, there is a fight to be had, the posse is ready to go.
00:20:07.860And yet we have three weeks between now and the election, it's almost as if the mentality right now in Washington is nobody else has to row, Trump's got this.
00:20:18.820Trump will carry us over the finish line, we don't have to have an agenda, we don't need to have a work ethic, we don't need to be passing bills.
00:20:25.420We can just count on Trump to carry us all over, and I think that is abandoning our post in a lot of ways.
00:20:48.900And by the way, Kim Jong-un just called and wants to know why Eli Crane is running up the margin so much that it's gaudy.
00:20:58.880Eli Crane got 80% of the vote in a primary where Kevin McCarthy had gone and recruited an opponent against him.
00:21:05.660I can't wait to hear from him in the upcoming segment.
00:21:07.960But I just have to lend my voice to the fact that, you know what, courage is popular.
00:21:11.820When people go take on the system and fight these deficiencies in our government, they will be rewarded by the voters just as Eli Crane was yesterday.
00:21:22.640Well, Matt, I do want to talk about that.
00:21:25.020I do want to give my congratulations to Eli and Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar and the great warriors and conservatives who just had a great victory in the night in Arizona, as you said, Carrie Lake.
00:21:40.440I'll just take one more minute just to highlight what you're talking about here with this absurdity with the Air Force and what that means for the state of our military is so critically important.
00:21:50.260And that's on the heels of countless dozens, hundreds of examples that we have in Congress.
00:21:54.780Most recently in the Fort – I'm going to call it Fort Bragg, again, speaking of woke – but the Fort Bragg briefing where they called pro-lifers terrorists and extremists.
00:22:04.340I was just pulling up the article to remind myself, specifically identifying National Right to Life and others as extremist organizations.
00:22:11.960They're doing it on purpose to not just go target those individuals but break the back of a military culture that served this country well for now almost 250 years.
00:22:42.380We didn't pass a continuing resolution into next year so that we can give the pen to Donald Trump instead of to the Democrats in December.
00:22:49.300We didn't attach to that continual resolution, the SAVE Act, which President Trump called for so we can ensure that only citizens vote, and then club Democrats for the next seven weeks.
00:23:05.900You've got a lot of people in this town who want to grab hold of Donald Trump's coattails and pray that they can ride him through November in order to get to some sort of victory so they can have power.
00:23:14.580But we have an obligation to go fight for the people and give people a reason to show up.
00:23:20.660And that's precisely what Eli Crane and our friends in Arizona did.
00:23:25.960I'll be delighted to come down to Florida to come help you and make sure you win.
00:23:28.920I expect you to win by 80 percent at least, Matt.
00:23:31.340And we'll make sure that we keep the posse.
00:23:34.420But can you talk about that a little bit further, about what we would have done and what you think we ought to do when we come back in September to lay the groundwork for fighting?
00:23:41.880Yeah, what you're watching right now is just rhythmic Washington.
00:23:45.360This is the rhythm that screws the American people and drives us into debt.
00:23:49.660Get to September, go on August recess without conducting the appropriations work.
00:23:55.560Do a short-term continuing resolution to December.
00:23:58.540Back everybody up against Christmas holidays and the end of the year.
00:24:03.060And then, lo and behold, you'll hear all the language of cleaning out the barn with another big, hairy, omnibus bill that has a bunch of earmarks in it for Democrat senators, that has a bunch of pork in it for people who are willing to just hold their nose and continue to avoid the programmatic review that you and I have been calling for to drive down spending.
00:24:24.400And you're right, that does empower Democrats.
00:24:26.860And if you don't think that these Biden administration officials are gonna take their last bite now that they know that Biden has rotted on the vine, they will absolutely do everything they can to empower the worst features of this government going after people who were at the Capitol on January 6th.
00:24:47.960The special counsels that have totally gone off the rails, that'll be funded.
00:24:51.680And the one you and I spent a lot of our time on, the border invasion.
00:24:55.580We were told in the last omnibus that it was a big win for the American people, that the NGOs that are funding the invasion got cut like 15%.
00:25:16.080We could have demanded in a legislative funding package this past week a requirement that your bill protecting the vote from illegal aliens be included in anything that goes forward.
00:25:29.400That would have empowered the supervisors of elections who actually want to do the right thing to be able to scrub out the illegal aliens voting, to check for citizenship status.
00:26:06.380What are your views and your feelings about the task force that has been created to go zero in on exposing and finding the truth with respect to the very clear assassination attempt that almost took the life of former President Trump, a Republican nominee?
00:26:24.400And, you know, how do you see that playing out?
00:26:56.460The reason Eli Crane and Corey Mills, two actual snipers in the United States Congress, aren't on this committee is because they don't vote for the spending bills.
00:27:05.140And so the signal here for the posse is they're trying to say that if you vote against the bad spending bills, even when you're the most qualified, we're gonna diminish your experience in the United States Congress.
00:44:16.240Well, again, it is Chip Roy from the 21st Congressional District of Texas.
00:44:23.560Proud to represent my fellow Texans there.
00:44:25.480Proud to be sitting in this chair in which Steve Bannon will be sitting sometime soon, Lord willing,
00:44:31.760after he is doing time in prison for you and me, for his country.
00:44:37.020He's never shied away from wanting to serve his country, whether he's in the military or now.
00:44:41.460And, you know, that's, I think, the critical thing we need to all be focused on here as we have been talking these two hours about the assault and the war on Western civilization.
00:44:51.800The amount of frustration that we just heard from my friend Eli Crane and Matt Gaetz, great warriors for freedom, that are frustrated that we left town.
00:45:00.200Frustrated that Congress took off for seven weeks while the American people, American families are still hurting, while our borders are still open, while we still have the possibility of non-citizens voting.
00:45:12.620When we haven't done our job to fund government at the levels that should be funded, cutting spending and lowering the size and scope of government.
00:45:20.480And we left town and we shouldn't have done that.
00:45:23.640And, you know, we're watching a, you know, embarrassment, but frankly, something worse than an embarrassment of our Republican form of government and the way our processes are supposed to work.
00:45:35.760Where the Democrat regime just ensconced Kamala Harris as their nominee.
00:45:40.700And they did so after years of a cover-up, literally years of a cover-up of the mental state of the president.
00:45:50.500This is something we've talked about regularly, whether it's in the context of the 25th Amendment.
00:45:54.880This is clearly someone who shouldn't have the nuclear codes.
00:45:57.340This is clearly someone who should not be commander-in-chief right now with the full ability to carry us out to war when I'm not sure you can spot cat if you, spell cat if you spot him the C and the T.
00:46:07.700And the fact is, Kamala Harris was put in place for political reasons only.
00:46:13.460Our Democratic colleagues, my Democratic colleagues, the radical progressive Democrat regime, they don't care that this country is endangered by having someone with the mental deficiencies that we currently see from the president of the United States.
00:46:36.580They were perfectly happy having Joe Biden there as long as he was the Manchurian president, as long as they could pull the puppet strings, as long as they could advance their radical progressive agenda to remake Western civilization, blow holes in our borders, allow criminals on our streets, weaken our country, endless wars abroad, undermine our energy, security, and freedom.
00:47:00.800Undermine our ability to live our life the way we want to advance a woke agenda, destroying our military, destroying our secret service, destroying our FBI, turning it against us.
00:47:11.120They were all happy to have a president they could use as a puppet to do that.
00:47:14.720But when it became clear that he couldn't get the job done to win in November, then and only then were they willing to ensconce Kamala Harris as their hope to try to shake things up.
00:47:26.100Then you end up with a vice president with people twerking on the stage and with random transgenders coming to the White House and advancing this radical agenda.
00:47:37.800And then they have the audacity to call J.D. Vance weird.
00:47:40.520When J.D. Vance is happily married, happily married and as a father, as someone who wants to stand up for hardworking people from Ohio, hardworking people across this country who are being left behind.
00:47:55.780So he's the weirdo in the eyes of this radical progressive left.
00:47:59.980The fact is we are at a new time for choosing, a new time for Americans to figure out what we're going to do.
00:48:06.860Whether we're going to stand up, as Steve often says, when he's sitting behind this microphone, whether we're going to show up to the fight.
00:48:13.720And 60 years ago, come October, President Reagan gave his famous time for choosing speech.
00:48:19.940Now, that was in the context of Barry Goldwater, another great patriot from Arizona, running against LBJ.
00:48:27.560But that speech wasn't about choosing Goldwater over LBJ per se.
00:48:33.160It was about the choice we had as Americans at the time.
00:48:57.200And then ultimately, not tax and spend, borrow and spend, print and spend.
00:49:01.360We increased the size and scope of the government.
00:49:03.700And we have been funding, with Republican support and help, we have been funding, with a uniparty swamp, we have been funding the very government that is at war with your way of life.