Sen. Eric Schmidt (R-Missouri) joins me to discuss his new book, The Last Line of Defense. He talks about how he fought for freedom in the early days of the Biden administration, and how he became the first black man elected to the United States Senate.
00:06:21.000Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
00:06:25.000Today we'll be joined by Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt, who's been on the front lines of all the biggest fights for freedom on Capitol Hill.
00:06:34.000And before that, he was the state attorney general of Missouri, where he was at the center of some of the biggest litigation in taking on the Biden administration madness.
00:06:44.000And he's telling those stories in his new book, The Last Line of Defense.
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00:09:23.000and the last line of defense until Trump could return.
00:09:27.000Can you walk us through what that felt like being in the trenches during sort of the dark days of the Biden administration?
00:09:32.000Yeah, I mean, I think part of the reason I wrote the book, and you can get it on Amazon right now, is that...
00:10:04.000deliberately open borders, DEI struggle sessions, and a censorship enterprise so vast that the Biden administration created, it's the biggest affront to the First Amendment we've ever seen in our country.
00:10:15.000And so it kind of fell to some relatively unknown folks.
00:10:18.000You'd throw me into that lot that had to stand up and fight back to kind of hold the line until the Calvary arrived a few years later.
00:10:25.000But man, it was, what I try to do with the book is to lay that out.
00:10:30.000So whether it was during COVID, we took on, We had the student loan debt forgiveness case, we took that to the Supreme Court and we won.
00:10:40.000And then we had the censorship case, of course, that before Elon Musk bought Twitter, before we had these congressional hearings, kind of laid out to the American people what they were doing to silence conservatives.
00:10:50.000And also we took the deposition, I know you'll find this interesting, of Elvis Chan, who was the FBI guy in Northern California pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story, you know, on the eve of the election in 2020, they were not like apologizing for any of this stuff.
00:11:05.000We just, they got caught red-handed, but the leviathan of government agencies engaged in censorship was crazy.
00:11:19.000And I think, again, you became, you know.
00:11:23.000If not the one of the MVPs of the United States Senate, certainly, you know, once JD left, you know, I know we joke that, you know, that's a very small pool of you know you know sort of america first rock stars in there but but nonetheless you are the cream of the crop there but as a g in missouri uh you had a big one well arguably probably the biggest for a lot of the people in this audience uh which was missouri versus biden the case that exposed really the censorship industrial complex that was meta and
00:11:53.000all of these guys basically working with the biden administration to censor what they didn't like not what was factually inaccurate just whatever they didn't like What was the moment when you realized the scale of, you know, government's collusion with big tech to suppress speech?
00:12:09.000You know, what did the victory there feel like, knowing that you were directly fighting for the heart of the America First movement?
00:12:16.000Yeah, and what I tried to lay out in the last line of defense was, um, that's a great question to ask because when I was AG, you saw the landscape.
00:12:26.000But in that case in particular, um, I remember Jin Psaki was at the podium.
00:12:32.000She would talk about how they were flagging, you know, posts for Facebook.
00:12:36.000They started to float this idea of a disinformation governance board.
00:12:39.000If you remember that, Mary Poppins, whoever that was.
00:12:44.000The censorships are talking about, hey, the government's going to decide what the truth is and what you can see and what you can see and what you can't see.
00:12:57.000And we made a strategic decision then.
00:12:59.000to seek discovery before we sought the injunction, which is kind of unusual.
00:13:03.000Normally with those cases, you try to get the government to immediately stop what they're doing, but we knew it was going to get a lot of scrutiny.
00:13:09.000People would call it a conspiracy theory, which they did.
00:13:19.000We got thousands and thousands of pages of emails, text messages of all these government agencies and the highest levels of government communicating with executive senior executives at Facebook.
00:15:16.000I mean, the law fair, you know, I'm obviously, I've been a big recipient of that.
00:15:21.000I mean, it feels like, hey, before the media was really good at sort of just or the left, they're sort of one and the same, but the left was really good.
00:15:28.000They controlled media, they controlled academia.
00:15:31.000Once they started losing their grasp on that because the pendulum just, they went so far with the insanity and they couldn't stop and they just couldn't help themselves, it was like, well, they just adapted.
00:15:57.000It was like, well, because yesterday I was getting 5,000 retweets a post.
00:16:00.000Today I'm getting 4, not 4,0000, 4, like single digits, 4.
00:16:06.000And I was like, nothing changed other than obviously someone was messing around with the algorithm.
00:16:11.000It took a while for other people to kind of catch on to that.
00:16:15.000I know the Missouri case versus the Biden administration, I guess it was you and Jeff Landry, who was the AG in Louisiana.
00:16:23.000Of all the Republican AGs, of all the Republican governors that could have done something, how come you guys were the only ones that actually bothered to step up?
00:16:31.000I mean, it seemed like there were plenty of other opportunities for other great states, perhaps even states that larger populations or could carry more weight.
00:16:38.000How come everyone else just sat back and let that happen?
00:16:41.000Well, there's a lot of people that, you know, there's a lot of different fronts in this fight and people took different roles.
00:16:46.000But I think Landry and I certainly were of the two most aggressive in pushing back.
00:16:50.000I think we intuitively understood what was at stake.
00:16:53.000This wasn't just a case here or there.
00:16:54.000This was, if you looked at the full landscape, this was an effort to remake America.
00:16:59.000And they believed and they used, you know, they used the misinformation and disinformation.
00:17:04.000They used January 6, all these building blocks they were using to sort of other half of America.
00:17:11.000And then they would sometimes say the things out loud.
00:17:13.000You know, you remember, you know, call people deplorable or call them trash.
00:17:17.000And then, of course, President Trump is in every tweet happened from like the entire Democrat leadership and the media.
00:17:22.000It was like the same three catchwords, whatever they were.
00:17:44.000You know, like I literally wanted to believe that, oh, well, if the FBI's saying it, you know, maybe some guy got into a room that I'm in and that, you know, therefore there's this at least notion that I'm somehow compromised.
00:17:55.000I'm like, I literally wanted to believe that these institutions were actually doing what's right by America as opposed to being totally weaponized, functioning as the marketing arm of the Democratic Party or whatever.
00:18:04.000I literally was like, there must have been something wrong.
00:18:07.000Like, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and like, they deserved none of that.
00:18:11.000I think we all know that now, but it took them literally trying to put me in jail for treason, you know, crime punishable by death to be like, wait a minute, maybe it's just all BS.
00:18:21.000Well, and I think also the original, the original sin.
00:18:25.000was President Trump running in the first place to them because they knew he represented something so different than what Permanent Washington is.
00:18:33.000And I see it now in the Senate and it's the things that I'm fighting against, but it's real.
00:18:38.000And so in 2016 they concocted this that we know now, like, by the way, you know why they were fighting so hard to make sure he never got back into office.
00:18:45.000Look at the disclosures that Tulsi Gavard is now making, right?
00:18:48.000The things that they never wanted the American people to see, which was George Soros, very much a part of this narrative from the get-go, the Steel dossier then, and then it becomes laundered through the intelligence agencies through Comey, Brennan.
00:19:00.000Clapper, they made it an official narrative and they tried to sideline, they couldn't believe that he won in 2016 then, then they tried to sideline his administration through this ridiculous narrative that was totally made up and they knew it wasn't true.
00:19:12.000And then, of course, you know, President Trump's out of power.
00:20:24.000And I think you need courage in the arena to fight back if you believe in this country.
00:20:29.000And I think your dad in particular has given.
00:20:32.000One of the biggest changes I think he's made to the Republican Party is he's given everybody the confidence to fight back because if you fight you could win because the American people are with us.
00:20:41.000Yeah, we've been playing an entirely different game than the Democrats for far too long.
00:20:45.000And the fact that now that we're playing the same game, they can't even handle it.
00:20:51.000I mean, you talk about the stuff that you were able to get both in, you know, the case versus the administration when you were AG at Missouri, but how much information I mean, I know you did the subpoenas and we're going to pretend they probably went along with that process.
00:21:05.000But when they did the Durham report, report investigating the Russia-Russia thing.
00:21:13.000None of the things that they found in the last two weeks are even remotely included, you know, two, three weeks, whatever it is.
00:21:21.000How can you go through, you know, the entire Mueller investigation and those things don't make it into it?
00:21:26.000Frankly, I'm actually shocked that some of those things even still exist.
00:21:29.000How much do you think it went beyond what we found recently that they were just smart enough to burn or hide or never perhaps put in paper?
00:21:37.000Well, I think that, you know, they were so confident that they were going to win again that they didn't, I guess they didn't burn this stuff, honestly.
00:21:43.000But I think it's the tip of the iceberg.
00:21:45.000I mean, just one example, the Missouri versus Biden case.
00:21:49.000a lot of stuff, but we found out later, actually, when Elon Musk bought Twitter, when they did the Twitter files, that they lied to us about the stuff, the executives that were actually involved, that's say Twitter at the time.
00:22:02.000One kind of interesting note just to show you how incestuous this was.
00:22:06.000There's a guy by the name James Baker, who's James Baker?
00:22:09.000James Baker was the general counsel of the FBI at the end of 2016, most certainly was aware of the Russia Gate nonsense.
00:22:15.000He then, when President Trump gets into office for the first time, he leaves, does a sten of a think tank, then he becomes the general counsel at Twitter, right?
00:22:26.000So when the Hunter Biden laptop thing's happening, he's the guy saying, yeah, we shouldn't talk about this or we should silence it.
00:22:40.000So, it's just one kind of story of how intertwined all this was in the kind of the administrative state, deep state, whatever you want to call it, and why it really takes a, you know, unrelenting desire for us in saving this country to upend it.
00:22:55.000One of the things I appreciate about President Trump is he kind of, he's put together a team of disruptors around him.
00:23:01.000And very, I think different than the first term, the time away in this nonconsecutive second term, he knows exactly.
00:23:09.000what he wants to do, who he wants to do it with.
00:23:12.000And I think we're seeing a lot of those, the fruits of that labor right now.
00:23:17.000But, but yeah, at the time, man, it was kind of lonely, but there was a lot of pride I take in pushing back and winning in some of the most consequential cases and issues of our time and providing enough time, I think, like I said, for the Calvary to arrive and President Trump to win again.
00:23:34.000Yeah, no, I mean, I think it was so important.
00:23:36.000Do you think anything ever happens to those guys?
00:23:37.000You know, I know, there's the highest level offenders and they all got pardoned by the Biden administration and stuff like that.
00:23:43.000Although it seems like there's a lot of things that I don't know that they could necessarily get pardoned for., but do you think some of those lower level offenders who are just as culpable and perhaps even more so because they were the minions actually doing the work knowingly, do you think there's any accountability to those guys ever?
00:23:58.000Or do they just get a job at CNN, MSNBC, or whatever it is, and they get to talk about ethics and democracy and outrage when they're the worst offenders ever.
00:24:10.000Yeah, they get to work at the Kennedy School and lecture on the clients for a lot of money.
00:24:15.000I actually think, and I have an op-ed out today, about the path to indictments for Comey, Clapper, and Brennan., I actually think so the legal issue is, you know, Obama ironically has presidential immunity because of the case that Jack Smith brought against your father.
00:24:35.000And my Solicitor General, this is kind of cool.
00:24:38.000My Solicitor General was a guy by the name of John Sauer.
00:24:40.000He was on the Trump legal team, then of course argued that case for the Supreme Court and is now the Solicitor General of the United States.
00:24:45.000So I think part of what we were able to establish in Missouri was this kind of ecosystem that's now helping out the country.
00:24:51.000But to answer your question, I think there is a path.
00:24:54.000So Obama may have immunity for the time he was in office.
00:24:58.000I don't know what he did after he was out of office.
00:25:17.000But the other thing too is, I think moving forward, we ought to do things like if an individual government bureaucrat's part of this censorship effort, they ought to be able to be sued by the person whose First Amendment's rights have been violated.
00:25:29.000You know, because I think that changes the incentive structure for sort of the lower level bureaucrat that's being told to do this.
00:25:35.000they might say, you know what, I actually, I don't want to be personally.
00:25:39.000I mean, if you knowingly did those things and he's like, if he's knowingly going out of his way to push a lie, using and manipulating an entire, you know, hundreds of millions of people on Twitter or whatever it may be, I mean, that's a pretty significant thing, especially when you talk about, you know, these are from the same people that talk about, you know, democracy dies in darkness.
00:26:36.000I think those four years were just an incredibly instructive, terrible time for the country where they were trying to, you know, you would lose your job.
00:26:43.000Like you were a guy working overtime trying to provide for your family.
00:26:46.000You were, you were going to lose your job because you decided not to get the COVID shot.
00:26:51.000The student loan debt forgiveness deal, Biden had no authority to go do that but if Missouri they they acknowledged that and they were like we're gonna do it anyway because we're gonna buy a couple votes for a few weeks we'll get overturned after the election so we'll get the credit for it now and it doesn't matter I mean that's right so it's a wild time you know you had social unrest all this crazy stuff and and that's why I wrote it just like there's a There's a lot of lessons learned there.
00:27:14.000There's a lot of good war stories, but more importantly, lessons learned for the future.
00:27:18.000Yeah, so the book also talks about using the courts to dismantle the administrative state.
00:27:22.000I mean, that's sort of a tactic that I'm sure the other side definitely did against us.
00:27:28.000You know, can you explain to the average person, you know, why an unelected bureaucrat writing a regulation is so much more dangerous than a law that's actually passed by Congress?
00:27:37.000Yeah, because there's no accountability, right?
00:27:40.000Our system of government's based on this idea that the people of Missouri can send me there, they can send me home, or they can send me back.
00:27:47.000Like if I vote on something, some regulation or whatever, or some law, they can hold me accountable.
00:27:52.000Nobody knows who the deputy undersecretary of the EPA is that just issued a guidance letter that destroyed a family farm.
00:27:59.000There's nobody accountable for any of that.
00:28:01.000So that's why I think we got to get back to this place where you have greater accountability.
00:28:05.000You get rid of the power that these unelected bureaucrats are doing.
00:28:08.000It's, by the way, Don, why they're losing their minds over this administration's posture of firing a bunch of bureaucrats we don't need getting rid of a lot of regulations.
00:28:19.000And I actually handled the resisions package in the Senate that we got done that clawed back, it defunded NPR, it defunded PBS.
00:28:26.000It's something we've been talking about for a long time.
00:28:29.000It also took away 8.1 billion dollars worth of money that these NGOs, you know, think of the Guatemalan sex changes, think of the DEI trainings in Burma.
00:28:42.000And so again, that's the power of what this presidency is.
00:28:45.000I think the band-aid President Trump got, I was honored to carry it.
00:28:47.000But I think that's all part of this effort to dismantle the administrative state because these people aren't accountable to anybody and they know it.
00:28:55.000And so they're willing to do things that an elected senator or representative wouldn't do because we know we are accountable.
00:29:00.000It's actually sort of funny because with our people, sort of the idea of term limits is actually very popular.
00:29:06.000And yet it's sort of the argument against term limits because those unelected guys, the chief of staff at a congressional office, By the time, you know, they become, you know, if someone's out, by the time they figure out the game, you're wondering, one of the few guys that sort of got into it and started fighting right away usually it takes years for people to either create the power or whatever it is that they can do that.
00:29:26.000But the argument, I had this conversation with Orrin Hatch, ironically, before he passed.
00:29:30.000And it was like, because I was such a believer and he goes, that happens.
00:29:34.000You got a big problem because all the people in that office are going to know where everything is.
00:29:37.000They're going to know how to do anything.
00:29:38.000And they're going to be able to subtly sort of manipulate everything around it.
00:29:42.000And we've seen the damage that it's done.
00:29:44.000So I know that's sort of an unpopular take, but it was sort of the one thing against term limits that I was like, that actually makes a lot of sense.
00:29:56.000One of the things that's been floated is sort of, you know, term limits for some of these bureaucrats, you know, because they do get entrenched.
00:30:03.000You know, I mean, kind of flip it on its head a little bit, too.
00:30:11.000and why, you know, one of the things President Trump's, I think, winning right now in court on is, of course, that the one person that's elected by the entire country, or JD Vance is too, but the two people, you know, elected, the president has the authority to make decisions on personnel and programming.
00:30:30.000He's got scored some pretty big wins on that, be able to fire some people on the NLRB.
00:30:34.000I think a lot of these things that USAID, those, you know, getting rid of those people is very important because just look at all the ridiculous, like people are crying outside of the office building, you know, like nobody ever did that for the factory that closeded in Missouri, the 1990s.
00:30:51.000And ironically, AI is going to actually displace the guy that was telling the pipe fitter to learn to code because the pipe fitter still will have a job.
00:33:08.000So the point is when you see this stuff, you got to fight back.
00:33:11.000And I would also say DEI and schools, we kind of turned the FOIA requests on their head.
00:33:16.000I saw at the highest levels of government this insanity, but then even also say a superintendent in Springfield, Missouri, you wouldn't think that this stuff would have gotten there but they get they go to Washington they go to these trainings they start putting the the gender um the uh the gender unicorn in front of teachers they start putting the oppression matrix in front of kids kids were doing privilege walks think about this this is not like just in St. Louis or Kansas City this was in rural you know ex urban kind of areas and so we expose that and
00:33:46.000I think what that did is it put some of those issues on the ballot and you saw some more conservative people elected to school boards but again this this era this kind of woke mind virus four years that gripped the country you needed people who were willing to fight back and and now it's in retrereat.
00:34:18.000But some of these, even the institutions that are acting good and they're not doing those things right now, I see them as putting their finger up.
00:34:39.000I mean, the fact that it ever happened in the first place is disgusting.
00:34:42.000But, like, there's no doubt in my mind that if you get a Democrat president and Democrats at a Democrat House, they would put this thing right back into place, destroy every farm in Middle America, destroy every manufacturing, send all our jobs abroad.
00:34:55.000You know, they'll do nothing about China polluting the world.
00:34:57.000But, you know, it would be a disaster.
00:35:00.000So how do we lock that into place to make it more permanent?
00:35:02.000Well, one example is I'm on the Armed Services Committee.
00:35:06.000We'll be voting on the, every year we do a National Defense Authorization Act.
00:35:10.000Basically, how do you spend, you know, the $900 billion effectively we spend to protect our country?
00:35:29.000But anyway, but we've got a provision in this year's NDAA.
00:35:33.000I mean, it's great that President Trump did it.
00:35:34.000To your point, Secretary Hexeth, they want to get rid of it, but we're actually going to enshrine it into law that you can't do this ridiculous DEI stuff.
00:35:41.000And it's like, it shouldn't do it anywhere.
00:36:57.000But I do think what's most interesting about that case is that when we filed it, it really exposed the sort of Trump derangement syndrome on the left.
00:37:08.000It's like President Trump issued a travel ban on people coming from China, which was a smart thing to do.
00:37:14.000He was called like the xenophobe and chief.
00:37:17.000it was just totally insane they would they you know where did the lab where did the virus come from well maybe it came from at the wuhan institute of virology like yeah and it was oh boy i got canceled for this uh you know because i was like Of course it came from the lab that studies the exact virus in question at the exact point of the outbreak.
00:38:10.000And then you have the, I think another thing that kind of made people understand what the COVID experiment was all about with some people, the left was whenever, you know, like people, like the George Floyd thing happens, Black Lives Matter starts rioting at night.
00:38:24.000Like they were everybody was being told by these local health officials, well, you shouldn't go outside, da da da da.
00:38:49.000Well, it's funny because we took, we took Fauci's deposition and, and we spent a lot of time actually asking him about the origins of COVID because he, like, what became very clear is that he spent a lot of time trying to discredit anyone, anyone who questioned his authority on these sorts of things.
00:39:06.000And he was adamant it didn't come from the Wuhan Lab.
00:39:43.000He hasn't been right about anything since 1980, including the age pandemic.
00:39:47.000Like, how does this guy still have a job or is that exactly the point about the government and just you know not exactly let's just say not our finest i can guarantee you this guy was never the best at anything other than perhaps being the best bureaucrat meaning anyone else who put up a conflicting view that was probably right he'd figure out how to snake him anyone who got in front of a tv camera in front of him that wasn't agreeing with him 100 he'd snake him that's what he was good at but as a doctor he seems like a total incompetent Well, and think about this.
00:40:24.000He did, he proposed something so unbelievable that Fauci tried to ruin his career, which was that natural immunity was still a thing.
00:40:30.000This great Barrington declaration that they made, these doctors said, you know what, natural immunity is still a thing even for COVID.
00:40:37.000And they tried to ruin his life over it.
00:40:39.000So it was just a, it's again a wild time that can never happen again.
00:40:43.000But if you're going to, if you say that, you got to be willing to take action, which is what the book's about.
00:40:48.000And I think what this whole movement about is, what, what, to me is so exciting.
00:40:51.000This is the party, you know, I grew up in a working class neighborhood.
00:40:55.000And I said to somebody I got, had the honor of speaking at the convention last year that, you know, it was a convention that had Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and like normal people.
00:41:03.000I'm like, this is what I've been waiting for my whole life, a Republican party that's like normal and speaks for the people.
00:41:09.000And I think to keep that coalition together that you guys have built and that allowed a popular vote win, we've got to be speak truth to power.
00:41:49.000The other side has definitely tried to utilize all those things against us, but this was a state that took on the federal government and did a great job stopping the insanity.
00:41:56.000Yeah, well, I think everybody when Biden, which was a very like just obvious play to get votes in the midterms in 2022, said it's like, you know, running for class president, you know, it's like somebody promises free subway for everybody and then they get enough votes to win or something.
00:42:18.000And that's a very important part that we kind of walk through in the book.
00:42:21.000Well, Missouri had this little known loan servicing agency called Mohila, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, which serviced loans.
00:42:29.000So we said, well, look, Mohila might be affected by this.
00:42:33.000So therefore, Missouri has standing to go sue you over it.
00:42:35.000And that's what the case came down to.
00:42:37.000If you listen to the oral arguments at Supreme Court, they knew he didn't have authority to do it, but could anybody actually have the standing to say, I was going to be injured by this?
00:42:45.000And we made that argument and we affected and we won.
00:42:47.000And we prevented literally a half a trillion dollars going out the door.
00:42:51.000And I just found it so offensive growing up where I grew up that somehow the truck driver or the waitress was going to be paying for the student loan debt of a college theater professor at Harvard who hadn't paid it off in 30 years.
00:43:03.000The people who call themselves the elites and all this stuff and look down their noses at everyone else who's a hardworking American.
00:43:08.000I was like, I don't know, if you're so freaking elite, shouldn't you be able to pay back your loans?
00:43:12.000Like, it doesn't seem like you're all that elite.
00:43:14.000It doesn't seem like you made the best decisions in life.
00:43:17.000But that was one, that was an example too, where there were a lot of people, and that was, you know, I was running for the Senate at the time.
00:43:22.000There were people saying, you know, like, I don't know, Eric, that might be, I don't know how the politics of that plays out or what that looks like.
00:43:29.000I just felt like it was the right thing to do.
00:43:30.000And at the end of the day, we were successful.
00:43:33.000And I think, you know, the country's better off for it.
00:43:35.000And for the people that, you know, in real America that work or, by the way, chose not to take out loans or work their way through college or doing something else or paid them back right right but the guys actually feel like the biggest shuck is the guy that actually did it took out the loans but actually paid it back and they're like wait a second i didn't have to pay that back i i sacrificed you know perhaps vacations and weekends and you know the cool toys i could have otherwise played with uh it it's insane but it seems like the biggest beneficiaries of the whole forgiveness were really those who
00:44:05.000chose to take on you know get their underwater you know basket weaving doctorate uh you know it's like they chose in you know in their 20s to take on something that had no chance of ever paying back those loans anyway because there's you know there's there's no market for some of these things.
00:44:20.000Gender studies, like, well, what are you going to do?
00:44:22.000Like, unless you're going to become a professor, like, how many gender studies professors can there be in the world relative to how many students are getting master's degrees in gender studies?
00:45:23.000The left seems to be really good at evolving.
00:45:27.000and coming up with the next fight to take us on.
00:45:29.000We're sort of always lagging back and catching up.
00:45:32.000But what do you see as that next big battle?
00:45:35.000And how can conservatives use lesson from the book to prepare for it?
00:45:38.000So one of the things that's so important about President Trump winning in 2016 and then having another term now is, I mean, if you remember in the waning days, and I know you do, you were like on the front lines in 2016, people knew that there was going to be for sure one, maybe two, likely maybe three Supreme Court justices on the line.
00:45:58.000And it, by the way, that's exactly what happened.
00:46:01.000President Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices the first term.
00:46:04.000I don't know that he'll get another one, but I also know that he appointed over 200 federal judges and he's well on his way.
00:46:10.000The first four actually from Missouri that worked in my Attorney General's office.
00:46:14.000So anyway, he's going to populate the bench with conservatives who view the law as it is, not how they want it to be.
00:46:31.000So if you think about the legal battles, and I know it's frustrating in the first, say, 60 days of Trump 47, there'd be some random district court win here that would block something here or there.
00:46:41.000Judge Bosberg, who's a, you know, who's somehow who was on vacation and not the emergency judge got some of these high-profile cases, right?
00:46:49.000But the truth is, as they've made their way up, by and large, President Trump and his legal team have been successful in winning at the Supreme Court.
00:46:57.000They got rid of the universal injunctions in that birthright citizenship case.
00:47:02.000The ability to fire and control programming has been largely upheld.
00:47:06.000And then I think most specifically on immigration, President Trump has been victorious on being able to get rid of the temporary protective status.
00:47:13.000I say this because We have to be, we established it.
00:47:20.000We just have to have the courage to implement it.
00:47:22.000And I think the people that he has around him, they're really smart.
00:47:26.000And we're winning a lot of these cases.
00:47:28.000But I also think it should give the book, should give hopefully some inspiration to people.
00:47:34.000Maybe they're a maybe they're an AG in another state or maybe they're just a citizen looking to get involved in their local school board.
00:47:40.000The punchline is that the left for a long time was successful because they intimidated Republicans or Republicans were just doing other things or didn't act a certain way.
00:47:50.000And now we know that if we can stand up and fight, we can win.
00:47:52.000So I think those court battles are playing themselves out on this term of President Trump.
00:47:56.000But largely, I think he's going to be successful.
00:47:58.000And this four year run here is going to help kind of pull back the administrative state and allow people to kind of pursue their dreams with less of this nonsense in their face.
00:48:26.000You say common sense conservative thought as a Republican and you'd get canceled.
00:48:29.000I think we've gotten through a lot of that, you know, from the just the social, you know, I think people are largely over it.
00:48:39.000They've seen the insanity and they're sick of it.
00:48:41.000But, you know, that message to the millions of Americans who feel like they're fighting for sanity and freedom every day, what do you think that is?
00:48:49.000Because again, it can be brutal, right?
00:48:52.000The social consequence of stepping out.
00:48:54.000You saw that, honestly, it's like, you know, the suburban housewife theory.
00:48:57.000You see half the stuff that becomes, you know, the suburban housewife theory in America, and you're like, I don't know, man.
00:49:03.000Like, I don't think any of them actually believe that.
00:49:05.000But like saying it in line at Starbucks with all the other ladies on the way to yoga, you know, I guess it wins them social credit scores that, you know, they can't get elsewhere in life.
00:49:16.000You know, well, I Yeah, I think the message, John, is, well, first of all, you're seeing this play out.
00:49:20.000What's another front that will end up in the courts, but needs to start somewhere first is take redistricting.
00:49:27.000Like for a long time, the Democrats have gotten all the juice out of this that they can.
00:49:31.000You look at the gerrymandered, like Illinois my neighbor to the east you know it's funny that people from Texas were talking about fleeing to Illinois to fight redistricting and it's the most gerrymandered state in the country I don't know is there a republic it's like yeah well they the list of entire states that don't have a single Republican seat and then you look at the map it's like here and Yep, they have five feet just to cover it.
00:49:55.000So when we fight, start fighting back, all of a sudden they're going to move and they're going to flee and it's the greatest threat to democracy.
00:50:00.000I'm like, there's like seven or eight states that don't have a single Republican seat in them.
00:50:03.000I don't know that there's any states that don't have a Democrat seat.
00:50:16.000California right now would have a lot, you know, a lot fewer seats right now if that were not the case.
00:50:21.000And so I think we just got to understand what we're up against, because if they ever have what we have right now, they will end the filibuster in the Senate, they'll pack the Supreme Court, they'll federalize elections, they'll add DC as a union, maybe into the union, maybe Puerto Rico for a permanent majority.
00:50:34.000So what we got to be willing to do is be tough, don't worry about what the Sunday shows are going to say, be willing, and I think JD Vance has always done a great job, our friend on this of just confronting the lies methodically.
00:50:45.000And if you do that, I will say that in this, I spent a lot of time with President Trump on the campaign trail in the fall, a lot of time with Vice President Vance on the campaign trail.
00:50:54.000What I saw was people who maybe voted Republican before, they then had a MAGA flag out, or they had a yard sign out.
00:51:23.000In addition to all the law fair, in addition to trying to bankrupt your family, he stood, he stared all that down and came out on the other side and won.
00:51:33.000And that should give everybody a lot of confidence that if you're willing to do it, not even to the degree of that, that we can save this country.
00:51:39.000And that's what I've tried to do in the jobs that I've had, AG and now Senate.
00:51:43.000And I think if we had more and more people doing that, this country would be an entirely different place.
00:52:08.000Yeah, we played a large role in the New York Pistol and Rifle case, which effectively said that New York, New York had this crazy law that said, you can have a concealed carry permit if you show us you have a heightened need, like you're under threat or that's crazy.
00:52:24.000The state shouldn't be determining whether or not you can protect yourself.
00:52:28.000That's the First Amendment, the Second Amendment.
00:52:30.000These are rights that we have that God gave us that that our constitution protects and government is supposed to protect.
00:52:36.000And so we won that at the Supreme Court.
00:52:45.000So these Black Lives Matter rioter folks go across a private street.
00:52:50.000They're out there protecting their home and a Soros prosecutor decided not to charge the rioters really that summer with crimes, but charge them.
00:52:59.000And I think again, it's just finding these fights wherever they are and willing to stand up.
00:53:04.000And if you do it, you can be successful.
00:53:06.000And I think, you know, as far as the case law is concerned on Second Amendment, we've never been in a better position.
00:53:11.000You know, you had the Heller decision, you know, 30 years ago.
00:53:16.000And then, of course, this recent decision really cementeements people's second amendment rights to defend themselves defend their homes um you know and uh and protect their families and so i think we're in a good spot there but we've got to be vigilant well i i agree a hundred percent i mean so as we wrap up congress gets back to work in early september uh what should we be keeping our eye on and what you know what are the top priorities uh for the end of the year i think we're going to move forward i'm working on some rule changes in the senate so we can process some of these appointments quicker um we've got
00:53:46.000to get president trump's team in place he's got his core team in but there's a lot of other people ambassadors key you know sort of undersecretaries things like that be working on that i think we'll have um you know we're going to end up with with a funding fight here at the end of the day.
00:53:59.000But I think the good news is one of the benefits that not a lot of people are talking about on the one big beautiful bill was, of course, we're fighting for working-class families, no tax on tips, no tax on overtimes, no tax on social security, all those things.
00:54:13.000But we've frontloaded money for the border.
00:54:14.000We've frontloaded billions for the wall, billions for new ICE agents.
00:54:18.000There's over 100,000 new applications for ICE agents in the last month, which is great.
00:54:22.000We've also funded money for more deportations.
00:54:25.000That debate, what the Democrats try to do is they try to hold military funding and border funding over our heads to get more social spending.
00:54:34.000border spending and military spending so that that can't be leveraged for them in this funding fight, which is a very smart strategic thing to do.
00:54:41.000So we'll have kind of those fights, but I also think we should continue to do more on resisions to kind of claw back some of the waste, fraud, and abuse.