Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - Kamala Fails Softball Interview, Adams Indicted, Live with Vivek Ramaswamy | TRIGGERED Ep.177

00:00:00.000 you you

00:02:29.000 you we have the great the one and only Vivek Ramaswamy tonight

00:02:56.000 He's back with us.

00:02:58.000 He has a new book out, Truth, the Future of America First.

00:03:03.000 And it's more than just a book, guys.

00:03:05.000 It's a toolkit on how to win in November, and more importantly, how to win beyond November.

00:03:14.000 And amid the left-wing madness that we see each and every day, we need a toolkit like that more than ever.

00:03:22.000 Like I always say, guys, I wake up wondering each and every day if I'm just the star of The Truman Show.

00:03:30.000 Kamala Harris can't even explain her own positions, but the media tells us she's incredibly brilliant. 0.96

00:03:38.000 She's incredibly articulate.

00:03:40.000 She can't even get through a softball interview, but we're supposed to believe that she's got all the answers, and her campaign is simply filled with joy.

00:03:49.000 I don't see a lot of joy on people's faces in grocery stores, or when they're trying to buy a home, or maybe get a mortgage.

00:03:59.000 I don't see any joy in Eastern Europe, where hundreds of thousands of young men are getting slaughtered in pointless wars, or in the Middle East. 0.63

00:04:10.000 Not a lot of joy going on in the world.

00:04:11.000 So I have a feeling that campaign is falling flat.

00:04:15.000 It's all nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and we're going to break it all down.

00:04:21.000 So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these episodes.

00:04:28.000 The rest of big tech, the mainstream media, they're stacked against us.

00:04:31.000 We have to work harder each and every day to make sure that we break through all of the noise and actually grow this movement.

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00:04:56.000 You know the deal.

00:04:57.000 We got to all be in this together.

00:04:59.000 For all of the top headlines that we'll spot here on the show, check out my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, MXM, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias, okay?

00:05:11.000 We're gonna get to those headlines in a second, but don't forget about our incredible and brave sponsors who have the guts to support programming like this, okay?

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00:07:14.000 Now, with that, let's get to some of the top headlines.

00:07:18.000 Before I do that, guys, laptop keeps timing out.

00:07:21.000 Uh, that way I can see your comments.

00:07:22.000 If you have questions for Vivek or otherwise, uh, we'll be able to get into some of those.

00:07:26.000 Uh, that's a big deal.

00:07:29.000 Like to hear from you guys.

00:07:30.000 Always gives me a different line of thought. 1.00

00:07:32.000 Uh, in case you weren't already aware, Kamala Harris is a liar. 1.00

00:07:36.000 For example, at the debate, she insisted that she had no interest in taking anyone guns. 0.92

00:07:42.000 Let's look.

00:07:43.000 ...my position on fracking, and then this business about taking everyone's guns away.

00:07:48.000 Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.

00:07:49.000 We're not taking anybody's guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this.

00:07:54.000 Well, for starters, I'm still buying, not buying, even a little bit, that she actually owns a gun.

00:07:59.000 Someone probably gave one to her and left it there so she could pretend she's a gun owner. 1.00

00:08:04.000 If she does, she should tell us all about it.

00:08:07.000 She should explain how these mechanisms work.

00:08:10.000 But when her claim that she doesn't want to take anyone's guns, there seems like there's something wrong with that.

00:08:16.000 That's a complete lie.

00:08:18.000 Kamala Harris supported a San Francisco ballot measure that banned San Francisco residents from possessing handguns.

00:08:25.000 Huh.

00:08:26.000 Sounds kind of like a ban.

00:08:28.000 Kamala Harris is such an anti-gun radical that she said she would walk into a locked home to examine how someone actually stores their guns. 0.97

00:08:38.000 Check this one out.

00:08:38.000 Responsible behaviors among everybody in the community and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn't mean that we're not going to walk into that home and check to see if you're being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs.

00:08:55.000 So now she's gonna walk into your home to check, to make sure. 0.86

00:08:58.000 Because, in her mind, that's the government's right.

00:09:02.000 What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?

00:09:04.000 If they don't like anything else you're doing, they can just walk into your home.

00:09:08.000 No cause, no effect.

00:09:10.000 That is Democrat America. 0.75

00:09:12.000 The good thing is that even the kids, because the children always know, folks, even the

00:09:17.000 kids know the truth about Kamala Harris.

00:09:21.000 Just watch what this recent CNN segment had to say about it.

00:09:26.000 What's the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris? 0.98

00:09:31.000 Liar. 0.99

00:09:32.000 I mean kid nails it! 1.00

00:09:36.000 Kid nails it.

00:09:38.000 Imagine that.

00:09:39.000 A young, elementary school-aged child has a better understanding of what exactly Kamala Harris is than most Democrat voters.

00:09:48.000 They get it.

00:09:49.000 They see it with their own eyes.

00:09:51.000 They're not buying into the narrative.

00:09:53.000 And it doesn't stop there, folks.

00:09:56.000 Here's another young girl saying exactly what she thinks about 2024.

00:10:00.000 It'd be good for us to have a black woman as president for the first time in history, but my vote's kind of still on Trump. 0.99

00:10:11.000 Smart kids!

00:10:13.000 They get it!

00:10:14.000 They probably hear their parents talking about the pain of feeding their families, of housing them.

00:10:19.000 They hear the stories around the world about never-ending wars.

00:10:23.000 Those kids are right.

00:10:24.000 By the way, imagine what the left would say if Fox News started trying to interview kids and put them on TV.

00:10:31.000 I think there's something probably a little disgusting about that.

00:10:33.000 But in this case, I'll take the results since they already put it on national TV.

00:10:36.000 Who am I not to talk about it?

00:10:39.000 Everything about Kamala Harris is a lie.

00:10:42.000 She tweeted this week that crime is down.

00:10:47.000 Really?

00:10:49.000 If crime is down, why is, like, deodorant locked up at my local CVS?

00:10:54.000 Why is it every big city, basic products?

00:10:57.000 Not luxury products.

00:10:58.000 Even the basic products are locked down in big cities.

00:11:02.000 Why are major stores like that shutting down across the country?

00:11:08.000 I'm wondering why that is.

00:11:09.000 It's almost like no one's reporting them.

00:11:12.000 Just because someone's no longer reporting crimes, or the FBI is no longer reporting on the statistics, or collecting them, or local agencies are too preoccupied to actually report, or they realize that they're just going to be manipulating statistics anyway, it's almost like the crimes aren't happening, even if they're happening.

00:11:30.000 And tomorrow, Kamala Harris is hitting the border and will claim to be really tough on illegal immigration. 1.00

00:11:37.000 She's gonna crack down now! 1.00

00:11:39.000 In fact...

00:11:41.000 She's going to a part of Arizona where the Trump wall was built. 0.79

00:11:45.000 That's the same wall she stopped construction of.

00:11:51.000 She's finally going to the border.

00:11:52.000 She was the Border Czar.

00:11:53.000 And I think everyone in my family has been to the border more than Kamala Harris because anyone can go somewhere more than zero times.

00:12:02.000 My father today addressed the damage caused by Kamala Harris' open border.

00:12:07.000 She's destroying American towns. 1.00

00:12:10.000 She's doing that every day. 1.00

00:12:13.000 Check this out.

00:12:15.000 In Aurora, Colorado, Springfield, Ohio, where it's been a mass invasion, these were two beautiful, successful towns, idyllic.

00:12:31.000 And they're in trouble, big trouble.

00:12:33.000 And very unfair that people want to leave, they want to get out.

00:12:37.000 But everyone's afraid to say, I want to get out, because they want to be politically correct.

00:12:42.000 And other towns just like them, hundreds of them all over America, Americans have watched their communities destroyed by this sudden, suffocating inundation of illegal aliens. 0.92

00:12:58.000 It's an inundation.

00:13:00.000 It's an invasion.

00:13:02.000 This influx has overwhelmed our schools.

00:13:07.000 They're taking the seats of students that can no longer go there, and they don't even speak English.

00:13:12.000 They're trying to fire a lot of people and hire interpreters. 0.52

00:13:18.000 Can you believe that?

00:13:19.000 They want to get rid of some people they want to hire.

00:13:21.000 Springfield is looking, the mayor said it the other day, looking for interpreters because Nobody in all of the 32,000 people that took into the town.

00:13:33.000 Think of this.

00:13:34.000 You have a town of 50,000 people, and almost instantly you have 32,000 people, in this case from Haiti.

00:13:44.000 Most of them don't speak English, so they're looking for interpreters.

00:13:48.000 You have to get them out.

00:13:50.000 We have to save our country.

00:13:51.000 You have to save these towns.

00:13:53.000 They flooded the job market with low-wage migrants, but many cases, migrants that also have horrible criminal records. 0.99

00:14:05.000 Murder, drug dealing, so many different things.

00:14:11.000 A lot of human traffickers.

00:14:13.000 And it's mostly human traffickers in women. 1.00

00:14:16.000 Last month, American-born workers lost 1.3 million jobs.

00:14:21.000 This is last month.

00:14:22.000 You know, when they were in office, even the beginning of Kamala Harris's career is a lie.

00:14:29.000 She got her start in politics from her then-boyfriend, Willie Brown.

00:14:33.000 Willie Brown appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission.

00:14:37.000 She made over $280,000 from that job and defended it by talking about how hard she worked.

00:14:47.000 I'm sure.

00:14:48.000 Sounds like she worked hard, but, you know, I'll let other people get into the details of that one.

00:14:53.000 But it turns out, like everything else, that's yet another lie.

00:14:57.000 Records show that Kamala Harris missed nearly a quarter of the commission's meeting. 0.98

00:15:04.000 All she had to do was show up to the job.

00:15:06.000 Show up to two meetings every month to make almost $300,000 a year.

00:15:09.000 And she couldn't even manage to do that.

00:15:16.000 Now she's claiming to care about crypto.

00:15:19.000 Semaphore is reporting that Harris escalated her courtship of crypto.

00:15:26.000 Thinking of McDonald's here for a second.

00:15:28.000 I'd pay a lot of money.

00:15:30.000 Like, I would honestly, I would pay a lot of money to hear Kamala Harris explain crypto blockchain technology without a teleprompter.

00:15:40.000 Do you remember what it was like When she was trying to explain cloud technology in the cloud, check this one out to refresh your memory.

00:15:49.000 Now, no longer are you necessarily keeping those private files in some file cabinet that's locked in the basement of the house.

00:15:58.000 It's on your laptop, and it's then therefore up here in this cloud that exists above us, right?

00:16:07.000 It's no longer in a physical place.

00:16:10.000 I'm going to ask the live chat.

00:16:11.000 What do you guys think?

00:16:14.000 $10,000 a minute?

00:16:16.000 $25,000 a minute?

00:16:17.000 No prompter to have Kamala Harris explain. 0.67

00:16:22.000 The longer you go, the better it could be.

00:16:25.000 I'd pay good money to watch her debate my 15-year-old son on the details of crypto and blockchain.

00:16:33.000 There's zero chance.

00:16:35.000 She knows anything about it whatsoever.

00:16:37.000 She just understands, well, Trump went there, so I gotta try to go there too.

00:16:41.000 All she has are word salads and platitudes.

00:16:45.000 Yesterday, she said in a speech that we need inspiration to become inspired.

00:16:54.000 Check this out.

00:16:56.000 And let that then inspire us by helping us to be inspired.

00:17:04.000 It never ends!

00:17:05.000 Like, what?

00:17:06.000 We need to be inspired.

00:17:08.000 To be inspired for the inspiration to inspire more inspiration, inspire all of us. 1.00

00:17:16.000 I mean, this person is an imbecile, folks. 1.00

00:17:19.000 Like, what are we doing here? 1.00

00:17:21.000 How is it that she can be the Democrat nominee without a single vote? 0.91

00:17:26.000 It's just supplanted there.

00:17:27.000 I just wonder.

00:17:28.000 This will be a good question for Vivek.

00:17:30.000 And meanwhile, New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on what feds say is foreign corruption.

00:17:37.000 Authorities say that Adams received over $10 million in public matching funds for campaign contributions by using so-called straw donors.

00:17:47.000 Where else do we think we see a lot of that?

00:17:49.000 Like, ActBlue?

00:17:51.000 The entire DNC?

00:17:54.000 To hide the fact that he was accepting foreign campaign contributions going all the way back to 2014.

00:17:59.000 But Adam says he's not going anywhere, and that he's been targeted for clashing with the Harris-Biden border chaos.

00:18:07.000 We'll see what happens next.

00:18:09.000 But the pressure is certainly building on Adams to resign.

00:18:13.000 It is interesting that you can be sort of Democrat royalty.

00:18:16.000 You can do everything you want.

00:18:17.000 It's never an issue, like sort of Hunter Biden, until you cross Democrat Party policy.

00:18:24.000 Eric Adams' mistake?

00:18:26.000 He talked about the tens of thousands of migrants stuck in high-end New York City hotels, costing city taxpayers billions on an annual basis, watching crime skyrocket as officers are beaten in the street, etc., etc., etc.

00:18:45.000 You can do whatever you want as a Democrat.

00:18:47.000 See Hunter Biden.

00:18:48.000 You just can't go against the regime.

00:18:51.000 When you do, indictment.

00:18:53.000 Now on Tuesday, Tim Walz will debate J.D.

00:18:58.000 Vance.

00:18:59.000 I can't wait to see that.

00:19:00.000 I'm going to be there myself.

00:19:02.000 I'm going to do the spin room afterwards.

00:19:04.000 There's a lot of things that Tim Walz needs to address.

00:19:07.000 Like why he took more than 30 trips to China.

00:19:12.000 Like why he's maybe a stooge of the communist regime there.

00:19:16.000 Why he lied about his military service.

00:19:19.000 And why he did nothing as Minneapolis burned.

00:19:23.000 You know, don't forget guys, he did do something.

00:19:25.000 I did.

00:19:25.000 He managed to get tampon dispensers installed in boys bathrooms in schools.

00:19:32.000 I just don't think that really does that much for anyone.

00:19:35.000 And it doesn't stop there.

00:19:37.000 I want you to remember the name Brian Lisinski.

00:19:41.000 You might know who this is.

00:19:43.000 And you might not, but you should.

00:19:46.000 Tim Walz hired him as a top educational official to shape Minneapolis's school curriculum.

00:19:53.000 Brian wants to destroy the United States.

00:19:56.000 I'm serious.

00:19:57.000 Listen for yourself.

00:20:00.000 We're also sometimes lying on ourselves when people say like, oh, we can, we use critical race theory in school.

00:20:09.000 We don't use critical race theory in school.

00:20:11.000 The first tenant of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist.

00:20:21.000 So if the nation state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with.

00:20:28.000 It must be overthrown, right?

00:20:30.000 And so we can't be like, oh, no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and diverse.

00:20:35.000 It's not about that.

00:20:36.000 It's about overthrow.

00:20:37.000 It's insurgent.

00:20:39.000 And we need to be, I think, more honest with that.

00:20:42.000 And it's funny that they, you know, they don't understand critical race theory, but they actually tell some truth when they're like, yeah, it is anti-state.

00:20:52.000 You can't be a critical race theorist and be pro-US.

00:20:57.000 It is an anti-state theory that says the United States needs to be deconstructed, period.

00:21:06.000 So I think it's an interesting argument there, and that's why I'm a critical race theorist.

00:21:12.000 But...

00:21:13.000 Well, that guy's definitely not a theorist on much else.

00:21:18.000 theorist on much else.

00:21:19.000 But guys, that's what we're up against.

00:21:22.000 That's who Tim Walz wants educating our children.

00:21:27.000 You don't think that's going to become a predominant theory of that administration if they win?

00:21:35.000 And remember, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are pretending to be centrists.

00:21:42.000 They're pretending to be reasonable.

00:21:44.000 The party of defunding the police and radical school indoctrination, the leaders of those camps, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, want you to think that they're moderate.

00:21:56.000 They're not moderate.

00:21:58.000 Speaking of which, have you seen the latest Trump ad about Kamala's radicalism?

00:22:04.000 It's actually perfect.

00:22:05.000 Kamala is, guys, for they them.

00:22:10.000 President Trump is for you.

00:22:13.000 Taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners. 0.53

00:22:15.000 Surgery.

00:22:17.000 For prisoners.

00:22:18.000 For prisoners.

00:22:19.000 Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access. 0.55

00:22:25.000 It's hard to believe, but it's true. 0.93

00:22:27.000 Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.

00:22:33.000 Every transgender inmate would have access. 0.98

00:22:36.000 Kamala's for they-them. 0.97

00:22:38.000 President Trump is for you.

00:22:39.000 I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message.

00:22:42.000 I mean, every transgender inmate.

00:22:46.000 You have the privilege of paying tens of thousands of dollars per person to make sure they can go through their gender voyage.

00:22:54.000 On your dollar.

00:22:56.000 We're not going to educate our kids.

00:22:58.000 We're not going to take care of our veterans.

00:23:00.000 We're not going to fix roads.

00:23:01.000 No, no, no. 0.94

00:23:02.000 If Kamala Harris is elected, they're going to make sure illegal immigrants and criminals can have all the sex change operations they want. 1.00

00:23:11.000 That's insane. 0.87

00:23:13.000 Media's never going to tell you that.

00:23:15.000 But they've done it.

00:23:17.000 They're pretending she's never made a decision in politics in her life, but she has for years.

00:23:22.000 There's a long record of it, that they're totally discounting.

00:23:25.000 Everything she's thought for decades has changed 100%.

00:23:27.000 And by the way, Kamala also claims she wants to try to unite the country. 0.99

00:23:34.000 So I'll ask you here all tonight, are you feeling the unity yet?

00:23:39.000 I'm feeling about as much unity as I'm feeling joy coming from these policies.

00:23:45.000 Guys, with that, Vivek Ramaswamy is coming up in a few minutes.

00:23:50.000 He's got a great new book, Truce.

00:23:52.000 But first, we have a brand new sponsor that totally aligns with the themes we talk about on the show.

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00:25:52.000 And guys, with that, joining me now, author of the new book, Truce, the Future of America First,

00:26:01.000 Vivek Ramaswamy. What's happening, man? How are you doing?

00:26:05.000 How you doing, man?

00:26:06.000 Good to see ya.

00:26:08.000 I'm keeping busy, bud. 0.98

00:26:09.000 I'm like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest right now. 0.68

00:26:12.000 But I see you out there, and we're both in that same boat. 0.91

00:26:16.000 Yeah, we know a little bit about the feeling of that.

00:26:18.000 I was in Wisconsin.

00:26:19.000 I was in Waukesha yesterday.

00:26:20.000 I was at the University of Pittsburgh last week.

00:26:23.000 Obviously pretty critical.

00:26:25.000 Swing states, I don't need to tell you that.

00:26:27.000 Both in the blue wall.

00:26:28.000 We probably need one of those states to take this. 0.98

00:26:31.000 And then I visited Springfield last week.

00:26:33.000 So I've been, you know, I've been on the move as you have been.

00:26:35.000 And it's interesting to get a pulse of how things are going.

00:26:37.000 No, it's important.

00:26:38.000 Listen, I saw some of the videos you were doing.

00:26:39.000 I saw you were with Charlie Kirk on some of these college campuses.

00:26:42.000 You were talking there, and it was interesting.

00:26:44.000 You know, you had, and he's done this for a long time, you're very good at it yourself.

00:26:48.000 I used to do it with him all the time, even back in 15 and 16 before, you know, when it was still almost verboten for a Republican to go on a college campus.

00:26:55.000 But it's sort of interesting.

00:26:57.000 I saw a lot of people kind of come at you initially with hate, but the second they actually had a moment to be sort of retrospective, to think about some of the basic You know, premises that they took as though it was like the gospel, and they were like, wait, what?

00:27:12.000 I didn't know that.

00:27:14.000 I think you had a lot of converts.

00:27:16.000 Explain it.

00:27:17.000 What did you think?

00:27:18.000 I think we had a lot of converts, too.

00:27:19.000 I was actually pretty encouraged.

00:27:20.000 So we went to the University of Pittsburgh, which is supposedly a more left-leaning campus.

00:27:23.000 It's in a city that's historically been the vibe.

00:27:26.000 First of all, I mean, of course, there's a selection bias of who comes out to an event.

00:27:29.000 But we're talking about, like, massive numbers.

00:27:31.000 I was blown away.

00:27:32.000 It's not like, OK, there's a few hundred people.

00:27:34.000 These are like hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of people.

00:27:37.000 For many of whom are just straight-up pro-Republican, pro-Trump, who are unafraid to say it on the campus.

00:27:42.000 I thought that was an interesting sign.

00:27:44.000 Much better, though, in the dynamic was, OK, yeah, we can get a bunch of, you know, fawning praise from people coming to the mic and say, we love you so much and can you sign my hat.

00:27:52.000 OK, that's only going to get us so far.

00:27:53.000 They're going to come vote for us anyway.

00:27:55.000 What we said is, come to the front of the line.

00:27:56.000 Like, clear the way.

00:27:57.000 We got enough of those.

00:27:58.000 Clear the way for somebody who actually wants to actually disagree with us.

00:28:02.000 And I will tell you, I've had different types of disagreements over the course of, obviously, the presidential campaign over the last two years.

00:28:09.000 We got mostly, I would say, 90% of those who came up were thoughtful, open-minded.

00:28:15.000 Some of them openly anti-Trump, but they would end the question with, but make the case to me, which I think is actually pretty interesting.

00:28:22.000 Which reflects a different kind of openness.

00:28:23.000 That would have never happened eight years ago.

00:28:25.000 I mean... Oh, it's totally different.

00:28:27.000 I got pulled off a stage almost once.

00:28:29.000 They were like, listen, I guess it was...

00:28:32.000 Where were we?

00:28:33.000 We were one of the, I think up in Michigan, like Michigan State Police.

00:28:35.000 It was me, Charlie, Tommy Hicks at the time.

00:28:38.000 It was like 50, we were like, hey, of course the university, you know, limits the size of the room, even though we had sort of overflow tickets, but then they have to make sure that equal side of the leg.

00:28:47.000 And they're like, we can't protect you.

00:28:49.000 There's, we have two cops here. 0.98

00:28:50.000 Like, you're going to get killed. 1.00

00:28:51.000 I was like, I'd rather get my ass kicked than walk away at this point. 1.00

00:28:54.000 But there was no reasoning. 0.99

00:28:56.000 They didn't want to hear anything.

00:28:57.000 They were just there to disrupt.

00:28:58.000 So I love that I'm hearing the people like, OK, fine.

00:29:01.000 I guess they get it.

00:29:02.000 They see it with their own eyes, too, what's going on.

00:29:03.000 Yeah, I think they're pretty open-minded.

00:29:04.000 Maybe it's not as good as they've been told.

00:29:06.000 There was actually one guy who came to the front.

00:29:08.000 So he was just like an obstructionist from the back.

00:29:10.000 And you could hear him screaming.

00:29:11.000 And he's got some signs.

00:29:12.000 So I'm wondering what the sign is.

00:29:14.000 It actually ended up being pretty interesting.

00:29:15.000 So he is far left.

00:29:17.000 He started a movement in his dorm.

00:29:19.000 And he's like a big crusader.

00:29:20.000 But the movement is right in Joe Biden.

00:29:23.000 So it was really interesting.

00:29:25.000 So we gave him the mic.

00:29:26.000 At first, Charlie and I were like, all right, we're going to get him up on stage.

00:29:28.000 Afterwards, I kind of leaned over to Charlie.

00:29:29.000 I was like, let's let this guy talk a little bit, OK?

00:29:31.000 Let's let this guy be heard.

00:29:32.000 So he wants people to write in Joe Biden and Pennsylvania in the ballot.

00:29:36.000 So there was interesting views across the spectrum.

00:29:39.000 But one of the things I would say is, so look, I was in the campaign.

00:29:43.000 I got an interaction with Don Lemon early on in my campaign.

00:29:46.000 He ended up getting fired after he erupted in ways that weren't productive for him.

00:29:50.000 But there are times where you're facing off with the left, especially with people in the media,

00:29:55.000 especially people who have actually bad intentions, the puppet master of the Democratic Party,

00:29:59.000 where you got to go hard. You got to go with gloves off, full on throttle, brass knuckles.

00:30:07.000 I think when you go to a college campus, and I think one of the things that I realized is we don't want to do that to a bunch of 18, 19, 20, 21 year olds.

00:30:14.000 It's different, right?

00:30:15.000 I think these people are actually persuadable.

00:30:16.000 Most of them are there in good faith.

00:30:18.000 And so my goal there was to, you know, it's one of my learnings actually was there for a few hours.

00:30:23.000 And we're going to do this again in a couple of the swing states is you got to give people

00:30:27.000 the space to be able to make the final leap on their own.

00:30:31.000 Because if you dump them all the way and you go all the way to just prove them, make a

00:30:35.000 fool of them on the spot, what's the point of you or I doing that to a 22 year old college

00:30:39.000 student?

00:30:40.000 But if you just ask a couple of questions and rather than me speaking by the end of

00:30:43.000 it, what I try to do is just ask them questions.

00:30:46.000 I think you give them the space to say, if we put them in a box, then they have to defend

00:30:51.000 themselves in that box.

00:30:52.000 But if we allow them the space to come out a little bit, see the sunlight, I think we

00:30:55.000 actually did wind up, end up winning some converts.

00:30:58.000 And so that's been one of my learnings in the last year, is you have some cynical, bad actors on the left, you gotta fight, you gotta fight hard without apology.

00:31:06.000 You've also got the next generation, many of whom are not really against us, even though they think they might be.

00:31:11.000 We just gotta give them the space to discover Maybe a different point of view that's different than what's been stuffed down their throats.

00:31:17.000 Yeah, because I mean, I look at all these young leftists.

00:31:19.000 I'm like, they're like, they think they're the rebels.

00:31:21.000 I'm like, listen, if you're siding with corporate media, if you're siding with like every mainstream left-wing politician, if you're siding with, uh, you know, woke corporate and Hollywood, like.

00:31:32.000 You're not the rebel you think you are.

00:31:35.000 If you're a conservative on a college campus, you actually have some guts.

00:31:38.000 That's not easy.

00:31:39.000 There's a consequence to that.

00:31:42.000 On the other side, you're regurgitating what the entire machine wants you to say?

00:31:45.000 I got news for you.

00:31:47.000 Also, in terms of your money's worth, college is pretty expensive right now.

00:31:51.000 You want to get more money out of your money's worth?

00:31:53.000 You actually learn more in college when you're challenged.

00:31:55.000 So if you're a conservative on a college campus or even a libertarian or even somebody who's an independent, but just maybe wants to question whether or not it's going to be existential threat to humanity if global surface temperatures go up by one degree Celsius, which by the way, there's no fact to suggest that that's going to be a threat to humanity.

00:32:11.000 Try questioning that on a college campus.

00:32:12.000 You're going to get some reactions, but they're going to force you to be on your toes and you're going to get a better education as a result too.

00:32:18.000 So with college being as expensive as it is, it's also almost a pitch to just get your money's worth out of an experience that otherwise is pretty wasteful.

00:32:25.000 100%.

00:32:25.000 I mean, I published Charlie Kirk's, you know, book, The College Scam, talking about sort of the ever-decreasing value proposition of that college education.

00:32:32.000 And so, you know, I know all about that.

00:32:34.000 You're right.

00:32:35.000 And as it relates to global warming, like, I'm actually currently much more worried about the global warming where the temperatures go from basically average temperatures as they've been for the last few hundred years to like 5,000 degrees Celsius because of nuclear war.

00:32:48.000 which we seem to be approaching much closer each and every day

00:32:52.000 as we torment Russia, as we now want to send long-range missiles 0.93

00:32:55.000 into Russia that are American-made, probably operated by Americans in Ukraine,

00:32:59.000 because I'm sure that Ukrainians couldn't figure out how to do it. 0.99

00:33:01.000 So as I watch that escalation, that's the real global warming that I'm worried about.

00:33:07.000 That's the one that there's no coming back from.

00:33:09.000 I would say that there are, I could probably list for you, a number of potentially existential threats to humanity

00:33:15.000 that rank way higher than climate change, probably hundreds.

00:33:18.000 But two that I'd put high on the list is major risk of World War III and also depopulation in the West and in the United States of America.

00:33:25.000 The decline in the fertility rate, the increase in global conflict rates from foreign interventionism, both of those are far greater threats to the future existence of humanity and to the United States than climate change is or ever will be.

00:33:38.000 But why aren't we actually talking about it?

00:33:40.000 It's actually, these agendas actually end up going together, actually.

00:33:43.000 It's no accident that people who are pushing the global climate agenda are also calling for greater depopulation in the name of saving climate, because it actually has nothing to do with human prosperity in the end.

00:33:52.000 That's too long of a discussion for us to have now.

00:33:54.000 That's why I write the book, and there's a whole chapter dedicated to the climate change debates.

00:33:59.000 But back to the broader point is you've got young people in particular, Don, and you know this, who are hungering for purpose, hungry to be part of something bigger.

00:34:07.000 And my advice to them is, I don't, you know, if you go to campus and say, vote Trump, I don't think, you know, some people will be convinced by that, and I'll put it that way.

00:34:14.000 But what I've said is, so I said this in Wisconsin last night, I said it in Pennsylvania last week, is just figure out who is going to make you more proud of being a citizen of this country.

00:34:25.000 Who is going to leave you more proud of your American identity?

00:34:28.000 Who's going to leave you feeling stronger as an American?

00:34:30.000 Figure out who that person is for you and vote for that person.

00:34:33.000 I have no doubt that if people are honestly going through that reflection, especially if they're undecided, who's actually going to make you feel stronger and more proud and more grounded as an American?

00:34:42.000 That's going to be Donald Trump.

00:34:43.000 But I'd rather actually let those final few undecides, they're not going to come to our side because we're, you know, screaming them to agree with us. 0.79

00:34:50.000 But I think they will, if they think about who's going to make you more proud to be a citizen of this nation, there's one answer to that.

00:34:54.000 And so that's been effective, I would say, on the ground.

00:34:57.000 Yeah.

00:34:57.000 And I say, you know, who do you think is actually going to do a better job for all of the things that matter to you?

00:35:02.000 For the young kids on a college campus, like you're going to graduate, you want to be able to get a job, who's going to do a better job with the economy?

00:35:07.000 That's not even close, because we've had actually four years under the Harris-Biden regime.

00:35:12.000 Joe Biden the other day just said, no, no, no, Kamala Harris was a part of every decision we made, and she owns every decision we made.

00:35:18.000 Almost confident he's throwing her under the bus because of the coup that she pulled off on him.

00:35:22.000 But, you know, are you going to be safer?

00:35:23.000 Are you going to get sent to the front lines of World War III?

00:35:26.000 Who's going to make peace? 1.00

00:35:27.000 The people who were so weak that they effectively brought on war and or so stupid that they gave Russia every excuse they needed to invade? 0.99

00:35:35.000 I mean, don't forget, three days before Russia invaded, Kamala Harris was the one they sent over there to try to calm things down and talk it down. 0.99

00:35:43.000 I don't know.

00:35:43.000 I don't want to send my kids to the front lines of a war that no one's articulated to me what victory looks like.

00:35:47.000 That doesn't make sense.

00:35:48.000 That's not patriotic war. 1.00

00:35:50.000 That's just stupidity to enrich the military-industrial complex. 0.99

00:35:53.000 So, yeah, there's a lot there that should be obvious. 1.00

00:35:57.000 But you're right.

00:35:57.000 I think you ought to do it from a different perspective than perhaps the way we've been doing it for the last few years.

00:36:02.000 Yeah, and one point on the war piece of this, people are really focusing on the Russia-Ukraine war correctly because it's bled about $200 billion of our taxpayer resources.

00:36:09.000 The only worse use of U.S.

00:36:11.000 military jets flying around Ukraine is U.S.

00:36:14.000 military jets carrying around the Ukraine's president around the United States of America to campaign for the opposition.

00:36:20.000 But actually, the Springfield event we did last week, which was awesome, by the way, and it was so cool to go to Springfield.

00:36:25.000 I just posted on X. There was no plan.

00:36:28.000 I don't have a campaign apparatus or anything.

00:36:30.000 So I showed up in Springfield.

00:36:32.000 We put up an Eventbrite.

00:36:34.000 2,000 people RSVP.

00:36:35.000 We can't even fit 75% of them into a room packed full of close to 400 people.

00:36:40.000 A 19-year-old kid comes up, and this is actually to bring it full circle on the age or generational thing.

00:36:45.000 He says, all right, I'm voting for Donald Trump, but I can't convince my mom.

00:36:49.000 What can you tell me so I can convince my mom to actually come around?

00:36:52.000 Because she voted for Obama twice, and then Hillary, and then Biden, and I would like to get her this time.

00:36:58.000 He's 19.

00:36:58.000 I said, all right, so is she helping you pay for your college education?

00:37:01.000 Yes.

00:37:03.000 Tell her I'm going to make more money when I graduate if Donald Trump is the president and now he's a sophomore in college than if Kamala Harris is.

00:37:10.000 I think that'll actually convince her, which is actually one way to do it at the bottom line.

00:37:13.000 Unless you want me living in your basement for the rest of eternity.

00:37:16.000 Now, there's some moms that may want that, so you've got to figure out where they strategically lie, but 100%. 1.00

00:37:22.000 We touched on war a little bit, Vivek.

00:37:24.000 My father's apparently meeting with Zelensky at Trump Tower tomorrow.

00:37:28.000 How do you think that conversation should go?

00:37:30.000 I mean, after sort of campaigning against him and realizing maybe he spent enough time with Kamala Harris to see the writing on the wall, now he's coming to meet with my father.

00:37:38.000 But what do you think should be said there?

00:37:41.000 How does it relate to any of the themes perhaps in your book?

00:37:44.000 Obviously, you're going to be very anti-war and, you know, we got to get involved in things that actually perhaps benefit America.

00:37:48.000 I think, you know, America first, that should be a fundamental tenet of that.

00:37:53.000 What do you think happens there tomorrow?

00:37:55.000 Yeah, well, I mean, I could talk about the principles behind this in the book, but very pragmatic tomorrow.

00:38:00.000 Well, I'll say the first thing is, it'll be very technical about this because you know what type of environment we live in with lawfare in the United States.

00:38:07.000 I would give advice for what that meeting looks like on January 20th, okay, after inauguration day or January 21st.

00:38:16.000 He's not going to be conducting diplomacy as a citizen.

00:38:19.000 He's going to be engaging in a conversation.

00:38:21.000 But when he's back in office, what does that first conversation look like?

00:38:26.000 I would tell you it's actually got to be deeply pragmatic.

00:38:29.000 One of the things I like about your dad is he's able to have a conversation with even people who have Disagreed with him, criticized him in the past.

00:38:36.000 He's able to put that to one side and do what's pragmatic for the future.

00:38:39.000 And I think that he's going to be able to find, and your father's good at this, I think good business leaders generally are, at finding everybody's incentives, all right?

00:38:47.000 How is everybody at the table going to be taken care of?

00:38:50.000 Right now, Ukraine actually is in a more vulnerable position than it would be if they did a deal that was backstopped by U.S.

00:38:57.000 self-interest.

00:38:58.000 So the deal I think we need is, all right, be really honest.

00:39:01.000 Here's what we care about as the United States.

00:39:03.000 We don't want Russia and China to be in an alliance anymore.

00:39:05.000 We think that's hurting us.

00:39:06.000 We think the Russia-China alliance poses a threat to us because that actually makes China stronger vis-a-vis the United States. 0.50

00:39:11.000 So we need to do a deal for American interests, this matters to us, that pulls Russia out of its alliance with China.

00:39:17.000 And I also don't like the fact that we got Russian military in our own backyard. 0.98

00:39:20.000 People don't know this.

00:39:21.000 Not many people do.

00:39:22.000 Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua.

00:39:24.000 Russia has a military presence in all those areas.

00:39:26.000 So I would use, from an American perspective, and your father's very candid, and I think his candor works in his favor, to say, candidly, this is what we want for the United States of America.

00:39:34.000 We don't want Russia in our backyard. 1.00

00:39:36.000 And we also don't particularly want to have them in an alliance with China.

00:39:40.000 And it's no skin off your back, Ukraine, if we even reopen some economic relations with Russia, okay?

00:39:45.000 We can have that reasonable discussion.

00:39:46.000 And if Russia's better off economically, because we're open to trading with them, That doesn't take any skin off your back. 0.97

00:39:51.000 But Russia's deal as a consequence is going to be, we're going to have some reasonable territorial concessions.

00:39:56.000 But if they infringe on those territorial concessions, again, the rest of the deal is off.

00:40:00.000 And so now Russia is in a tough spot if they renege on the deal.

00:40:04.000 Ukraine is better off because now hundreds of thousands of your own sons and daughters are not dying in that war.

00:40:09.000 And by the way, Ukraine's military is so Depleted.

00:40:13.000 They're now having to recruit people above the age of 40 to serve.

00:40:16.000 Put an end to that senseless war that you should have done in 2022 before Boris Johnson showed up on your doorstep to deflect from his own domestic problems in politics at home.

00:40:25.000 And you actually get a reasonable deal.

00:40:27.000 Is it everything you want?

00:40:28.000 No.

00:40:29.000 But it's a reasonable deal that allows you to have a security agreement that's backstopped by U.S.

00:40:34.000 self-interest.

00:40:36.000 That's far more powerful than what you're going to get by fighting an uphill war that otherwise, frankly, could result in Even much of Ukraine no longer existing as a sovereign country if you actually see this play out several more years on the correct trajectory.

00:40:48.000 I mean, I look at this as a genocide.

00:40:49.000 And by the way, from Russia, too.

00:40:50.000 I mean, listen, Russia haven't exactly had an overperformance in terms of military might of the Russian standing army, which, you know, any one of us who would have grown up in the 80s would have feared and, you know, And we're like, not a great performance.

00:41:03.000 And Putin's lost a ton of men too, but he's finding people from Siberia 1.00

00:41:10.000 that he doesn't care about.

00:41:11.000 He'll send them, this is not like oligarch sons from Moscow dying on the front lines.

00:41:16.000 And so, and by the way, Zelensky being no different.

00:41:18.000 They're just sending a bunch of, who they look at like the peasants. 0.99

00:41:21.000 We're gonna send a bunch of our peasant white folks over there and the men will die. 1.00

00:41:24.000 And they're recruiting guys in their fifties. 0.98

00:41:27.000 It's multiple generations of men just sent to their death for, no.

00:41:32.000 And by the way, I sort of do this now and I don't know that I've spent time

00:41:35.000 with anyone in Washington, DC.

00:41:37.000 in politics who has articulated to me what victory actually looks like.

00:41:41.000 It's lunacy.

00:41:42.000 That's right.

00:41:43.000 I think you're 100% right.

00:41:44.000 I think the reason they don't say it is certain of those people in Washington, D.C.

00:41:47.000 do know what victory looks like.

00:41:49.000 They just understand that it's outside of the acceptable window of what they can say.

00:41:52.000 It's regime change in Russia.

00:41:53.000 I think that that's actually what... Yeah, that's great.

00:41:55.000 But you and I have actually done business unlike most of the people in Washington, D.C.

00:41:59.000 I don't know.

00:41:59.000 Honestly, I don't know that I've ever had a deal where I got everything I wanted.

00:42:02.000 Everything was... Oh, that's right.

00:42:04.000 I mean, regime change in Russia, I don't even think it's a worthy goal.

00:42:08.000 I don't even think it's a worthy goal, by the way.

00:42:10.000 Think about who fills the vacuum left by Putin.

00:42:12.000 And our track record of regime change hasn't exactly been great.

00:42:14.000 How'd that work in Iraq, Vivek?

00:42:16.000 Yeah, hasn't been a, you know, if we don't learn from our past mistakes, we're doomed to repeat them.

00:42:21.000 But I do think that, look, Zelensky, you got to look at this from a business perspective, actually, too, right?

00:42:27.000 I think the expected value outcome is even if he has, we've tilted his incentives, okay?

00:42:33.000 There's a term that I would call chain ganging.

00:42:35.000 He's chain ganging us into this war because that's kind of what his incentive is too.

00:42:40.000 So like in a business setting, all right, let's just play this out.

00:42:43.000 Forget the war context.

00:42:44.000 In a business setting, if there's a 1% chance that you're going to make a billion dollar cash out on a deal, that's still an expected value of $10 million.

00:42:53.000 But if you take a 99% chance you're going to end up with a zero, that's still like a high potential expected value, where in fact, you might actually just be better off getting a normal job that makes you two million bucks.

00:43:02.000 Okay, that's actually a better case scenario for your family.

00:43:05.000 But if you're thinking big, and you have a 1% chance at a billion dollars, that's a $10 million value, you might have a person who's willing to take that risk.

00:43:14.000 That's effectively the situation we're putting Zelensky in, which is with our own health, He has some shot at maybe even going on an offensive in Russia and emerging with strength, but actually the downside for his own people is going to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, we've already seen, and casualties.

00:43:32.000 And I think the actual security threat to the very people who are funding it, the West that's funding it, ends up on the losing end of that security catastrophe.

00:43:38.000 So Brzezinski makes sense to go for broke because, or at least in some vision of the world, it could make sense to go for broke.

00:43:45.000 He wears the cargo pants like he is.

00:43:47.000 It's great.

00:43:48.000 I have cargo pants too, but it doesn't mean I'm a frontline soldier, you know?

00:43:52.000 It's part of the sales pitch.

00:43:53.000 But I do think there's a reasonable, and even for the Ukrainian people, the better outcome is, I think, a negotiated peace there.

00:44:00.000 And it shouldn't be outside the Overton window to say this, frankly, in both parties.

00:44:03.000 It's not just a Democrat issue.

00:44:04.000 And it's one of the things I try to do in this book.

00:44:07.000 It's probably going to make some people upset.

00:44:10.000 It came out this week, in that it's not just speaking hard truths to the left.

00:44:14.000 It's also speaking hard truths to our side.

00:44:15.000 You know, some people will say, OK, well, we're ahead of an election.

00:44:18.000 We've got to focus.

00:44:19.000 And I am focused on making sure we defeat Kamala Harris and win the down-ballot races.

00:44:23.000 But what's the point of winning if our own party is actually going to adopt some of the very poison that we think we're up against?

00:44:30.000 And so I think the more we're able to look at this outside of the partisan silos and just talk about this in first principles, the stronger we're actually going to be.

00:44:38.000 So how would you describe the, you know, the Harris campaign strategy right now?

00:44:42.000 I mean, I don't know if you saw sort of my intro, but I played some of the clips of her, you know, talking about, you know, the cloud and cloud technology and other word salads.

00:44:51.000 You know, she's now adapting a pro crypto stance. 0.95

00:44:53.000 Like, I'd love to hear her explain.

00:44:55.000 Anything crypto, like, I'd love to hear her explain the blockchain, like, I'd pay a lot of money, uh, you know, to hear her do that.

00:45:03.000 You know, there's no substance, uh, but yet much of the regime media, they don't seem to care.

00:45:08.000 It's like, you could hear the dumbest thing and it's like, it's brilliant. 0.74

00:45:12.000 It's brilliant. 0.85

00:45:12.000 You must, it's like, you know, when you're looking at some, you know, modern art, like, uh, you see the guy that's a big art guy in the world. 0.85

00:45:18.000 It's like, he's like, it's brilliant.

00:45:19.000 You're looking at him.

00:45:19.000 I don't know.

00:45:20.000 My kid drew that.

00:45:21.000 Like, what are you talking about?

00:45:22.000 Uh, Is anyone buying it anymore?

00:45:25.000 Do people see through it?

00:45:26.000 Yeah, I think people do see through it, but it's hard.

00:45:29.000 And I'll tell you why.

00:45:31.000 So the short answer is, the things she says are obviously not brilliant.

00:45:36.000 They can, in some ways, qualify neither as dumb nor brilliant, because she's not even saying anything, actually.

00:45:42.000 Well, by the way, there's truth to that, yeah.

00:45:43.000 But the strategy, we got to call this out, the strategy is kind of brilliant, actually, because it's a short enough time.

00:45:48.000 So I think this all fits together.

00:45:50.000 I mean, how would a candidate like her couldn't earn a single Democratic vote even in the primary? 1.00

00:45:55.000 She couldn't even make it to the Iowa caucus.

00:45:56.000 How is she even a plausible candidate to be the next president of the United States? 1.00

00:45:59.000 It's kind of a brilliant strategy, and it dates back to long before she was the nominee.

00:46:03.000 So I think this was in some sense part of the game plan the whole time.

00:46:06.000 And I called this out from the Republican debate stage back when they called me a conspiracy theorist for saying it.

00:46:11.000 But the reality is just play at the incentives, right?

00:46:14.000 So if you're going to swap out Biden, you'd rather have the option value for as long as you can, right?

00:46:19.000 In the world of capital markets, you call this a call option.

00:46:22.000 They bought themselves a call option by making the earliest possible presidential debate in US history.

00:46:26.000 It's the earliest ever debate they've had in June.

00:46:29.000 Because if he did well, by some miracle, it would have reset the race.

00:46:33.000 And if he didn't do well, they have a free option to switch her out.

00:46:36.000 They wanted that switch to happen literally as late in the cycle as possible.

00:46:41.000 Because the first thing that happens when you replace Biden is it doesn't matter who you put in.

00:46:44.000 It's like the equivalent of the reaction that a tortured prisoner has to his His the person who releases him from captivity. You're

00:46:51.000 going to fall in love with that person no matter who it is In this case

00:46:54.000 They had the honeymoon phase with kamal harris And the bed as you rise that ride that honeymoon phase all

00:46:58.000 the way through november by saying as little as possible Yeah to disrupt the don't let people hear about her

00:47:05.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:47:06.000 So in some sense, it's actually a brilliant strategy.

00:47:08.000 And we've seen that proven by the fact that every time she has tried to veer into grocery price controls or some element of substantive policy, it hasn't gone well for her.

00:47:17.000 And so she understands that for much of the voter base in the United States of America, especially in the state of civic decline that we're in, they vote based on a vibe rather than actually based on policy.

00:47:27.000 So that's their strategy.

00:47:28.000 The question for us is, what do we actually do about it?

00:47:30.000 It's our job to actually call that out, to offer our own alternative vision, to show up in the places where we're not otherwise showing up.

00:47:37.000 I think your father has done a masterful job of that, but I think that that's going to be required all the way through the finish line, because, frankly, it's a strategy that you're asking, are people seeing through it?

00:47:47.000 Well, I think some people do.

00:47:48.000 I think we've been lied to in every major election.

00:47:51.000 There's been one major lie, at least, one major lie.

00:47:54.000 Got the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the Russia hoax of 2016.

00:47:58.000 You got the Hunter Biden laptop suppressed on the eve of the election by every major tech company on the eve of the 2020 election.

00:48:05.000 This election, it was the idea that Biden could not possibly be swapped out as the nominee.

00:48:09.000 That ended up being the fact that they actually made it work all the way through the very end.

00:48:15.000 I think for us, the right criticism of Kamala, because I think the criticisms that are closest to the truth are the ones that land.

00:48:21.000 People are intuitively intelligent about this stuff.

00:48:26.000 It's not really that she's actually a Marxist or a communist.

00:48:31.000 I think that I think that's off the mark by a little bit, and it doesn't help us quite as much as I want it to for two reasons.

00:48:39.000 One is, it gives her too much credit, right?

00:48:42.000 It gives her the credit of being an ideologue, right?

00:48:45.000 It says that she actually has function and policy principles.

00:48:46.000 She's a chameleon, not an ideologue.

00:48:48.000 Right, yeah, so she's not an ideologue, and that almost gives her too much credit.

00:48:50.000 The second thing it does is it puts them in a position to allow, right, the billionaire class who's on CNBC on a given day to talk about how, no, no, she's actually pro-capitalism.

00:48:59.000 Well, she switched yesterday to being in favor of some sort of pro-growth policy on cryptocurrency or AI or whatever the next thing.

00:49:06.000 It doesn't matter, but it allows her on paper to defy the idea that a true Marxist wouldn't say this.

00:49:12.000 And second of all, she isn't really smart enough or I think even principled enough to have a deep-seated political philosopher ideology. 0.82

00:49:20.000 I think the truth of the matter is she is a cog in a machine.

00:49:24.000 And we're running against that machine.

00:49:25.000 And I think our movement is at its best, I think your father's at his best, when he is running against the machine, to dismantle the machine, above the fray of partisan politics.

00:49:35.000 There's a reason why we're not only seeing former Democrats come to our side, we're seeing former Republicans like Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney move to the other side.

00:49:43.000 It's not about Republicans and Democrats, really.

00:49:45.000 It's about the citizen versus this managerial class.

00:49:49.000 And more than anybody who's run for president in our lifetime, who's been the major nominee of either party in our lifetime, Donald Trump is the person whose mission it is.

00:49:57.000 When we say drain the swamp, it is to dismantle that machine.

00:50:01.000 I think that's a powerful message that wins over a lot more of those independents rather than just Saying that she's a communist, which I think gives her too much credit.

00:50:09.000 Because at least, you know, say what you will about Karl Marx.

00:50:11.000 He was at least a smart guy.

00:50:12.000 Say what you will about Bernie Sanders.

00:50:13.000 At least he has the principles, right?

00:50:15.000 I think that neither of which we could say about really about Kamala Harris.

00:50:18.000 But I think what we can say is just like Biden's cognitive deficits were In some ways, a feature, not a bug.

00:50:27.000 Her policy deficits are really a feature, not a bug for the people who are controlling her. 0.99

00:50:32.000 But if we call this out as the machine we're up against, it doesn't matter if it's Kamala, Joe, Sherrod Brown, or whoever the next guy, they're all cogs in that machine and we're going in to break the machine.

00:50:41.000 I think that's a powerful message, but I think it's a powerful message because it's closest to the truth.

00:50:46.000 So, you know, speaking of sort of, you know, the failed policies, you know, Kamala Harris, she's going to the border tomorrow. 0.96

00:50:51.000 I mean, it sort of feels to me like that's like a murderer visiting the crime scene.

00:50:55.000 But can you explain how your book maybe helps demystify why the American left is all in on open borders?

00:51:03.000 I mean, they literally hate the idea of a national sovereignty.

00:51:07.000 Why is that?

00:51:08.000 I mean, it seems like, I can't name a civilization in history that put themselves last And managed to survive.

00:51:18.000 What is it about the American left that is all in on this concept?

00:51:21.000 Right.

00:51:22.000 So I'm going to read you the title of this chapter.

00:51:24.000 It's called, An Open Border Is Not A Border.

00:51:27.000 Where, if I told this to you, or like most of the other chapters in this book, if I told this to you in the 2000s, I would advise you to save your money and not buy this book because it's far too obvious for any person to even waste the paper that it's printed on.

00:51:39.000 Today it's actually a controversial thing to say in many corridors of the modern left.

00:51:43.000 So, there's two sides to this, and there's one side that our side gets a little shy about talking about, which is the legal immigration side of this, which I'll get to in a second.

00:51:52.000 On the illegal side, and I say this as the kid of legal immigrants myself.

00:51:56.000 My parents came here with no money.

00:51:57.000 I founded multi-billion dollar companies.

00:52:00.000 That's the American dream.

00:52:01.000 You do it the right way and you're going to make contributions to this country.

00:52:04.000 I'll get to that.

00:52:05.000 And you believe in this country and you embrace the civic ideals this country was founded on.

00:52:09.000 You could speak the English language.

00:52:10.000 I mean, these are, I think, attributes that really matter for immigration.

00:52:13.000 I say this as the kid of those legal immigrants.

00:52:16.000 Your first act of entering this country can't break the law.

00:52:19.000 This is solvable.

00:52:20.000 I mean, we just go through just a litany of this.

00:52:21.000 This is the easy part.

00:52:22.000 This is sometimes the easy part, but we got to do it.

00:52:24.000 Move the military to the southern border.

00:52:26.000 We got 100,000 troops.

00:52:27.000 A lot of people don't know this.

00:52:28.000 100,000 troops in Western Europe.

00:52:30.000 What the hell are they doing there?

00:52:30.000 Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was the supreme commander of NATO, okay, when he was the head of,

00:52:36.000 effectively like a commander in NATO, he said that if we have troops here 10 years from now,

00:52:41.000 that's a proof that NATO has failed.

00:52:42.000 Now in the year 2024, we got 100,000 troops in Western Europe, move some fraction of them,

00:52:47.000 if not all of them to our southern border, complete the wall, put aquatic barriers in the Rio Grande,

00:52:52.000 stop paying for sanctuary cities, end birthright citizenship for the kids of illegals, 0.93

00:52:57.000 reinstate, remain in Mexico.

00:52:59.000 And just tell somebody, if you're going to claim asylum, you got to at least have proof of asylum.

00:53:03.000 That ends the illegal mass migration crisis.

00:53:05.000 This is not complicated.

00:53:06.000 And if you're in this country illegally, we'll return you to your country of origin. 1.00

00:53:09.000 That's the illegal side.

00:53:11.000 Now, on the legal side, I think we often make this out to be a much harder problem than it is, right?

00:53:17.000 Because then we'll start talking about, and I've talked about this too, merit-based immigration.

00:53:20.000 Well, what is merit?

00:53:21.000 What does that mean?

00:53:21.000 Okay.

00:53:22.000 Let's not get theoretical.

00:53:23.000 Let's just get really practical.

00:53:24.000 I'll give you 75% of the solution here, and I talk about this in the book.

00:53:28.000 If you basically have a system that says, if you are going to rely on welfare, if we can predictably say, based on your economic condition, we require transparency of what your economic condition is before you enter, if we know you're going to rely on government assistance within the first couple of years you're here, we're not going to admit you, and we make you ineligible to receive any form of government assistance for at least 7 to 10 years after you come.

00:53:51.000 Okay, if you're going to rely on government assistance, welfare, Medicaid, etc., and we know that, we should not be admitting you to the country. 0.99

00:53:57.000 If you do not speak English, we should not be admitting you to the country. 1.00

00:54:01.000 If you don't know the first thing about the U.S.

00:54:02.000 civic ideals, and we have a civics exam for naturalization, move that to the front end.

00:54:06.000 If you don't know the basics about the civic understanding of the United States, you're going to run out of the country.

00:54:10.000 Those three things alone.

00:54:11.000 If we eliminate anybody who's going to rely on government welfare or recipient of government aid, anybody who can't speak English, and anybody who doesn't know the first thing about U.S.

00:54:19.000 civic history, that alone solves, I kid you not, 75 plus percent of our legal immigration problem.

00:54:25.000 That's not complicated.

00:54:26.000 Yeah.

00:54:26.000 Totally.

00:54:26.000 How do you institute that when the Democrats seem...

00:54:29.000 You know, I know great guys that are, you know, they're computer programmers from Eastern Europe.

00:54:33.000 They're brilliant.

00:54:34.000 They work, you know, they work.

00:54:35.000 I mean, half the tech stuff I invested, you know, it's done over there.

00:54:39.000 Those guys have zero chance of getting into America.

00:54:41.000 Now, they could create jobs, they could add value.

00:54:43.000 They would never be dependents, but the entire Democrat party seems intent.

00:54:48.000 The only kind of immigration they want are people who will be permanent dependents because it's a reliable vote for them. 0.95

00:54:54.000 They've ostracized so many people that would have otherwise been reliable Democrat voters, whether that's a lot of, let's call it even African American men, certainly a lot of Hispanics around the country.

00:55:05.000 You know, they're just importing a reliable voter base since they're not willing to actually do the right things for the people that were traditionally Democrat voters.

00:55:12.000 Yeah, and to those who would say that's a conspiracy theory, I would encourage you to just go back and look at what the Democrats themselves were saying in 2012, right?

00:55:18.000 Democratic strategists.

00:55:19.000 There's an article in Political Magazine from 2012.

00:55:22.000 Just look at that.

00:55:22.000 That was a stated strategy of mass migration, which has long-run electoral advantages into the country.

00:55:27.000 I do think a lot of Democrats, especially those at the more local level and the state level, mayors, even some governors, I think are beginning to see the first-hand effects that's having on them.

00:55:35.000 So I think they could actually be the front lines of shifting the tide on this.

00:55:39.000 But forget partisan politics about it for a second.

00:55:43.000 I want people to think about this.

00:55:44.000 This is actually one of the things I expose in this chapter of the book is you could design an immigration system and it's like whatever the incentives are, whatever the incentives you set up in that system is exactly what you get.

00:55:53.000 So in the legal immigration system, you could imagine one that rewards people who are the smartest, in which case you get the most intelligent.

00:55:59.000 You could imagine you reward somebody who is the most hardworking, most likely to be industrious or make contributions.

00:56:05.000 You could imagine you could have a system that rewards those who demonstrate a love of the United States or readiness to assimilate or speak English the best, whatever it is.

00:56:12.000 You could imagine any one of those as being the type of person or at least the type of quality that the immigration system rewards.

00:56:19.000 In fact, the immigration system, even on the legal side right now, the immigration system we have is none of those.

00:56:25.000 The hard truth is that the number one human attribute that our current immigration system rewards is Your willingness to lie, actually.

00:56:37.000 Your willingness to just outright, intentionally tell a lie under oath, under pain and penalty of breaking the law.

00:56:44.000 If you're willing to do that, that dramatically increases your odds of getting into the country.

00:56:48.000 Now, you have somebody on the other side of that saying, OK, I can't in good conscience tell you that I'm seeking asylum or refugee status because I face imminent risk of bodily harm due to my race or my religion.

00:56:59.000 And therefore, that's what it takes to qualify.

00:57:01.000 I can't lie.

00:57:02.000 That person's not going to get in.

00:57:03.000 The person who's willing to tell that lie is exactly who our current immigration system rewards.

00:57:09.000 And against that backdrop, it is no surprise that you're seeing an increase in crime, because if you're willing to lie to break the law as your first act of entering, even through the so-called legal system, you're going to be more likely to continue to break the law while you're here.

00:57:22.000 And we haven't talked about that enough on our side, but I mean, that's part of the reason I write this book.

00:57:25.000 Well, it's complicated, because on behalf of the people that are doing the asylum checklist, well, they travel through eight countries to get here.

00:57:33.000 They could have sought asylum in any one of the other countries, but, you know, America's the one that's gonna give them, you know, $3,000 a month, and a phone, and a this, and housing, and guaranteed healthcare.

00:57:42.000 You know, you lose a little bit of that asylum right when it's like, oh no, I just got to a place where I'm safe.

00:57:49.000 No, no, no, you traveled through seven other countries to get to America.

00:57:51.000 Like, there's a difference.

00:57:54.000 It's even funny how it relates to sort of the woke victimhood culture mentality a little bit in terms of what our immigration system rewards.

00:58:00.000 So I tell one of the stories, it's a true story, but I tell one of the stories in the book of a woman who came here Fleeing from persecution, so under the asylum system, persecution by Vladimir Putin because of his assault on the LGBTQIA plus community.

00:58:16.000 She's a lesbian and she comes here because she's going to be unsafe, imminent risk of some kind of bodily harm to her if she stays in Russia. 1.00

00:58:23.000 She comes here on the slightest questioning of it based on the way she lives her life here.

00:58:27.000 Wait a minute.

00:58:28.000 How could you possibly have been fleeing if you're really an LGBTQ person?

00:58:32.000 It doesn't seem like that.

00:58:33.000 Immediately breaks down and says, OK, I admit it.

00:58:36.000 I'm not even gay.

00:58:37.000 In fact, I don't even like gay people. 1.00

00:58:38.000 I never have.

00:58:39.000 It's just a made up myth because that was what was required.

00:58:44.000 But anyway, it's a story of who do we actually reward through our immigration system?

00:58:49.000 It's the people who, sadly, Today's system rewards you most.

00:58:54.000 Not if you're the smartest, not if you're the hardest working, not if you love this country.

00:58:58.000 The number one human attribute that's rewarded is if you're willing to lie.

00:59:01.000 And in some sense, you as a country get what you deserve.

00:59:03.000 If that's the system that we're going to have, our nation's declining.

00:59:06.000 But in some sense, our policymakers get for our country what they've created.

00:59:11.000 I think we can reverse it.

00:59:12.000 It doesn't have to stay this way.

00:59:13.000 These are solvable problems.

00:59:14.000 I mean, this is not... This is not about... Curing Alzheimer's is harder.

00:59:18.000 Putting a man on Mars is harder.

00:59:20.000 This is not a problem of nature.

00:59:21.000 This is a man-made problem.

00:59:23.000 And a man-made problem always has a man-made solution.

00:59:25.000 But, you know, I think that's actually what this election is about, is November 5th is not the destination.

00:59:31.000 It is the starting line.

00:59:32.000 We just got to get there.

00:59:33.000 So, you know, interesting one, because I want to shift gears a little bit.

00:59:36.000 I mean, since we sort of started speaking about that woke victimhood culture that people are clearly taking advantage of, and many are just lying about to gamble.

00:59:45.000 And I'm sure there's some people that really believe this stuff.

00:59:46.000 And I'm sure there's plenty that say, hey, I'd love to go to Harvard, so I'm going to be trans.

00:59:49.000 And that's a sure way to do it.

00:59:52.000 Maybe if I want to become a general in the military, just check that box, and you're probably good these days.

00:59:56.000 but you're now a significant shareholder in BuzzFeed, which I did not have on my bingo card, you know,

01:00:04.000 anytime soon.

01:00:05.000 Will you be able to make any changes to that website?

01:00:10.000 And will you be able to, you know, talk about what you hope to achieve?

01:00:13.000 I have sort of a long story.

01:00:14.000 So when they were going down the tubes, I had a little show and fraud, you know,

01:00:18.000 I don't often take glee in other people's misery, but they tried going after me one time on a total lie.

01:00:24.000 I I managed to catch him I'll tell you because it's actually they tried linking me to Jeffrey Epstein Uh, you know because I was at some party I guess a friend of mine was doing this development I'm a real estate guy from New York.

01:00:34.000 So a real estate guy from New York was a good friend invited me down And apparently Jeffrey Epstein was at this party.

01:00:39.000 I don't know.

01:00:39.000 There's no pictures.

01:00:40.000 There's no this I didn't know who the guy was is it but this was like 2007-2008 You know, I get a call and like...

01:00:47.000 2020.

01:00:47.000 2020, you know, we have credible evidence from two sources that say you're on Epstein's

01:00:53.000 plan. I was like, I wasn't on Epstein's plan, didn't go to him, didn't go to this. And they're

01:00:56.000 like, we don't care. We're going to write the article because you can link the article.

01:00:59.000 So of course I go, I don't know, like, why don't you write about all the times that Bill

01:01:02.000 Gates was there or Clinton or Stephanopoulos or whoever the other people that I've read,

01:01:06.000 you know, have been accused about being there. There are big time Democrats and who spent

01:01:10.000 a lot of time on the island. You're saying I was on a plane with them. No, we're just

01:01:13.000 running the article. You have six hours to respond.

01:01:15.000 Otherwise we're going with, you know, two people who say you were there. And I'm like, I wasn't.

01:01:20.000 I just, and I remembered, I actually flew down with a friend and we flew down private

01:01:23.000 and I called the guy, but it was like 12 years prior. So I was like, listen, uh,

01:01:27.000 could you go on the record and just tell these guys I flew down with you and I was there

01:01:31.000 with my wife and we flew down with you and we flew back with you. And he was like, yeah,

01:01:33.000 sure. But he goes, you know what? My pilot's like a real, you know, anal guy. Like, let 0.53

01:01:38.000 me, let me call. He calls the guy and I was like, oh yeah, no, I kept the records.

01:01:42.000 I was like, you kept records from 12 years ago?

01:01:44.000 Like flight manifestos?

01:01:45.000 Like, you know, mostly you throw that stuff two, three years and you throw it out and it's gone, right?

01:01:48.000 He goes, oh yeah, no, here it is.

01:01:49.000 So I sent the guy a text about five minutes before the deadline.

01:01:52.000 I go, uh, if you write the article now, I'm going to sue your ass off and I'm going to own your magazine and I don't get it.

01:01:58.000 And you know what? 0.98

01:02:00.000 It was like, I ripped his heart out of his throat.

01:02:02.000 Like, and it didn't matter.

01:02:03.000 There was like, okay, well, you know what?

01:02:05.000 We got bad information.

01:02:06.000 We had bad sources.

01:02:07.000 It was that he wanted to hurt me.

01:02:11.000 Uh, you know, and so I remember, it was BuzzFeed at the time, and so it was one of those, when they went down, so what the hell?

01:02:17.000 And also BuzzFeed News was actually the one, they're also one of the ones, the BuzzFeed News division, which actually doesn't exist anymore, they shuttered it, was also one of the ones that broke the stories on a lot of the, a lot of the supposed Russia's collusion, all that stuff back in 2016.

01:02:30.000 Oh yeah, no, these guys were vicious, and it was all lies, and all nonsense, and no consequence.

01:02:34.000 So when they went down, I was like, You know, I know they love to throw out the learn to code to a bunch of guys that are plumbers and construction workers, but it was like, yeah, maybe you guys are going to need to learn to code or be replaced by AI in about two weeks because that's where probably most of that's going anyway.

01:02:48.000 But how do you figure this one out?

01:02:51.000 How do you get involved?

01:02:52.000 Are you going to be able to change it?

01:02:54.000 Yeah, so first let's take a step back.

01:02:56.000 So I left the campaign and I got in the world of politics, but the business world was my background.

01:03:00.000 And so I left the campaign in January.

01:03:02.000 Obviously I've been heavily involved in helping your father and other candidates.

01:03:07.000 But I do have a lot more spare time on my hands after leaving the campaign, which is a full-time activity.

01:03:12.000 Yeah, I miss scratching the business side of my brain a little bit as well.

01:03:16.000 And so I've started a couple of companies, actually, a couple of which I think are going to go on to do some big things of guided enterprises that have already started.

01:03:24.000 But I also have always had an itch for finding undervalued opportunities.

01:03:28.000 This is a company that has just, for some of the reasons you may have mentioned, cratered since its IPO.

01:03:34.000 It is Still generating an interesting amount of revenue.

01:03:38.000 It has a bloated cost structure that hasn't served the company too well, and there's some debt-related pressures.

01:03:44.000 But I said, you know, for a relatively modest sum, at least, you know, thankfully, I've lived the American dream.

01:03:49.000 But from my own vantage point, from my portfolio, a relatively modest investment, I could come out owning a significant piece of a company that, if they did change direction, Could create, I think, a lot of value.

01:04:02.000 And one of the things that I think is missing in the conglomerate model of media... I mean, you got the creator economy today, right?

01:04:07.000 You got Rumble.

01:04:07.000 It's a great example of that.

01:04:08.000 By the way, I was an investor in Rumble back when it was a private company, even before its own public listing.

01:04:13.000 And so I believe in driving positive change through capitalism.

01:04:17.000 But, you know, one of the things you see in the creator economy, whether it's Rumble or X, is Yes, you have no ideological filter, and I think that's great, but you also have no quality filter, which is to say that that's not a publisher, it's a platform.

01:04:29.000 And then you have publishers who apply ideological filters, they apply quality filters, but with that quality filter comes also an ideological filter.

01:04:37.000 And I just happen to think there is an opportunity out there for somebody, right?

01:04:41.000 You could say whether it's BuzzFeed or anybody else, but for somebody to create a content publisher, not a platform, but a content publisher, That actually represents a truly diverse range of viewpoints under the same platform, under the same publisher, and builds a powerful corporate brand around that.

01:04:57.000 I think that opportunity exists.

01:04:58.000 I think nobody has stepped up to seize it.

01:05:00.000 Now, BuzzFeed is a company that effectively is a brand in search of an identity, right?

01:05:04.000 Everybody's heard of BuzzFeed.

01:05:06.000 They have a huge name ID.

01:05:07.000 Which is a wish for any media startup to have.

01:05:10.000 Distribution channels and pipes of reaching tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people via social media, YouTube, and their followings, yet they don't have the right fluid flowing through those pipes.

01:05:19.000 And so those were, in my view, underappreciated assets if they were managed in the right way, but that's the big if.

01:05:25.000 And so historically, you know, the way it works is, so I'm the second largest outside shareholder.

01:05:30.000 I didn't, you know, it's pretty easy for publicly traded companies.

01:05:33.000 You buy the shares of the stock and you file the right thing when you're supposed to file the right thing.

01:05:38.000 And so I'm an activist investor in BuzzFeed and it's the, I'm the second largest outside shareholder.

01:05:41.000 Great.

01:05:42.000 Now, conventional wisdom is that in certain companies that have the dual class shareholding structure, What the founder, who in this case is also CEO of the company, has outsized voting power, you're not going to be able to drive too much change as an activist.

01:05:57.000 There's some interesting dynamics here, and I'll keep it pretty high level, but they do have some debt that could effectively come due or be put to the company as soon as the end of this year, which changes the usual game theory around that situation.

01:06:11.000 Obviously, there's a lot going on this year and a lot that I have my focus on even outside of the business world.

01:06:17.000 But in the effort of trying to drive some positive change through the private sector and creating value in the process, I saw this as an opportunity to, as an outside investor, not as a CEO or anything like that, but as an activist investor, to bring some interesting ideas to the table at a time where they're going to have to do something.

01:06:35.000 I think it's great.

01:06:36.000 We need more people doing that.

01:06:38.000 The other side is very good at being activists.

01:06:39.000 We don't tend to do that.

01:06:43.000 I'm not afraid to bring ideas to a table where they're initially not welcome, maybe.

01:06:47.000 But actually, it's the same thing.

01:06:50.000 If you actually have a coherent vision for how you're going to create value, forget the ideological left-wing or right-wingness of it.

01:06:56.000 Is there an opportunity to use existing assets to build a coherent brand and create value?

01:07:00.000 Even if it's not the one that I've suggested, but it's something different than the direction the company is going and bring some discipline to a cost structure and so on.

01:07:06.000 Yeah, I do see an opportunity to create value in mismanaged companies.

01:07:10.000 And this is one of several private sector pursuits I've picked up since leaving the campaign.

01:07:15.000 It just happens to be the most visible because it's a publicly traded company.

01:07:19.000 I think it's great.

01:07:20.000 You know, Vivek, you wrote the book Truce.

01:07:23.000 What would your priorities be for a second Trump administration, the second term?

01:07:27.000 What are the truths that can guide us in a second term?

01:07:31.000 What can your book teach us about that next chapter in political history?

01:07:36.000 And, you know, where does it go sort of beyond Trump?

01:07:40.000 What's that bench look like? 0.98

01:07:41.000 How do we curate that so it doesn't just come back to, you know, the same old, same old swamp garbage that I think so many people are fed up of?

01:07:49.000 Yeah, so actually, this book deals with both of those things.

01:07:52.000 But the first of those is, in some sense, easier.

01:07:55.000 The second of those is actually an interesting intellectual fissure, even within our own movement.

01:07:59.000 I think it's interesting.

01:08:00.000 But I think we begin to explore in this book, and I think our movement's going to be stronger if we see it with clear eyes.

01:08:06.000 On the first one, I'll distill it down to a really simple punchline, OK?

01:08:09.000 It can be a tale of two mass deportations.

01:08:12.000 First is the mass deportation of millions of illegals who are in this country illegally.

01:08:16.000 Send them back to their country of origin and stop them from coming in. 1.00

01:08:20.000 But there's also the second mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C.

01:08:26.000 I think we achieve both of those things in many of the illegal rules and unconstitutional rules that they've written along with it.

01:08:33.000 So I say that somewhat blithely.

01:08:35.000 Obviously, there's a lot of nuance and a lot of breadth of range of issues.

01:08:37.000 But if you want to save a country and distill it to two punchlines that effectively come out and are developed in more obviously rigorous and detailed ways in this book, You have the first mass deportation of millions of illegals out of this country.

01:08:48.000 Your father talks about it all the time.

01:08:50.000 The only thing is, I would say, don't forget that second mass deportation of literally, there's four million unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. 0.59

01:08:57.000 that are writing rules that never passed Congress that are acting like a wet blanket on our economy, constraining our freedom and providing the basis for weaponization.

01:09:05.000 We have saved a country in the process.

01:09:07.000 So that's what I think a second Trump term that's North Star number one and two.

01:09:12.000 You could debate which one's number one and number two.

01:09:13.000 I put actually the unelected bureaucrats as number one. 0.95

01:09:15.000 By the way, in terms of future damage, in terms of being able to, you know, take advantage of a guy that, like my father, who has the guts to actually do some of these things, that would be very controversial in Washington, D.C., even if it's right for the people.

01:09:29.000 I think that's, you know, as important, if not more so, perhaps.

01:09:33.000 And I like the dynamic, by the way, the setup that it's going to be a second term, so it's not like he's going to have to have some sort of, you know, re-election, you know, sort of back in the back of a shadow.

01:09:42.000 I like the fact that he's been out of office for four years and had a chance to actually even reflect, as you and I both know he has, on exactly how we're going to, in that second term, achieve even more than he did in the first.

01:09:52.000 I know he's, and you know this obviously better than anybody, how ambitious he is about that.

01:09:57.000 So I think that's what that term looks like.

01:09:58.000 I think the The thing I touch on in this book, and this is really intended to just open the conversation in this book, I'm opening the conversation on this, is one of the tough questions we're going to have to grapple with in the new America First movement, right?

01:10:14.000 Rejecting the neoliberalism of yesterday, okay?

01:10:16.000 The idea that we're going to spread democracy through capitalism to China didn't really work, okay?

01:10:20.000 So we reject the neoliberal shibboleths of yesterday, but As we go forward, I think we confront a tough question where there's great people who mutually respect each other, good friends, allies, right?

01:10:34.000 We're sitting on the same side of the table here.

01:10:35.000 I think we're still gonna have to sort out where our priority is.

01:10:38.000 On one hand, do we want to replace the left-wing nanny state with A version of a right-wing nanny state. 0.84

01:10:47.000 Industrial policy that provides subsidies to select sectors over others.

01:10:51.000 You know, we want to set caps on credit card interest rates.

01:10:54.000 I mean, Kamala Harris once said, grocery price caps, we got interest rates.

01:10:57.000 You know, these are thorny questions.

01:11:00.000 Do we want to actually use the levers of government and the use the levers of the bureaucracy to advance our substantive goals for American workers or manufacturers in a well-intentioned way?

01:11:09.000 It's hard.

01:11:10.000 Or do we actually want to get in there and actually, three words for me, shut it down.

01:11:16.000 And I fall in the latter cap.

01:11:18.000 I believe the right answer for the long run, even for America, even and especially for American workers and manufacturers, is actually going to be getting there and actually just shut it down.

01:11:28.000 You may cut so much fat that you also cut some muscle.

01:11:32.000 But I don't want to turn to the CFPB, which is the same agency that Elizabeth Warren was the first head of, scold them for saying we're asking small businesses for their race and gender data, but on the other side of our mouth say that, hey, we want to empower that CFPB to cap the way that credit card interest rates are being calculated.

01:11:49.000 I actually would rather just scrap the whole thing.

01:11:51.000 I can see a lot of that stuff backfiring.

01:11:52.000 We come up with something that seems to be well-intentioned, and then the left takes it when they get back in power someday and just weaponizes it against everything.

01:11:59.000 And you see it.

01:12:00.000 I had Bobby Kennedy on the podcast last week.

01:12:02.000 We're talking about some of the stuff with food and man, we're giving our kids poison.

01:12:06.000 But you know, I could say, well, you know, hey, cheese, it's a really bad.

01:12:10.000 We're going to get rid of those on the shelf.

01:12:11.000 And, you know, the left comes back and said, you know, cows are really bad for the environment.

01:12:14.000 We have a scientist here that says it's causing all of the climate change.

01:12:17.000 There's no more beef.

01:12:18.000 You know, doesn't mean we shouldn't let people know what they're eating.

01:12:22.000 They can make their own decision.

01:12:23.000 They can force corporate policy with their purchasing power.

01:12:27.000 You know, there are ways to do these things.

01:12:28.000 But I want to be careful with some of these outright ban, whether it's speech or otherwise,

01:12:32.000 because, you know, frankly, the left has proven themselves to be much better and much more

01:12:35.000 vicious about implementing these things.

01:12:38.000 And so, yeah, you're right.

01:12:39.000 I think we have to be very careful about that.

01:12:41.000 And one of the things I'm encouraged by in sort of the future leadership in our movement, I mean, we've had...

01:12:46.000 You know, we've been at dinners, yourself, myself, JD, you know, being able to debate the different contours of this.

01:12:54.000 I mean, broadly aligned on the overall principle, deeply aligned on putting our country first over any other one.

01:12:59.000 But against that backdrop to say, OK, how are we actually going to make America stronger?

01:13:03.000 Is it in the short run going to be through a little bit more of a muscular subsidy based and temporary even regulatory state to reorient it the right way?

01:13:12.000 Or is the right next step to actually just say, you know what?

01:13:15.000 It might cost us some in the short run, but just dismantle it.

01:13:18.000 Shut it down.

01:13:19.000 Shut it down again. 1.00

01:13:20.000 Burn it. 1.00

01:13:20.000 Burn the ashes. 1.00

01:13:21.000 And when necessary, start from a blank slate.

01:13:23.000 And I think that that's That's, I think, what I see in the character of the emerging... You asked about the binge.

01:13:28.000 One of the things I love about some of the people who have been around those dinner tables with us is that they're people who share the same principles, but are still able to actually engage in reasoned debate.

01:13:38.000 Here's what I want to see not happen in the America First movement, right?

01:13:42.000 The reason the neoconservative and the Mitt Romney John McCain version of the GOP, it floundered.

01:13:48.000 It wasn't just that they had the wrong ideas.

01:13:52.000 Think about liberal internationalism, the democratic capitalism of somehow believing we're going to change China through trade.

01:13:59.000 The reason it failed wasn't just that those were inherently bad ideas in retrospect.

01:14:05.000 You never know, you know, no one's going to get it right in the first instance.

01:14:08.000 None of us know what the future holds in store.

01:14:09.000 We have the benefit of retrospect and we reject that today.

01:14:12.000 The reason it failed is it became so codified where it was, these guys, Mitt Romney, John McCain, they didn't know why they were saying the things they were saying.

01:14:22.000 They just knew they were supposed to say them.

01:14:23.000 They said them out of habit, out of muscle memory.

01:14:26.000 And so, you know, I'm speaking I was, you know, spitting some hard truth for us here, too, if I may, but I think it's going to make us stronger.

01:14:33.000 And I say the book is truths, it's not just to the left, but 360 degrees.

01:14:38.000 I don't, I sometimes, when I'm traveling the country for these down-ballot Canada's, I'll occasionally see people, they'll go on a stage and say things like, We need to put America first.

01:14:47.000 We need to make more things here.

01:14:49.000 We're the party of the working class.

01:14:51.000 But the way they're saying it reminds me of the way that John McCain or Mitt Romney might have said it, just because it feels like what you're supposed to say, as opposed to actually knowing why we're saying it.

01:15:01.000 I don't want to see the same thing happen in our movement.

01:15:03.000 I think you're right.

01:15:04.000 So I want to keep that culture of healthy debate in a constructive sense of how we put America first alive.

01:15:10.000 Our bench, and especially the younger side of that bench, I think, has that character to it.

01:15:15.000 But, you know, we got a job to achieve.

01:15:16.000 His first is, let's put your father back in office, the two mass deportations, fix the country and revive that economy, seal the border, get us out of the brink of World War III, just like he did, by the way, last time he took office back in 2016 with North Korea. 0.78

01:15:30.000 Do the same thing again.

01:15:31.000 And then after that, I hope there's a longer renaissance yet to come where we're going to be iterating on what it means to be America first.

01:15:38.000 And this book, I think, opens the door on that conversation.

01:15:42.000 Well, no, I agree with you.

01:15:43.000 It's actually interesting, you know, watching, you know, a guy like yourself and a J.D.

01:15:47.000 sort of, you know, do well, you know, a couple others even, you know, sort of emerge in a Republican primary.

01:15:52.000 You know, two years ago, I would have been like, oh, man, like, what's next?

01:15:56.000 Like, it's just going to go back to the same old.

01:15:57.000 But it's great to see people that have come out, you know, sort of as warriors, people who are willing to have those conversations about not just Again, the rote truth that they're told to say, but like, who actually understand the truths, are willing to go to bat for them, are willing to enable, more importantly, are able to articulate them beyond sort of the surface.

01:16:16.000 And I think that's a huge thing.

01:16:19.000 Did you get the bug, though?

01:16:20.000 Is it fighting from the outside?

01:16:21.000 Do you want to get back in the game?

01:16:23.000 Where's your role in the future of the movement?

01:16:26.000 What footprint do you want to have, Vivek?

01:16:28.000 You know, we should probably talk about that in about 45 days after we've won this thing.

01:16:34.000 It's really hard to kind of think about it, you know, contingency plan.

01:16:37.000 I mean, people in Ohio, you know what their effort was.

01:16:40.000 I mean, even in Springfield, people here want me to be the next governor here.

01:16:43.000 I mean, I think obviously we got J.D.' 's seat for the Senate, so there's the Ohio-centric stuff.

01:16:48.000 You know, obviously there's a lot that needs to be done in implementing the agenda.

01:16:51.000 You know, we've talked in the past about cabinet positions, administration.

01:16:55.000 I think, let's turn to that soon after November 5th, when we have some clarity.

01:17:00.000 And clarity, I mean, not just in terms of the presidency, where frankly right now, I don't want people to be complacent, but I actually feel pretty good.

01:17:08.000 But also in terms of what the Senate looks like.

01:17:10.000 I mean, look, we couldn't pass the SAVE Act.

01:17:12.000 That's a big deal.

01:17:12.000 The hardest part of the J.D.

01:17:13.000 decision was like, man, it's not like we have a lot of rock stars in the Senate.

01:17:17.000 You know what I mean?

01:17:17.000 There's two or three, but that's about it.

01:17:19.000 That's not enough.

01:17:21.000 We couldn't get the SAVE Act, not because Democrats didn't support it, but not even because enough Republicans supported it.

01:17:26.000 And so I do think that, let's see what that picture looks like.

01:17:29.000 And I don't think 51-49 is good enough. 0.89

01:17:32.000 No, no, we need 54-55.

01:17:35.000 Just to cancel out the guys that will just vote with the Democrats every time because it's like that, because they can, it's because it's easy for them.

01:17:41.000 It's expedient in Washington, D.C.

01:17:43.000 They'll get invited to the cool person holiday party.

01:17:45.000 Totally.

01:17:46.000 So if we're really in, if we're like in really like outstanding shape, like close to a 60-40 or 55, 56-44, right, in the Senate, yeah, that could be point one direction.

01:17:56.000 On the other hand, if we're razor thin, that could point in a different direction.

01:18:01.000 You know, I think there's a lot of ways to have change in the next four years, but whatever it is, we want to, we don't want to, we don't want to play small ball.

01:18:08.000 We get the chance.

01:18:09.000 We're going to be given the mandate by the people.

01:18:10.000 We don't play small ball and play big ball in the short time we're given.

01:18:13.000 And so that's how I'm looking at it.

01:18:15.000 I think you're 100% right, man.

01:18:16.000 That's what I say all the time.

01:18:17.000 We've been playing t-ball while they've been playing hardball, and, you know, you can't play against each other in that game.

01:18:22.000 We got to be playing the same game, and you've done a great job with that.

01:18:26.000 Vivek, where can we, where can people get the book?

01:18:28.000 Is it just The Usual Suspects available everywhere?

01:18:31.000 Yeah, Usual Suspects.

01:18:31.000 You know, funny story, actually, is it's been on number one on Amazon, like, the whole week, and then I just, the publisher agent just told me it was, oh, it just got bumped to number two.

01:18:41.000 I looked at, like, who bumped me from number one?

01:18:43.000 It was Melania.

01:18:44.000 Which is really great.

01:18:46.000 Which is also another great book, which I'm actually looking forward to.

01:18:49.000 My wife is looking forward to getting and reading as well.

01:18:51.000 But nonetheless, yeah, just get it.

01:18:52.000 Go to Amazon, get it.

01:18:54.000 It just came out this week.

01:18:55.000 It'd be pretty cool if we, you know, topped the bestseller list or whatever, just because it forces people on the left to read it and engage with it.

01:19:03.000 You know this as well as I do.

01:19:04.000 If you want to make money, books are not the way to do it.

01:19:06.000 But if you want to get a message out in a nuanced way, And I hope it arms people where... You know, you and I are both in this category.

01:19:13.000 I think you and I should talk about this publicly more.

01:19:15.000 We have friends on the left, right?

01:19:17.000 We have friends who disagree with us.

01:19:19.000 I grew up in New York City.

01:19:20.000 Like, you know, I was always a conservative, but there was a time, like, you could actually have a conversation.

01:19:24.000 Totally.

01:19:25.000 And I miss that.

01:19:25.000 I literally remember being like, hey guys, like, I get your point.

01:19:28.000 I totally disagree.

01:19:29.000 But like, if you're going to make that point, at least this seems to be the way to take it.

01:19:33.000 They're like, that's a really good idea.

01:19:34.000 I didn't think of that.

01:19:35.000 I'm like, you know, I just think we should remind people though, like your father has friends, you have friends, I have friends on the left, but what we want to do is actually open their eyes.

01:19:44.000 And so when people ask me in the campaign, how did you do that?

01:19:47.000 How do you talk to people on the other side?

01:19:49.000 That's actually what motivated me to write this book.

01:19:51.000 This is how you do it.

01:19:52.000 It's my suggestion of how you do it.

01:19:54.000 And if it helps people at home actually bring voters along, especially before November, then I think it will have been a success.

01:19:59.000 So I'll be grateful if people check it out.

01:20:01.000 Well, Vivek, great to have you here.

01:20:03.000 Guys, make sure you check out the book.

01:20:05.000 Vivek, I'm sure I'll run into you on the campaign trail.

01:20:07.000 I think I'm seeing you at a couple events over the next few weeks, so I look forward to catching up in person, and then in 40-something days, starting those other conversations up again, because we're going to have a busy road ahead.

01:20:18.000 Guys, Thank you so much for being here tonight.

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Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - September 26, 2024

Kamala Fails Softball Interview, Adams Indicted, Live with Vivek Ramaswamy | TRIGGERED Ep.177

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