00:10:09.520That's why I'm saying the polling I'm not focused on.
00:10:12.540If he were trying to run for re-election, I think you'll look at polling and you think about how that's going to play out.
00:10:18.460He is uniquely liberated to do what he thinks the right results are without having to worry about the day-to-day polling.
00:10:26.140And by the way, that is potentially going to run out in 2026 when they're likely going to impeach Trump again if Democrats take back control of the House.
00:10:37.420They don't have anything new to hit him with.
00:10:40.120So expect for them to go back to the tried-and-true failed methods of the past.
00:10:46.080We've already seen it with them trying to broadcast and attack him by saying he's Hitler.
00:10:50.860I think where we are likely headed is Trump has got to get everything done between now and the summer of 2026.
00:10:59.140And then we will see the House come down to five or six different really close races.
00:11:06.040And Democrats are either going to have a tiny minority or Republicans are going to have a tiny majority, right, tiny leadership.
00:11:14.060I think that we're going to see in the Senate good stuff.
00:11:18.240Republicans are going to maintain control of the Senate.
00:11:20.620So for judges, things like that, Trump is going to have four years to get his view of the judiciary through, get as many different judges confirmed.
00:11:30.760But in order to have both control of the House and the Senate, he's got to be fast.
00:11:37.960And I think that's what you're seeing right now.
00:11:40.240And sometimes that's going to make people a little bit upset.
00:11:43.320So that's why I'm not concerned about any of the polling to the extent it's accurate as we sit here at 100 days because he's making decisions that are multi-years in nature.
00:11:51.840Well, yes, and this is why I want Trump to not care about the polls right now because the polls in a year, as they pertain to the midterms and the Republican Party in its future, will matter.
00:12:03.860The polls right now do not matter at all.
00:12:05.960In fact, all the polls really do is give a talking point to anti-Trump media and the Democrat Party that want to create a perception of, oh, this isn't working.
00:13:19.420I also think, and we'll talk about this more, the next 100 days or so are set up to be incredibly consequential.
00:13:25.900Hopefully, we get some form of resolution in Ukraine, more resolution in Gaza.
00:13:32.640And again, inflation, which to me, I'll hit you when we come back, Buck, with what the American public, from an economic perspective, is most focused on.
00:16:32.160If my University of Tennessee ever gets back in the title game, I would be terrified to miss any of it.
00:16:39.000What was your play there for national title game day as a Buckeye?
00:16:42.980Yeah, there are a couple different things going on.
00:16:44.720So, first, I actually talked to my team about whether it would be possible to skip the inaugural balls so that I would be able to go to the game.
00:16:55.300And actually, you know, I guess we'd get inaugurated, we'd go to a few parties, and then I'd be able to watch the game while the president took care of the inaugural balls.
00:17:04.380Apparently, it would have been unprecedented for the vice president to skip the inaugural balls the night of the inauguration.
00:17:09.960What we were able to do, though, is before the first ball, I actually had all of my friends and family, we got basically, we turned a big hotel room into a sports bar.
00:17:21.300And so I was able to watch the first quarter before the first ball.
00:17:24.940And I think it was either right after the second or the third ball, Notre Dame started to come back a little bit.
00:17:31.220And so I sat in a room with like a 19-inch TV and just sort of watched the Buckeyes put it away.
00:17:36.880So I got to see a little bit of it, man.
00:17:39.220But, yeah, it's on the one hand, like, what a cool day for an Ohio State fan to be inaugurated as a vice president and have your team win the national championship.
00:17:48.040On the other hand, it was sad to miss most of the game.
00:17:50.380But, you know, official duties come first.
00:17:52.900J.D., I was also happy to see Vice President Vance.
00:17:55.800Very happy to see my beloved Buckeyes do so well.
00:17:58.740Well, I want to ask you about the border, if I can, and what's going on with the administration on, well, let's get into the next steps.
00:18:07.440The good news is you can sit here and tell us, but Clay and I have been telling everybody about this so far.
00:20:51.360And, you know, he felt, and I think he was right about this, that, you know, the left felt defeated in a certain way,
00:20:58.780that there were a lot of, you know, grassroots activists that just weren't nearly as fired up in 2024 as they were in 2016.
00:21:06.440And he's talking about people on the far left.
00:21:08.580But he said that, look, the courts are going to try to stop everything that we do.
00:21:11.860And it's actually not just immigration.
00:21:14.660I mean, the courts have tried to stop Pete Hegseth from not allowing, you know, transgender military personnel to continue serving.
00:21:23.380They've done a lot, I mean, which goes to the heart of military readiness, right?
00:21:26.820The Secretary of Defense saying that, you know, if you're dealing with a serious mental health issue, our compassion goes with you,
00:21:32.940but you can't be deployed to the battlefield.
00:21:35.940Like, that is the heart of the president and the Secretary of Defense's authorities.
00:21:39.800And so you have these district courts who really want to run the country and have decided that they are actually in charge of the United States of America.
00:21:48.620There's this very funny, I think, headline from the Babylon Bee that was, you know, something like,
00:21:53.860Donald Trump considers resigning to become a very powerful district court judge.
00:21:57.580But it's one of these jokes with a kernel of truth, which is that the district courts in this country have tried to take upon themselves powers that belong to the president of the United States.
00:22:08.760And it's funny, guys, you know, you hear the media and they'll say, well, this is a constitutional crisis.
00:22:13.700And the constitutional crisis is not Donald Trump refusing to allow the district courts to govern the country.
00:22:20.980The crisis is the district courts trying to govern the country.
00:22:24.420And our approach is we're fighting it legally.
00:22:27.600Of course, we're taking some of these cases to the Supreme Court and we think we're going to get success there.
00:22:32.120We're finding alternative methods to do what we need to do in compliance with the law.
00:22:37.260And we're just going to have to keep on fighting this, you know, day by day, figuring out where the district courts and to be clear, it's not all district courts.
00:22:54.640We're speaking to Vice President Vance and Mr. Vice President.
00:22:57.720Let me ask you about how things are going at this stage with not just identifying the waste, fraud and abuse within the government, a big mission that Doge has taken upon itself.
00:23:08.400But what we can expect now, how much of this do you think has been completed when you look at Elon and Doge's mission?
00:23:17.260Does Congress have to play a major role with rescissions?
00:23:20.280Essentially, we know there's a lot of shenanigans going on, but how do we actually get the shenanigans in government spending to stop?
00:23:28.200Yeah, I think we're making a lot of progress.
00:23:29.660I wouldn't say that it's done by any means.
00:23:32.020And, yes, Congress has a role because here's what happens.
00:23:35.140If Doge and Elon find $10 billion of spending that's just ridiculous, that's not consistent with the law or with the administration's policy priorities, that money just kind of sits there.
00:23:46.480And so it's still been taxed from the American people.
00:23:49.260And if we want to use it to pay down debt or to give it back to the American people through tax relief, then that does require an act of Congress.
00:23:56.240And I think Congress is very willing to do it.
00:23:58.340But I don't know if you saw, I think it was today or maybe yesterday, a report came out that Treasury actually is borrowing less money than they expected to borrow.
00:24:07.180And I think that's because of the success of Doge.
00:24:09.400You're seeing them make meaningful cuts in some of these crazy foreign aid programs.
00:24:14.280But I also think they're finding a lot of fraud in programs that are meant for American citizens that are going either to illegal aliens or to complete fraudsters.
00:24:23.240And so I think Doge is making a lot of progress, but it's not done.
00:24:27.400And I don't think it's ever going to be truly done, right?
00:24:29.420This is one of these problems that we have to continually fight against.
00:24:33.040And the reason why it was such a shock to the system is we had allowed the waste and the fraud to become so endemic in the way that we did government in this country.
00:24:42.140And I don't think we should ever go back.
00:24:43.760And I actually do think, and maybe this is too optimistic, that when all the political controversy is cleared, we look back on this a few years from now, we're going to realize that Doge saved the American people a lot of money, that it cut a lot of fraud out of our government, and that even some Democrats are going to say,
00:25:01.160Well, we have to keep doing this because we can't just let hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud every single year become part of how the U.S. government functions.
00:25:10.120We're talking to Vice President J.D. Vance.
00:25:12.500You guys have made tremendous strides with young men.
00:25:15.820The data continues to reflect that young men are breaking for both you and Donald Trump in big numbers.
00:25:21.600I think a big part of that is because young men are over this idea of men being able to play women's sports.
00:25:54.860I definitely think it's a winning political issue for the Republican Party because it's just basic common sense, right?
00:26:00.960I mean, people don't want women competing against grown men in sports, especially in some of these contact sports where the women could get injured.
00:26:10.140You know, I'm the father of a three-year-old daughter.
00:26:13.900I think it teaches valuable life lessons, but I don't want her competing against grown men when she does it.
00:26:18.240And this is just, again, it's basic common sense.
00:26:21.000I think it's the basic masculine instinct to protect young women.
00:26:24.780And one of the ways you do that is to not let, you know, a male boxer in the room with a female boxer.
00:26:30.540Just things like that I think have turned it into a 90-10 issue, that basic common sense.
00:26:34.980But, man, I think that so many of these companies, Nike or otherwise, they got caught up in this cultural zeitgeist of 2020, 2021.
00:26:43.960And it's like, I don't know, maybe they just thought the progressives were going to win.
00:26:48.460And so they decided to fund this stuff to the hilt, not realizing that the American people would have a rebellion against the craziness.
00:26:55.140I think that rebellion on the trans issue in particular, I mean, think about this, giving hormonal therapies to 12-year-old kids, causing irreversible damage to their bodies, forcing young girls to compete against boys in sports, sometimes causing serious injury in the process.
00:27:11.400I think this issue is such a bad loser among the American people that even some of the true believers have dropped it as a political issue.
00:27:20.600But I think it's our job to remind the American people this is what they've tried to do.
00:27:30.520You just had some Democrats who are smart enough to recognize it's a political loser.
00:27:34.780But, yeah, they're going to try to force 12-year-olds to take cross-sex hormones, and they're going to try to force young girls to compete against young boys if we give these guys power.
00:27:43.380The craziness, in other words, hasn't gotten away.
00:27:46.000They've just gotten a little bit better at hiding it.
00:27:49.640I appreciate you making the time for us today.
00:27:51.620The tariffs issue is something that has gotten a lot of attention on this show across the country for obvious reasons.
00:27:58.340People are very attuned to what the Trump negotiations with these countries and his approach to China is doing to the economy, the market, prices, everything.
00:28:09.320Wall Street Journal being a little salty about it today on their front page.
00:28:13.420What do you say to anyone who is trying to steer Donald Trump away from this course because they're a little nervous about the tariff situation?
00:28:21.860So I've had so many conversations, guys, in private with the president about this, and I think his public statements, I mean, going back to the 1980s, this is an issue that he feels very deeply about.
00:29:10.720And God forbid, you know, we've had shortages of critical pharmaceuticals in this country over the last few years.
00:29:16.760We cannot have a real, successful, prosperous country if we're dependent on the communist Chinese for the drugs that we put into the bodies of our children.
00:29:26.900And so what the president has said here is, yes, this is going to be disruptive.
00:29:31.820Yes, this is going to require some transition.
00:29:33.960But he's fundamentally committed to the basic process of manufacturing more in the United States, creating good-paying jobs in the process, but more fundamentally making America more self-reliant.
00:29:44.360And I think the problem is that we had a bipartisan consensus in this country for 40 years that we could just ship all of our heavy industry overseas, that we could ship a lot of our good jobs overseas, a lot of our factories, and that somehow that would make the United States more prosperous.
00:30:00.800I think the reality is that it's made us weaker.
00:30:03.640It's made us more dependent on the communist Chinese.
00:30:06.560And when you see, for example, the Chinese respond to the president's trade policy by saying, well, we're going to cut off the United States from critical supplies that are necessary for the American people, doesn't that just prove that Donald Trump was right?
00:30:22.120How did we ever get into the position where the People's Republic of China could threaten the American people with the loss of critical supplies?
00:30:30.920And given that we are in that position, Donald Trump is exactly right that we have to get out of it.
00:30:35.140I'm not going to tell you it's going to be easy because it's not, but it's necessary.
00:30:39.720And I think the president recognizes he has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do it.
00:30:43.640J.D. Vance, vice president of the United States, congratulations on the first hundred days and your Ohio State Buckeyes being the national champs.
00:41:56.200And the thing that Trump got right back in 2016 when he said it is, hey, I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and my base is not leaving me.
00:42:05.340And I'm paraphrasing him on that quote, but that was basically the quote.
00:42:42.140If the price of gas keeps coming down and if the price of groceries does not go up, the average American is going to consider Trump to have done a decent job.
00:42:53.080I'll also layer on foreign affairs doesn't feel like we're very close to a war.
00:42:58.360Now, I hope I'm not jinxing it, but it feels like for Americans in terms of our stability and safety around the world, I feel pretty good about that as we speak right now.
00:43:09.460If Trump decides to just get it together and invade us, I am going to blame you for this now.
00:43:13.160This will be on me if Canada or Mexico, Canada or Mexico, Costa Rica decides to finally get an army and decides to try to invade.
00:43:20.560This will be on me because I just said I feel very safe.
00:43:22.980But in general, I feel like we're a long way from any wars.
00:43:26.220Also, I would just say, what would people want Trump to be working on right now?
00:44:05.160It happened even faster than I anticipated that it would.
00:44:07.780He's getting the negotiations going on tariffs.
00:44:10.040He has the negotiations going on Russia, Ukraine.
00:44:12.280He is looking at Iran and Israel and, you know, Mideast peace, et cetera.
00:44:18.680What is he not doing that he said he would do?
00:44:21.780That's I think in a lot of ways the real test of the first hundred days is that, you know, promises made, promises kept goes a little bit too far because, well, have we gotten the results yet that we need?
00:44:34.340No, but focus is important and the focus has been on what he said it would be.
00:44:40.960And I think in the first hundred days of an administration, that's about the best you can ask for is you're actually doing this stuff, right?
00:44:48.060You're trying to do this stuff actively.
00:45:19.180Let's talk about preborn for a second here.
00:45:20.560The preborn network of clinics has a team of people who have a critical mission saving the lives of unborn babies.
00:45:27.060They see the access and widespread availability of abortions for pregnant women who are debating such a decision.
00:45:32.520And preborn steps in and does all they can to help convince that pregnant mom that there's a better option for her than abortion life for her baby.
00:45:41.160And one way that preborn achieves this is by giving the gift of an ultrasound because that ultrasound allows that mom to meet her unborn child, to hear the heartbeat and see the movements of the child within her.
00:45:52.460They accomplish this goal with just twenty eight dollars in expense.
00:45:56.460OK, that is fantastic because it allows them to put so much time and effort toward actually the mission, helping moms in this process.
00:46:06.140Preborn operates its clinics in communities across the country where abortion rates are tragically high.
00:46:10.860They do this on purpose because preborn gives resources and services to women, including that ultrasound, to help save lives every day.
00:46:20.080In 20 years, the preborn clinics have saved three hundred thousand plus babies to donate securely to preborn.
00:47:07.820And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.
00:47:17.320So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:47:20.560Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:47:36.140They say they surveyed nearly 20,000 adults and asked top economic issue for you and your family.
00:47:45.460Forty four percent buck said inflation.
00:47:48.640So if I were giving advice to anyone in the Trump team over the next hundred days, I would say maniacally focus on bringing the cost of goods down, because I think that's the number one way that people tend to react right now to the economy.
00:48:17.980Again, these are big, major systemic issues.
00:48:22.580And then you get into housing, the stock market, which is in many ways a snapshot of whatever the economy is at any given time.
00:48:29.480Those are things that I think Trump gets.
00:48:33.120But if I were saying if you could focus on one thing and solve one thing, inflation is down.
00:48:39.240But I think if you could change the idea that Biden built in, that things are going to cost far too much, that would be the most helpful in the next hundred days.
00:48:50.440Hey, if you were going to be judged on something, what would you want to be judged on bringing inflation down and cost of goods being not a massive thing that everybody's obsessed with?
00:49:01.460It would be nice, though, at some point to get a reduction in rates here.
00:49:05.240That could be I know Trump has been very vocal about that.
00:49:08.060I think he's right about that to free up a little bit of liquidity in our economy would be a good thing.
00:49:14.220I think people are waiting to make moves based upon this.
00:49:47.740People that have big stock accounts, multiple homes, own businesses, et cetera, they generally do much better when inflation is high or rather they can weather the inflation much better.
00:49:58.820But, you know, the Treasury Department is going to borrow five hundred and fourteen billion dollars this quarter.
00:50:04.660According to Bloomberg, Clay, this is a three hundred twenty percent increase from its previous estimate.
00:50:09.480We're still spending too much money, everybody.
00:50:11.340But I guess this is the problem is the biggest challenge I think for Doge all along has been.
00:50:16.800So we can't touch 70 percent of spending.
00:50:19.340Let's see what we can do to make the other 30 percent of spending not so crazy.
00:50:29.060Well, I mean, this is the thing that we're speeding at rapidly is, frankly, if you don't address the thirty six trillion dollars in debt, sooner or later, the bill is going to get paid maybe by your grandkids.