Eric Trump-Exclusive Interview on his new book Under Siege
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Summary
Ted Cruz sits down with his good friend Eric Trump to discuss his new book, Under Siege: My Family s Fight to Save Our Nation, a memoir about growing up in the shadow of the Trump empire, and facing down the FBI.
Transcript
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It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, and it's Ben Ferguson with you.
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It's so nice to have you with us, and certainly if you're listening on radio right now as
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And this is going to be a really fun show tonight, Senator, because we're going to get
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to have a good friend of ours on, take a pause sort of from politics for a moment, talk about
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a cool new book that is out, and what was behind writing this book, and I'll let you
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You know, Ben, I've got to say, we try to count on being honest and candid with our
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viewers and listeners, and yet you just claim that we're going to take a break from politics,
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and this is about as far away from taking a break from politics as I can possibly imagine.
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Today, we are very pleased to welcome our friend Eric Trump, President Donald Trump's son, who
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The book is entitled Under Siege, My Family's Fight to Save Our Nation.
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He is in the midst of his nationwide book tour right now, and in classic Trump fashion, he's
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on the list, and there's only one place to be on the list, and that is at number one.
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It's the number one best-selling book in America right now.
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Mr. Senator, now it will probably be my last book as well, because I'm not doing this again.
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The return on time of books is especially when you put your heart and soul into it.
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And Mr. Senator, you've done a better job fighting against the weaponization of government
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than I would say just about anybody other than maybe Donald Trump, right, who's had to face
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And, you know, I became the pinata in this whole fight because I was the one guy who
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You know, I was the guy that was running the Trump organization.
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I was the guy that ran everything that was outside of Washington, D.C. for my father when
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And what they tried to do to us, what they tried to do to our family, what they tried to do
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to this nation, what they tried to do to you and all your viewers on this show is unthinkable.
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And somebody had to materialize it because it was the greatest governmental corruption
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And they launched everything they had at your father, at your family, four separate indictments.
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On top of that, the asinine case from the New York attorney general trying to argue
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that somehow global international banks are innocent waifs who are deceived and apparently
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are unable to value real estate because, you know, giant banks have never had to value
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I will confess, for me, maybe the most absurd moment of all of it was when the idiot judge
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in New York valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million, which I'll confess, I saw your dad.
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I saw your dad not shortly after that, and I offered it on the spot.
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I said, Mr. President, I'll give you $20 million right now.
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I mean, as you know, you can't buy a hot dog stand in Palm Beach for $18 million.
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And that notion, to me, it was the most ludicrous, it was a relatively small detail of what was
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But you guys were the targets of it, and it cannot have been fun.
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Mr. Senator, I became the most subpoenaed man in American history for doing absolutely
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I've lived a very straight, very good life, hardworking guy, no games, never even approached
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the line, you know, raised right, you know, and they tried to destroy us.
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I was the one that was getting calls from the FBI.
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You remember the Russia hoax very well, because you were probably the best person at fighting
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Eric, I hear you have secret servers in the basement of Trump Tower communicating directly
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I literally started, Mr. Senator, I started laughing.
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I go, first of all, you don't keep servers in basements because basements flood.
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And they did it so a greedy woman could get about three extra votes, right?
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And they used that as their explanation as to why she lost.
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And then it was 112 subpoenas that I received for, again, doing nothing wrong.
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And then it was weaponization of every attorney general and district attorney in this country,
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whether it be Letitia James or Alvin Bragg or Cy Vance or Fannie Willis and her boyfriend
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in Fulton, Georgia, you know, or Jack Smith or Comey and everything that they did.
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Then they took my father off the ballot in Colorado.
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And then they took him off the ballot in Maine.
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And when that didn't work, they tried to silence his voice and get rid of his First Amendment rights.
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And when that didn't work, when we popped up Truth Social, what did they do?
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I was the guy that got the call when 30 FBI agents were outside screaming in a phone to me,
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And I'll never forget walking out of that jail cell with my father in New York after the 34 felony counts, right,
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And I said, Dad, we either win the White House or you and I are in jail for doing absolutely nothing wrong.
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And they were doing it to the people in this country as well.
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You know, they were skipping great people who had worked their butts off their entire year
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because of DEI hires and literally ruining upward mobility of people across the country.
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This siege wasn't just against the Trump family.
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It was against every person that's watching us right now.
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You mentioned Mar-a-Lago a second ago and getting that phone call.
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Can you just explain how insane that day must have been?
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And when you're getting a phone call, they're telling you to turn your cameras off.
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It was about 7.50, 8 o'clock in the morning when I got a call from my team.
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They say they're 30 FBI agents and they have a search warrant.
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Like, we have, like, such a great relationship with law enforcement.
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I go, how would I not know about this from Secret Service?
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And I'll never forget, I said, I finally figured out what they were doing.
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And that's when he wrote up that beautiful tweet, as you remember.
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And the FBI was so damn pissed that we sent out that tweet.
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And instead, my father writes that beautiful tweet.
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You know, right now the FBI is raiding the famous Mar-a-Lago, my home.
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And remember, Senator, they said it was on behalf of NARA, right, National Archives.
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And I go, does anybody actually believe a glorified library sent 30 FBI agents to invade Mar-a-Lago with firearms?
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And then sure enough, it comes out that it was Joe Biden and it was Merrick Garland and it was the whole host of criminals that weaponized the entire system.
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I actually own two different barbecue restaurants, one right now.
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And the quality of meat when you want to make amazing food is so vitally important.
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Now, you've heard of big pharma, but have you ever heard of big ag?
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Did you know that 85% of American beef is controlled by just four major companies?
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Just because you buy American doesn't mean you're buying healthy.
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I know you're going to try to terrorize the New York Times a little bit.
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That's the hardest thing, is just to screw with them and be at the top of their list.
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So everyone listening, I hope you'll buy the book just so we can screw with them a little bit.
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Well, I will say, Eric, you should brace yourself.
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It doesn't matter how many copies of the book you sell.
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The New York Times is going to insist that, like, left-handed transgender witches is the number one book in America.
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And to be fair, in the New York Times newsroom, it probably is the number one book in America.
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But if you get outside the New York Times and to the rest of America, there are a lot of people right now that are going to Amazon.
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Buy one for yourself and buy one to give a liberal just to drive them crazy.
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And to say, explain to me again how you think weaponization is a bad thing because your liberal friends, to the extent you have any, that they haven't de-friended you, they're not going to have an answer to that.
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Eric, tell me, what was your dad's reaction when you went in and told him, OK, the FBI agents are here?
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But, like, what was his immediate reaction when you tell him that?
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You know, it's, you know, I've seen my father pissed many times, but he doesn't get pissed off in situations of kind of, like, great anguish and stress, right?
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But, you know, almost foreshadow Butler is the same thing.
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It's, I probably would have been pissed in Butler, and I think he was actually remarkably calm, especially in the aftermath of what happened.
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And, you know, he was always his calmest in the worst moments, always.
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I mean, you were there for many of them in so many different ways.
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It was a very, he goes, you've got to be kidding me.
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I mean, for the next month, they had helicopters buzzing over Mar-a-Lago.
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And, you know, the scenes of that front gate, you remember the cop car in front of the front gate of Mar-a-Lago?
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I mean, Mar-a-Lago became, not that it wasn't probably already, but it became the most famous property in the world based on that raid and what they did.
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And in the aftermath of all of it, we find out Jack Smith was bringing classified folders and effectively staging photo shoots on the office floor of my father's office.
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But, you know, as I said before, guys, I mean, they were going through Melania's closet.
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They literally, they took his medical records, right?
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I can only tell you, they took attorney-client documents, right?
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That also really pissed off Eileen Cannon, the judge on the case.
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And then, you know, again, all of this was staged.
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You think Donald Trump just leaves classified folders fanned out perfectly on the floor?
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They wanted to weaponize the system in any way, shape, or form.
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A lot of people remember the de-platforming, and you mentioned that earlier.
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And you go back to the end of his first term in office.
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But one of the things you mentioned earlier on was they tried to ruin your businesses by
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Can you explain for people that don't understand just how critical that was in a time in the
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I mean, you've been handed the family business to run it, and now you're finding out you
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can't even have banking the way that you need to have banking to literally run businesses.
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Whether you're a big business or a small business, a lot of people listening right now, if you
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I mean, literally, it was coordinated by the administration.
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And they called up, and they said, listen, congratulations, you canceled the account.
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These are massive commercial buildings that have hundreds of tenants, thousands of people
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working in these buildings, hundreds if not thousands of vendors, heavy real estate taxes.
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I mean, people, hundreds and hundreds of people depend, their livelihoods depend on these
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They've got complicated lockbox provisions and loan documents, thousands of inputs coming
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And they just called up, your accounts are going to get closed.
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You've got one or two days to move them, and congratulations, you're done, all because
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we wore a hat that said, make America great again, that was red.
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These were escrow accounts, things that had nothing to do, nothing to do with politics
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They do all the e-com platforms in the middle of the night, turned off our accounts
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We were selling golf polos that we have from Mar-a-Lago.
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And they did everything they could to hurt us, to turn off the rails, right?
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You had Letitia James that was trying to repossess our assets.
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Hence the reason the appellate courts threw out the case 5-0 when we got a resounding
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And because I was the guy outside of Washington, D.C., because I ran the company, it all fell
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That's how I became the most subpoenaed person in the history of this country, having never
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They wanted to get to my father coming through me.
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Now, were these business accounts, personal accounts, both?
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I mean, how many accounts are we talking about, roughly?
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You know, lots of those being business accounts, all of them being us.
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You know, my wife has, like, athletic clothing line.
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You know, JPMorgan Chase wouldn't open up an account.
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If you even came close, you know, if you even came close, I have a little farm with a couple
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If it was six degrees of separation from Trump, they canceled us.
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And honestly, guys, you know, I'm an outspoken, you know, big fan of, you know, cryptocurrency.
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That's how I found crypto, because I realized how quickly financial institutions can be weaponized
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against the American people and realized that there's nothing that can be done on, you know,
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using traditional financial institutions that can't be done better, faster, cheaper,
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safer, and more efficiently using cryptocurrency.
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Did they even purport to give you any explanation?
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Or you just get phone calls or get an email and say, okay, this account's done?
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Yeah, other than a lot of those, you know, a lot of the people that worked in the banks
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who otherwise said this is the most, I can't believe it.
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That's what they're saying in the corridors every day.
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They're telling us, you know, they're telling us we can't talk to you ever again.
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To take the rails of being able to pay employees.
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To not be able to pay them a salary all because somebody wanted to politicize a system against
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a candidate because they happened to be a conservative and they believed in making America great again.
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Senator, this is a story that we're hearing about the weaponization of the private sector.
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The private sector against the Trump organization.
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The moment that he just said 500 bank counts just shut down.
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That number, I'd never heard anything remotely close to that.
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So you're running your family's outside businesses.
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What do you do when you're given, what, you said 24 hours, 48 hours notice?
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Like, were there banks that were willing to welcome your business?
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Or what did you do with 500 accounts being canceled?
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You had a lot of attorney generals and you had a lot of government institutions that were
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going to these banks saying, don't even think about it.
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You know, Letitia James was doing that to the bonding companies when we had to, after the
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initial ruling, when we had to post a $600 million bond.
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By the way, that was like five times the size of the Boeing bond.
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That made them, you know, literally, I mean, it was the biggest bond ever seen in the
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country, you know, and she was going to the very same institution saying, don't even touch
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So we had to post a bond based on the court before we had everything overturned.
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And she was going to the biggest insurance company saying, you don't touch that bond.
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If you touch that bond, I'm going to think less favorably on you.
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That's how badly they weaponize the system.
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And honestly, I had probably 100 people in the company that didn't sleep for a six month
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And thank God we had enough little local banks, you know, that you move all the accounts.
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I'm thinking, right, to these little local branches who want to take your money.
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They were small little mom and pop regional banks that did the right thing and honestly
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probably saved us based on the fact that they were willing to do the right thing.
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I'd hear from people every single day, you know, my bank canceled me.
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Well, my company makes a spring and the spring goes in a fishing reel.
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And Bass Pro Shops sells 12 gauge duck hunting ammo.
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And they thought the affiliation, I heard this everywhere I went.
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I believe in the future of kind of modern finance.
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And because I believed in cryptocurrency, my banks canceled me.
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It's illegal in a lot of states and under a lot of banking clauses.
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But the fact that you can literally, I mean, could you imagine if AT&T or Verizon just
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decided to cancel all conservative cell phones?
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How much money do you think that Trump, when you guys were out during the four years and
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under siege like this, how many business deals got blown up because people were afraid even
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to just do business with you because they were afraid their business would be affected
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I'm assuming that was a reality for quite some time.
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I mean, there were reporters that just made their whole livelihoods.
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David Fahrenthold from The Washington Post and others, you know, made their entire livelihoods
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calling up, you know, vendors of ours, calling up our employees, calling up brides and grooms
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that were going to get married at one of the properties, one of the hotels.
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They were harassing people that were getting married at Trump resorts?
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Oh, I have more emails than you can possibly imagine.
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You know, I hear you're going to go get married at Mar-a-Lago.
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You know, this might have to make the front cover of our respective paper.
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And these brides and grooms are saying, I just want to get married in peace.
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You know, I just, you know, this is a beautiful property.
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Whatever the hell the reason, they were doing that.
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Hey, you tell us anything about Donald Trump, we'll let you go.
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They tried to turn you against your own father.
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They weaponized every DA and AG to try and flip every single person to say anything negative,
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to get any negative testimony against Donald Trump for their own political purposes.
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Guys, this was the siege that I dealt with every single day, right?
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I mean, it was all of these factors that came together all at once, all the time, doing
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anything they could to just chop us off at every single—I mean, when they made up the
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I mean, they have stories about prostitution in there, about golden you-know-whats, right?
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Also, a greedy woman could get, you know, again, two more votes.
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And there's been zero accountability for any of it.
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And as a son who fought by my father's side every single day during this battle, somebody
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Somebody had to tell the inside perspective of the lengths that a corrupt government will
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go to, besides just spying on campaigns and despite just, you know, raiding homes, you
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know, all the things that they did to try and destroy us, to try and destroy Make America
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Great Again, and try and destroy conservatives all across the country.
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Look, it was unmitigated evil, and it was driven—part of it was driven by hate.
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Today, the defining characteristic, I think, of the Democrat Party is they hate your father.
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I mean, that anything connected to your father, they hate.
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And I think it also, though, was a deep contempt for democracy.
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I think every one of these indictments, I think the weaponization that we saw, their
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underlying terror is that the voters would do what they did in November of 2024 and vote
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And this was all about undermining democracy and preventing the voters from doing that.
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You know, Eric, you mentioned earlier that you described yourself as the most subpoenaed
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How many subpoenas did you get, and did you testify a lot of times?
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I sat in more depositions than any human being in the history of depositions.
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And by the way, these are like big boy subpoenas, right?
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They're all coming from, you know, your close friend, Elizabeth Warren, as we like to call
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You know, please give us every email in the company, and they would list 1,000 words.
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But aside from that, they would list national and international.
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Well, all our hotels are Trump International Hotel, and all our golf courses are Trump National
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Every email signature of every person in the company either has the word national or
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I actually brought this to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court specifically told them,
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They wanted to find any comma that was out of place, and they couldn't.
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I mean, in the Letitia James trial, literally, Deutsche Bank was on the stand saying that
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Trump was the best lender that they've ever had, right?
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We made them hundreds of millions of dollars, paid off every loan, paid it off ahead of time,
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Even in the darkest days of COVID, when they made us shut down our properties, we never
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missed, we never defaulted, we never breached a covenant.
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And then one day, I wake up to the nightmare of, you're fined $600 million for doing nothing
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wrong with banks that loved us, that testified that they loved us.
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I mean, it was, you know, and that's because you had a crooked judge, again, got overturned
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5-0 at the next court, but they rigged the entire system, and you're seeing them do that
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You're seeing them do that in Washington, D.C., where 94% of the cases that go in front
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of the lower course are literally, you know, going against the administration, and then
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they all have to go up on appeal and get overturned.
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But guys, the beautiful thing about this story is we won, right?
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I mean, my wife is on Fox News on a Saturday at 9 p.m., and she's getting four extra ratings
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of CNN on the same time slot on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in prime time slots, right?
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And independent voices like these podcasts are winning the day.
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I had a chance to be on her show, and she's a great interviewer because she's relaxed.
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She's asking real questions, and it's night and day.
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I actually think he has a padded room, and he, like, puts on a straitjacket when he remembers
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I just came off Caitlyn Collins about 20 minutes ago, all right?
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Let me ask you, when all of this was coming in, and it is not exaggeration to say there
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has never been a political leader, subject to more weaponization, more assaults, more
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insanely unfair attacks than your father has been.
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Was there ever a time that you felt yourself giving in to despair?
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We like pain or something along those lines, right?
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And I think it served us well, but no, I think we were so pissed off.
00:27:39.500
At that point, we wanted to fight, and we wanted to win, and we wanted to save the Constitution.
00:27:47.120
We wanted to save the, you know, Second Amendment.
00:27:51.380
We wanted to stop the DEI nonsense, you know, men my size swimming in women's sport.
00:27:57.080
We wanted to save the greatest country in the world against absolute lunacy.
00:28:04.460
We went out there, and we punched back every single day, and we did that as a family.
00:28:09.480
And honestly, I've never been more proud of a human being in my life.
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Senator, you and I were just talking with him about this,
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What did you guys spend just doing the fighting of all the lawsuits against you during that four-year period?
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If you want to come in, I'll break down the finances.
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We spent $400 million to defend ourselves against nonsense.
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The fact that we did not have secret servers communicating with the Kremlin.
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Remember, you had Adam Schiff out there every single day.
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Guys, if he wasn't protected by the speech and debate clause,
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He would have been living in a shoebox based on the fact that you would have sued him for slander
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They did everything they possibly could to take us down.
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Between that, you know, Letitia, you know, Alvin Bragg, Cy Vance, you know, Fannie.
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Between Alvin Bragg, Cy Vance, Letitia James, Jack Smith.
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And I don't know, Alvin Bragg, because you had Bershon.
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I mean, Judge Bershon's daughter is like the head digital fundraiser for the Democratic Party,
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And literally, you'd be sitting in these courtrooms, guys, and I would not leave my father's side.
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If he was there, I was going to be there as a son to support him.
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You know, and most of the time, some of these cases I wasn't gagged in.
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So normally I was the guy in the courthouse steps, you know, shouting and yelling at the cameras
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as to what the hell was actually going on, because that's the only way you could communicate a message.
00:32:07.420
But guys, I mean, you had liberal, and I mean liberal reporters,
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who were in that courtroom shaking their heads saying, none of this makes any sense.
00:32:14.880
I mean, they shut down all of Manhattan, lower Manhattan, for a $100,000 payment
00:32:20.720
that my father didn't even make, made by a lawyer.
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I mean, you know, Al Capone had one felony indictment.
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They indicted my father 34 times for a $100,000 payment, by the way,
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by a district attorney who ran on the premise, you know, of reducing what,
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you know, just decriminalizing just about anything.
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You know, you could shoot somebody in the face in Times Square, and it was decriminalized,
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and you're going to let them out, and, you know, you're going to have community policing
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I mean, he ran on the premise of literally emptying Rikers Island so you had no criminals in there,
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yet, you know, 34 felonies in a six-month period of time is shutting down New York
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If only your father were mugging people in Times Square, then Alvin Bragg would never have prosecuted him.
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But instead, he committed the unspeakable sin of not only being President of the United States,
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but being an extraordinarily successful and bold President of the United States,
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All right, we don't have much time left, but I want to take it a little bit lighter.
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I've never in my life have I met anyone remotely like your father.
00:33:38.820
But before he was president, what was it like growing up as a kid with Donald Trump as your father?
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Like, what was he like as a dad when you were 10?
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Honestly, the greatest dad you could ever imagine.
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I mean, every day I'd go give him a kiss before I went to school.
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You never knew how important that was going to be now.
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Yeah, as I said, it probably benefited us pretty well.
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You know, listen, we were spoiled as hell in that we lived in, you know, Trump Tower.
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If we wanted something, if I wanted a fishing rod, congratulations, you're working for it.
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I got on our construction sites when I was 11 years old, doing demo, doing electrical, HVAC, you know, running backhoes, excavators, you know.
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I grew up working with my hands on our construction sites with many of the guys that work for me today.
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And by the way, he wanted us to be tired as hell at the end of the day.
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You know, because, listen, don't give type A kids, or any kid, but don't give type A kids money or free time because bad things happen.
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And everything we've ever done, we fought together, whether it's real estate, whether it was The Apprentice.
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I mean, when he decided to run, he said to us, he goes, you know, kids, let's do this.
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I've got nine illegal immigrants around me, and I'm battling all of them.
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And I don't know the first damn thing about illegal immigration, right?
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I mean, like, this is not the world that we came from.
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My mother was an amazing powerhouse and strict, demanded manners, demanded respect, demanded work ethic.
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And I have the greatest parents you can ever imagine.
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I spent a lot of time in Under Siege talking about, you know, being raised by them.
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And, you know, it was unique in so many ways, but they did everything they could in this strange world that we lived in to ground us and make sure we turned out to be hard workers, normal, you know, and didn't have any of these kind of Hunter Biden-esque problems.
00:35:52.820
You know, I don't do finger painting selling it to, you know, foreign nationals all over the world.
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I, you know, never married my, you know, my brother's ex-wife, like, never did that kind of stuff.
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I was always a good kid who believed in God and believed in hard work and, you know, lived an honest life.
00:36:09.760
Eric, I can't tell you how many times, dozens if not hundreds of times, people have commented that one of the things they admire most about your dad is you and your brothers and sisters.
00:36:21.780
And, listen, it is hard for any successful person to raise good kids.
00:36:29.200
And, you know, I know your entire family, and I will say, literally, people early on throughout the process, they'll comment, well, you know, somehow his kids are, like, not messed up and incredibly successful and put together.
00:36:45.560
And, I mean, it's – all right, let me ask you.
00:36:47.580
Let's say we have some young parents that are listening to this podcast.
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Are there any lessons – a young parent, by the way, you know, Ben has young kids.
00:36:58.640
Are there any lessons from your dad that young parents should know or lessons that you've tried to apply?
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Keep them poor and make them start working early.
00:37:17.560
And, you know, I can't tell you guys how many friends I had, you know, who were peers who went to school with me.
00:37:22.960
And, you know, three-quarters of them ended up in rehab, and a lot of them went down bad roads.
00:37:28.000
They were getting Ferraris, you know, when they're, you know, 16 years old.
00:37:31.040
Like, what do you ever want to aspire to get if that's how you're being raised?
00:37:36.560
I mean, does it surprise you that those people don't have work ethic?
00:37:39.280
Does it surprise you that they go down bad roads?
00:37:41.340
And my father would never let that happen to us.
00:37:46.160
And believe me, if I wasn't good at what I did, real estate-wise, I would not be in this chair.
00:37:52.980
You know, if we weren't incredibly capable, believe me, I wouldn't be running one of the largest real estate empires anywhere in the world.
00:37:58.600
And he made us work, and he made us prove that we were good at what we do, and we fought every single day.
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And we're an incredibly tight family, and he's a remarkable person.
00:38:09.080
And I'm so proud of him, especially in a week where he's accomplished as much as he had.
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I am so damn proud of what he did and what he's accomplished and the hell of a journey.
00:38:21.460
The siege is all worth it based on, you know, the great things that are happening to our country and our world.
00:38:31.280
Don't forget, grab the podcast, share it wherever you can, and thanks for joining us.
00:38:35.260
It's Verdict with Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:38:37.120
We'll see you back here on the podcast all week long.