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[00:00:01]

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[00:00:30]

What it is now a little over 24 hours after Donald Trump won the majority of the popular vote, about half the Latino vote, overwhelming majority of the Electoral College, just all three branches of government.

[00:00:47]

Amazing.

[00:00:48]

Both Houses of the Commerce and the Executive Branch. How did that happen?

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I think it happened because it was, a, a rejection of what the modern left has put on offer, which in some ways was a great favor to the rise of this country. You need something to actually provoke a rebellion like the one that we had. That's right. I also think that it is a feature of the leader who actually led this entire movement. It was very personal to Donald Trump, too. I think that's one of the things I've appreciated is that I wrote this the morning after the lecture, the afternoon after, and it just felt right to me. The thing that I've learned as I've gotten to know him over the last year much better is He's not an ideologue or a policy wonk, and he doesn't pretend to be one. But he is a badass, actually. He's definitely a badass. I think the nation- He's definitely a badass.

[00:01:48]

Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. They're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson. Com. Here's the episode.

[00:02:07]

The nation needs a badass as its commander-in-chief right now. And democracy works, actually, in the end. The people really knew what they needed, and they showed up in droves to put the right person in office. And so I just think it is one of these rare inspiring moments in history where the people knew what they wanted, They would not be shaken from their will. He would not be shaken from his will. I loved being in Mar-a-Lago that night where it was just interesting where everybody else is, myself too, included, is just really joyous about what's happening. I'm sitting next to Donald Trump, and he's sitting there and It was just, Yep, this is exactly how it was supposed to be. Wait till it comes in. All right, now we're going to the Convention Center. This is where I was destined to be and what I was put here to do. I think the people of this country right now want somebody who has that level of self-confidence and conviction to bring that back for the country. Anyway, I just think it was a beautiful moment of democracy working. It was incredible. It goes beyond policy.

[00:03:09]

It's just like the persona of the country is actually what we recovered.

[00:03:12]

Yeah. I mean, I've spent eight years watching Republicans kiss Donald Trump's ass in public, and I always feel a little nauseous. I love Trump just personally because I know him well, but I hate hearing people say... It's all fake. Yeah, it is. It's performative. But now, ever since he got shot, I realized not only do I really like Trump, I find him confusing, and I really respect Trump, and I mean that when I'm saying it. I have no reason to kiss his ass, and I mean that. I felt that at night.

[00:03:44]

I think actually for me, that's been a bit of a journey as well. Of course. I didn't know him as well as you knew him anyway. But at this point in time, yeah, he's the right guy to lead the country.

[00:03:53]

Exactly. He's actually the right guy to lead the country. You go through phases of taking, maybe I'm being too honest, but taking Trump seriously. Trump is eccentric. I mean, that's just a fact. He got elected in '16, not accidentally. There are reasons he got elected, but he said to himself many times, and it's true, I was there, he did not expect to win. It was this on the road with the grateful dead thing, just shambolic. You know what I mean? This did not feel that way at all. It felt purposeful. It felt like he was living out his destiny and the nation's destiny. It felt very That's how it felt that night.

[00:04:32]

It was like a conviction that this is my destiny, this is the nation's destiny. America has this great tradition, by the way. We believe in our own manifest destiny. It's just like we had no reason to believe it. Basically, we have no logic behind it. It's just that we know that we're born to be the greatest nation that sets an example for everybody else of what's possible for human capacity. This is the country that does it. We had no reason to believe that other than the fact that we do. I think that that's the leader we need right now to bring that back, and that's Donald Trump as a person. In some ways, Trump's story is America's story. Trump's comeback is now hopefully America's comeback. I actually just think it's going to play out that way in the next couple of years. The national spirit is going to be back. You'll see it in the composition of the electorate, by the way. A lot of young people. That was probably the biggest demographic shift. It was the biggest, It just came in a tidal wave of force, which I was particularly passionate about seeing this time around.

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Me too. I totally agree. I think it's just this moment where we're going through a great spiritual, I don't mean spiritual in the religious sense here. I mean, the civic sense, but a spiritual revival of American identity. Clearly. That was the pinnacle of what we saw on Tuesday night.

[00:05:38]

There was a moment, I think right around the time he was shot and Elon endorsed him within moments, which I think was Just looking back, a pivot point, the whole thing. But where I think, or I myself felt this way, why are we on the defensive? People who vote for Donald Trump, why are we embarrassed? There was this very successful effort to make people feel ashamed for supporting Trump, and it worked for, I mean, eight years anyway. Then in one moment, it just evaporated and you saw 22-year-old sorority girls.

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That's right.

[00:06:11]

With Trump hats. You're like, Wait a second. No one's embarrassed about supporting Trump anymore. They're wearing a Trump hat in midtown Manhattan. Totally. Who would do that? Nobody would have done that three years ago.

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I think it's a beautiful thing for the country. I mean, it started a little bit with you saw it in the business elite community. I mean, Elon endorsement was obviously huge, but I think this has been percolating for a little while. Probably the thing I was most gratified by after the election is the next morning, the number of either calls or messages I got from real serious business leaders, billionaires in different domains or whatever. They I don't have to do this, but a few of them shared with me, Look, I think you were an important part of giving me the permission to support Donald Trump. A hundred %. Or giving me the permission to at least stand up against whatever, left-wing orthodox in a way that they couldn't have. I think a lot of other people played important roles in that as well. Elon probably played the biggest role in giving people that permission.

[00:07:02]

No, but you're from exactly that world. Just to be super blunt, you have the credentials that mark a member of that class.

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Yeah, which matter to some people in terms of giving them the permission.

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Well, our whole system is based on them, right? Jd, to some extent, is like this, David Sacks and Elon above all, but you're definitely in that world. They made a concerted effort to make certain that people like you would never admit to liking Trump.

[00:07:32]

That's right. Liking Trump and standing for a rejection of the left wing orthodoxy the last four or five years that reached a fever pitch and peak. I had to step down for my job. You and I first met after I stepped down from my job as a biotech CEO. I wrote my first book. For me, that was actually cathartic. Then I just wanted other people to be able to experience that as well, to be able to spread the possibility of what it feels to actually speak your mind in the open. It's It's like a liberating experience. It's a deep personal sense, liberating experience. I actually just wanted more people to be able to experience that. What's the point of having a billion dollars if you can't even express your opinion in public? I totally agree. But now I think that that's mostly... It's actually mostly behind us.

[00:08:17]

Can I just push a little bit on that point, though? You and I talked a lot before you ran for president. I remember thinking, most people imagine that if you make a lot of money, you make a lot of money young. That gives you the freedom to say whatever you want. But of course, the opposite turns out to be true. It's totally the opposite. The more you have, there is no FU money. That's right. There's only FU poverty. The richer you get, the more vested you are in the current system, the more you have to lose. I did think you were very unusual in that you made all this money young and you're like, Yeah, I'm happy to, first of all, stop making money for a while. You didn't seem addicted to it. No. They all get addicted to it. No. You know what I mean?

[00:08:58]

We actually spent it. Some of it. That's all this stuff.

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You blew a lot of it. No, but there was something great about that. But why were you different from everyone else you went to Yale law school with other than JD?

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All of our classmates. It was just the two of us. I could tell you there's some... I I won't even tell you about the email chains where they still have the class email list. There's a lot of funny stuff that goes on. They've lost their minds over myself and JD. Oh, have they really? Oh, yeah. It's actually hilarious.

[00:09:25]

You guys were in the same class?

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Yeah, we're in the same class. Me, we're all JD, we're all classmates. My wife was in med school at the same time, so we were all friendly.

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Where was she in med school?

[00:09:33]

At Yale. Yeah. It's hilarious. Which is really funny.

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You all misused your credentials against the system that bestowed them. I have to ask you to pause. You're on the Yale Law School, which for those who don't follow us, is the most prestigious law school in the United States, I think it's fair to say, but also probably the most insane in some ways.

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Yeah, I think all of those things are fair. Yeah.

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But what's the email chain line?

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Each class just has their own like listserv where they all stay in touch. After the Springfield stuff, people were going totally nuts.

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Eating the cats.

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Yeah, or eating the pets. They were going totally nuts. Then there was this long thread of what charity people were going to give to in Springfield, a town they otherwise would never visit, never have heard of, never have given second care to, to say, Okay, here's what we're actually going to do to help this community. And they started to have everyone piling in, Well, I'm going to make my donation, and I'm going to make my donation here. It was so nauseing, but there was actually a very keen effort to get the New York Times to report on it. So the New York Times did report on that. Of course, the New York Times has their own agenda in wanting to report on this because it's designed to actually make- Wait, so they wanted to give money to- To particular causes in Springfield to virtue signal the fact that we're not on the JD Vance, Donald Trump side of this. As fellow Yale law school alums who came from that same class, we're going to actually make a concerted donation to send a different signal that we're on the side.

[00:11:01]

But you and JD are actually from Ohio.

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Yeah, actually. I actually spent a lot of my youth in Springfield. I actually know a lot about this. I'm tempted to pull up the email that I sent. I sent an email to the group. I haven't commented on this list in five years or 10 years, probably. I haven't posted a single thing, but I entertain myself watching this stuff from time to time. I actually also went to Springfield myself. Actually, this is a... Well, let's rewind back. When all this was playing out, I said, I want to go to Springfield and check this I have a lot of family that's lived there in the past. I have some family there who lives there now. I spent a lot of my youth there. There's a sub place that I used to go to, when I used to play tennis at Wittenberg every summer, which is the University in Springfield. I've spent a lot of time there growing up. I said, I live like 50 minutes from there right now in Columbus. I grew up in Cincinnati. I live in Columbus. Springfield is literally on the way right in between. Let me just go check it out.

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I just was having dinner with my wife and a couple of friends in Columbus, and I just put out a tweet. I said, I'm to Springfield. I want to see what's happening, see it for myself. No plan for an event or anything like that. But some guy then replies and says, I have an event space. It can hold 375 people. We show up in Springfield. This is what? Like a month or two ago when all this played out. This is 375 people. It could hold 2,000 people show up, but they couldn't hold 2,000, so the rest were lined up outside, and people just wanted to be heard. Did I see evidence of cats and dogs being eaten? I didn't see evidence of that. What I did see evidence of was a woman being chased out of a store with a machete, her daughter by an illegal immigrant who was in this country, which didn't get reported on by the news at all, but was a function of a woman who actually came and told that story of her daughter, who was literally being chased with a machete out of a grocery store, called the police, and the police didn't show up for hours, and they didn't follow up with an investigation either.

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I thought people I deserve to hear- The police did nothing. That's what she said, and I have every reason to believe her. That's insane. Anyway, against that backdrop, I also wanted to do something positive for the community. Having shown up in Springfield, there's obviously a strain on local resources, so I wanted to make a donation. I As you said, I've lived the American dream. I wanted to make a $100,000 donation. For my family, that's an easy thing we were able to do to help a local community. Where's this strain? We found where the local strain points are, access to local primary care. We tried to make a donation in conjunction with my trip, but the organization did not want to accept the donation that our family was about to give. They've talked about Springfield. We need help. We need all the people who can to help support the community. And yet here is as somebody who is living in Ohio, has lived the American dream, I want to actually use a small portion of what this country has given us to help a community that's important to me in the area of health care, where there were a lot of strained resources, in part because of the large numbers of people who've been moved to that community.

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I didn't even have the ability to help the community that way.

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Why?

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They didn't provide a great explanation.

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Should they turn down a hundred grand donation? Yeah. Well, Who would do that?

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I mean, an administrator, I suppose.

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But because of your politics.

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I can only assume. I would say I heavily doubt that if I were Sherrod Brown or something like that, that they would have turned down a similar donation in a time of need. Anyway, I talked about all this when I visited Springfield, but afterwards, I told people that I was going to help support Springfield, so I decided I wanted to follow through on that. We found a couple of other charitable causes to donate in totaling $100,000 to help Springfield, and one of them was a crisis pregnancy center. I'm pro-life, and we wanted to at least to help people get to strains on the system. It's a different area of health care where we thought there were strains on the system. I actually surveyed a lot of people in Ohio and in Springfield, privately, who I knew, where could I have an impact? They gave us this as a resource. Anyway, to bring this back to the original story, we have this law school listserv where they've made a donation to... I think it was a left-leaning group that had a lot of woke stuff on their front page. I can't tell you which exactly one it was.

[00:15:10]

Dei, plastered all over wherever it needs to be. They made the donation. They got a bunch of people to sign on. Every time somebody donated, they would reply on and say, I have also donated. There was a certain pride and sanctumony in that. They got the New York Times to report on it. They got MSNBC to pick it up. There's a lot of media around. That's crazy. Comparatively not quite as much money being raised even, but that's beside the point. I'm on this list having to see my inbox repeatedly flooded with every other time somebody made a donation. I just sent a note because maybe there's people who have a different point of view from supporting exactly the cause they put up. I included a link saying, for those who want to support Springfield, here are some other alternative causes that you might wish to support. My family and I were pleased to support the community. They lost it with respect to a crisis pregnancy center. They Well, they didn't like that? Actually, they didn't like it very much. What did they say? I think they called it a... They saw it as an insult, actually.

[00:16:10]

They felt personally insulted that I was going to exploit their good feeling about Springfield and the attention they wanted to draw by supporting it, by offering a very different cost. But a beautiful thing happened because this goes to the same trend you and I are talking about. There were actually a lot of my classmates who I know lean left of center who then came out and were just like, Well, have you ever considered the fact that we might also have classmates who have a different point of view on these questions, and you may not just want to be donating to one particular side of this cause? And there was just a debate amongst them. I didn't really get further involved in this. I rarely post on that list. That was just a two-liner that I had to share to offer an alternative.

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Have they attacked you and JD personally on the list?

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I don't read most of the emails. I think there have been a lot of unfriendly things said, yes.

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You got to wonder about that whole world. I mean, so Trump went to Penn, JD went to Yale. So you still have two guys with Ivy League degrees in the top two jobs.

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By the way, I don't think there's any... Far from being shame in that. I had a great experience at Harvard and Yale, and we learned a lot of stuff. I think independently. I got a better education because of a lot of these people leaning left. You get questioned more than the average person.

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I bet that's right. But there's also over the past several years, there's just been a lot of evidence that those schools Probably aren't good for a lot of the kids.

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They're not the same place as they were even.

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The weaker kids who go there. I mean, you're obvious, you've got a strong personality, you know what you think, you're not dependent on other people's approval, obviously, you don't seem to care that much. But most people, young people, really do care what the herd thinks. For those kids, a lot of them get destroyed and become completely irrational and into the witchcraft of transgenderism or whatever. They become not really functioning people. You just wonder, how long does the prestige attach to those institutions, particularly in, say, China, which keeps them afloat. Yeah, that's- Maybe not Yale, but below Yale, a lot of these schools are dependent on- Absolutely.rich Chinese. When does that end? When do we stop genuflecting before these places?

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Either they're going to massively change what they are and what they represent, or they're going to go the way of the dust bin of history. They are, right? That's the true option. They are. The thing is, there's a difference between even these places now versus 20 years ago. It's just not the same place in the same institution. Harvard, Yale always leaned left, always have had a very certainly self-important view of themselves. That's always been the case. But they were institutions, certainly when I was there. I could tell you from experience where alternative ideas were tolerated. There was good debate. I actually learned a lot from being pushed by classmates who had different points of view than mine. I evolved in some of my views. It's a beautiful thing. That's what's supposed to happen through a supposedly liberal arts education. That is not the institution of Harvard or Yale or countless like them that exist today. There's something dramatic has changed as they have lost their North stars no longer, at least dated as of, let's just say, six months to a year ago. Maybe a lot's going to change. We're no longer committed to the pursuit of knowledge, and we're committed to the pursuit of affirmative social goals.

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Harvard's top goal, it seems, is to drive social change in the world rather than to actually educate their students. Yale has completely abandoned the idea of free speech, that the expression of certain ideas is itself a constitutes an act of violence in a way that they no longer would tolerate on their campus. I think all of that's going to have to change because otherwise, you're going to actually produce a bunch of, let's just say, effete graduates that aren't going to go on to actually accomplish very much, which gives the next generation very little incentive to want to go through those institutions in the first place. That's exactly right. What's going to happen? Either they're going to become increasingly irrelevant and go through this process of elegant decay that they're in right now. Either they evolve or die. Those are It's the two choices, I would say. Just like all of us. Yeah, it's true.

[00:20:02]

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[00:21:12]

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[00:21:45]

What are the effects of Trump's win?

[00:21:48]

I think it's a renewal of national self-confidence, actually. I think that we're going to be more sure of ourselves as Americans. I think we already are. I think that the idea that people are... A lot of people who would have either felt uncomfortable saying they supported Donald Trump or didn't even think they did, but now realize that they actually value what he represents, have a greater sense of conviction in themselves, have a greater sense of conviction in America. I think that's probably the most important thing.

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Gold dropped $100 an ounce in like an hour.

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Yeah, it's interesting how that works.

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Gold, of course, is a bet against the US dollar.

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And the stock market went exactly in the opposite direction. Markets reflect confidence. I think the revival of our self-confidence is the most important thing, actually, because everything else, we could talk about the issues that fixing the border, restoring law and order, enforcing the law, ending rampant crime in the country, growing the economy. All of those things require a certain level of self-confidence in America, requires a certain sense of spine in who we are to be able to say, Okay, an economy grows when people are willing to take risks. You're not willing to take risks to create a new business or to grow or to invest in a new venture unless you have actual confidence in yourself and your ability to do that. Same thing with respect to the rule of law. You have to believe in the validity of American rule of law to actually stand by it, even when it's actually hard or unpopular to do so. Same thing to say that our own border actually means something. You have to have confidence in a nation to believe that that nation is worth protecting. If you actually don't believe in what's inside, then there's no real reason that you have to protect it physically either.

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I think the revival of our national self-confidence is the most important thing Donald Trump has delivered and I think is going to deliver for the country. If we get that back, the rest of it's actually pretty easy. It falls into place more or less automatically, I would say.

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But along the way, there are all kinds of obstacles. The first obstacle is finding the right people to staff the government. Yes. Which was it, and Trump has said this himself, including to me, the day before he got elected in public, I didn't have anyone to run the government, and there were a lot of bad people wound up in positions of real authority. Will it be different at this time?

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I think it will, actually. I think it will because, first of all, we're all human beings, Donald Trump included, has learned a lot from that first term. I think that if you have somebody who had never run for office before, and I'm particularly sympathetic to this, I ran for President without knowing what the heck I was getting into. It was very much a fire first, aim later strategy for me over the last year when I ran. I can deeply empathize with Donald Trump's first run for President, but not only did he run for the first time, he actually won the first time as well. To be able to get in there, as you said, I wasn't there, but it sounds like without even that much of an expectation of winning, I think the system was able to strike back before he and his team were able to get their arms around the system. Even still accomplished a lot. I think that first term was, you and I said this when we spoke the other day, but it was the most successful president of the 21st century, which is setting a very low bar because the other presidents in the 21st century have been awful.

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George Bush, Joe Biden, Barack Obama are the others, and Trump was unambiguously the best of that batch. But I think the idea that there's certain things you can only learn by doing it. I mean, even running for president, there's only certain things I could have learned about that process by doing it, now, let alone leading the country. I think there's only certain things Donald Trump could have learned by actually being in that position. And so this time around, I think he is laser-focused on making sure that the people he puts into those positions actually share broadly his vision for the country, broadly share an allegiance. People make this some bad thing, but an allegiance to him personally. I'm sorry, if you're running a company, you can't run that company as a CEO. If the people who work for you actively dislike you or wish to undermine you personally, even if they believe in the company's product, it doesn't work if they actually actively hate the CEO. I don't know why the liberal press actually likes to make a big deal out of the fact that Donald Trump wants people who will also share a personal allegiance to him and are mission aligned.

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I think both of those things are required for a functioning organization.

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Because it's a Totalitarian because under Trump, the FBI was always showing up at people's houses and stealing their cell phones and carding them off to, oh, wait, no. These people are totalitarians. I know a lot of people personally. I'm friends with people who've been the target of FBI raids, including today. Elfie Oaks, who's a wonderful man.

[00:26:23]

We went to visit his restaurant and shop in South Florida, Naples. Good man. I don't I don't know anything about the allegations against him.

[00:26:31]

Best grocery store in the United States. I have no idea.

[00:26:32]

He's a very kind human being who was immensely... He just took such great care of our family in the short time we spent with him.

[00:26:38]

Yeah, he's a wonderful person. I was shocked to see that. He's an outspoken conservative and outspoken Trump voter.

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Which is your right to do in this country.

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Of course, he was a COVID dissident, and he was rated by the FBI today. Now, I just texted him. I don't know what the charges are, the pretext is for raiding his house, but I'm willing to stake my credibility on, since I know him so well, don't think Al Fioeke is doing anything that warranted an FBI rate, and I doubt he would have been rated to be not been an outspoken Trump voter. Anyway, these people are scary. They're going to be thrown out of power. What does Trump do with the mandate that he has?

[00:27:20]

I hope as much as possible, as quickly as possible. I think the lesson from last time around is if you don't move fast, the beast ultimately will we'll swallow any individual hole. Of course. I think he's ready to go in with real determination this time around to move quickly, move fast. I think we need wins behind our back early on. One of the things that I think we learned from last time around is a lot of this is just early momentum. Let's say we have all three branches. Let's say we've got judicial branch. We have a great judicial branch right now at the top of the Supreme Court, the best we've had, certainly in our lifetime. But you combine that with the strong electoral mandate for the presidency, a strong, of a majority in the Senate, hopefully get a good Senate majority leader picked. I think Rick Scott would be great for that, but that's a side note.

[00:28:07]

It can't be John Cornan. John Cornan is an aggressive liberal. If Donald Trump wins the popular vote in John Cornan of Texas, who is way more liberal than a lot of Democrats I know, winds up Senate majority leader. I mean, that's just it's crazy.

[00:28:21]

Assume a few more of those correct pieces fall into place, and then even a majority, at least an impeachment proof house. I think that we got to go big. We got to go fast. Two major issues right out the gate. One is already the one that Donald Trump has been talking about the entire time. You know he's pumped up about it, and he is not going to mess around with this, is to fix the illegal immigration crisis and actually seal our national borders. He is laser-focused on that. He has made no secrets about that. That's his top campaign message. He's going to keep that promise, and I think he's going to keep it fast starting on day one. That's number one, and there's a lot to say on that, but it's hard to say what hasn't already been said about what needs to be done. It's just about in there and doing it. So that's mass deportation, number one, is millions of illegals out of this country and sealing the border along with it. But I'm actually far more intrigued and interested for the long run in what I think of as the second mass deportation that we require.

[00:29:14]

Fire, which is the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the DC bureaucracy. I do think that is what's going to save this country in the long run. But you can't do that. I think you actually can.

[00:29:26]

You can't fire. We can all be fired. I've been fired many I'm sure you just lost a presidential race. The only group that cannot fail that has actual tenure is not Harvard professors.

[00:29:39]

Not even.

[00:29:39]

It's not even. It's federal bureaucrats. Now, Amy Wax just got tenure is no protection at all compared to the protection of federal employment.

[00:29:48]

The one difference is, first of all, we have a president who I think has the spine to actually step up and do it. But the second thing is we actually have a, not to get too in the weeds here, but we actually have a legal landscape with the current Supreme Court that allows us to do what couldn't have been done in the last half century.

[00:30:05]

They have a moral right to work from home 10 hours a week at our expense at a far higher wage than the average America. Oh, absolutely.

[00:30:16]

The funny thing is- But they have a moral right.

[00:30:18]

You can't complain about it.

[00:30:19]

You actually brought up a really interesting dimension of this. If you literally just mandated that they have to actually show up to work Monday through Friday, I know a radical idea. They don't go to work. Actually, a good number of them would quit that That way. That step alone. You don't even have to talk about you're in a mass firing, a mass exodus. Just tell them they have to come back five days a week from 8:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Like many Americans, most Americans who work hard to earn a living in this country, just show up physically to work. You'd actually have about a 25% thinning out of the federal bureaucracy right there. That's an easy first step. Next step is, so the Supreme Court, what they've laid out right now is they've basically said in so many words, that most federal regulations are unconstitutional, close to in so many words, that's what they've said. If Congress didn't pass it, it's a basic principle here is the people we elect to run the government should run the government. That's not the case today. The people who write most of the rules were never elected to their positions.

[00:31:11]

Congress makes the laws. That's what the Constitution says.

[00:31:12]

That's what the Constitution says, but that's not exactly how it works today. The Supreme Court, thankfully, has had a major problem with that. So it was this case West Virginia versus EPA two years ago. There was this Loper-Brite case that came down this year that overturned this horrific doctrine called Chevron Deference, which said that the courts have to defer to the agency's judgments on what the law actually says. The Supreme Court's torn all of that to shreds. And basically what they've said is, if it's a major question, if it's something that affects people's lives economically or relates to a major political issue, it cannot be written into existence by somebody who is not elected to office or who can't be voted out of office. It has to be done by the people who are elected to write the laws. Who could be voted out if they write bad laws? That's a beautiful thing. I think that those were seismic in their impact.

[00:31:58]

That's democracy. That you're describing That's actually the essence of democracy.

[00:32:02]

That's the essence of self-governance. We've had those cases come down under this Biden-Harris tenure. But actually, if you have somebody who takes over in the presidency now, as we're going to on January 20th, who takes a posture of executive humility, and this is the key part, because people will say, Oh, Donald Trump's going to go. If he's going to go shut down these agencies, that's executive fiat. No, you got it mixed up. The executive fiat is what's been happening for the last century, really, in this country, but over the last four years included, unelected bureaucrats by fiat legislating what otherwise should have gone through we the people and our elected representatives. The Supreme Court has already said, told the executive branch, No, you can't do that. Actually, a lot of that was illegal and unconstitutional. All we need right now is an executive branch that says, Hey, the Supreme Court, you've told us a lot of what we're doing is illegal. It violates the Constitution. So we're not going to do that anymore. And that requires us to take any regulation, any federal regulation that fails these standards that the Supreme Court has given us in West Virginia versus EPA and Loper Bright, and there's another case called Jarkasi versus SEC.

[00:33:08]

That one relates to slightly different issues. But the Supreme Court standards, all of these regulations that fail that test, we're just going to rescind them. They're null and void. We don't have to rescind them because we already know they're actually null and void and illegitimate anyway. But we will put the public on notice to say these tens of thousands of regulations that have been written by federal bureaucrats, they're null and void because they were never written by the people who we elected. Now, if you have 50% fewer regulations, that creates an industrial logic to say that, okay, well, then we don't need 50% of the people around anymore either. The way these rules have worked in the past is, you know this well, the civil service rules, the civil protection rules that say you can't fire these federal bureaucrats. That's been the historical accepted dogma. Actually, if you read the law carefully, it doesn't work quite that way. That applies to individual firings. To say, if I fire you, you have a special protection to say that I either politically discriminated against you or discriminated for some other reason, or if you fire a bunch of people with discretionary firings, if there's a disparate racial impact or a gender impact or whatever, you could be sued on a million grounds.

[00:34:16]

But if it is part of a mass firing, what you call a reduction in force, if it's just a mass firing, those actually fall outside the civil service rules as they exist. If you go in that order to say, Okay, the Supreme Court has already told that all of these regulations, not all of them, but an overwhelming majority of them, are invalid. You go straight down that list and say, We have 50%, 70%, 80% fewer regulations. Then you look at the 4 million people, civil servants or whatever, and say that, Okay, if we have 80% fewer regulations, then we need 80% fewer people to enforce them. That simply makes sense. Then you have the industrial logic for right there under current law, mass downsizing just the scale of the federal government. And part of the problem is these things are deeply related. When you have a bunch of people who show up to work who should have never had that job in the first place, they start finding things to do, actually. And that's what gave us that regulatory morass in the first place, like the Federal Reserve. I mean, if you just fired, you have about 22,000 employees in the Federal Reserve.

[00:35:20]

If you fired 90% of them, there would still be 2,000 left, which is arguably on the high side if you have a Federal Reserve whose sole focus is restoring the stability of the US dollar, which I do think should be the sole mandate and sole purpose of the US Fed. Same thing with respect to you go straight down the list, EPA, SEC, FTC.

[00:35:37]

What does 22,000 employees do with the Fed?

[00:35:40]

They do a lot of calculations. They do a lot of conjecture. It feeds their hubris a little bit. Markets, and I worked at the hedge fund. It was the first job I had for seven years out of college, and understand a way in which people will huddle around divining what the exact meaning is of a comma at the end of Federal Reserve Minutes. Does that mean that they think the economy is overheating so much that they have to raise interest rates? That feeds the hubris of the bureaucrat to make them think that they're some genius and some actual savant that merits this attention. But the reason the market actors pay attention to what these Federal Reserve people say is not because they have some expert knowledge that's actually meaningful. They're actually looking to see effectively how they're going to screw it up in the process. Academics took over the Federal Reserve in the late 1990s.

[00:36:30]

But the Fed only has one big lever, right?

[00:36:32]

Well, they have a few levers, actually. They're able to pull. One big lever broadly means how much money you feed in or suck out of the system. That's true, but they've used that in ways that have been, I think, badly destructive to the country. Because here's an example of how... When the academics took over the Fed in the late 1990s, one of the things that happened, and this was a managerial class in this agency, and that's a three-letter agency in some form, the FED, What they said was, okay, if wages are going up, this is a long story if you want to get it, but we can give you a short version. If wages are going up, that is a leading indicator of inflation. So wage growth was a bad thing. So the way you fight wage growth is by tightening monetary policy into wages going up. Here's the problem with that. Anybody who's run a business knows this. Okay. Wages are generally the last thing to go up in the business cycle. If things are going really well in the business cycle, The last thing most employers want to say, I'm not saying it's the right decision or the wrong decision, but most employers, the last thing they want to have go up is the wages.

[00:37:37]

Wages tend to be actually not a leading indicator of the business cycle. Wage growth tends to be a trailing indicator of the business cycle. But you have the academic mindset of the Federal Reserve that said, That's one thing we can measure, that we can observe and feel smart about. So wage growth, we're going to treat that as a leading indicator of inflation, even when it's a trailing indicator. Well, what does that mean? They tighten monetary policy precisely into a natural downturn of the business cycle which gives you the boom, bust, and then what comes after a bust is, of course, the bailout. So you get these boom, bust, bailout cycles. That's exactly what happened, you could say in 2000, you could see it in 2008. You could see some version of it even in 2023, although that was a little bit more subtle. Anyway, that's a whole rabbit hole about the Fed. But it's an example of when you have 23,000 people show up to work who should have never had the job in the first place, they start finding things to do. When you find things to do, that ends up being destructive rather than helpful, which means the root causes, you got to get rid of the presence of the people who populate that bureaucracy.

[00:38:32]

But in order to do that, you need this industrial logic. That industrial logic, in my opinion, is what the Supreme Court has already given us, which is this mandate to say the executive branch, the fake executive branch, the administrative state, has written all these rules by fiat, most of them are illegal. They're actually unlawful. They're illegitimate. If you have an executive branch that says, Okay, we're going to recognize that most of these regulations are illegitimate, there's your blueprint for then shaving down the size of the federal bureaucracy, which is the permanent solution to stop that bureaucracy from perpetuating this illegal rampant action. I think that's the stuff of how you actually save a country, boring as that might sound.

[00:39:10]

It's not boring. I think I've never heard in my whole life in Washington, anybody suggests that this is a process that could really be stalled or reversed, the process being the growth of the federal government, which is just inexorable because the purpose of the institution is to protect itself and expand.

[00:39:30]

That's It's like a law of physics applied to this government. That's it.

[00:39:31]

Every institution exists to protect itself for its own benefit. That's its purpose, and it's demonstrable in its behavior. But it's so obvious, it's so overwhelming. It's the largest institution in human history. I've never heard anybody say, We have a shot of lopping off 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 80%.

[00:39:51]

80%, yeah.

[00:39:53]

I mean, that would change everything from our foreign policy to our economy to our culture. You really think that could happen?

[00:40:02]

Yeah, I think it could happen. I think there'll be trade offs. I'm not going to paint some exclusively- One of the trade offs, excuse me, you're going to have a crash in the economy of Arlington, Virginia.

[00:40:14]

Which is well deserved.

[00:40:16]

Maybe a boom of the economy elsewhere.

[00:40:17]

And long overdue. Why shouldn't Arlington and McLean and Loudoun County share the pain of Gary, Indiana? I don't understand. Or Springfield, Ohio. I don't understand that.

[00:40:29]

I'm actually going to take the bright side of this. I'm sorry.

[00:40:32]

I'm taking the apocalyptic side.

[00:40:34]

I'm in the golden age mood right now. Yeah, sorry. We're entering the golden age.

[00:40:38]

You can feel the resentment.

[00:40:39]

It's two sides of the same coin, though. They go right together. Send these people to Gary, Indiana or to Springfield. We don't need external individuals to the nation to actually fill those open positions. We have 3 million of them sitting in the Greater Washington, DC, area. Who now they could say, Well, are those people really going to do those jobs? Maybe they should, actually. They could be far more productive than the destruction that they're doing to the country right now. It is a fact that we have more open jobs than we have people in the country. That's often one of the backdoor arguments made for mass illegal immigration in this country. But actually, I think for rule of law reasons, you need deportation of people who are in this country illegally. But if you get 3 million people out of the federal bureaucracy in Washington, DC, they are Americans, and those are available candidates to actually provide a little shot in the arm to the labor market as well.

[00:41:25]

Why shouldn't the agencies be moved to Baltimore and Gary and Cleveland?

[00:41:28]

To the extent they exist, I think should absolutely be moved. Absolutely. I think many of those agencies should not exist. Many of them that do continue to exist, absolutely should be moved to other parts of the country. I don't think the surgeon general office should sit in Washington, DC. I don't think you should have much of I guess more broadly. I don't think that the Department of Agriculture should sit in Washington, DC. I think there are countless agencies, the Department of Education. I think you're wrongfully insulated in Washington, DC. Now, certain of those agencies, like the Department of Education, should not actually exist. I wouldn't want to start this process of just saying, Okay, let's move them out of Washington, DC, as some polite, genteel way of avoiding and sidestepping the thing that we actually need to do, which is bring a jackhammer and a chainsaw to the whole thing. But even those that do continue to exist, you would actually have a lot more accountability to the people, and probably even some stimulus, if you will, in parts of the country that wouldn't mind a little bit of that growth getting out of DC and coming to their own back backyard.

[00:42:30]

These two things go together, though, because if you actually did take one of those agencies and say, Hey, you have to show up to work five days a week, and actually you have to go to Topeka, Kansas, or Cincinnati, Ohio instead, you'd actually have a good number of the people quit anyway, which avoids the severance costs. I like that method as you could get two in one right there, is thinning it down and moving it out. But yeah, move the agencies out. You should fire about 75% of the federal employee headcount. If not, immediately on day one, you could ease into that pretty quickly. Agencies that are redundant can be reorganized that shouldn't exist. Department of Education is a good example. Shut it down, send the money back. Workforce Training can move to the Department of Labor, and loan collections can move to Treasury. There's just a mass opportunity for a mega reorganization and thereby downsizing of this bureaucracy. It's a one-way ratchet because it's not like if another president comes back, they can write that back into existence by fiat. They'd actually have to go through Congress to do it. I think this is a To call it once in a generation, understates it.

[00:43:34]

It might be closer to once in a century or once in a nation's lifetime opportunity to drastically reorganize and reshape and drive structural change in the federal government. I'm pretty pumped up about that, actually.

[00:43:49]

Would you be involved in this effort?

[00:43:51]

I'd like to be. Yeah, absolutely. I've given it a lot of thought. It was the centerpiece of my presidential campaign. I spent a year and a half in my life. It was probably the most... I took a lot of on a lot of things, but this is probably the single most useful and certainly personally important to me, part of the policy aspect of my campaign last year. I have been involved, let's just say, in recent months in laying out what the blueprint should look like.

[00:44:16]

This is the Draining the Swamp part of the operation that we were promised but never got. I know you've talked to the President-Elect about this and many other topics. Do you think he's on board for something this far-reaching?

[00:44:27]

He understands this is the root cause of the cancer. He said Drain the Swamp for a reason. You could talk about all the reasons why that was hard to do the first time around. One of the reasons is we didn't even have that legal landscape from the current Supreme Court, and he made some good Supreme Court appointments that allowed us to have this landscape. Now I think he is dialed in understands that incrementally tinkering around the edges of these agencies, it doesn't work. There's a temptation to say if you just fire the person on top, that somehow that's going to fix the problem. No. Get James Comey 2.0 or whatever to fill the same But I think if you're willing to actually strike the Leviathan at its core, I think that that's actually what it's going to take to save a country. I do think he gets that in a deep way.

[00:45:11]

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Expressvpn is pretty complex, technically, but it's very It's easy to use. It works on everything you own, your phones, tablets, smart TVs, computers. You can use it on eight devices at once, so you can share the privacy that you've received with your entire family. Right now, you get an extra three months free when you use this special link, go to expressvpn. Com/tucker. An extra three free months of ExpressVPN. It's expressvpn. Com/tucker. Federal employees are the core audience of CNN and MSNBC, so I don't think they're going to be. You think so? Yeah, of course they are. Who's watching that crap? What happens? I mean, right, that's a good company. I'm not, obviously. But apparently people are. They're watching The View. What happens? They're watching Jimmy Kimmel or whatever his name is. What happens to all those people? I mean, have they reached the point of being so totally discredited that they can't continue?

[00:47:36]

Here's my view. When I talk about the bureaucracy as something we need to bring a chainsaw to, I actually draw a distinction between the bureaucracy as its own self-perpetuing organism and the individual 3 million people who populate it. There are certainly some people who are in positions of authority who are just individually bad people, absolutely, that need to be purged from the federal government and get out and back into normal life. Maybe they can be rehabilitated, but that's not going to be the job of the new government. That's going to be something that their own spiritual advisors have to help them through. That's a separate category, but I think that's a relatively small minority of the three plus million federal civil servants who I do think are probably dead weight, worse than dead weight, because they're actually inadvertently even doing things that are net harmful to the country. I think it's the machine itself that I think is a big part of the problem. A lot of these people are people who individually believe that they're carrying out some good. It comes from this organizational conceit, which is basically skeptical of self-governance. I mean, it's as old as human beings are.

[00:48:48]

It's the idea that you can govern yourself was mostly a radical idea that most people thought was laughable and crazy. I mean, that's why we fought the American Revolution over the exact topic that you and I are talking about here. Because the basic The public view is that if you leave it to we the people, you'll burn yourself out of existence through global warming or climate change, or you'll harm yourself before you even know it through racial equity failures or climate change failures. That's the equivalent of what the old European worldview was, was that the idea that we, the people, could be trusted to govern ourselves and express our own opinions, that was crazy. That's why we fought an American Revolution. Well, it turns out that that ugly monster is just rearing its head again saying that, No, you actually can't be trusted to self-govern. So we'll tell you that you are to give you the satisfaction of believing that you live in a Republic. That was actually they could think of, rewrite the American Revolution through a revisionist lens and say, Okay, you can't tell people they live in a monarchy, but if you can at least keep the parts of a monarchy that are required for a society to continue to exist, but fool people into thinking they live in a democracy or a self-governing Republic, that's almost good enough.

[00:49:54]

That comes with some inconveniences because sometimes it will actually even behave a little bit like a democracy at times. But in the core questions, at least if it was unelected people who actually made those decisions, that machine is actually what protects humanity from itself. The people who occupy those positions are individually people who believe that they are doing the right thing, not even for themselves or that they're trying to harm their fellow citizens. They're doing the right thing for their fellow citizens. I'm thinking about the average civil servant working at the FDA or the SEC or whatever. They believe that if it weren't for them, the silent, the Bruce Wayne figure that they are, the hero that Gotham deserves, that's how they think about themselves. And individually, I guess you could say that that motivation, as much as there's a conceit embedded in that, they're not individually irredeemable people. I just think that they have become part of a machine that is irredeemable. And so maybe they'll continue to watch Jimmy Kimmel. That's a separate issue. We have cultural issues in the country. But if we view the bureaucracy as its own target, separate apart from the individuals who comprise it, I think that's going to, A, allow us to be more successful, and B, allow us to, I think, sell it to the rest of the country, and not in a fake sale, but like a true sale, to say that we don't hold this against the individuals who are working here who have put in 20 years of work to the federal government.

[00:51:22]

But we owe it to the rest of the people of this country that the job of the federal government is not to employ these people. Where does the rubber hit the road on that? Here's one where You could call me soft for this, but I actually think this would be advisable. I actually think this would drastically increase the probability of success of this happening. But I also think that it doesn't really dilute what we're doing. It doesn't dilute our purpose. I would actually favor rather generous severance arrangements with those individuals. We could debate whether that's a year, is it a year and a half? A year and a half would be extremely generous. You could say that, well, then you're eating into some of your cost savings. Not really. In the long run, still saving a lot of money. For sure. But the whole exercise wasn't really about saving their headcount costs anyway. The biggest cost of employing the people in this machine is the action of the machine itself. If you've debilitated that for a year and a half's worth of severance, well, I mean, what's that? It's like a year and a half's worth of not having done this in the first place, pay that as down payment to actually make that happen.

[00:52:19]

That by normal employment standards is actually really generous. If you're working at a company and you're not doing a great job and someone fires you, or even if you are doing a great job and you're part of a division that's no longer part of that company, you're generally not going to get a year and a half's worth unless you're the CEO. You're not going to get a year and a half's worth of pay. It just doesn't work that way. You might get two weeks, you might get two months at most. To treat these federal employees far more generously than they would have been in a private sector circumstance, There's probably people watching this who would think I'm being soft for saying that. No, I think that's the right thing to do because it will allow us to do this in a way that separates this as a personal vendetta against those individuals who themselves have their their kids and whatever, to say that we're solving more of a structural problem. That's how I separated Tucker, especially economically on the severance piece of this. I want to go in, I want to go hard, I want to go aggressive, but I want to make this less about going after the individuals.

[00:53:18]

They're still free to watch The View if they want. You know what? They can have a year or a year and a half's worth of their salary.

[00:53:22]

But the view will oppose it because...

[00:53:24]

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter right now, actually. I love that. Yeah. They'll sue and they'll take it to the Supreme Court. That's also why this has to be done now, not only because it's the window of the electoral mandate we have. I think the current Supreme Court is on our side in a way that it never has been since the advent of the administrative state, which was around 1920. In the last century, we have not had a Supreme Court that has been as aligned with the vision that I'm describing to you as we have now. Fast forward another 20 years, we probably won't, really. I mean, realistically, in the next 20 years, there's going to be somebody who you and I don't agree with who's probably going to be elected President, and there's going to be Supreme Court justices who either die or get swapped out in that time frame. This is, again, back to a once in a century, maybe once in a national history opportunity to really drive deep structural change in the federal government.

[00:54:18]

Improvement. Here's how I would stop it if I were on the other side and opposed to this. I would have a war.

[00:54:26]

I mean, we have- Like a foreign war.

[00:54:28]

Well, sure. The federal government is at its current size because of war. The main physical effect of the Second World War in the United States was the construction of the world's largest office building, the Pentagon. We have DHS because of a war. No, it is.

[00:54:43]

Dhs came into existence, of course, in the of 9/11.

[00:54:44]

Yeah, post-war. Yeah, war increases the size of government. It changes attitudes. It changes your society always in terrible ways, in my opinion. But certainly it changes it. But it creates an environment where people don't question because people are afraid.

[00:55:00]

Yeah.

[00:55:01]

And so they feel like they need government.

[00:55:03]

It's the ultimate big government is the- There's a lot of money spent in the last year on war with Iran.

[00:55:14]

People want war with Iran. That's the war people want, donors want. I know for a fact. So if we get a war with Iran, then we're not cutting the government at all.

[00:55:23]

Interesting. I have to give that some thought. One of the things that's also true is that massive Leviathan we're talking about, probably I gave the... We went to this esoteric example about the Fed, but one of the best places and best examples of that is the State Department, as you well know. That is when you think about the swamp and the unelected bureaucracy and the people who set policy were never elected to set that policy. I mean, the State Department is probably even a far better example than the US Federal Reserve. There are too many good examples to choose from, but that's- State Department is disgusting. Yeah, that's probably high on the list.

[00:55:54]

No, it's got some mandate to make the world gay or something. I don't understand where it came. I mean, the point of the State Department is to conduct diplomacy on behalf of the United States. It's not to change cultures around the world to fit the mores of Bethesda, Maryland, actually.

[00:56:09]

Well, I think it's behaved like most organizational bureaucracies. It takes on a life of its own. That's, again, another example of an agency, and it's just another agency, really, that needs to be... We got to take the same attitude to say that if you got a bunch of people showing up to work who shouldn't ever had that job, they start finding things to do that are generally damaging. That could include even not only in our own soil-Oh, my gosh. But abroad as well.

[00:56:32]

Oh, it's... I mean, my dad works in the state-The welfare state is upstream of the welfare state in some ways, too.

[00:56:37]

Because it even relates to the immigration crisis. Actually, more so in Europe, though, I think it probably will eventually be directly linked to the immigration crisis here, too, where part of Europe's mass invasion, if you will, of illegals entering Europe is actually the consequence of US disruptions that we created in the Middle East.

[00:56:58]

The war in Syria.

[00:56:59]

Absolutely. Syria and Libya.

[00:57:01]

That's exactly right. No, we did that.

[00:57:03]

That necessitates a welfare state. We're different from Western European countries, but if you view the West more broadly and the rise of the welfare state in the West, the warfare state actually creates the need for that welfare state, which then actually creates the magnet that keeps the illegal migration pattern coming.

[00:57:19]

Sure. The real labor shortage in this country is in the Pentagon. They can't meet their recruitment goals. So they're going to start-25 %. Yeah, waving in illegal aliens and giving them automatic weapons.

[00:57:29]

Do you think Do you think that's where this is going? Of course.

[00:57:33]

Then you have late Rome, where the Germanic tribes are populating your-It's history. It's terrifying. It doesn't-Okay, so let me ask you about the election. Yeah, it's so dark. I can't even think about it, but that's where we're going. Okay, so within hours of the election of Trump being declared the winner in this last election, numbers appeared on the internet, which are accurate, which I know you've seen, that showed the vote in the last four elections for the Democrats. In three out of the four, including this one, the number hover between, say, 59 and 65 million votes. Then you have this weird anomaly in 2020 where it was 81. How do you go- Biden was such a compelling candidate. That doesn't make any sense. This candidate, his vice president, she received, she, Kamala Harris received, they tell us, Wikipedia tells us, She's received 81 million votes in 2020. Then somehow she received 15 million fewer. What happened to those 15 million? That just does not make it... I just dare anyone to explain that to me.

[00:58:43]

What is that? Look, I'm not a scholar on this stuff, but what I will tell you- You are a math guy. Yeah. I think a good number of those on the super positive side of this, a lot of those people are the people who were given the permission structure. Whether it's those people or not, we'll put that to one side. But There are a lot of people who actually did vote for Joe Biden who could not stomach voting for anyone other than Donald Trump this time around. I think it's great.

[00:59:08]

But Trump's numbers stayed the same. Trump's numbers have stayed the same. That's true. For three elections, pretty much the same.

[00:59:15]

Let's just cut to the chase on this. We won the election. Here's what we do. Single day voting on election day as a national holiday with paper ballots and government-issued ID to match the voter file. I would also add, while we're at it, make English the sole language that appears in a ballot. You know what? It's a beautiful thing. Puerto Rico does it this way. There's other countries that do it this way. I think that that's something that we could actually do. The country that sent a rocket out and caught it on the way back, yes, we would be able to actually run elections on a single day with paper ballots.

[00:59:44]

Yeah, and send dominion packing.

[00:59:46]

The fact that there is resistance to this, let's just say the policy proposal on offer. I've said it countless times now, and Trump's talked about this. Single day voting on election day, make it a national holiday that actually brings people together, paper ballots, government-issued ID to match the voter file. If that is objectionable, that itself raises doubts about exactly what the heck is going on.

[01:00:08]

I don't think Kamal Harris... You can check this, but I'm pretty sure Kamal Harris did not win any states with voter ID law.

[01:00:16]

Oh, is that right?

[01:00:17]

That's interesting. She didn't lose any states that don't require Voter ID. That's really interesting. No, I'm not saying there's a connection there, Vivek, but- You're following That's the science. I just don't understand. Again, I've been in 18 hours or whatever of depositions from voting machine companies to disgusting companies. I was not named in either suit, but they hauled me in and tried to wreck my life just for, I don't know, I guess, disagreeing with them or something. Smartmatic and Dominion, disgusting companies. Why do we have electronic voting machines? No one will say this because they're afraid of getting sued by these companies. What's the justification?

[01:00:57]

I haven't followed the industrial history of this. When did that come in? When did they start using them and what was the justification?

[01:01:04]

The justification was that they're more efficient and faster, more accurate and faster. It turned out- It takes a lot longer to get our- No. India, I I think is the largest country in the world. I think we reset the population numbers recently. If it's not the largest, it's one of the largest by the second largest.

[01:01:22]

Yeah, I think it's largest now.

[01:01:23]

I think it is the largest. And largest democracy for sure, in the history of the world. I think they finished counting in every time. Is that correct?

[01:01:32]

I think it did. It was pretty fast. A lot of countries do it pretty fast. As I said, you look at a territory of the United States, even Puerto Rico runs their elections with such executional excellence compared to the rest of the United States of America.

[01:01:47]

And they can't even keep the power grid going. They can pull off a fair election.

[01:01:51]

It's unbelievable. What did we say this time around? This had to be by such a decisive margin that a landslide minus some shenanigans is still going to be a decisive victory. And that's what we got. My view is we can... I think there's going to be such a temptation to do this is we actually won. We're actually in a winning position right now. I more or less could care less for the Kamal Harris or Joe Biden pastor. It just doesn't matter.

[01:02:21]

That's the spirit.

[01:02:22]

What I care about is how are we actually going to fix it in a lasting way, in a way that just lasts for a really long time. I think there would be enough of an an opportunity. When you think about the majority we're now commanding in the Senate, I think we can do this nationally where you make election day, national holiday, put it on a single day, and at least for federal elections, because state elections run by states. But at least for a federal election, all 50 states have a bare minimum standard of single day voting, paper ballots, government-issued ID to match the voter file, period. I think more or less we've solved the problem of public confidence in elections for the long run.

[01:02:58]

You solve it right there.

[01:02:59]

If you're against that, then I'd love to hear the best possible argument offered against that. I haven't really heard one yet.

[01:03:06]

Black people don't have IDs in this country.

[01:03:08]

Yeah, I think that that's a racist supposition, actually. It's insane. Then they will allege racism for somebody who actually thinks anything different than the actual most racist thought on the matter. But I haven't heard a good... Most Black people favor motor ID laws, actually. Most people favor motor ID laws, so it should not be surprising that most Black people also favor motor ID laws. I think if somebody's on their way to... If somebody's driving, somebody uses this analogy that I thought was pretty good, is driving on their way to vote and they actually get pulled over. They say, No, I'm on my way to vote. That's your way out of actually a speeding ticket. Because if you're on your way to vote, you don't need a voter ID. But if you're driving anywhere else, you do. It's a funny little paradox. It's common sense. It's called common sense because most people everywhere tend to have it. I think most people agree on this issue. We now have enough of a mandate.

[01:03:55]

I think let's just take it. We are proud at TCN to offer quality long-form programming. Films, documentaries, short series, and we've got a new one rolling it out. It's a six-part documentary series called All the President's Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump. It's made by our friend, the documentary filmmaker, Sean Stone. All six episodes available now at tuckercarlson. Com. It's an in-depth look at what happened in the first Trump administration, 2016 to 2020. And while the rest of us is busy watching TV, behind the scenes, permanent Washington, particularly the intel agencies and the law enforcement agencies, under the indirect but pretty clear command of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, set out to systematically destroy not just Donald Trump, but the people around him, the people who supported him. And this series explains exactly what happened. It's worth seeing as Donald Trump starts his second presidency. This series is interviews with the people who were targeted and presents it in a way that will help you understand exactly what happened, how American democracy, as democracy, was undermined by the people who claimed to be defending it. It's in this series, and it's absolutely worth it. All the President's Men, The Conspiracy Against Trump, out now on tuckercarlson.

[01:05:12]

Com. How did you... I saw you in Florida on election night with with Trump, and you clearly like him. He clearly likes you. Running against somebody for office is not a natural environment for a friendship to Sprout at all. Jeb Bush was not there. How did you end up liking Trump? How did he end up liking you? Why do you have such an easy friendship after running against him?

[01:05:52]

I think we're both unusual individuals in ways that caused us to gel, actually. I didn't see the point in I ran against Trump for sure, and I made my case for why I thought I was the right candidate. I think that I was the youngest person ever to run for US President as a Republican, and I do think that there is an opportunity to lead and bring in a new generation. In some ways as we have, nonetheless, in the last year. But I didn't do the Trump bashing thing. It just seemed lame. It seemed really facile.

[01:06:23]

He was the best. Yeah, but it's these things. That's right. Everyone starts out that way. But then it gets intense.

[01:06:28]

It gets intense, yeah. We had our sharp moments over the course of the campaign.

[01:06:33]

Sure, but it wasn't personal. How did you- It wasn't personal. How did you do that? How did you not get mad? They all get mad at the end.

[01:06:39]

It was interesting. I guess the whole thing wasn't an exercise that I took super personally, anyway. I think when you take this stuff too personally, it becomes exhausting. But for me, it was, look, I feel like I have a calling for the country. I'm running for something. I'm running for my vision. You know what? Along the way, because it was deeply consistent with my vision, I respected Donald Trump. In a certain sense, if you think about a family business or something, you're going to have a guy who started it, bequeaths it to his kids. At some point along the way, there are some bumps in the road in terms of how that happens and when and when's the right time for the torch to be passed on. Those would be legitimate disagreements, arguments within the context of family business. I know many people who have been in that similar position. In that sense of carrying the American torch, we could have a reasonable debate about when the right time is for that to be able to pass on to the next generation of leaders or whatever. But I came from a place of actual deep respect for Donald Trump the whole time that I ran.

[01:07:43]

Because one of the reasons why is it was a fact of the matter that I was self-aware about myself. I would not have thought about running for US President had Donald Trump not actually done it as a first-time outsider and won in 2016. Yeah, of course. I don't think that idea would have occurred to me. I'm an entrepreneur. I believe in achieving things that have been achieved before. But that particular thing, I just wouldn't have even considered that possibility had Donald Trump not run, won, and been a successful president. I said it on the debate stage. I thought Donald Trump was the greatest president of the 21st century, and I think it actually caused more anger from the other candidates on that stage at me for the rest of the raise than Donald Trump or I ever had with respect to each other. Oh, really? They didn't like that? They didn't like that very much. Who didn't like it? Well, I I think most of the other people on the debate stage, actually.

[01:08:33]

How many were there?

[01:08:34]

This started with 10. The last debate I had, there was four of us up there. That was interesting. There was so many things I would do differently. But that's a story for another day. No, no, no, tell me. I think the hardest part was in the short windows into a campaign that you have interfacing 300 million people. I think even the people who were in physical rooms with me understood me at a different and deeper level than the 99.9% of the electorate that never was, but who saw the few windows that they had to see who you are. Now, the debate is one of the things I learned about them, is that it's different for a general election debate. If you're going against Trump versus Harris or Trump versus Biden, people watch that for good reason. I'm glad they did. But in a Republican primary debate in the early cycle where there's 10 people standing on a stage, most people don't actually watch that debate or see what happened for themselves. But what they do see is the distillation of it. The clips, as we say. The clips, but even just the verbal descriptions of actually what happened, that's what they get, is the synthesis.

[01:09:49]

The audience, functionally, of a primary debate isn't really the electorate. It's two groups of people. It's the gatekeepers in the media, and it is the people who fund campaigns. That's That's the audience that actually matters. I'm not saying it should work that way, and I'm not saying I want it to work that way. But functionally, if you're looking at moving the ball forward in a race, that is the group that determines whether or not that event actually advanced your campaign forward towards victory. At a certain point in the campaign, you and I actually spoke a few times over it, including over conversations like this we had while I was running. The conclusion I arrived at was, Here's my strategy. I'm going to tell you what I actually believe right now. 99% of the time, that was the same thing that I believed four years ago. 1% of the time, it was not. But I'm going to tell you what I believe right now, and I'm going to tell it to you straight without filters. It felt like that should be a winning electoral strategy. I'm not sure it's the winning electoral strategy, but this race was just so different from any other one because in retrospect, there's literally...

[01:10:58]

It's foolish for anybody, myself included, to think that anybody else was going to come out of this process other than Donald Trump as the nominee. It's because the moment right now that we're in, the people of this country know what they need when they need it. They needed a guy who had been there, who was strong enough, who wasn't necessarily an ideologue, but who was a badass, who actually had the experience and was ready from those learnings to be charged up and go back in and actually take it to the next level. They knew that. I don't think the outcome was going to be any different in terms of who the nominee was, regardless of what I did. But There was still a lot of learnings through the process. Now, things like I could have done better, a million things I could have done better. But I think that Being unsparing as I was, I think that I wouldn't change. But to be able to combine that a little bit more with... If there's a way for me to allow a lot of people to know me the way that my employees at my businesses know me or my closest friends know me, I would I would love to think about how to do that.

[01:12:02]

Donald Trump is actually really good at that. Yeah, he is. Yeah. I think that he's the best at it. Watching him, even in the year since I left the campaign, has been eye-opening. It's been inspiring, actually. It's made me think a lot about he's able to take 20,000 people in a room at a time, but also 100 million people not in the room at that time to really get to know him, who he is, and feel like they actually deeply know him as a person as opposed to just his policies. I I was really good at allowing a lot of people around the country to know what my policies were, what my specifics of were my vision for America. I found it a little bit hard to figure out how to let people on the other side of the camera know who you actually are.

[01:12:44]

I get it.

[01:12:44]

It's difficult. That was one of the reflections.

[01:12:47]

Trump is more self-deprecating than he gets credit for quite self-deprecating.

[01:12:51]

It's actually really funny.

[01:12:52]

It's actually makes him funny. Really funny. The other night in last week of the campaign, he was pivoting against the Trump photos are garbage, Biden's comment, he shows up in a garbage truck, I think you were there, wearing the dayglo vest, and he comes out on stage wearing it, and he says, My staff told me they wanted me to wear this. I want to wear it. They said to me, It makes you look thinner.

[01:13:11]

Yeah, I like that.

[01:13:13]

I said, Anything makes you look thinner, I'm for it. That's hilarious. That's true. It was actually funny. It's hard to say stuff like that about yourself. I've just wondered, one of the ongoing side skirmishes that I'm trying to pay too much attention to, but it's a little mesmerizing, is the Never Trump movement.

[01:13:29]

Oh, yeah. What's going on with that right now?

[01:13:31]

Well, I don't think anything, actually. I'm interested because they're all people I know because I'm from Washington. That makes it more interesting for you. It does. For you, yeah. I don't know. They're just so repulsive to me.

[01:13:44]

What do you think is going on? I think there's a… Well, there aren't many of them. It's like a psychological derangement. It's almost like a condition that needs to be treated with like- A hundred %. By a priest or something.

[01:13:55]

Totally. If you're whatever Dick Cheney's repulsive little daughter oriona Goldberg, it's like you're not… They're just not impressive people. They were exercising authority far beyond what they had earned, in my view, in the first place, both of the products of nepotism. They're just mad that their world ended, whatever. But here's the... I don't want to be mean about it, though that was mean. Really mean, but true.

[01:14:20]

It's not an honest.

[01:14:21]

It was true. But in the closing days of the campaign, the Harris people kept telling us there were a lot of people like that. There were a lot of Republican women who weren't going to vote for Trump because he's too repulsive.

[01:14:34]

They wouldn't tell their husbands.

[01:14:35]

They wouldn't tell their husbands, and they were going to vote for Kamal Harris. It turns out the never Trump world has gotten so much attention, but there's no one in it.

[01:14:45]

And no clothes.

[01:14:45]

Absolutely. There's no one there. Totally.

[01:14:47]

It actually ended up just being a mirage. That whole thing at the end started. That actually really got under my skin a little bit. The whole thing about go into the ballot box and vote differently than your husband. That was a pitch that was made.

[01:14:58]

Subverting the family, subverting the marriage, encouraging a spouse to lie.

[01:15:03]

Yeah, you could vote differently, but the idea that you want to do it secretly creates this some... It's the ultimate division play because identity politics divides it based on- It is the division play. It's the natural extension of division on race, division on gender, division on gender within the household because they're fundamentally against the household as a unit anyway. That's for sure. That was probably the thing that pissed me off the most.

[01:15:25]

Well, I don't even understand it. I know someone really well was saying, I said, Well, we're voting differently in our household. I said to my wife, If we're going to vote for different people, first of all, I would say, Absolutely not. We're not voting for different people. Start with that. We're not going to vote if we're going to vote for different people. Second, we're going to take the weekend and talk for as long as it takes to get on the same page. Maybe I'll change my view, maybe I'll change yours, but we're going to align because we're married. I don't even understand that.

[01:15:54]

You're on the same team at the deepest sense. A hundred %.

[01:15:59]

Basically, they're encouraging people to- To not only split the team, but to lie about it. Actually, that- To lie to your husband. Yeah. That is the Democratic Party just distilled. It's the lie to your husband party. It's the weak man, unhappy woman party. Sorry. It makes me... There's Something really sinister about that.

[01:16:16]

There's something sinister about it. But it reveals... It's something sinister about it, but it's also... I mean, it's transparently what the agenda is actually about. Of course. Yeah. That was, in some ways, the tactics of the politics of it revealed a big part of what the whole project was in the first place.

[01:16:31]

It was like they were always telling you during COVID or during the BLM riots, the real insurrection, which is what that was, go home and lecture your racist uncle or grandfather at the Thanksgiving table. That's right. That was again- destroy your family.

[01:16:46]

That was, again, destroy your family over what your ideological obligation is.

[01:16:51]

Do you think the culture changes?

[01:16:54]

I think it has to. I mean, I think if we get our job right here, let's say we're just going dismantling the administrative state, actually fixing illegal immigration in this country, and actually having secure national borders, reviving our self-confidence, I can't see how the culture doesn't change. In some ways, actually, it's a cultural change. That might even just be the wrong framing of it. That is a small part of the story. I think in some ways, the culture has already changed, and the best evidence of that is what we saw the last couple of days. What we saw on Tuesday night, where, by the way, at the time, you and I scheduled this to sit down, I was skeptical because I thought we're going to be sitting here looking at TV screens and counting ballots in Pennsylvania or something like that, which would have been a horrific way to spend time. But the fact that we're not doing that, and that very night, we actually knew the result in a way that nobody anticipated, suggests that we actually have already had the cultural change in this country, and it was just revealed to be so.

[01:17:53]

Whatever happened to Joe Biden? I'm not making fun of him. I feel sorry. No, I feel bad for him, actually. I do, too. But I've never seen anyone disappear faster than Joe Biden. You never heard a word from him.

[01:18:06]

I wonder what his attitude is towards the Obama family right now, towards Barack Obama. Because Joe Biden certainly would have been a more compelling candidate than Hillary Clinton in 2016. This guy has had this life dream. He's worked his entire life, became a senator, was elected at the age of 30 or 29 or whatever it was. Then when he's elected and he was turned 30. Who has aspired his entire entire life, over the span of decades, beginning long before I was born. Over 50 years. For this, significantly longer than I was born, this man has been a US senator and aspired to be US President. To say that finally, when his turn came around in 2015, after faithfully serving as a vice president or whatever, to say that no, no, no.

[01:18:50]

For eight years.

[01:18:51]

For eight years going through that ignominy. Then to have Hillary Clinton to say, No, no, no, it's not your time. Then finally, he just Okay, after Hillary loses, I'm just going to do this myself anyway by hell or high water. That's a whole separate discussion, gets his way into the White House. Then to say the same guy comes back, and who knows if the reporting on this is true, but effectively, threatens to have him constitutionally removed from office and to lead a coup unless you bend the knee, the same guy, only to then watch, again, the woman instead, who this time was nominated, Austin was Hillary Clinton, this time in Scamaleras, fail at the very mission that you otherwise run. I cannot even begin to fathom what that feels like. He is surely the happiest person about the election result on Tuesday night in America, right? Because he's at least personally, maybe him or Joe Biden, his wife, had to have been the two most Schadenfreund-relieved Americans in the country. Totally right. But how is he doing? I don't know. Does that help? If you're going through a state of cognitive decline, does something like that, as painful as that is, does that sense of aggrievement and desire for vengeance actually sharpen you?

[01:20:13]

Maybe it does because it did It seemed like he actually got a little bit sharper, actually, after he was yanked out. It's like part of him came back, right?

[01:20:24]

His wife wore red on election day.

[01:20:26]

Oh, did she?

[01:20:28]

Yeah, I mean- He wore a Maga hat. Yeah.

[01:20:29]

To it. It's not like they were hiding it too much. But it's just a fascinating thing. It's neither critical nor not. It's just interesting sociologically and just psychologically interesting.

[01:20:42]

What about the rest of the party? Well, you failed. You ran for president and didn't get elected. I know because I talked to you about it, there was a time after where you thought, Okay, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? Where you take on a stock of your own behavior because that's it is to grow. That's called adulthood. Is there a moment like that for the Democratic Party, do you think?

[01:21:04]

I hope there is, actually. I'm rooting for that because that'd be better for the country. I mean, the number one person who's responsible for whether or not you achieve your goal is you, actually. There's a lot of other factors you can blame. Of course. But the number one determinant of whether you achieve what you set out to achieve is you. That applies to the level of an individual. If your team is a political party in American politics, then that's true for your team. They were responsible for their own failure and demise. I saw some interesting things over the last day, and it hasn't been as monolithically crazy as I expected. I expected everybody just in lockstep in the same way to go the same direction of threat to democracy, authoritarianism has reached America, and we're seeing certainly a lot of that. That's like 90% of it. But I think there were, I think, some thoughtful moments of reflection of a few folks. I think, I don't know this guy, but someone sent me his tweet. Does Iglesias sound right? Matt Iglesias. Yeah, Matt Iglesias. He had something thoughtful. In my campaign, I had 10 truths, 10 things that are true that I lay out.

[01:22:09]

That was the centerpiece of my campaign. You might remember. They sent to me. He had nine today, but he forgot number 10 was the joke that somebody sent me.

[01:22:18]

But actually, I read them, and it wasn't- They were all smart and reasonable. You saw this? Yeah. It wasn't bad. I don't like Matt Y. Iglesias at all, but I must say- I don't know him.

[01:22:26]

I saw this- I'm a non-fan, and I'm willing to to admit that all nine of them were great, actually. Yeah, it actually made me feel pretty good.

[01:22:35]

The US government exists for the benefit of its citizens.

[01:22:38]

Yeah, exactly. It was stuff like that. It was stuff that was not too dissimilar from what you and I might say about our vision for what the United States record should be. I totally agree. I disagree with some of the stuff on there, the framing of it. He said something about climate change. I just think the whole agenda is artificial. He said, Well, climate change is real, but it's not a goal in itself. It is a means to the end of doing what's better for humanity. I thought that framing was- I agree. Was, at least as a framing matter, the right way to look at it. If that's evidence to say that even within a period of 48 hours, you can at least have thoughtful voices on the other side who are willing to look themselves in the mirror, admit failure, inquire about the nature of the screw up, and maybe even begin to offer some path forward. I think that actually leaves me... I'm just in a... Of all the times you and I have gotten I'm probably in the most hopeful mood I've actually ever been in right now. I'm hopeful for the future of the Republican Party.

[01:23:36]

I'm hopeful for the future of our country. But a weird part of me is almost hopeful for the future of the Democratic Party, based on.

[01:23:46]

I agree.

[01:23:46]

Oh, either that or they're going to have to go the way the Harvard and Yale that we talked about earlier. Either that or they die. It's either evolve or die.

[01:23:52]

As someone who's been fired a lot, I can say there's nothing better for you than failure. It builds character. In fact, it's essential. Yeah, because you'll never reassess. Winning, succeeding, I think exacerbates your worst qualities.

[01:24:07]

Totally, because it covers them up and cause you to die.

[01:24:10]

Totally. It affirms your hubris and like, I'm successful because I'm so great. That's not entirely true. This time of year, we are focused on our families because we're apt to be with our families, celebrating together. It's the time of year where you might ask yourself, what happens when you're gone? What's left behind? Well, protect your family's future and peace of mind with a product called PolicyGenius. Policygenius has one goal to make it easy to find and buy life insurance. So your loved ones have something when you're not here. Something that can use to cover debts and expenses if something unexpected happens because unexpected things do happen. With PolicyGenius, you don't need to struggle to do this. You can find life insurance policies that start at $292 per year for a million dollars coverage. Some options are 100% online, and that lets you avoid unnecessary medical exams, which is always good. Policygenius combines digital tools with the expertise of real licensed agents. You compare quotes from America's top insurers side by side for free, and there are no hidden fees. Their licensed support team helps you get what you need fast. You can get on with your life.

[01:25:24]

Join thousands of happy PolicyGenius customers who have five-star reviews on Google and Trustpilot. So secure your families tomorrow so you have peace of mind today. It's easy. Go to policygenius. Com/tucker to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. Again, it's policygenius. Com/tucker. One last question. Elon. Yes. You know him? I think you've known him for a while. You're from similar worlds. Tell us what you think his significance in this election was and what his significance will be going forward. Huge.

[01:26:12]

I actually haven't known him for that long. I only got I just know him last year. He came to dinner I was at while I was running for president. We really hit it off. I like people who are extremely intelligent, and he is in the category of extreme intelligence. He's somebody who who is able to, not only able to, but requires himself to be doing multiple different things at the same time, and he's better individually at each of those things because he's also doing those other things at the same time. But I think that his significance was twofold. One is he really expanded that permission structure we were talking about earlier for people who are elite in America, people who define their status based on the number of dollars in their bank account, which I think is probably the wrong way to look at your own status as a human being. But we all have our biases. If the richest man in the world and the most successful self-made man in human history can publicly state his support for Donald Trump, then there's nothing stopping me from doing so if I believe that's the right answer to it, and he's pretty darn smart, actually.

[01:27:17]

If this guy both can do it from a social perspective, but also is as intelligent as he is to send rockets to outer space and back more intelligent, and the US government has, ever, if he can do the analysis and say that Donald Trump is going to be the right choice for the future of the country, then you know what? Maybe I should do some simpler thinking of my own and have the courage to arrive at the same place. In terms of blowing out that permission structure, that was certainly what I consider to be one of my responsibilities over the last year. But the person who really blew that out, bar none, was Elon when he came out publicly, endorsed Trump. I love the way he did it because it was clearly he was just moved by the fact that, okay, he was maybe thinking about it, who who knows where exactly he was in his journey right there. He and I talked at various points, but I don't know that he was going to come out and publicly endorse Trump in the way he did. But there was this supernatural event. I do think it was a divine moment in American history where we averted a national disaster by about two centimeters, and Elon just said, Okay, it's done.

[01:28:21]

I'm doing this. He's an American hero, and I'm endorsing him. I thought that was number one. Number two was on just the execution of it, too. And this election, Pennsylvania was, it turns out Donald Trump would have won regardless. But Pennsylvania was the key that allowed us to really secure this victory and to just go in and say, got a lot of political consultants and a lot of people in traditional Republican Party apparatus who have tried to figure this stuff out and say, No, I'm just actually going to figure it out myself directly and understand, Here's low propensity voters. I'm going to personally go and talk to them myself. I'm going to spend nine figures or whatever it was in the end, I think it was at least nine figures, to actually make sure that we get the job done and then get the job done, I think was essential, actually, to this victory. I hope he's an essential part going forward of saving the country and using this mandate to shred to pieces that federal bureaucracy, you and I talked about earlier. I hope he doesn't lose his interest in American politics for a long time to come.

[01:29:24]

You and I, I think, have been on the side of... Because you hear this objection now coming up, actually infuriates me about, oh, well, what about all of a sudden now, after 14 years of being silent on this from the left, we don't like this influence of money in politics. Well, okay.

[01:29:41]

Trump got outspent three to one.

[01:29:43]

Exactly.

[01:29:44]

Three to one.

[01:29:44]

Exactly. Shut up. In the swing states, right? So long as we have the game, and I think that this is something for our side to man up into as well, is if you're going to play the game, you got to compete, actually. We can't just win this against the so-called successful or elites or whatever. No, actually, we are better off if we have our own cadre of superhuman heroes who are able to, with their own unique skills, be they cultural leaders or business leaders or whatever, to have our own version of our special forces as well.

[01:30:21]

Well, especially since nobody... I don't like most political donors. I know them all, and most of them have creepy agendas, or they just want to get their picture taken with a politician, which is a very low motive in my view. Elon is not unique, but he's very unusual in that he doesn't really want anything. Yeah. He doesn't really want anything.

[01:30:39]

Well, he certainly doesn't need anything.

[01:30:41]

That's what I'm saying.

[01:30:41]

He has a lot to lose, but he certainly doesn't need anything.

[01:30:43]

No, but he doesn't want anything for himself. He's not in it, obviously not in it for the money. There's something uniting about it. He was not a conservative. I mean, the whole Trump phenomenon is, if you take three steps back, unifying.

[01:30:56]

Yeah, I think it's a unifying moment.

[01:30:58]

Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn voting for Donald Trump. You had Muslims in Southeast Michigan voting for Donald Trump.

[01:31:04]

It was awesome.

[01:31:04]

You had sugar cane workers, the people who cut the cane in Florida, and the people who own the ranches all voting for Donald Trump. You had North Georgia white rednecks, and you had Black men in Atlanta all voting for Trump. Totally. Then above them all is Elon Musk, who's just this figure who's above politics. He's for Trump. I don't know. There's something...

[01:31:25]

Yeah, it was in some ways, In some ways, you could say, what was the causal link that he played if he were in your analytical hat? I think it was huge. There's also some broader sense in which this was just destined to happen. Totally. This was all just playing out.

[01:31:42]

I'm with you.

[01:31:43]

We're going to have a false analytical hubris here by just dissecting exactly. No, but you're right. It was just all destined to happen. It was going to happen. It was just going to happen. This was all part of it playing out.

[01:31:54]

Did you feel that? I did. You were there when they won. Even just over the last year, I I would mean to commit the sin of flattering you to your face, but I think one of the things I liked about our conversations, and I fashioned myself as having some of this as well, is Just having a little bit of an intuition of where things are going a little bit.

[01:32:19]

Just get a pulse of the country and to see it. I think you and I had conversations over the last year where I think we were both on the same page about early on, last year in spring of 2023, being both convinced that Joe Biden was not going to be the nominee.

[01:32:39]

Yeah, that's right. You said it many times in public.

[01:32:42]

There's some darker ones that you and I, I think, sadly, predicted but were wrong about by two centimeters. Yes, exactly. Thankfully. Even the idea that this was going to be a landslide. You could just feel it. It was just in the ether. In some sense, At our very best, we might smell it coming, but it was coming either way. No, I think that's right. I think the more we remember that, that actually is, I think, what's uniting, actually. Once you see that, that's really uniting. The idea that it's not being done by us, actually. It's being done through us. That's a liberating feeling. In that sense, you and I or any other everyday American is united with Elon Musk to Donald Trump. We're all part of I think, a higher plan. It's being done through us. This was coming. It was going to happen one factor or not. In some ways, we're all just playing our little piece of a role in playing out what was going to play out all the while.

[01:33:45]

I can't improve on that. That's the greatest summation I have heard of this election so far. Vik, thank you very much.

[01:33:51]

Good seeing you, man.

[01:33:51]

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[01:36:04]

Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson. Com to see everything that we have made, the complete library. Tuckercarlson. Com.