American Thought Leaders - Eric Trump: How America Can Outcompete China in Manufacturing

Episode Date: June 28, 2025

In this episode, I sit down with Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization. We dive into his vision for revitalizing American manufacturing, making American-made products competitive globally, and building alternative financial and tech systems where people can’t be canceled.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The amount of campaign speeches I gave in shutdown, broken factories, factories that had chain-link fences around them that had no lights, the electricity had been turned off, the most beautiful buildings you've ever seen were lifeless. And we allowed all our manufacturing to go overseas and it's not okay. China's a, what, $24 trillion economy. We're at almost 30. The difference, the difference with China is they've got five times the amount of people. So our productivity is not only greater, but it's greater in terms of a productivity per person. We do it better than anybody in the world.

In this episode, I sit down with Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization. Yeah, he's on construction jobs at the age of 11. I was working for stone masons, working for electricians, plumbers. I spent an entire summer cutting rebar with an acetylene torch. It made my father really believe in putting us to work at a young age, making us truly understand what real estate is. We dive into his vision for revitalizing American manufacturing and building financial and tech systems that make it harder for people to be cancelled. These are banks that I had done business with for 30 years, never had a default, never had

a breach. And just like that, we were turned off. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Eric Trump, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be here. I've been huge on American manufacturing being a centerpiece of not just success in the world for America, but frankly, for the free world. I think it's something that's really important. As actually a Canadian myself, who's very bullish on America. Tell me a little bit about your vision for bringing back manufacturing and exploding manufacturing in America. Well, Jan, I'm not sure if I had a vision

before 2016. And now I think our entire family has huge vision. I spent every day on a campaign trail and the amount of campaign speeches I gave in shutdown, broken factories, factories that had chain link fences around them, factories that had no lights, the electricity had been turned off, they had the most beautiful buildings you've ever seen. I mean, they were the base of kind of the industrial complex for America in manufacturing, the greatest steel mills,

the greatest foundries, these unbelievable brick buildings that were lifeless, and we allowed all our manufacturing to go overseas and it's not okay. We can manufacture the greatest products in the world here in America. We should manufacture the greatest product. I'm not talking about the stuff that gets sold in dollar stores around the world. I'm talking about we can manufacture products better than anyone. We can do it better. We can innovate better or better entrepreneurs.

And we better bring it back to the United States. than anyone. We can do it better, we can innovate better, we're better entrepreneurs, and we better bring it back to the United States. And it's been a big part of my father's thesis. And, you know, just very quick story. Yesterday I was at the Ford Motors factory, I got invited there and I was literally on the assembly line. It's very infrequent that I take, you know, these kind of field trips to do,

go do things that are outside of my, but I wanted to go see it. And I'm walking these lines as F-150s are being produced every 57 seconds another f-150 comes off the assembly line of the plant that I was in and these hardworking Americans who are building the greatest products for the greatest companies that were representing you know the automotive industry to the entire world and I the only thing I can think of is America America can do it better than China, American can do it better than Asia, American can do it better in all these

places. I'm not talking about the trinkets, but the things that are important to us, the high tech items, the items are imperative to national security that are imperative to health, we better manufacture in this country. But we also better be able to put ourselves in a spot where we can actually have a competitive advantage. And when we were paying more taxes when we had the worst EPA laws in the world when we were putting in You know ten extra regulations every two days that were just absolutely crushing The profitability the productivity of our companies you you couldn't right and and I think under my father all of that stuff is getting reversed

Right now taxes are going, interest rates are going down. Obviously, regulation is going down, speed to build plants is massively increasing, meaning as they cut red tape, and it's actually giving American companies a chance again, including one other thing, by the way, the tariffs, which have really made all the difference in the world and are actually allowing America to once again have an advantage and equal playing field to the rest of the world. Eric, to your point, I just recently visited a small business, about a $30 million manufacturing facility in the

heart of Amish country in Ohio, where the gentleman John Miller, he basically was told at the time when everybody was shifting to China, he was told, you're going to be in China, you better be in China, we're not going to be buying from you anymore. What he decided to do is innovate and invest in his company. He kept the company in and now he actually exports to Mexico. So it's completely doable. I'm curious what you think. You mentioned, of course, the big business, Ford, one of the massive American mainstay companies, but what about the small business like John Miller's?

Well, I think we can do that better than anybody as well. You know, America was founded in a really interesting time and back to Ford, I know it's a completely separate conversation. But when Ford created the Model T, it gave people this kind of renewed spirit. If you go over to Europe, if you go to the UK, everybody hopped on a train at nine o'clock in the morning and everybody would get on that train. They'd go from point A to point B. It created a very monolithic thought.

As American Industrial Revolution was really around a car, if you wanted to go to New York City because you were into jazz, you could do that. If you wanted to go to Adirondacks because you were into the outdoors, you could do that. If you want to head west to California, well, you know, across 66, you could do that. And it created just different thinking, right? People approach problems in a different way. It created the greatest entrepreneurs in the world. We make products better than anyone. I don't care what anybody says about China.

China is a $24 trillion economy. We're at almost 30. The difference to China is they've got five times the amount of people. Our productivity is not only greater, but it's greater in terms of a productivity per person. It's like five X in America. We do it better than anybody in the world. We've got the best system. We've got the best country.

We're the best innovators. I mean, we're shooting rockets into outer space. We're catching them with chopsticks right now. I mean, we lead the way in terms of everything we do. And that's a beautiful thing. We can never ever let it go. And, and that's why government needs to set great policy that allows the best entrepreneurs in the world to create the greatest companies.

And then it's got to get the hell out of the way. It's got to keep us at a great competitive advantage. And so long as you do that, allow capitalism to reign. That's the advantage. And none of these other countries in the world has. Allow capitalism to reign and America will always win. We will always win if we allow them to do that. Where we get into real problems is every single day when incompetent politicians start putting their foot on the pedal.

When they start skewing those dynamics, they start putting in crazy regulations, they start putting in crazy taxes, they start putting in crazy taxes, they start putting American businesses at a massive disadvantage. It's why we lost those factories in the first place. And so, so long as you can keep government the hell out of the way, so long as government can actually do their job and create competitive advantage, we're gonna win. And, you know, people want to be associated with American companies, people want to be

associated with the American legal system, people definitely want to be associated with the US dollar, as many problems as we all know we have. There is no second best to us and people want it. We've got a tremendous competitive advantage in that regard. Someone I've come to trust quite a bit on the side of the economy, both Chinese actually and American. Kyle Bass, I had him on the show just recently. One of the things that we talked about is his belief that really, we do have a huge debt problem in America, but his vision is that we absolutely have to grow out of it. That's really the only way to unleash that prosperity in a very serious and deliberate way to deal with the debt. So to your

point. I've had Mike Rowe on the show a number of times. I've been on his show as well. And one of the problems that he sees that he's trying to solve with his foundation is this basically skilled worker shortage. And it's kind of dramatic in America. There's so many of these skilled jobs that are out there, there simply aren't enough people to staff. Have you thought about this? What is it that we can do to actually shift that? Well, it's actually deeply personal to me. I was on construction jobs at the age of 11, making minimum wages,

working for stonemasons, working for electricians, plumbers. I spent an entire summer cutting rebar within a settling torch. I can run any backhoe, any excavator. I spent every summer of my life doing that. I can wire a house like it's nothing. I have calluses on my hands that prove it. I mean, my father really believed in putting us to work at a young age,

making us truly understand what real estate is. And that's bricks, that's mortar, that's concrete, that's that's electrical, that's plumbing, that's HVAC. And I can do all of those things extremely well. In fact, that's still kind of a hobby of mine today. I laugh at friends who literally and these are incredibly competent people, these are people that work on Wall Street, you know, do very nicely for themselves in a lot of they can't hang a picture on

a frickin wall. I mean, it's embarrassing. You know, hey, you know, it's something broke in their house. Give me, give me your tools, tools. Like they might have a screwdriver in a drawer and you just, it makes you laugh. And it's incredibly sad though. I mean, we've lost the skills. I mean, we need manufacturing, we need skilled labor.

And that's why you see so many people coming at us, you know, they don't even necessarily go to they don't go to college. And so many cases, they go out, they create these great electrical companies, they create these great plumbing companies, they go get licensed. And all of a sudden, they build them into massive enterprises. Because you know, so many people are trying to run toward the Ivy League degree. When there are so many jobs out there, man, you know, look at some of these diving jobs, the saturation

diving. Look at so many of these welding jobs. Some of these jobs are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, incredible careers. And yet people largely ignore them in this country. And what Mike Rowe is doing is absolutely phenomenal. He's prioritizing the trade schools again. I mean, we need to be able to build, we need to be able to manufacture, we need to be able to create. But you better understand electrical engineering if you're

going to do that. You better understand metal energy if you're going to do that. You better understand kind of all these complicated things. And there is no person in the country who is a bigger fan of Mike Rowe and what he's accomplished and I am because those skill sets are fading away. And that's going to be a horrible day for this country. You know, just a bit on the personal side, I had the benefit of my father teaching me how to wire electrical and I did quite a bit of it. I didn't realize how odd that was for me

for I think it was I was 12 when I was doing it or something like that. But it didn't your father, the president didn't realize how odd that was for me for I think it was I was 12 when I was doing it or something like that But but it didn't your father the president didn't strike me as a sort of person who'd be doing that That's kind of that that's amazing. He was encouraging you to dive into all these things back then It's been the greatest thing in my career It obviously we were building high rises all over the place We have properties all over the place and I spent every summer, you know working on those job sites And you know, it's I still have one one property where the guys called me up, Hey, there's a tree near one near one of the houses. Can you drop it? Because we're all petrified to

do it. And it's, you know, he really believed in teaching us kind of the fundamentals of the business. And I can't tell you how many times in my career that's come across, you know, I deal with contractors every single day. And you'll get a you'll get a bid and you'll say, give me a fricking break. No, that doesn't take you 14 hours because guess what? I've done it. You know, and, and, and, and you're full of, you know what? Right. And the second they know what you're actually talking about, the, the second, you know, you can impart a little bit of that knowledge on them.

All the BS disappears and you get a much more honest conversation. And, um, that's funny. Well, we, my wife and I moved into a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a knowledge on them, all the BS disappears, and you get a much more honest conversation. And it's funny, well, my wife and I moved into a new house, and I didn't have any plugs in my closet. So I started running conduit, and she goes, honey, are you gonna kill yourself? I'm like, honey, no, I'm not. It was what I did every summer of my entire life. But it's important. It's important to ground kids that way. And you've lost so many of the skilled traits. The skilled traits are

some of the greatest jobs in this nation. We have to stop doing that. We have to focus on the straight schools. We have to bring it all back. Our country will be a lot better for it. I think a lot of people's lives will be a lot better for it. What would you say would be the single most useful thing to kind of get people motivated to actually build these skill sets. These are pretty high-paying jobs, many of them.

I think the woke cancel culture in so many of these institutions is probably doing that better than anything. I'm not sure if you could beat them at it. There are so many people, including me, who literally look at college for their kids is the I mean, you have to beat whether or not it's just a total waste of time and money. You know, I'm not I'm not confident I learned a whole lot in college, right that I didn't know beforehand, right? I think you learned the social skills. You know, do I remember anything about multi linear statistics? Now, of course, I don't write it. It's so many people I graduated with, as I said

before, you know, and not be able to calculate a mortgage, not be able to calculate a car payment, like so many of life skills aren't being taught. And that to me is deeply depressing, right? And then, and frankly, I went to a business school, right, let alone go to liberal arts college, where they're teaching you basket weaving 101, and you come out, you know, $300,000 in debt, and you can never dig your way out from

under that debt. And so I think the whole system has to be shaken up in a big way. God bless, if you can pay for it, go major in basket weaving. But you literally have college debt that lingers over people's heads for 30 years. That's not fair when a school actually teaches them no tangible skills, but kind of dupes them saying that they're going to come out with the greatest careers, right? And so, you know, I think at some point you need to reprioritize, you know, true skills and skills that matter and skills that you can ultimately monetize, skills that benefit society. And I think the college system in this country is gravely, just gravely failing at that mission. And I think it's causing a lot of people across the spectrum who are

sitting there saying, okay, my son, my daughter can't walk across Columbia as a Jewish student without getting the crap beat out of them. And by the way, then they come out there in debt and they've really learned nothing. Do I really want my child going into that environment? You know, and so I think you're seeing a kind of this paradigm shift where maybe the IVs are becoming less impactful than they were certain schools like Liberty, who's kind of embracing the exact opposite of that, you're really going against the tide, are doing magnificently well. And a lot of people are taking that opposite approaches. You know, what does my my son or daughter whatever, what do you think I'll get their electrical

contracting license, what do you get the plumbing license, and all of a sudden, you know, they take the same amount of money that they would have invested in in a bad education, put it into one of those fields. And 10 years later, they've got 15 work trucks doing tons and tons jobs. They grew this incredible company, and they're making millions and millions of dollars without the baggage hanging over their head. And so I think people are questioning the traditional route more than ever before. And it's not that I'm not the biggest advocate of higher education. I am. But higher education,

if you actually get something out of it versus I think so much of the nonsense and crap that these schools are espousing right now. I wanted to shift gears a little bit. You actually have a couple of new initiatives that you're into. One of them is Trump Mobile, perhaps most prominently. As I understand it, you're basically trying to create businesses that are more difficult to cancel, if I understand that correctly. Tell me a little bit about what TrumpMobile brings to the table. Let me zoom out to technology in general, if you don't mind. I'll talk about TrumpMobile

in a second. When my father was in office, they did everything they could to kill us, literally. Obviously, they tried to impeach him twice. They went after Supreme Court justices. They took him off the ballots of every state. Every AG, every DA started coming after him and me. I became the most penitent person in American history. The banks start canceling us like we were going out of style. I'm saying, they're saying, I don't understand.

I'm golf course in upstate New York. Why would you cancel that bank account? Like, it's not part of the political discussion, we have nothing to do with politics. My father's not on any of the entities in our company. He has nothing to do with running our company's commander in chief, why am I being canceled? And the answer was F you, you know, you're in the political arena, and we just, you know, you're gone, right? And these are banks

that I had done business with for 30 years, never had a default, never had a breach, only had the greatest relationship with the bank, had made them hundreds of millions of dollars in so many cases. And just like that, we were turned off. And so, you know, that was done for free speech as well, right? We created Truth Social based on the fact that we were deplatformed from Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and everybody else. We had no way to communicate. So all of a sudden, this kind of brought us into this new digital realm, this new technology realm. We created

Truth Social to give ourselves free speech back. We got into crypto, World Liberty Financial, which one of the fastest growing companies on earth right now, because we needed something to which one of the fastest growing companies on earth right now, because we needed something to counter the banks canceling you and not having kind of traditional finance. So we went into the DeFi and decentralized finance and centralized finance, stable coin, but using kind of blockchain. And then obviously the mobile phones was a third initiative,

which is here's hardware. Here's hardware that can bring it in a certain way altogether. But again, it gives people freedom. It gives people freedom from the conventional choices. We can do something better. We can put more effort into it. We can put more heart and soul into it. We can do it cheaper with somebody that people ultimately trust.

And so technology has become a lot bigger part of our company than I would have ever possibly fathomed before. But it is normally kind of a reaction to the pendulum going so far in one direction that you actually had to create this product, you know, because you had no other alternatives, right? Again, we had no other alternative that communicate if we didn't build Truth Social and it skyrocketed the second we did it. We're going to build a financial institution that can't be cancelled and we're going to do it if need be on DeFi and we'll put JP Morgan out of business, right? I mean, because there's nothing that can't be done in crypto better, cheaper, faster, more transparently than these massive financial institutions and buildings behind me right now that are filled with tens of thousands of people you know pushing paper forms back and forth you know that work on a nine to

five Monday through Friday that don't work the weekends that take two hour long lunch breaks you know why isn't finance 24 hours a day seven days a week why is it that on it that you can trade Bitcoin at Saturday night at nine o'clock while having a glass of wine with your wife, but yet you wanna pull out $5? You can't. Why is it that a bank takes 120 days to do a,

know your customer, to give you a home mortgage because you and your wife wanna buy a property that you saw while you're driving home one day? And what, after banking you for 25 years, you have to fill out a paper, know your customer form? It's insane. And so, Trump Mobile, all the crypto ventures that we're doing, World Liberty Financial, obviously Truth Social was a way to kind of combat that kind of woke, weaponized culture that was being thrown at us. It's been some of the most incredible projects we've ever done. It's been so much

fun. Just on the truth social side, I was stunned. I became friends with Devin Nunes through us covering Russiagate and he being one of these key figures who was kind of digging in and trying to figure out what was going on. But then when he suddenly left Congress to head up Truth Social, it was shocking to me. I was like, are you sure you want to be doing this? You're playing a kind of an important role here. We actually did an interview about this and I can see a lot more clearly what he was thinking. Jan, I was sitting at this desk when I got the calls from the Washington Post and your times. Eric, I hear you have

a servers in the basement of Trump Tower that communicate directly to the Kremlin. I kid you not. You go, excuse me? Servers where? Yes, yes, we hear very credible sources. You have servers in the basement of Trump Tower that communicate directly with the Kremlin. I go first of all, like we're largely a cloud based computing company. So, you know, we're pretty server free.

Second of all, you don't put servers in basements because basements flood. Third of all, I don't know damn person over in in Russia. You know, I mean, I hardly knew what a delegate was. You know, we hardly knew what caucus was, let alone, you know, some high tech scheme to communicate with Russia to overthrow an election. I mean, it was all BS as, as obviously everybody came, it came to found out. But now it's amazing. I mean, the political discourse is really amazing.

Devin was amazing in that whole process, but he's doing a great job on the truth front. You know, I think really between what we did, which was, was create a community that actually had free speech, it brought. Tens and tens and tens of millions of people into it. You know, it really forced Twitter to do what it ultimately did. And then obviously, Elon to come in later and do what he did so well. I really believe that we are the catalyst to restoring free speech in this country because every single one of us and certainly the epic times and certainly all of your viewers they would post something and everybody

could see them turn down the dials. You know normally if one of my posts was liked by 70 000 people you know it would get liked by 2000 people and then I'd ask my friends to go in and search for it and it wouldn't come up on any of their profiles I mean they were turning down the dials. They were controlling what people saw they were censoring free speech In my father's case, they just flat-out You know turned him off despite the fact that the Aitola was on there. The Taliban was on there Boko Haram was on there I mean literally they were all these terrorist organizations were on Twitter, yet the 47th president of the United States, who was beloved by well over half America, but let's just say half America was thrown off, but the Taliban could stay on there.

No, I really think that these things were catalyst to kind of restoring free speech in the country. And Devin was a very big part of that. It's very interesting that you talk about this ability to dial down messages. And this is something I've been reflecting on a ton, because there's two sides. One side is you can dial up a message, especially when you put a lot of money in there, you have a lot of different channels to do so. But that's a lot less pernicious than the ability to

actually turn off a voice, to basically have a whole swath of people never actually hear that alternative viewpoint at all. Yeah, we're back. It's astonishing. I backfired on them. Let me just give you a crazy example. CNN, how many people does it have watching prime time now, like 400,000 or something like that? It's horribly bleak numbers, horribly bleak numbers. You could go look up the stats, but it's like, it's a total joke. Now CNN's about four blocks that way, right? I'm in Trump Tower right now. CNN is over Columbus Circle, AOL Time Warner Building,

filled with thousands of employees, the fanciest studios you have ever seen, the nicest elevators. And then all of a sudden you look at Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan's literally broadcasting off of an iPhone. I mean, slightly more sophisticated than that, but not not a whole lot right small studio small operation And he's literally touching the entire world and man what a great job that guy has done He has done a phenomenal phenomenal job and the whole world was watching you have these kids That popped up through the campaign that were literally broadcasting off of an iPhone.

Their setups were nothing. One one thousandth of what CNN was. And yet their message is getting disseminated to the masses in the ways the mainstream media could never possibly imagine. In terms of cost per viewer, they're one thousandth of what the big networks would otherwise be. And so what's happened is you have this massive paradigm shift in mainstream media. Mainstream media has gone like this. I mean, it's just absolutely tanked.

And you have all these independent voices who aren't controlled by kind of the corporate world by one of three families that controls all of media, and they're skyrocketing while the other people are falling like bricks. And so I do think that they did it in 2016, but they did it to their peril. Always be very careful of unintended consequences. And you want to talk about the law of unintended consequences? The law of unintended consequences is as they dialed us all down, they empower all of these people.

They create such dissent against their own networks that people canceled these people and went with these people and created a whole new media paradigm. The media right now is the weakest it's ever been by far. People don't trust them. People don't like them. People don't wanna listen to them. People want the counter messaging. And most of the time, people, when they listen to them, people don't like them, you know, people don't want to listen to them, people want the counter messaging, you

know, and most of the time people when they listen to them, if they do listen to mainstream media, frankly roll their eyes. And so in a certain way, it's created this like unvarnished honesty in society, you know, and my father was was catalyst number one for all of this. But it's amazing. Again, remember that word, you know, the unintended consequences, and the unintended consequences of the media's actions doing what they did, discredited in such a way that will actually

make them eventually disappear. Yeah, I do think something shifted after the 2024 election. I do feel like a little bit of this weight, kind of not as heavy anymore, but you've still been out there slandered and all sorts of stuff for a very long time. I don't mean you, I mean, everybody who had messaging unapproved, so to speak. We won. A year ago, right now, I was sitting in a cold-ass

courtroom with my father right behind him. I wouldn't leave his side. I was there every single day with him, right? As they literally tried to imprison him for doing absolutely nothing wrong, right? And every single day, those networks, the MSNBCs, the CNNs, ABCs, the CBSs, every single day they sat there and they slandered him and

they slandered him and they slandered him. And we won. Right? What does that tell you? So you're right, they drug our name through the mud. I can't tell you how many negatives, I can't tell you how many kill piece words were written about me personally. Honestly, they don't even bother me anymore.

Like, we, like, we've won the battle. We won the war. They did that for eight years. Actually, they did it for 10 really. I mean, I'll never forget, you know, 12 minutes after my father was sworn as commander in chief, the Washington Post wrote a story this meant each minute of Donald Trump begins, right? Like, they didn't even try to hide what their intent was. I mean, every subpoena of the 116 subpoenas I received, every single subpoena came out of a story that was planted in the Washington Post or in New York Times that was then sent to either some state AG or DA, you know, who would end up going down some, you know, rabbit hole, send you a subpoena

three seconds later, the coordination between all of them was like not, I mean, the media became the lobbyist arm of the DNC and the entire Democratic Party, you know, yet we still won. And so for all the people who are hurt by these people for all the dials that were turned down Again take solace knowing in the fact that they did not win because people understood exactly what they were doing It pissed them off and they decided to vote against the very establishment that was trying to take away Not their eighth amendment, right? Not their it the man their first Amendment, right the very right along with freedom of religious religion You know that they're entitled to under the US Constitution the first here's what I'll tell you

Don't try and control Americans free speech It will not work out well for you and and the media and the entire Democratic Party and all the people that orchestrated nonsense found that out the hard way. And frankly, they're weaker for it and we're a better country for it. I think you did mention World Liberty Financial. Of course, you're trying to create an institution based on crypto, a financial institution, using crypto at its core. There's been a lot of initiatives out of your father's White House around crypto. There's a strategic Bitcoin reserve, this digital asset stockpile, there's been

the working group, there's been the promotion of stable coins, and so forth. Some people are saying, hey, looks like the Trump boys might be trying to leverage this somehow. How do you respond to that kind of criticism? I respond very simply. My father has always loved crypto. We've always loved crypto. We started World Liberty Financial when we were sitting in a courtroom where we had a 0% chance of winning according to the mainstream media. It isn't really interesting. My father wants to do the things that are best for this country. We have to win the digital revolution. We don't believe

that China is running at it as fast, maybe faster than even we are. So we're gonna get totally left behind. But no, these projects were started, you know, pre politics. When the New York Times said we had zero chance of winning, because we truly believe in the future of finance. And, you know, you've got to break, you know, you've got to break that to the antiquated system, which, by the way, the people that the antiquated financial system, the, you know, traditional finance, you know, you've got to break that the antiquated system, which by the way, the people that the antiquated financial system, the, you know, traditional finance, you know, benefits, it's guys like us, right? It's, it's guys that have big balance sheets, guys that big companies, guys that have a lot of zeros behind their name, you know, who's absolutely

devastating till everybody else. Like I can negotiate my interest rates. I can negotiate bank terms. You know who can't? The person who's trying to buy that $80,000 or $100,000 house with JP Morgan doesn't even want to finance because it's a waste of their time and it doesn't move their needle based on the enterprise value and the capitalization of a company. That's where really crypto comes in, in a massive way. It gives people financial freedom. It it's cheaper It's faster. It's more transparent

You don't have a person who's gonna cancel you because they all like the fact that you're wearing a red hat this is make America great again on it or your company is affiliated with a church or A thousand other reasons that I've heard. I mean, I literally had a guy come up to me saying My cancel my company's bank accounts were canceled for a thousand other reasons that I've heard. I mean, I literally had a guy come up to me saying, my company's bank accounts were canceled because we make springs. Some of those springs go in fishing reels.

Those fishing reels are sold in Bass Pro Shops. Bass Pro Shops sells guns. And they thought we were too close to the equation. I mean, you can't make this up. So no, our involvement in crypto started when we had no choice, when every person, every bank in the world deplatformed us for no reason whatsoever. We're moral people. We run a great company and we were left with no option.

That's when it started. But now it's very convenient for them to say, okay, it's based in politics. It wasn't based in politics. It was long before politics that this started. Ironically, the same people that asked that question are the same people who never asked the question of, is it morally okay for Hunter Biden to happen to find his way into finger painting and sell his art for hundreds of thousands of dollars to God knows who all over the world? I mean, I still ask, Hunter Biden had more entities,000 to, you know, God knows who all over the world. You know, I mean, I still ask, you know, Hunter Biden had more entities, illegal entities and shell companies than any person I've ever seen in my entire life. What product was he selling?

You know, we've been in real estate for four generations. My entire life starting at 11 years old, as I said, was working on construction sites, building projects. You know, we sell condos, we sell hotel rooms, we sell rounds of golf, we're in hospitality. Companies that we were affiliated with long before my father, anybody even thought my father had a chance of regaining office as we were in a courtroom are somehow questioned. I find that rather amusing to tell you the truth. But no, I stay out of any kind of political legislation in terms of crypto.

I don't get involved in the fray. I put my head down, as I've always done. We're building the greatest real estate projects on earth. I'm very proud of them. I've got well over 10,000 employees around the world. But we're an American company. We're an incredible company. We've got phenomenal people, the most iconic projects, and we do it the right way. We absolutely do it the right way. And we do it for the benefit of America. We pay a fortune in taxes. I wouldn't say the same is true of a lot of people to say the least. Eric, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A quick final thought as we finish? Well, first of all, I appreciate you guys because you've always been on the right side of the fight. The way they've targeted you, the way they've targeted the publication in your outlet is nothing short of spectacular. They did it to you both in

Asia, and they've clearly done done to you in the US. So thanks for having conviction. The amount of people I've met in my life who have very little conviction, very little backbone and don't actually stand up for what they believe, it's kind of tremendous. And you guys have been on the right side of this. So thank you for honorable journalism and the fight that you've taken on every single day and again, having the resiliency that you guys are. You guys are truly amazing. And I say that with all of my heart.

Well, Eric Trump, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks so much, Jan. Thank you all for joining Eric Trump and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.