The Tucker Carlson Show - JD Vance: The Immigration Crisis, How Polls Are Used to Fool You, and the Left’s Plan to Stop Trump

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

No one in Washington seems to know how much we’re spending on illegal aliens. JD Vance plans to find out. (01:54) Meet Atlas (02:40) JD Vance’s Predictions About the Election (10:00) The Left’s Plan to Beat Trump (12:00) How Much Is the US Spending on Illegal Immigration? (22:39) The Polls Aren’t Real (29:30) Kamala Harris (36:11 ) Why Don’t We Know Anything About the Trump Shooter? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And 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. J.D. Vance, thank you for this. We're on the road. You're in Phoenix. Yep.

So where is the race right now? I mean, sincerely to the best of, well, first of all, before we start, who is that? This is Atlas. Atlas, come here. Atlas, come. What's up, buddy? So this is Atlas, which I found out on the internet a few weeks ago that he's actually a rented dog that was given to me by the campaign to make me seem like I'm a dog fan. How weird. How weird. And it's actually hysterical to hear these lefties be like, oh, that dog, that's totally not his dog. And, you know, of course, we got him when he was like an eight-week-old puppy.

And we've been, you know, we love dogs. And he's been our little guy. But he's like so well-trained and so normal. It's like shocking to me that anybody would think that he's not our puppy. But here we are. He's on the road with you. He's on the road with us. Yes, we have our whole family up here.

My kids are like, you are like two stories above. And of course, they woke up at like 4.30, the ass crack of dawn because they're on East Coast time, Ohio time. And here we are in Arizona. So we've been up for a long time. I appreciate you doing this, but I'm gonna drink a lot of coffee during our interview. But anyway, you asked, how was the race going? Yeah, so what is your sincere belief about how this plays out?

I mean, look, I think we're going to win. And I think we're going to win, I wouldn't say comfortably, but I don't think it's going to be the sort of thing where, you know, three days later, we don't know the results of the election. Who knows, of course, I've been wrong before. But I mean, look, the basic fundamentals of the race are 65% of Americans, give or take, are unhappy with direction of the country. They're unhappy with the foreign policy chaos. They're unhappy with the fact they can't afford groceries or housing. And they're unhappy just generally with the fact that Kamala Harris is, you know, not a real person who's running for president. She clearly doesn't have her own ideas about how to advance the country forward.

So I think that we're in a good spot. Now, there was, of course, the switcheroo from Biden to Harris. And even though a lot of Americans don't like Kamala Harris, like, you know, she's younger and she's not as infirm as Joe Biden is. And so that sort of invigorated the Democratic base a little bit. And you see that sugar high in a little bit of the public polling. I mean, we're about eight weeks to go before Election Day, and the public polls have shifted a little bit in their direction. But what we're seeing both when we talk to the Kamala Harris, like the journalists that are

close to the Kamala Harris campaign, I mean, you know how this goes, right? You sort of give journalists some information, they give you some information. You yourself are a journalist, or at least you once were. And so our numbers, their numbers very clearly show that she's not doing very well in the states that she needs to win. But a lot could change and we have to get out the vote. And there, of course, are all of these ways in which Democrats have become very good at using both big tech, but also the sort of ballot harvesting operation to try to squeeze out as many votes as possible in particular areas. So we have to do that ourselves. And I think that we're in a much better position to do it in 2024 than we were in 2020, though there's a

lot of catching up to do. But on balance, man, when the country's not going in the right direction and people fondly remember the presidency of Donald Trump because take-home pay was going up, I think that puts us in a good position, but we still have to run our race. But my prediction, 60-40, is that we have a relatively early night on Tuesday night. And I think the 40% is it's probably tight, but we still win.

And you think they'll accept that? Well, yeah, it's a good question, right? They'll be like, we call this race for Donald Trump. And it'll be like, you know, he's the president. I didn't vote for him, but that's okay. Well, I think that, look, there's only so much they can do, right? They've already switched out their candidates six weeks before their convention. They've already sort of marshaled

the ballot harvesting operation, which of course is the story of 2020. It's not like, you know, it's not ballot machines were hacked into. The story of 2020 is that they really, you know, turned on this ballot harvesting machine and they used, of course, big tech to silence stories that were negative about Joe Biden. They're certainly going to do that again. They're already seeing that, right? The technology sector is already fully in the tank for Kamala Harris. They've obviously switched out their candidates. So all of the negative feelings that people had about Joe Biden don't necessarily get translated onto Kamala Harris.

They have different negative feelings, but it is different. So yeah, I think they're doing everything that they can to ensure that Donald Trump is an elected president again, but there is only so much they can do. And I think it's important, you know, for those of us who think like you and I do, there's this big question, right, about like how, what's actually going on with the people who run the country? Are they evil geniuses or are they incompetents? And the more that I get to know these people and the more that I sort of spend time around them, the more I think that they're much more incompetent than they are evil geniuses. And so that makes me think what they're doing, we can see it's all out in the open and we just have to push back against it as well as we can, but not assume that these people can

like, I mean, look, I just don't see any evidence that these people are like controlling the puppet strings and they're going to do everything that they can. They are going to do everything that they can, but it's not that much. So right now, yeah, I think Donald Trump's going to be the next president. And if he gets elected president, once again, do you think they will accept that? Are you concerned? Yeah. They've spent the last 10 years taking full control over the U.S. military,

which is, I mean, I'm sorry to even talk like that, but they think that way, so it's worth saying it. Yeah. So that's what worries me. So you hear all this talk about threats to democracy, right? And the biggest threat to democracy in this country is not like Donald Trump using legal maneuvers to challenge the 2020 election. The biggest threat to democracy is that the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. is fundamentally misaligned with at least half the country, right? Yes. So what I worry less about is like, are they going to let Trump win? Well, it's not going to be easy,

but I actually do, sitting here right now, maybe I'm wrong, but I do feel very confident that Trump's going to be elected president, that he will be president. I think the real fight is going to be when he becomes president and he tries to do things, they're going to take him down and try to take him down in a very big way. And that's where the real fight is going to be. And I think it's going to look like a few different things. So number one, I really worry about the minute we start doing anything on the deportation front, like you have 25 million illegal aliens, you and I've talked about, I think it's the biggest threat to our country. You have got to get these people out of the country. You are going to have a reaction from the media, from the tech sector that's unlike anything that we've

ever seen. It is fascism come to America. When we sell people who have come here illegally, you have to go back home, right? That is going to be a major, major focal point. I think the other thing that I really worry about, Tucker, is bond markets, right? Because the country's deeply in debt. Atlas, come here. Come here, buddy. Hey, hey, come here. Come here. Sit, sit. Lay down. You're okay. Just chill out. I know you don't have your bed here. He's used to a nice plush pillow here. And he's like, what the hell? None of my stuff is here. I know. He's a very good dog. So the thing I really worry about on bond markets is, OK, we have, call it, $1.6 to $2 trillion in debt every single year in this country getting added to the national debt. And the only thing that really makes that serviceable is that interest rates are still pretty low, right?

They're about 4 and a half percent, right? Now, if interest rates go to eight percent and you're actually spending way more to service the debt than you are on actual good services and infrastructure for your country, that can become a huge spiral that could take down the finances of this country. We've never had that in 200 plus years of being an American republic. We've never had a true debt spiral in this country. So I really worry about, do the bond markets, do the international investors, the people who are getting rich off of globalization, the people who have gotten rich from shipping our manufacturing base to China, the people who've gotten rich from a lot of wars, do they try to take down the Trump

presidency by spiking bond rates? And one of the things that I think a lot about, and I talk to the president about this a lot, is when we think about who we're choosing as treasury secretary, one of the things the president, of course, it's his choice, ultimately, is we've got to find the guy who's going to make sure that we can manage this country through a real time of crisis where we get the country's finances back on track. That is one of the ways they could take down Donald Trump. And you have to ask yourself, the tools at their disposal,

they're doing everything that they can to manipulate voters. I don't think it's going to work. But if Trump wins, it's not just going to be smooth sailing for four years. They're going to do everything that they can to take down his presidency. So the key number is that interest rate. I think that's probably the most important

and the most impactful way they could try to take down his presidency is by spiking the interest rates. You saw this, by the way, Tucker, Liz Truss in Britain. Yeah. Okay. Which, by the way, I like Liz Truss. I disagree with her on a lot of issues. So I'm not trying to stand up or say Liz Truss is my person. But look, she came in, she had a plan, and the Bank of England, I think, made a lot of mistakes, maybe intentional. Interest rates shot through the roof, and it took down her government in a matter of days. Of course, we don't have the same style of government, but it would be devastating to the president if you had this bond market death spiral. And that's one of the things we're

going to have to fight against when we win. Again, I think we're going to win. Yeah, I think so too. And I think if you don't win, barring some dramatic unforeseen development, it'll be hard for people to believe you didn't win because who would vote for more of this? But how do you prevent your opponents from spiking those rates? Well, I think one is you have to get,

I mean, look, you have to have actual smart people in government. And I mean, this, it sounds so simple and it sounds so obvious. But one of the things that I think we have done wrong on the Republican side is, you know, we don't like the government generally. Right. There are things that we think the government should do, but we want the government to be smaller than the Democrats want the government to be. And so I think that that actually creates a blind spot where the things the government does, you actually want them to be done very well, and you want them done by very smart people. And so I think you have to staff the Treasury Department with the right kind of people who can manage various fiscal problems. And then I also think that you have to be willing to actually

pursue, whether you call it the Trump agenda, the America first agenda, you actually have to be willing to do this stuff, even when the media and even when frankly, some Republicans howl in protest, right? So one thing the president has talked a lot about, by the way, it's not just smart policy, it's also very smart politics is you need to penalize companies that are shipping America's industrial base overseas. And you need to penalize companies that are shipping America's industrial base overseas. And you need to reward companies that are hiring and building in the United States of America, right? Well, one of the ways you do that is through tariffs. You say, if you're going to manufacture all your stuff in China, we're going to penalize you for trying to access American

markets with goods that are made by slaves in China or some other country. Now you do that, you both create more prosperity at home. You also raise some revenue from the companies that are made by slaves in China or some other country. Now you do that, you both create more prosperity at home, you also raise some revenue from the companies that are just gonna say, we're staying in China, your economic policy be damned. That actually stabilizes in a lot of ways the fiscal situation in this country. You've also gotta tackle some of the big spending items.

I mean, we still have, let me give you a crazy statistic. So in 2019, total federal spending in this country was $4.5 trillion. In 2024, it will be north of $6.5 trillion. Okay, where's that $2 trillion difference come from, Tucker? Now, people will say, and I think they're being dishonest and they're being even malicious, they'll say, well, that's Social Security and Medicare. You have to fix Social Security and Medicare. Well, of that delta, man, of that difference, you're talking about maybe $100 billion additional per year on Social Security, maybe $100 billion in Medicare. So there's still $2 trillion that we're spending. And what happened in 2020? COVID, right? COVID blew up the American federal debt and the American federal budget deficit. And we've got to get back to like some

basic common sense and some basic sanity there. And I think if we do that, you have smart people managing the bond markets of treasury and how we're auctioning off treasury bonds. And you actually have a president, I know Trump is committed to this, who's committed to steering us through these very troubling financial times. Finally, you unleash America's energy markets because that drives down the cost of goods. You do all those things in tandem, and you actually get America on a much more sustainable fiscal situation. But that's a lot. And you have to have a very strong president, and you have to have Republicans who are willing to go along with it. And I think that we have that, Tucker, but it's not easy, right? This is the basic,

we have to be good at government. Even though we want the government to be smaller than the Democrats, we have to be good at government. And I think President Trump is very committed to that. We're going to have to see how much we can bring our fellow Republicans along. So two pretty easy, very popular ways to save money would be, one, no more subsidizing illegal immigration. That's exactly right. We're not going to pay people to break our laws. We're not going to pay them to rob liquor stores, you know, or come into this country.

We're not going to give them free cell phones or free airplane tickets or housing vouchers. We're not going to stop doing that. And the second is we're going to stop sending billions of dollars around the world to people who hate us, who, you know, when it doesn't serve our interests. Why can't we do those things?

Well, it's very important, right? So this is one of the reasons why I'm instinctively skeptical. And look, I want Social Security and Medicare to be financially sustainable for the long term. They're very important programs for our elderly Americans. But when people say the reason why we can't have reasonable spending policies is because of Social Security and Medicare, I'm like, whoa, that's a distraction. You're distracting from the reason that we actually have an out-of-control budgetary picture. That's why I just gave you the six and a half versus four and

a half trillion dollar number. What are we really spending money on that is unsustainable? It's wars, right? It's foreign conflicts. And you're right, it's hundreds of billions of dollars per year that we're spending on illegal aliens. Now, here's a crazy thing. I've been in the Senate for not even two years. When I ask people how much money, okay, talk about healthcare for illegals, talk about social security fraud, talk about Medicare fraud, talk about housing vouchers, because even though illegal aliens aren't entitled to Section 8, there's fraud in the program and also their children are entitled to Section 8. So, course that money flows to the illegal aliens. Add all this up and then take probably 25, 30 million people who are here illegally and maybe that undercounts it. How much are we actually spending per year on

illegal aliens in this country? No one in our government knows. I've heard estimates that it's $100 billion a year. I've heard estimates that it's $600 billion a year. I've heard estimates that it's $600 billion a year. I've heard estimates that it's even higher. There are ways to estimate it, but we don't actually have good ways to track this stuff because a lot of the money, Tucker, think about this, a lot of the money is spent at the local level, right? So if you're an illegal alien, you commit a crime and you're in a local jail cell, we're not really counting that money into the cost of having illegal aliens. But of course, if you're a municipality and you're spending $40,000 a year to house some criminal who should go back to where he came from, that's real money, right? Or let's take this example. Where do most illegal aliens

get their healthcare? Emergency rooms. Emergency rooms, exactly right. That's why you can't go to an emergency room now when your kid gets sick. The wait time in emergency rooms has nearly doubled over the last few years because we have all these illegal aliens who are getting hospital services at emergency rooms. Well, obviously, they're not paying the bill. When they get it, who pays the bill? The American taxpayer. You add up all these costs, and I think it's hundreds of billions of dollars that we're spending on illegal aliens. And this is why I think it's ridiculous for people to say, well, we can't get America's fiscal picture under control unless we cut, you know, social security from American citizens who have paid into it for 45 years. My response is, why don't we start with the wars? And why don't we start with not giving illegal aliens a ton of

benefits and then see where our fiscal situation is after that. We haven't done that. Those are wildly popular ideas. I can't imagine that they're below 65, 70% in the polls, if you were to pose that question. Probably higher, yeah. Yeah, probably higher. But there's no sense that any of those things are going to happen because there's so much money behind keeping them in place. What do you do about that? Well, I think what you have to do is, first of all, you have to go at the heart of the people who actually drive public opinion and drive the decisions that are made in this country. Tucker, the reason why all these popular things don't happen, like why aren't we deporting illegal aliens? Why aren't we cutting off the money

spigot that goes to illegal aliens? Why aren't we stopping sending thousands of American kids to die overseas in some pointless war? It's because in reality, right now, we don't live in a real democracy in this country, right? The people who call the shots in this country have further and further divorced themselves from any kind of real democratic accountability, right? So ask yourself, in 2008, did America have a real choice between the foreign policy of John McCain and the foreign policy of Barack Obama? Of course we did, right? They were saying, in effect, the exact same thing. For the first time in 2016, we had a real choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, okay? Of course, the American people chose Donald Trump

despite every incentive and every pressure to not choose Of course, the American people chose Donald Trump despite every incentive and every pressure to not choose Donald Trump, the American people still chose Donald Trump. And of course, what did they do? They spent the next four years trying to destroy them. So the question is like, how do we do these things? You have to make the actual levers of government power accountable to the American people.

And that means you've gotta be able to fire bureaucrats who don't do their job, right? This is a common sense. I mean, let me take like a very isolated example. If you were to poll what percentage of Americans think that the VA should be more responsive to the healthcare concerns of American veterans, that's probably a 95% issue, okay?

And I, you know, I'm a veteran myself. I served in the Marine Corps. I went to Iraq. I have gone through the VA healthcare system. And by the way, 92%, 95% of the people who work in the VA are great. But as you know, in any organization, if you have 5% of people who refuse to do their job and you can't get rid of them, they make it impossible for the 95% of people who are trying to do their job. And of course the veterans suffer because of it. So why does the VA not work as well as the American people want it to? Because the 5% who don't do their job at the VA are calling the shots and making it harder on everybody else. And that basic story is true in our entire government. The Joint Chiefs of Staff. Donald Trump orders the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do a

troop rotation in Syria. The Joint Chiefs of Staff lie to him. They actually stagger the troop redeployments in a way where it looks like they're obeying his orders when in actuality, they're actually disobeying his orders. Okay, every single person who was involved in that decision should be fired. You have to make the government... If not arrested, how can the military in a democracy act, you know, autonomously? The commander-in-chief tells you to do something. We don't have to be in control of the military military. Like that's the nightmare scenario. That's right. But that, but that, that is part and parcel of the broader problem, which is you don't have real democratic accountability in our government. And to get it back, the people who call the shots have to be

responsive to the elected president. And this is one of, you know, Trump's main campaign platforms. One of the main things that he talks about, and of course, I think he learned in some ways the hard way during his first four years in office, is the president recognizes that if you have people in your government who you tell to do something and they disobey you, that's not like checks and balances. They're part of your government. The check and balance is the House, the Senate, the judiciary, right? If the people in your own government aren't obeying you, you have got to get rid of them and replace them with people who are responsive to what the president is trying to do. If you don't have that, you don't have a real democratic accountability. You've got to be a nut cutter because that's the system at stake. That's democratic control. How

do voters have any control over their government if the people they elect have no control? That's exactly right, man. And again, we have to sort of remind ourselves that it's real people who suffer because of this, right? There are Americans who are dead because the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn't listen to the President of the United States when he said you need to do troop redeployments out of Syria. There are veterans who are dead because the VA does not function as well as it could because the president needs to be able to fire, again, the small number, but the small number of people who aren't doing their job. And that same story repeats itself, rinse and repeat because the president needs to be able to fire, again, the small number, but the small number of people who aren't doing their job. And that same story repeats itself, rinse and repeat,

through the entire American government. You have got to have basic democratic accountability. I think most Americans recognize, look, we're fine with bureaucrats making a reasonable salary. We're fine with people having a good life, but they've got to do their job, right? When you're in public service, you've got to do your job. And whether you're an elected official or an unelected bureaucrat, if you're not doing your job, you've got to get out there and make way for somebody who will. So if you guys win and you start firing people who are acting against orders of their commander-in-chief and against the expressed will of voters, the New York Times will call it a fascist takeover. That's exactly right. So the question is, do you care? Well, I think we have to not care. You know, you have to care about public opinion,

of course, because you have to actually make the case to the American people. But if you're acting on behalf of the public, you have to say, I mean, look, it is it's what's so funny about it is it's the opposite, right? Real democracy is when the elected leaders the voters elect actually make the decisions of the government. But fascism, if it's anything, it's that the voters don't get any say in how their government actually operates. So I think you have to do it. two years. But there are all of these really subtle ways in which the media, the tech sector, the people who call the shots, try to manipulate the American public and manipulate political leadership into not doing the things the American people actually want. So here, let me give you an example. Mark this down. I guarantee in 18 months or so, we're going to have, this is going to be

prophetic. So right now, according to public opinion polling, 65% of Americans, give or so, we're going to have, this is going to be prophetic. So right now, according to public opinion polling, 65% of Americans, give or take, support mass deportations, meaning 25 million people here, you've got to send some of them back to where they came from. Okay, that's a common sense issue. Two-thirds of Americans, give or take, support it. In 18 months, there will be media stories and there will be public opinion polls to back it up that actually Americans do not support mass deportations, that Donald Trump is doing all of these terrible things and he has to stop. It's inhumane, it's evil, and the American public don't support it. The same people who put those public opinion polls together are the same people who say,

for example, that Donald Trump was going to lose Wisconsin by 17 points. Remember that? Three days before the 2020 election, Donald Trump was supposed to lose Wisconsin by 17 points. And set to the side all of the debates about what happened in 2020, Wisconsin was basically a tied election. So these guys use public polls, they use the media, not even just to manipulate public opinion, but to manipulate our leadership about what public opinion actually says. So how does that happen? So those polls are fake is what you're saying? Oh, absolutely. They're fake.

They're absolutely fake. And we see this, I mean, again, you know, this is like very nerdy, but let's like go down this polling rabbit hole, okay? So I, you know, a friend of mine, I think is the best pollster in America. Every race I've ever seen him poll, he's way better than anybody else, okay?

So good pollster versus a standard media pollster. Fabrizio. Tony Fabrizio, great guy. He's the president's pollster, okay? Take a standard media poll and ask yourself, like, what are they doing? Those polls are all conducted by what's called online panels. In other words, they have a group of people that they go to again and again and again, they ask their opinion.

Well, who are the people who are gonna respond aggressively to online panels about what they feel about every issue of the day? A bunch of highly engaged, typically far left, typically people with professional degrees, people who are not representative of the American people at large, right? Meanwhile, most Americans are trying to pay their mortgage and trying to take care of their kids and

trying to do all the things that are necessary to live a life in this country. And they're not answering the phone when a pollster picks up. So if you actually look at the good pollsters, they're telling you a radically different story because they're talking to a representative sample of the United States. And the fake media pollsters are talking to a very narrow slice of the United States. And again, they're trying to sell us a story. And it's not just, again, it's not just, this is not primarily to manipulate the American people, I think. I think it's to manipulate us, meaning elected officials. Because I've sat in lunches with a number of my colleagues who will say, look at this poll, and look how Americans

are responding to this or that issue. And then you realize that that exact same poll was wildly inaccurate two years ago. Why are you making your judgments about what the American people believe based on some poll? And oh, by the way, why don't you express some leadership? Why don't you just actually have a view and go to the American people and try to persuade them that your view is wise and then enact legislation in accordance with that wisdom, right? That's how real leadership should work. But what's so deceptive, and I think what people don't realize is that a lot of these polls are designed not to measure opinion, but to shape it. Yes. So they are tools of influence. 100%. President Trump said this recently in an interview, where he said that the purpose of some of these polls that say,

okay, you're down 17 points in Wisconsin. So say you're a Republican voter, you want to support Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. And of course, the polls now are much better for us than they were back in 2020. But let's say you want to support President Trump, and you read a story that says he's down by 17 points in Wisconsin. Why even show up, right? So there's a voter suppression dynamic here where you try to get people to get depressed and to drop out of the democratic process. Don't even go and vote if the president is down by so much. The purpose of these polls

is actually manipulation of both the public themselves, but also, of course, elected officials. And I think that we just have to have the courage to trust our own convictions, to say, screw you, I don't buy the polls, and to do what you think is right on behalf of the country. Sounds so common sense. A lot of elected leaders don't live in the world of common sense. So you said at the outset that, you outset that if the current trajectory continues, you're pretty confident you're going to win. Yeah.

I mean, look, you can never be sure. And I've been wrong before. But I just, look, the energy on the ground is really good, right? I mean, we had an event yesterday in Arizona. And we had a few thousand people there. And we didn't have a rock star or a rapper there know, we had a few thousand people there and we didn't have a rock star or rapper there. We just had a few thousand people. And I'm the VP candidate. I'm not the presidential candidate. President Trump is getting 20,000 person crowds. I do think that crowd size is predictive of enthusiasm.

And so you're seeing a lot of evidence that things are that our voters are enthused. The internal numbers are good. People aren't happy with the direction of the country. I feel like we're going to win, but yes. Yeah. Everything you're saying makes sense. I think it's demonstrable. But you've got to think that the Kamala Harris campaign is also aware of this,

that they're maybe not lying to themselves. They may be involved in fake polls designed to mislead, you know, others. They are probably clear-eyed about their chances. They are. And I doubt that, I just have trouble believing they're just going to sit back and think, well, you know, Trump's tried hard. People kind of prefer him. Yeah. Well, it's funny. What do you think could happen between now and election day? Yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny, man, because

you know how this works, but I'll sort of give some insight into your, into this for your viewers and your listeners okay so i have said publicly i've been attacked by this from the left i've said look kamala's own internal polls are not very good right now and of course the lefties say well jd vance is the vp candidate for republicans nobody in kamala harris's campaign is talking to him that's right by the way kamala harris's campaign is not talking to me but they are talking to journalists yeah and then those journalists want insights into what's going on with the Republican ticket. They want to see our internal numbers. And look, the journalists are telling me that Kamala Harris doesn't like her numbers.

The journalists are telling me our campaign does like their numbers. There's a consistency of story here. Journalists act as kind of like it's an information. They're like the intelligence operatives, right? That's totally true. And some of them are working for intelligence operatives. Yeah, journalists are to electoral politics, but like the CIA is the international relations. People think just like in polling, they think, oh, polls are designed to measure what people think. Journalists are designed to report what happened. No. Journalists are players in the political system. Yes. And they

do not disclose that to their readers, and you see it up close. But it's interesting. They play the role of kind of like covert diplomats between the campaigns. Yes, they do. Yeah, and I'll tell you, I mean, in 2016, what the journalists were telling you was Hillary Clinton's campaign is confident, but then some of them, like Bill Clinton, were very not confident. Yeah. And in 2020, they were saying nobody really knows what's going on. And in 2024, they're saying Kamala Harris is feeling a little bit rough about her chances.

The Trump people are feeling good about their chances. Look, I think we're in a good spot, but you can't take this stuff for granted, right? And by the way, I think this goes in both ways, right? If you take too rosy of a picture, you can get demotivated. If you take too pessimistic of a picture, you can get demotivated. Excuse me, we still have to do our job. We have to go out there, persuade voters, we have to go out there, knock on doors. If you're watching this and you want to get involved in the campaign, like go and do it. Go to DonaldJTrump.com, volunteer, become a door knocker because we actually can win this race. I think we will win this race, but not if we sit on our asses and don't get out there and work for it.

What if the hot war breaks out between now and November? Well, that's a very good question. Look, I obviously, just baseline, I don't want a hot war to break out because I don't think that we have a functional president right now, right? I genuinely think that the closest thing that we have to a president right now is Kamala Harris because Joe Biden clearly can't do the job. The people around him recognize that. And so it's the bureaucrats and Kamala who are calling the shots.

If God forbid a true hot war, not just between Russia and Ukraine, but a broader regional war broke out, or not just between Israel and some of Iran's proxies, but a broader regional war, it would scare the hell out of me to have Kamala Harris at the helm. And I think that we have to do a better job at highlighting, it's not just Kamala Harris, you know, we say these things about her that are true. She wanted to defund the police. She wanted to ban fracking. She wanted to

open the border. These things are all true. In fact, she is on video saying these things. But there's a fundamental incompetence to Kamala Harris. So let me ask you, what was the Biden turnover rate among the people who worked for Joe Biden? About 78%. That's, by the way, about medium for American politics. Working in the White House is a tough job. Donald Trump did better than that. But I think Donald Trump, a lot of people have a very intense loyalty. Donald Trump did better than that. But I think Donald Trump, you know, a lot of people have a very certain, a very intense loyalty to Donald Trump. So it's not surprising he did better. Okay. Kamala Harris, 92% turnover. If a hot war breaks out, who is even going to be staffing the administration if you have a person who can't keep human beings in the executive administration of the government, right? That's scary. If you're such an incompetent person that 92% of your staff doesn't want to work for

you, maybe we shouldn't elect that person as president. Or you watch Kamala Harris give an interview. I mean, this is not a person who has like very well-developed views about what she wants to do in the world. She's fundamentally a cog in the wheel of a very corrupt machine. That scares the hell out of me when that person goes to negotiate with a world leader about a hot war. So, okay, we're talking about the substance. Okay, I know you're interested in the politics too. I don't know, like, if, God forbid, the Russia-Ukraine thing becomes a broader regional war,

I don't know if that helps Kamala Harris or hurts her. I almost think it's like too grotesque to even think about because hundreds of thousands and maybe more people would be dying. And I would just be terrified for the country and terrified for humanity. I couldn't agree more. Obviously, I agree with that vehemently. I only ask because I wonder if there's an incentive. I think they're desperate. I think they worry that if you guys get back in that you're going to be a little less humorless and forgiving this time. A lot of people have committed very serious crimes against the United States. They're currently serving in government. Like they have, they're afraid of what happens if you win, and they should be. So like, do they have an incentive to start a hot war? I guess that's

my question. Yeah, no, it's, look, it's a totally fair question. And I don't know, because I don't know that it actually helps them, right? Because one of the things that, look, even President Trump's critics would have to admit, like, remember this, like, I was a Trump critic back in 2016, of course. You remember this. The president remembers this very well. He busts my balls about it all the time. And, you know, you hear these people who say, well, you know, Trump and Biden are both too old for the presidency. And it's like, Trump's memory is like a steel trap. Trust me, I know, because he remembers what I said about him

in September of 2015 to like an excruciating level of detail. But obviously, you know, the president and I are, like very simply, I changed my mind because he was a great president, right? But remember back then, the thing that they said about him is that he would start a nuclear war. Oh, I remember. Right. That was the main thing. All right, you've got this

cowboy. He's going to start a nuclear war with Russia or China or somebody else. And even his critics admit that in hindsight, he was actually the president of peace. Now, of course, conflicts break out, bad things happen, the president can't control everything, but he was remarkably good at using diplomatic leverage and the threat of American power to keep the world in a place of relative calm and stability. So if a hot war breaks out, my guess would be a lot of Americans would say, holy shit, we've got to get back to the guy who knows how to manage the world, not the person who's so incompetent that she blundered us into this conflict in the first place. But I mean, look, man, who knows, by the way, it's shocking how little we know about the guy who shot Donald Trump in the head.

I mean, weeks later, months later, we still have no idea. We allegedly have no idea what the guy's real motive is. But do I think that they are going to do increasingly crazy things to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president? Yes. I don't know exactly what that are going to do increasingly crazy things to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president? Yes. I don't know exactly what that's going to look like. I think we have to be prepared for it. And we just have to do everything we can to make sure he wins.

Last question. And as to what you just said, Trump gets shot in front of everybody live on TV and the media, you know, bury it. But there's also, you would think, a process in place to find out what exactly was that. Yeah. Who was the person who did it? Why did he do it? Why was he allowed to do it?

Is that process underway? I never hear Trump talk about it. I never hear you talk about it. Like, what, when are we going to find out what that was? Yeah, I mean, part of the reason why we don't talk about it that much is because we recognize that Kamala Harris

runs the administration right now. And do we trust Kamala Harris's Department of Justice to really investigate this stuff? I mean, I don't. I don't think the president does either. But there needs to be a real investigation into this stuff. I think it's bizarre that we don't know anything about the guy's motive, though I've heard various rumors. We don't really know anything about the guy's motive. I think there clearly were some very serious security breakdowns. Some of my colleagues in

the Senate have done a good job of pointing this stuff out. But unless you have an administration that's willing to cooperate, you can't actually do this stuff. I think he'd be much better at sniffing out what's going on with all these security breakdowns. But I mean, I think, so here's, this should be actually a media scandal. Okay. So Kamala Harris is running against Donald Trump for president. Kamala Harris runs the government right now. And Donald Trump came within millimeters of having his life taken by a massive security breakdown. She should be using every lever of power to force insight and to force some sunlight into what's actually been going on here. What breakdown happened?

The fact that she's totally uninterested in it, I think is a real scandal. Her political opponent nearly got killed, and she has not used her government to actually investigate why or what security breakdowns led to him almost getting killed. The media and everybody else should be really pissed off about this because she could be doing much more than she's doing right now. But it suggests like a level of darkness that's hard for me to accept. What is that? I mean, I don't know, right? Is it incompetence? Is it that she doesn't want to get to the bottom of it? Is it that if a story comes out that this guy was a left-wing radical, does it help Donald Trump,

and so she wants to hide the motive? There are so many different explanations here for what could be going on. But look, man, I'm a realist. Do I think that we're going to find out what actually happened in Bucks County, Pennsylvania before the election? No, I don't. Because every incentive that exists in our government right now is to hide it, is to suppress it, is to lie about it, is to cover up for various people's failures. And because of that, look, man, I just don't think we're going to learn a whole lot about it. We're going to try. And my Senate, again, Ron Johnson's a great, great friend of mine, a great Senate colleague, does a very good job. I know he is obsessed with trying to get to the bottom of the security failure. Like, how did the guy get with an AR-15 130 yards from the president, which as you know,

that is like a pot shot, right? That's a layup for an AR-15. It's shocking in some ways that President Trump didn't lose his life, but the fact that we're not more focused on the security breakdowns that led to that in the first place, look, man, it's bizarre, it's dark, and I think unfortunately we're not gonna learn

a whole lot about it until November. And the problem is that like so many American young people in their 20s, he had no social media profile whatsoever. Never went online? Never went online. Never went online. And never said anything publicly. And everybody, he was basically a ghost. A ghost who just so happened to nearly kill the future president of the United States.

And, yeah, man, it's pretty weird. It's pretty weird. J.D. Vance. Senator J.D. Vance. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

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