The Tucker Carlson Show - Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump’s Sweeping Victory, & What It Means for the Future of Government Bureaucracy
Episode Date: November 8, 2024Vivek Ramaswamy on how good just triumphed over evil. (00:00) Donald Trump’s Overwhelming Victory (07:38) Why Did Vivek Go All-In for Trump? (23:00) What Are the Effects of Trump’s Win? (32:04) T...rump’s Government Efficiency Plan (50:33) The Oncoming Collapse of Corporate Media (58:42) How Foreign Wars Are Used to Expand Government Bureaucracy (1:16:03) The Left’s Mission to Divide Us Paid partnerships with: Cozy Earth https://CozyEarth.com/Tucker Promo code “Tucker” for up to 40% off ExpressVPN Get 3 months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker Policygenius Get your free life insurance quotes today https://Policygenius.com/Tucker Alp Pouch Join the VIP list at https://AlpPouch.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
So 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.
Amazing. Yeah.
Both houses of the Congress and the executive branch.
How did that happen? I think it happened because it was 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.
Yes.
And I think that's one of the things I've appreciated is that I wrote this like the morning
after the lecture, the afternoon after, and it just felt right to me. He's not actually,
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. And I think the nation- He's definitely an ideologue or a policy wonk, and he doesn't pretend to be one. Right. But he is a badass, actually.
Oh, he's definitely a badass.
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 Tucker Carlson dot com.
Here's the episode.
The nation needs a badass as its commander in chief right now.
And democracy kind of works, in the end. Like 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 kind of 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.
And I loved being in Mar-a-Lago
that night where it was just kind of interesting where everybody else is, you know, myself too,
included, is just like really joyous about what's happening. And I'm sitting next to Donald Trump
and he's sitting there and he's 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. And this is where I was destined
to be and what I was put here to do. And 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.
And so, anyway, I just think it was kind of a beautiful moment of democracy working.
And it goes beyond policy.
It's just like the persona of the country is actually what we recovered.
Yeah.
I mean, I've spent eight years watching Republicans kiss Donald Trump's ass in public.
Yeah.
And I'm always feel a little nauseous.
I love,
I love Trump just personally because I know him well,
but I hate hearing people say,
it's all fake.
It is.
It's performative.
Now,
I just,
ever since he got shot,
I just,
I realized,
not only do I really like Trump,
I find him amusing and all, I really respect Trump.
And I mean that when I'm saying it.
I'm not, I have no reason to kiss his ass.
Yeah.
And I mean that.
And I felt that at night.
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.
Exactly.
He's actually the right guy to lead the country.
You go through phases of taking,
maybe I'm being too honest,
but, you know,
taking Trump seriously.
Trump is eccentric.
I mean, that's just a fact.
And, you know,
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.
And it was kind of this you know
on the road with the grateful dead kind of thing you know just like shambolic you know what i mean
uh 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 heavy that's how it felt that night it was just
like it's like it's like a conviction that this is my destiny This is the nation's destiny
And America has this great tradition by the way
We believe in our own manifest destiny
It's just like we have 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
And we have no reason to believe that other than the fact that we do
And I think that that's the kind of leader we need right now to bring that back and
that's donald trump as a person so in some ways trump's story is america's story trump's comeback
is now hopefully america's comeback and i actually actually just think it's going to play out that
way in the next couple of years the national spirit's going to be back you'll see in the
composition of the electorate by the way a lot of young people that was probably the biggest
demographic shift just came in a tidal wave of force, which I was particularly passionate about seeing this time
around. Me too. I totally agree. And, and, you know, I think it's just this moment where we're
going through a great kind of spiritual, I don't mean spiritual in the religious sense here. I mean,
the civic sense, but a spiritual revival of American identity and like that was that was the pinnacle of what we
saw on tuesday night it there was a moment i think right around the time he was shot and elon endorsed
him within moments yes which i think is was looking back you know a pivot point the whole thing um but
where i think or i myself felt this way like 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.
And then in one moment,
it just evaporated
and you saw like
22-year-old sorority girls.
That's right.
You know, with Trump hats.
And you're like, wait a second.
No one's embarrassed
about supporting Trump anymore. And they're wearing a Trump hat in Midtown Manhattan. Totally. Who would do that? Nobody would have done that three years ago. this has been percolating for a little while. I was really, 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 didn'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. Or give me the permission to at least stand
up against whatever left-wing orthodoxy
in a way that they couldn't have.
And I think a lot of other people
played important roles in that as well.
I mean, Elon probably played the biggest role
in giving people that permission.
No, but you're from exactly that world.
And like, just to be super blunt,
you're from, you have the credentials
that mark a member of that class.
Yeah.
And which matter to some people
in terms of giving them the permission.
Well, it's our whole system is based on them. Yeah. Right. And so, um, and JD to some extent is like this David Sachs and Elon above all, but you're definitely in that world. And, you know, they made a concerted effort to make certain that people like you would never admit to liking Trump. That's right. And even it's liking Trump and standing for a rejection of the left-wing orthodoxy of the last, you know, four or five years that reached a fever pitch and peak.
So I had to step down from my job.
You and I first met after I stepped down from my job as a biotech CEO.
And, you know, I wrote my first book.
For me, that was actually kind of cathartic.
And then I just wanted other people to be able to experience that as well, to be able to like spread the possibility of what it feels to actually speak your mind in the open it's like a
it's like a liberating experience it's like a deep personal sense a liberating experience
and 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 agree but now i think that
that's mostly it's like actually mostly behind us Can I just push a little bit on that point
though? I mean, you and I talked a lot before you ran for president. And I remember thinking,
you know, most people imagine that if you make a lot of money, you made a lot of money young,
that that gives you the freedom to say whatever you want. But of course the opposite turns out
to be true. Oh, it's totally the opposite. Right. So 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. And so I did think you were very unusual
in that you made all this money young and you're like, yeah, I'm kind of happy to, first of all,
stop making money for a while. You didn't seem addicted to it.
No.
They'll get addicted to it.
No.
You know what I mean?
We actually spent it. Some of it.
Right. You blew a lot of it. No, but there was something great about that. But why did,
why were you different from like everyone else you went to Yale Law School with?
Other than JD.
All of our classmates, you know, it was just the two of us. I can tell you there's some,
I won't even, 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.
Yeah.
It's actually, it's actually kind of hilarious.
You guys were in the same class?
Yeah.
We're in the same class.
Me, Oshera, JD, we're all classmates.
And my wife was at med school at the same time.
So we were all, we were all friendly.
Where was she at med school?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's hilarious. Which is really funny funny you all misused your credentials against the system exactly that bestowed them um so i i have to ask you to pause so you're on the yale law
school which for those who aren't don't follow this 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 yeah yeah
i think all of those things are fair yeah so. So what's the, what's the email chain line? So each class just
has their own, has their own like kind of like listserv where they, where they all stay in touch.
And after the Springfield stuff, right. So people were going, people were going totally nuts.
Eating, eating the cats. Yeah. Or, you know, eating the pets. Right. So they were going totally nuts.
And then there was this like 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.
And it was so nauseating,
but it 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 particular causes in Springfield to virtue signal the fact that we're not on the J.D. Vance,
Donald Trump side of this. And as fellow Yale, 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. But you and JD are actually from Ohio. Yeah, actually. Yeah. Yeah.
Actually, I actually spent a lot of my youth in Springfield. I actually know, I actually know a
lot about this. I'm tempted to pull up the email that I, that I sent. So I sent an email to the
group. I never, I haven't commented on this list is serve in like five years. Like I sent an email to the group. I haven't commented on this list in like five years or 10
years probably. I haven't posted a single thing, but I kind of entertained myself watching this
stuff from time to time. So I actually also went to Springfield myself. So this is a, well,
let's rewind back. So when all this was playing out, I said, I kind of want to go to Springfield
and check this out. 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 this place, there's a sub place that I used to go to,
like, you know, when I used to play tennis at Wittenberg
every summer, which is the university in Springfield.
So I've spent a lot of time there growing up.
So I said, I live like 50 minutes from there right now
in Columbus.
I grew up in Cincinnati.
I live in Columbus.
Springfield's literally on the way right in between.
Like, let me just go check it out.
So I just was having dinner with my wife and a couple of friends in Columbus. Andfield's literally on the way, right in between. Like, let me just go check it out. So 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 going to Springfield.
Want to see what's happening.
See it for myself.
And no plan for like an event or anything like that.
But some guy then replies and says,
well, 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 of this played out.
And you know, this is 375 people. It could hold 2,000 people show up, but they. This is what, like a month or two ago when all of this played out. And, you know, there's 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. So I thought people
deserved to hear- The police did nothing.
That's what she said, and I have every reason to believe her. So 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.
And as you said, I've lived the American dream.
I wanted to make a $100,000 donation, right?
And so to help, for my family, that's an easy thing we were able to do to help a local community.
Where's the strain?
So we find where the local strain points are, access to local primary care.
And 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.
So they've talked about Springfield.
We need help.
We need all the people who can to help support the community.
And yet here is 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 healthcare,
where there were a lot of strained resources
in part because of the large numbers of people
who've been moved to that community.
And I didn't even have the ability
to help the community that way.
Why?
They didn't provide a great explanation.
Should they turn down a hundred grand donation?
Yeah.
Well, who would do that?
I mean, an administrator, I suppose.
But because of your politics.
I can only assume, right?
I would say I heavily doubt that if I were, you know, Sherrod Brown or something like that,
that they would have turned down a similar donation in a time of need. So anyway, I talked
about all this when I visited Springfield, but afterwards, I just, I told people that I was going
to help support Springfield. So I decided to, I wanted to follow through on that. So we found a
couple of other charitable causes to donate to, you know, 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 help people
get to, you know, strains on the system. It's a different area of healthcare 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 and they gave us this as a resource.
So 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 like, 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, you know, DEI all plastered all over wherever it
needs to be. And they made the donation. They got a bunch of people to sign on. And every time somebody donated, they would reply on and say, I have also donated. And
there was a certain pride and sanctimony in that. They got the New York Times to report on it.
They got MSNBC to pick it up. So 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. And so I'm on this list having to sort of see my inbox
repeatedly flooded with every other time somebody made a donation. So 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. So 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.
Actually, they didn't like it very much.
What did they say?
You know, I think they called it a, they saw it as a insult, actually.
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
kind of 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. So 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. Have they attacked you and JD personally on the list? You know,
I don't read most of the emails. I think there have been a lot of unfriendly things said.
Yes.
So you've got to wonder about that whole world.
Yeah.
I mean, so Trump went to Penn, J.D. went to Yale.
So you still have two guys with Ivy League degrees.
Yeah.
In the top two jobs.
By the way, I don't think there's any, far from there being shame in that, like I'm very, I had a great experience at Harvard and Yale and we learned a lot of stuff.
Yeah, I had a great experience at Harvard and Yale and we learned a lot of stuff. Think independently.
I got a better education because of a lot of these people leaning left.
You get questioned more than the average person.
I bet that's right.
Yeah.
But there's also over the past several years, there's been a lot of evidence that those schools, you know, probably aren't good for a lot of the kids.
They're not the same place as they were even.
The weaker kids who go there.
I mean, you're obviously, 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, you know, most people, young people really do care what the herd thinks.
And for those kids, like a lot of them get destroyed and become completely irrational
and into the, you know, the witchcraft of transgenderism or whatever.
I mean, they become like
not really functioning people and and you just wonder like how long does the prestige attach to
those institutions particularly in say china which keeps them afloat yeah that's maybe not yale but
like below yale a lot of these schools are dependent on absolutely rich chinese yeah so
like when does that end when do we stop genuflecting before these places?
Either they're going to massively change what they are and what they represent, or they're going to go the way of the dustbin of history.
They are, right?
They kind of are.
So, the thing is, there's a difference between even these places now versus 20 years ago.
It's just, like, not the same place and the same institution.
Harvard, Yale always lean left, always have had a very, you know, certainly self-important view of themselves. That's always been the case,
but they were institutions, certainly when I was there, I can 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 others 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. Like 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 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.
And so, you know, what's going to happen, you know, 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 the two choices, I would say.
Just like all of us.
Yeah, it's true.
So Christmas is coming and winter is coming.
And that's the perfect combination for Cozy Earth.
Cozy Earth is a company that makes exactly what it sounds like. Products
that are close to the earth and that are quite cozy and you should consider them
this Christmas. They have the best sheets available. They're made out of bamboo
believe it or not and it's hard to believe how great they are until you try
them. We have and they are great. They're a great fit for everybody in their
shopping list. What sets them apart? Well, their fabrics are temperature-regulating.
That means they keep you cool and cozy,
or warm and cozy, depending on the temperature,
and they have a 10-year warranty.
So if anything goes wrong with your sheets,
you get free ones.
Go to CozyEarth.com slash Tucker.
Use our promo code Tucker for up to 40% off.
And if they ask, tell them the Tucker Carlson Show sent you.
Everyone here uses those sheets and loves them.
No Frills delivers.
Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express.
Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum points on your first five orders.
Shop now at Nofrills.ca.
Whether it's a family member, friend, or furry companion joining your summer road trip,
enjoy the peace of mind that comes with Volvo's legendary safety. During Volvo Discover Days,
enjoy limited time savings as you make plans to cruise through Muskoka or down Toronto's bustling streets.
From now until June 30th, lease a 2025 Volvo XC60 from 1.74% and save up to $4,000.
Conditions apply. Visit your GTA Volvo retailer or go to volvocars.ca for full details. So what are the effects of Trump's win?
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 you know 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 oh i mean gold dropped 100 bucks an ounce in like an hour
yeah it's interesting how that works and this, of course, is a bet against the
U.S. dollar. And the rest of the stock market, the stock market went exactly in the opposite
direction. And so, you know, markets reflect confidence. And I think the revival of our
self-confidence is the most important thing, actually, because everything else we could
talk about the issues that, you know, 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, OK, 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, you know, 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. So 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. And if we get that back, the rest of it's actually pretty easy. It sort of
falls into place more or less automatically, I would say. But along the way, there are all,
I mean, there are all kinds of obstacles. And the first
obstacle is finding the right people to staff the government. Yes, yes. And Trump has said this
himself, including to me, like the day before he got elected in public, I didn't have anyone to run
the government. And there are a lot of bad people wound up in positions of real authority. Will it
be different this time? 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. And it was very much a fire first, aim later strategy for
me over the last year when I ran. And so 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. And 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 and even still accomplished a lot. I mean, I think that first term was,
you and I said this when we spoke the other day, but it was like 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. George Bush, Joe Biden, Barack Obama are the others. And Donald Trump was unambiguously the best of that batch.
But I think the idea that there's only,
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 like this some kind of 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.
Well, sure.
Even if they believe in the company's product, it doesn't work if they actually like actively hate the CEO.
So 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.
I think both of those things are required for a functioning organization because under trump the fbi was always showing up at people's houses and stealing their cell
phones and carting them off to oh wait no yeah you know these people are totalitarians it's actually
i know i know a lot of people personally i'm friends with people who've been the target of
fbi raids including today, Alfie Oaks,
who's a wonderful man.
We went and visited his restaurant
and shop in South Florida, Naples.
Good man.
I don't know anything about the allegations.
Best grocery store in the United States.
I have no idea.
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.
Yeah, he's a wonderful person.
I was shocked to see that.
He's an outspoken conservative and outspoken Trump voter.
Which is your right to do in this country.
Of course, he was a COVID dissident.
And he was raided 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, you know, don't think Alfie Oaks is doing anything that warranted
an FBI raid and I doubt he would have been raided had he not been an outspoken Trump voter. So
anyway, these people are scary. They're going to be thrown out of power.
What does Trump do with the mandate that he has? 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 swallow any individual hole.
Of course.
And so I think he's ready to go in
with real determination this time around
to move quickly, move fast.
I think we need the winds behind our back early on. One know, one of the things that I think we learned from last
time around is a lot of this is just early momentum, right? 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 decisive majority in the senate hopefully get a good senate majority leader picked and then and
i think rick scott would be great for that but that's it can't be john cornyn yeah john cornyn
is an aggressive liberal and if donald trump wins the popular vote in john cornyn 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 that's just 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's 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. And 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 getting 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, which is the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bureaucracy.
And 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.
You can't fire.
We can all be fired.
I've been fired many times.
I'm sure you just lost a presidential race.
The only group that cannot fail, that has actual tenure, is not Harvard professors.
Not even.
It's not even. It's not even.
It's federal bureaucrats.
No, Amy Wax just got, you know,
tenure is no protection at all
compared to the protection of federal employment.
So 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, you know, 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.
They have a moral right to work from home.
Yeah.
10 hours a week at our expense at a far higher wage than the average American.
Oh, absolutely.
So the funny thing is.
They have a moral right.
You can't, you can't complain about it.
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 way. Right. That
step alone. So you don't even have to talk about, you don't have mass firing, mass exodus. Just tell
them they have to come back five days a week from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m., 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.
So 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'veconstitutional. Close to in so many words,
that's what they've said. If Congress didn't pass it, right, 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. And that Congress
makes the laws. That's what the Constitution says. That's what the Constitution says, but that's not
exactly how it works today. And 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 Bright 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 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 were elected to write the laws, who could be voted out if they write bad laws.
That's a beautiful thing.
And I think that those were seismic.
That's democracy.
That's democracy.
That you're describing democracy.
That's actually the essence of democracy. That's actually the essence
of democracy. That's the essence of self-governance. So 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, right? 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, no, no, you got it mixed up.
The executive fiat's 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.
So the Supreme Court's already said, told the executive branch, no, no, 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 Jarkesee versus SEC. 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. And 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 kind of an industrial logic to say that, okay, well, then we don't need 50% of the people
around anymore either.
And the way these rules have worked in the past
is they have these, you know this well, right?
The civil service rules, the civil protection rules
that say you can't fire these federal bureaucrats.
That's been the historical, you know, accepted dogma.
Actually, if you read the law carefully,
it doesn't work quite that way.
That applies to individual
firings right 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 but if it is part of a mass firing what you call a reduction
in force if it's just like a mass firing, what you call a reduction in force,
if it's just like a mass firing, those actually fall outside the civil service rules as they
exist. So if you go in that order to say that, okay, the Supreme Court's already told us 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. 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 U.S. dollar,
which I do think should be
the sole mandate and sole purpose
of the U.S. Fed.
Same thing with respect to,
you go straight down the list,
EPA, SEC, FTC.
What do 22,000 employees do at the Fed?
Oh, they do a lot of calculations. They do a lot of conjecture. And it feeds their hubris a little
bit. So markets, and I was, you know, I worked at the hedge fund. That was the first job I had
for seven years out of college. And, you know, understand the 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's overheating so much that they have to raise interest rates?
That feeds a kind of hubris of the bureaucrat to make them think that there's some kind of genius
and some kind of 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 sort of expert
knowledge that's actually meaningful. They're actually looking to see effectively how
they're going to screw it up in the process, right? And so academics took over the Federal
Reserve in the late 1990s. But the Fed only has one big lever, right? Well, they have a few levers,
actually, they're able to pull. Yeah. I mean, one big lever broadly means how much money you feed
in or suck out of the system. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. But they've used that in ways that have been, I think, badly destructive to the country.
I mean, because here's like an example of how. So when the academics took over the Fed in the late 1990s, one of the things that happened, and this was a kind of managerial class in this agency, and that's a three-letter agency in some form, the FED, right? What they said was,
okay,
if wages are going up,
this is a long story
if you want to get into this,
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, you know, 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.
So 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, you know, even in 2023, although that was a little bit more subtle.
And so 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.
And 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 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, like they're actually unlawful.
They're illegitimate. legitimate, there's your blueprint for then shaving down the size of the federal bureaucracy, which is then the permanent solution to stop that bureaucracy from perpetuating this kind of
illegal rampant action. And I think that's the stuff of how you actually save a country.
Boring as that might sound. It's not boring. And I think I've never heard in all the, you know,
my whole life in Washington, anybody suggest 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.
It's like a law of physics.
That's it.
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 therable in its behavior so um but it's it's so obvious it's so overwhelming
it's the largest institution in human history i've never heard anybody say you know we have a
shot of like lopping off 10 20 30 40 percent 80 percent yeah that i mean that would change
everything from our foreign policy to our economy to our culture. You really think that could happen?
Yeah, I think it could happen.
I think, well, there'll be trade-offs.
I'm not going to paint some sort of exclusively fantasy picture.
Well, one of the trade-offs is you're going to have a crash
in the economy of Arlington, Virginia,
which is well-deserved.
And maybe a boom of the economy elsewhere.
And long overdue.
Yeah.
You know, why shouldn't
arlington and mclean and loudon county share the pain of gary indiana i don't understand
or springfield ohio i don't understand that actually i'm going to take the bright side of
this as i take it the apocalyptic side i mean i'm in i'm in the golden age mood right yeah
you can feel the resentment um two sides of the same coin, though.
They go right together.
Send these people to Gary and Dana
or to Springfield.
We don't need external individuals
to the nation
to actually fill those open positions.
We have three million of them
sitting in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
Who 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, D.C., they are Americans.
And those are available candidates to actually provide a little shot in the
arm to the labor market.
Why shouldn't the agencies be moved to Baltimore and Gary?
To the extent they exist.
I think they should absolutely be moved.
Absolutely.
I don't think all of,
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 is parts of the country. I don't think the Surgeon General's office should sit in Washington, D.C.
I don't think you should have much of HHS more broadly.
I don't think that the Department of Agriculture should sit in Washington, D.C.
I think there are countless agencies, the Department of Education.
I think you're wrongfully insulated in Washington, D.C.
Now, certain of those agencies like the Department of Education should not actually exist. So I wouldn't want to start this process of just saying, okay, let's move them out
of Washington, D.C. as some sort of 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 kind of stimulus, if you will, in parts of the country that wouldn't mind a little bit of
that growth getting out of DC and come into their own backyard. 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.
So I kind of like that method is you could kind of 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, you know, immediately on day one, you could go,
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.
And 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.
And so I think this is a,
to call it once in a generation,
understates it.
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. And I'm pretty pumped up about that,
actually. Would you be involved in this effort? 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
of my life. It was probably the most, I mean, I took a lot of positions 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.
And yeah, I have been involved,
let's just say in recent months,
laying out what the blueprint should look like.
This is the draining the swamp part of the operation
that we were promised but never got.
And 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? He understands this is the root
cause of the cancer. I mean, 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. So 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, you know, get James Comey
2.0 or whatever to fill the same seat. 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. And I do think he gets that in a deep way.
Turns out that what you do online is not private, not even close. Data brokers are tracking and
creating a profile of everything you do that would include your
spending habits your values your beliefs here in the united states for some reason they're allowed
to sell all of that information and that means that big corporations buy and sell everything
about you and then give that information to others who use it against you and to control you. How do you push back? How
do you hold on to your privacy, which means your freedom? Well, we use ExpressVPN. With ExpressVPN,
100% of your online activity is rerouted through secure and encrypted servers. And that means it's
impossible for your internet service provider to know what you're doing or for outside parties or governments to sell your data.
ExpressVPN hides your IP address. Data brokers use that IP address to build a profile on you
and then sell it to whoever they want. But without it and without all of your online activity,
data brokers can't do that. They can't add it to your profile. You are free to do what you want online without prying eyes spying on you.
ExpressVPN is pretty complex technically, but it's very easy to use.
And 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 can get an extra three months free
when you use this special link.
Go to expressvpn.com slash Tucker,
an extra three free months of ExpressVPN.
That's expressvpn.com slash Tucker.
This episode is brought to you by DAZN.
For the first time ever,
the 32 best soccer clubs from across the world
are coming together to decide
who the undisputed champions of the world are
in the FIFA Club World Cup.
The world's best players,
Messi, Holland, Kane, and more
are all taking part.
And you can watch every match for free on DAZN
starting on June 14th
and running until July 13th.
Sign up now at DAZN starting on June 14th and running until July 13th. Sign up now at
DAZN.com slash FIFA. That's D-A-Z-N.com slash FIFA. Mom, mom, did you see my race? Of course I did,
darling. Look, you did your best. You tried. The thing is, it's not about winning. It's about
taking part. Next year you might do better. But I did win, mom. You did? When it's not about winning. It's about taking part. Next year, you might do better.
But I did win, Mom.
You did?
When it's sunny, make sure you can still see.
At Specsavers, get two pairs of glasses from $149,
and one can be prescription sunglasses.
Hey, the sun won't wait. Visit Specsavers.ca for details.
Conditions apply. conditions apply federal employees
are the core audience
of CNN and MSNBC
so I don't think
you think so
yeah of course they are
who's watching that crap
yeah
what happens
I mean right
that's a good question.
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?
So here's sort of 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-perpetuating organism
and the individual 3 million people who populate it.
So 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.
And maybe they can be rehabilitated,
but that's not gonna be the job of the new government.
That's gonna 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 sort of good. And it comes from this sort of organizational conceit, which is basically skeptical of self-governance, right? I mean,
it's as old as human beings are, is 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 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, no, 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.
See, 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 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.
And 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. And so 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 FTA or the SEC or whatever.
They believe that if it weren't for them, the silent, you know, the Bruce Wayne figure that they are, right?
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, like 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 like a separate issue, right? We have cultural issues in the country.
But if we view the bureaucracy as its own target, separate and 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.
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.
So 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, right? Like 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, you're still saving a lot of money.
For sure.
But the whole exercise wasn't really about saving their headcount costs anyway.
The biggest costs of employing the people in this machine is the action of the machine itself.
So 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.
That by normal employment standards is actually really generous. Like 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. So 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 we're actually,
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 families
and their kids and whatever to say that we're solving more of a structural problem
and so that's how i kind of separated tucker is especially economically on the severance piece
of this like i want to go in i want to go i want to go hard i want to go aggressive but i want to
make this less about going after the individuals or you know 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 own salary.
But the view will oppose it because, I mean-
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Like it just doesn't matter right now, actually.
I love that.
Yeah. And 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. Like 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. And 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 timeframe.
So this is a, 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.
Improvement.
So here's how I would stop it
if I were on the other side and opposed to this.
Yeah.
I would have a war.
I mean, we have-
Like a foreign war.
Well, sure.
We have these, I mean,
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. And DHS came into existence, of course, 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.
And DHS came into existence, of course, in the—
In 9-11.
Yeah, post-9-11.
So, 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.
Yeah. And so they feel like they need government. So, um, it's the ultimate big government is,
is the, you know, there've been a lot of money spent in the last, uh, year, um, on war with Iran.
Like people want war with Iran. That's, that's the word people want. Donors want, I know for a fact.
So, um, if we get a war with Iran,
then we're not cutting the government at all.
Interesting.
I would give that some thought.
I mean, 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, right?
That is when you think about the swamp and the unelected bureaucracy
and the people who set policy who were never elected to set that policy,
I mean, the State Department is probably even a far better example
than the U.S. 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, yeah.
No, it's got some sort of 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,
you know,
the mores of Bethesda,
Maryland actually.
So,
well,
I think it's,
it's behaved like most organizational bureaucracies.
It takes on a life of its own.
And so that's,
that's again,
another example of an agency.
And it's just another agency really that needs to be, you know, we've got to take the same attitude to say that if you've got a bunch of people showing up to work who shouldn't have ever had that job, they start finding things to do that are generally damaging.
And that could include even not only in our own soil.
Oh, my gosh.
But abroad as well.
Oh, it's, I mean, my 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 U.S. disruptions that we created.
The war in Syria.
Absolutely. Yeah, Syria and Libya. That's exactly right. No. disruptions that we created in the Middle East. The war in Syria. Absolutely, yes.
Syria and Libya.
That's exactly right.
No, we did that.
And so 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.
And the labor, you know, the real labor shortage in this country is in the Pentagon.
They can't meet their recruitment goals.
Yeah.
And so they're going to start, yeah, waving in illegal aliens and giving them automatic weapons.
Do you think that's where this is going?
Of course. And so then you have, you know, late Rome, where the Germanic tribes are populating your regions.
That's history.
Yeah, it's terrifying. It doesn't quite work. Okay, so letulating your regions. That's history. Yeah, it's terrifying.
But, okay, so let me just 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 totals in the last four elections for the democrats yeah and in three
out of the four the number including this one the number hovered between say 59 and 65 um million
votes and then you have this weird anomaly in 2020 where it was 81 huh so how do you go it was
such a compelling candidate that doesn't make any sense.
So this candidate, his vice president, she received, she, Kamala Harris received, they tell us, Wikipedia tells us, received 81 million votes in 2020.
And 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. What is that? I mean, look, I'm not a scholar on this stuff,
but what I will tell you, what I will tell you is, so 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. But Trump's numbers
stayed the same. Trump's numbers have stayed
the same for three elections.
Pretty much the same.
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. And I would also add while we're at it, make English the sole language that appears in a ballot.
Yes. And 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 the way back yes we would be able to actually run elections on a single day with paper ballots yeah
and send dominion packing and the fact the fact that there is resistance to this let's just say
the policy proposal on offer okay i've said it countless times donald 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.
So I don't think Kamala Harris, you can check this, but I'm pretty sure Kamala Harris did not
win any states with voter ID law. Oh, is that right?
Yep. And she didn't lose any states that don't require voter ID.
Huh?
So,
um,
that's really interesting.
No,
I'm not saying there's a connection there,
but,
um,
you're following the science.
So I just don't understand.
And I,
again,
I've been in,
you know,
18 hours or whatever of depositions from voting machine companies to
disgusting companies.
Um, 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?
I haven't followed the industrial history of this. When did that come into, when did they start using them companies what's the justification what's what i i haven't followed the the industrial history of this when did that come into when did they start using them and what
was the justification the justification was that they're more efficient and faster more accurate
and faster yeah and it turned out like it takes a lot longer to get our no um so india i think is
the largest country in the world i think they we reset the population numbers recently. If it's not the largest, it's one of the largest
by population. Second largest. Yeah, I think it's the largest now.
I think it is the largest.
And largest democracy for sure
in the history of the world. And I think they finished
counting in one day every time.
Is that correct? I think it did. It's pretty fast.
A lot of countries do it pretty fast.
As I said, even, I mean, like 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.
And they can't even keep the power grid going.
It's unbelievable.
They can pull off a fair election.
It's unbelievable.
And so what do 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.
So my view is we can, and I think there's going to be such a temptation to do this, is we actually won.
Like we're actually in a winning position right now.
So like I more or less like could care less for the Kamala Harris or Joe Biden passed or whatever.
Like I just don't, it just doesn't matter.
That's the spirit.
What I care about is like how are we actually going to fix it in a lasting way, like in a way that just lasts for a really long time.
I think there would be enough of an opportunity.
I mean, 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 are 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.
And I think more or less we've solved the problem of public confidence in elections for the long run.
Oh, you solve it.
You solve it right there. If you're against that, then I'd like to offer,
I'd love to hear the best possible argument offered against that.
I haven't really heard one yet.
Black people don't have IDs in this country.
Yeah, I think that that's a racist supposition, actually.
That's insane.
So, you know, and 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
voter ID laws. Actually, most people favor voter ID laws. So it should not be surprising that most
black people also favor voter ID laws. And 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 kind of a funny little paradox. So it's
common sense. It's called common sense because most people everywhere tend to have it. And I
think most people agree on this issue. We now have enough of a mandate. So I think let's just do it.
We are proud at TCcn 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 were just 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 has interviews with the people who were targeted
and presents it in a way that will help you understand exactly what happened,
how American democracy, yes, democracy,
was undermined by the people who claim 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.com.
Introducing TurboTax Business, a brand new way to file your own T2 return,
all while getting help from an expert who actually knows small businesses.
Got a tattoo studio?
Toy store?
Tiny but mighty taco stand?
We've got someone who gets small business taxes inside and out.
Experts are standing by to help and review while you file, so you know your return's
done right.
Intuit TurboTax Business.
New from TurboTax Canada.
Some regional exclusions apply.
Learn more at TurboTax.ca slash business tax.
Breaking news! A brand new game is now
live at Bet365. Introducing
Prize Matcher, a daily
game that's never ordinary. All you have
to do is match as many tiles as you can
and the more you match, the better. We also have
top table games like our incredible Super
Spin Roulette, Blackjack, and a huge selection
of slots. So there you have it.
How can you match that?
Check out Prize Matcher and see why it's never ordinary at Bet365.
Must be 19 or older, Ontario only.
Please play responsibly.
If you or someone you know has concerns about gambling,
visit connexontario.ca.
T's and Z's apply. so how did you when i i saw you um in florida on election night with with trump and you clearly like him he clearly likes you um you know running against somebody for office is not
a natural environment for a friendship to sprout at all.
You know, Jeb Bush was not there.
Yeah.
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?
I think we're both unusual individuals in ways that caused us to gel, actually.
I didn't see the point in running.
I ran against Trump for sure.
And, you know, I made my case for why I thought I was the right candidate. You know, I think that there's I was the youngest person ever to run for U.S. 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. Like it just seemed,
seemed kind of lame.
It seemed really facile.
He was the best.
but as these things,
that's right.
Everyone starts out that way,
but then it gets intense.
It gets intense.
Yeah.
And,
and,
and we,
we had our,
we had our sharp moments over the course of the campaign.
Sure.
But it wasn't,
how did you,
it wasn't personal.
Well,
how did you do that?
How'd you not get mad?
They all get mad at the end.
It was,
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. And you know what? Along the way, because it was deeply
consistent with my vision, I respected Donald Trump. Like in a certain sense, if you think
about like a family business or something, right? You're going to have a guy who started it,
that 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.
And those would be legitimate disagreements, arguments within the context of family business.
I know many people who have been in that similar position. And so in that sense of carrying the
American torch, we can have like 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.
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 U.S. president had Donald Trump not actually done it as a first-time outsider and won in 2016.
Yeah, of course.
Like, I don't think that that – I don't think that idea would have occurred to me.
I'm a you know, 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 one and been a successful president.
And so, you know, I said it on the debate stage that 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 race 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 think most of the other people on the debate stage, actually.
How many were there?
This started with like 10.
You know, the last debate I had, there was four of us up there.
That was interesting oh there was there's oh so many things i would do differently but that's that's a story
for another day you know i think the hardest the hardest part was in the short windows into
a campaign that you that you have interfacing with like 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 debates, one of the things I learned about them
is that it's different for a general election debate
if you're going against like Trump versus Harris
or Trump versus Biden.
People watch that and for good reason, I'm glad they did.
But like in a Republican primary debate
in the early cycle where there's like 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.
And so the clips,
as we say,
the clips,
but even,
even the,
even just like the verbal descriptions of actually what happened,
that's what they get is the synthesis.
So 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.
Like that's the audience that actually matters. I mean. 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. And at a certain point in the
campaign, I mean, 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. And 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 for anybody, myself included, to think that anybody else was going to come out of this process other than Donald Trump
as the nominee. And it's because the moment right now that we're in, the people of this country
know what they need when they need it. And 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
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. So they
knew that. And 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. I mean, a million things I could have done better but I think that
you know I think that being unsparing as I was I think I 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 sort of
know me the way that like 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. Donald Trump's actually really good at that.
Yeah, he is.
Yeah. And I think that he is, he's like the best at it. And watching him even in the year since I
left the campaign has been eyeopening. It's been, it's been kind of inspiring actually. And it's
made me think a lot about, he's able to take, you know, 20,000 people in a room at a time,
but also a hundred million people not in the room at a time but also 100 million people not in the
room at that time to really get to know him like who he is and feel like they actually deeply know
him as a person as opposed to just his policies i think 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 right no camera know who you actually get it it's it's difficult that
was that was like kind of one of the one of the reflections trump is more um self-deprecating
than he gets credit for quite self-deprecating it's actually really funny it's actually makes
him really funny the other night in last week of the campaign he was pivoting against the
trump voters are garbage b Biden's comment. He shows
up in a garbage truck wearing, I think you were there wearing, you know, day glow 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. And they said to me, it makes you look thinner. Yeah, I like that. And I said,
anything makes you look thinner. I'm far. That's hilarious. It's hard to say stuff like that about
yourself. Yeah. So what about, I've just wondered, like one of the sort of ongoing side skirmishes that I try not to pay too much attention to, but it's a little mesmerizing, is the Never Trump movement.
Oh, yeah.
What's going on with that right now?
Well, I don't think anything, actually.
And I'm interested because they're all people I know.
Yeah.
Because I'm from Washington.
That makes it more interesting for you.
It does.
For you.
Yeah.
And they're just so repulsive to me.
What do you think is going on?
I think there's a kind of,
there's like a psychological derangement.
It's almost like a condition
that needs to be treated with like,
by a priest or something.
Totally.
If you're, you know,
whatever Dick Cheney's repulsive little daughter
or Jonah Goldberger, you know, 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 are the products of nepotism. And 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 me really mean but true honest it was true uh but the 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 they wouldn't
tell their husbands they wouldn't tell their husbands and they're going to vote for kamala
harris and it turns out like the never trump world has gotten so much attention but there's like no one in no clothes
absolutely there's no one there totally yeah it was 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 like the
whole thing about go into the ballot box and vote differently than your husband like that was a
pitch that was made subverting made. Subverting the family,
subverting the marriage,
encouraging a spouse to lie.
Yeah, you could vote differently,
but like the idea that you want to do it secretly creates this some kind of,
I mean, so it's the ultimate division play
because identity politics divides us based on-
It is the division play.
It's the natural extension of like-
Outrageous, actually.
Division on race, division on gender.
Totally.
Division on gender within the household
because they're fundamentally
against the household
as a unit anyway.
That's for sure.
And so that was,
that was,
that was probably the thing
that pissed me off the most.
Well, I don't even understand it.
I mean,
I know someone really well
was saying the other day,
well, you know,
we're voting differently
in our household.
And I said to my wife,
if we had,
we're going to vote
for different people.
First of all,
I would say absolutely not.
We're not voting
for different people.
Sorry that.
We're not going to vote if we're going to vote for different people. And second, we're going to vote for different people first of all i would say absolutely not we're not going for different people sorry that we're not going to vote if we're going to vote for different people
and second we're going to take the weekend and talk for as long as it takes to get on the same
page yeah and maybe i'll change my view maybe you'll change yours but we're going to align
because we're married yeah i don't even understand that you're on the same team a hundred percent
yeah yeah so basically they're encouraging people.
To not only split the team, but to lie about it.
And actually that.
To lie to your husband.
Yeah.
Boy, that is the Democratic Party just distilled.
That's right.
It's the lie to your husband party.
It's the weak man, unhappy woman party.
Sorry.
Oh, it makes me.
There's something really sinister about that.
There's something sinister about it.
But it reveals, I mean, that's what,
it's something sinister about it,
but it's also,
I mean, it's transparently
what the agenda is actually about.
Yeah.
And so that was,
in some ways,
the tactics of the politics of it
revealed a big part
of what the whole project was
It was like,
they were always telling you
during COVID
or during the BLM riots,
the real insurrection,
which is what that was,
you know,
go home and lecture your
racist uncle or grandfather at the thanksgiving table that's right that was again destroy your
family that was again destroy your family over what your what your ideological obligation is
do you think the culture changes i think it i think it has to i mean i think if we get our job
right here let's say we're just going and 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.
And 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 kind of skeptical because I thought we're going to be like sitting here looking at like TV screens and like 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.
Whatever happened to Joe Biden?
Is he, I mean, that, I'm not making fun of him.
I feel, I feel sorry.
I do too. But I've never seen anyone disappear faster than Joe Biden. You never heard a word from him?
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. And so this guy has had this life dream.
He's worked his entire life, became a senator,
was elected like at the age of 30 or 29 or whatever it was.
And then when he's elected and he was turned 30,
who has aspired his entire life over the span of decades,
beginning long before I was born.
Over 50 years.
For this, I mean, like significantly longer than I was born,
this man has been a US senator and aspired to be U.S. 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.
For eight years.
For eight years going through that ignominy.
And then to have Hillary Clinton to say no, no, no, it's not your time. And then finally, he just says, 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. 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 it's Kamala Harris,
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 jill biden yeah his wife are are the had to have been the two most you know schadenfreude
relieved americans totally right but it's it's it's how is he doing? I don't know.
Does that help if you're going through
like a state of cognitive decline?
Does something like that, as painful as that is,
does that sense of aggrievement
and desire for vengeance actually kind of sharpen you?
Maybe it does.
Because it did seem like he actually got
a little bit sharper actually after he was yanked out.
It's like part of him came back, right?
His wife wore red on election day.
Oh, did she?
Yeah, I mean-
He wore a MAGA hat.
Yeah.
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.
What about the rest of the party?
Like if you, I mean, well, you failed.
You ran for president and didn't get elected.
And I know because I talked to you about it.
There was a time after where you thought, okay, you know, what did I do right?
What did I do wrong?
Where you take on a stock of your own behavior because that's what it is to grow.
That's called adulthood.
Is there a moment like that for the Democratic Party,
do you think?
I hope there is, actually.
I'm kind of 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.
And that applies to the level of an individual.
And if your team is a political party in American politics, then that's true for your team, right?
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, you know, 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, you know, a few folks. Like I think, I don't know this guy,
but someone sent me his tweet.
Does Iglesias sound right?
Yeah, Matt Iglesias.
He had something thoughtful.
Like, in my campaign, I had 10 truths,
10 things that are true that I lay out.
That was kind of the centerpiece of my campaign.
Yeah.
You might remember.
They sent it to me.
He had nine today, but like, he left it.
He forgot number 10 was the joke that somebody sent me.
But actually, I read them, and it and it was they were all smart and reasonable.
You saw this.
Yeah, I don't like Matt Wyglasius at all.
But I don't know.
I saw I saw I'm a non fan and I'm willing to admit that all nine of them were great.
Yeah, it actually it actually made me feel pretty good.
The U.S. government exists for the benefit of its citizens.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Stuff like that.
It was stuff that was not too dissimilar from what you or I might say about our vision for what the United States of America should be.
You know, I disagree with some of the stuff on there, the framing of it.
He said something about climate change.
Like, 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. And I just thought that framing was, at least like as a framing matter,
the right way to look at it. And so 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, of all the times you and I've gotten together, I'm probably in like the most hopeful
mood I've actually ever been in right now. And I'm hopeful for the future of the Republican Party.
I'm hopeful for the future of our country. But like a weird part of me is almost hopeful for the future of the Republican Party. I'm hopeful for the future of our country. But like a weird part of me
is almost hopeful
for the future of the Democratic Party based
on... Oh, I agree. Oh,
either that or they're going to have to go the way of the Harvard
and Yale that we talked about earlier. Either that or they die.
Right? So it's either evolve or die.
As someone who's been fired a lot, I can say
there's nothing better for you than failure.
Yeah. You know, there's...
Oh, it builds character. In fact, it's essential. Yeah, because you'll never reassess. You know, there's... Oh, it builds character. In fact, it's essential.
Yeah, because you'll never reassess.
You know, winning, succeeding,
I think exacerbates your worst qualities.
Totally, because it covers them up and...
Totally, and it affirms your hubris
and like, I'm successful because I'm so great.
Yeah.
That's not entirely true.
So this time of year, we are focused on our families
because we're apt to be with our
families celebrating together.
And 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 Policy Genius.
Policy Genius 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 they 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 of coverage. Some options
are 100% online and that lets you avoid unnecessary medical exams, which is always good. Policy Genius
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 so you can get on with your life. Join thousands of happy Policy Genius
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 slash Tucker to get your
free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. Again,
it's policygenius.com slash Tucker. It's one of the saddest things about this country. The
country's getting sicker. Despite all of our wealth and technology, Americans aren't doing
well overall. Obesity, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, all kinds of horrible chronic
illnesses, weird cancers are all on the rise. Probably a lot of reasons for this, but one of
them definitely is
Americans don't eat very well anymore.
They don't eat real food.
Instead, they eat industrial substitutes
and it's not good.
It's time for something new.
And that's where masa chips come in.
Masas decide to revive real food
by creating snacks how they used to be made,
how they're supposed to be made.
A masa chip has just three simple ingredients,
not 117.
Three.
No seed oils, no artificial additives, just real delicious food.
And I know this because we eat a ton of them in my house.
And by the way, I feel great.
So you can still continue to snack, but you can do it in a healthy way with chips
without feeling guilty about it.
Masa chips are delicious.
They taste how a tortilla chip is supposed to taste.
But the thing is, you can hit them really, really hard, and I have, and not feel bloated or sluggish after. You feel like you've done something decent for your body. You don't feel like you got
a head injury or you don't feel filled with guilt. You feel light and energetic. It's the kind of
snack your grandparents ate. Worth bringing back. So you can go to masachips.com, Moss is M-A-S-A, by the way, mossachips.com slash Tucker to start snacking, get 25% off. We enjoy them. You will too.
Remember in 2020 when CNN told you the George Floyd riots were mostly peaceful,
even as flames rose in the background? It was ridiculous, but it was also a metaphor for the
way our leaders run this country.
They're constantly telling you, everything is fine.
Everything is fine.
Don't worry.
Everything's under control.
Nothing to see here.
Move along and obey.
No one believes that.
Crime is not going away.
Supply chains remain fragile.
It does feel like some kind of global conflict could break out at any time. So the question is, if things went south tomorrow, would you be ready?
Well, if you're not certain that you'd be ready, you need Ammo Squared. Ammo Squared is the only
service that lets you build an ammunition stockpile automatically. You literally set it on autopilot.
You pick the calibers you want, how much you want to save every month, then they'll ship it to you or they'll store it for you and ship it when you say so. You get 24-7 access to
manage the whole thing. So don't let the people in charge, don't let CNN lull you into a fake
sense of safety. Take control of your life, protect your family, be prepared.
Go to AmmoSquared.com to learn more.
One last question.
Elon.
Yes.
You know him.
Yes.
I think you've known him for a while. You're from similar worlds. Tell us what you think his people who are extremely intelligent and he is in the category of extreme intelligence. He's somebody 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, you know, 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.
So 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 intelligently than the US government has,
you know, ever, if he can kind of do the analysis and say that Donald Trump's 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. So in terms of blowing out that
permission structure, like that was certainly what I consider to be one of my own and have the courage to arrive at the same place. So in terms of blowing out that permission structure, like 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. And 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 knows? 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. 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, I mean, 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 apparatuses who have tried to figure this
stuff out and say, no, no, 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 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. And so 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. And I hope he doesn't lose his interest
in American politics for a long time to come.
You and I think have been on the side of,
because you hear this objection now coming up,
which 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.
Trump got outspent three to one. Yeah, exactly. money in politics. Well, okay.
Trump got outspent three to one. Yeah, exactly.
Three to one.
Exactly, 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.
And 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. Especially since nobody, I mean, I don't like most political donors.
I know them all.
And most of them have creepy agendas or they just want to be,
get their picture taken with a politician,
which is like a very low motive in my view.
Yeah.
Elon is not unique, but he's very unusual in that.
He doesn't really want anything.
Yeah.
He doesn't really want anything.
I mean, he certainly doesn't need anything.
That's what I'm saying. He has a lot to lose, but he certainly doesn't. No, but he doesn't want anything. Yeah. He doesn't really want anything. I mean, he certainly doesn't need anything. Well, that's what I'm saying.
He has a lot to lose, but he certainly doesn't.
No, but he doesn't want anything for himself.
Like he's not in it, obviously not in it for the money.
Yeah.
And 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.
Yeah.
I think this is a unifying moment.
Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn voting for Donald Trump.
Yeah.
You had Muslims in Southeast Michigan voting for Donald Trump.
It was awesome.
You had sugar cane workers, the people who cut the cane in Florida and the people who own the ranches.
Right.
All voting for Donald Trump.
You had North Georgia, you know, white rednecks and you had black men in Atlanta all voting for Trump.
Totally.
And then above them all is Elon Musk, who's like just sort of this figure who's above
politics.
He's for Trump.
I don't know.
There's something.
Yeah, it was part of it was it was in some ways.
In some ways, you could say, like, you know, what was the causal link that he played if
you 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 is all just playing out.
Oh, I'm with you.
Like we're going to have like a false analytical hubris here by just like dissecting exactly.
No, no, but you're right.
It was just all destined to happen.
It was going to happen.
It was just going to happen.
And this was all part of it playing out.
Did you feel that?
I did.
I mean, you were there when they won.
And even just over the last year, I mean, I, and yeah, I'm not,
I mean,
we wouldn't mean to commit
the sin of flattering you
to your face,
but I think one of the things
I liked about our conversations
and, you know,
I, you know,
I fashioned myself
as having some of this as well
is just having like
a little bit of an intuition
of where things are going
a little bit.
Like, just like,
just get a pulse of the country and to sort of 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 like spring of 2023
being both convinced that Joe Biden was not going to be the nominee.
Yeah, that's right. You said it many times in public.
And there's some darker ones in-
Yeah, for sure.
I think sadly predicted, but were wrong about by two centimeters.
Yes, exactly.
Thankfully.
And even the idea that this was going to be a landslide.
You could just sort of feel it, right?
Totally.
It was just in the ether.
And so in some sense, at our very best, we might kind of smell it coming, but it was coming either way.
No, I think It's being done through us. That's a liberating feeling. And 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. And in some ways, we're all just playing our little piece of a role
in playing out what was going to play out all along.
I can't improve on that.
That's the greatest summation I have heard of this election so far.
Vic, thank you very much.
Good seeing you, man.
Great to see you.
So the story of the last few years is the story of watching institutions
you loved and trusted be revealed as totally corrupt and filthy. And it's bewildering.
And you never thought it would happen to your beloved nicotine pouch company. But that's
exactly what happened to us. The people I thought were my friends at Zinn, their employees were
sending the overwhelming percentage of their donations to Kamala Harris. And before Kamala
Harris, it was Joe Biden. And before Joe Biden, it was Hillary Clinton.
And I thought, why in the world am I using a product made by people who hate me?
That, by the way, is not very good.
It's dry, like a teabag.
I'm a man.
That's disgusting.
And I thought to myself, I'm going to create an alternative because there's no way I'm going to spend another dollar on a product made by people like this.
And so we created an alternative.
And it's called Alp, and it's delicious.
And when you try it, there will be no doubt in your mind that it's much better than anything the Zin Corporation,
the humorless Kamala Harris-supporting Zin Corporation has ever produced.
It's delicious, and it's moist.
It's not dry like a teabag, which again is
disgusting and possibly immoral. That's not to say that there isn't some role for Zin or whatever.
I mean, I think, you know, if you're got a girlfriend who's drunk at a Taylor Swift concert,
probably throw in a Zin. That's like a time and place thing. It's like appropriate for that. I'm
sure most people at a Taylor Swift concert are using Zinn.
That's not what this is for.
This is for people who really enjoy nicotine pouches, who aren't ashamed of that, who don't
want to buy products from a company that hates them and their culture, and who have some
self-respect, who don't want to teabag or go to Taylor Swift concerts.
I mean, again, we're not judging anyone who does.
This is not the product for you.
So we are proud to announce that Alp will be available for purchase on our website,
alppouch.com, starting in November and in stores shortly after.
In the meantime, you can sign up.
Our VIP list is at alppouch.com to get exclusive early bird access to our products.
And they are great.
Have one in right now, in fact.
Warning!
This product contains nicotine.
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.