Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump’s Sweeping Victory, & What It Means for the Future of Government Bureaucracy

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Shop Firestone Tires at TireRack.com. 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.
Right. But he is a badass, actually.
He's definitely a badass. Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show.

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The nation needs a badass as its commander in chief right now.

And democracy is of works, actually, 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 a 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 i'm always feel a little nauseous i i love trump just personally because i know him well but i hate hearing people say it's all fake it is now, I just, ever since he got shot, I just, I realized, not only do I really like Trump, but 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 that 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 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? 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. Did's how it felt that night.
It was just 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 had no reason to believe it. We have no, you know, 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 had 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 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 it 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, 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 the pinnacle of what we saw on Tuesday night.
There was a moment, I think right around the time he was shot and Elon endorsed him within moments. Yes.
Which I think was looking back, you know, a pivot point, the whole thing. 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. I think it's a beautiful thing for the country.
I mean, it started a little bit with, you saw it in the business elite community. I mean, Elon was endorsement was obviously huge, but I think 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.
100%. 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 which matter to some people in terms of giving them the well it's our

whole session is based on them yeah right and so um and jd to some extent is like this david sacks

sure um 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

Thank you. from my job.
You and I first met after I stepped down from my job as a biotech CEO. And 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 spread the possibility of what it feels to actually speak your mind in the open.
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? I totally 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.
They'll get addicted to it. You know what I mean? We actually spent it.
Some of it. You blew a lot of it.
There was something great about that. But 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, Oshad, JD, we're all classmates. And my wife was in med school at the same time.
So we were all friendly. Where was she in med school? Ayo.
Yeah. It's hilarious.
Which is really funny. You all misused your credentials against the system.
Exactly. That bestowed them.
So I have to ask you to pause. So you're on the Yale Law School, which for those who don't follow, 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 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'll 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 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 J.D. are actually from Ohio.
Yeah, actually. Yeah, yeah.
Actually, I actually spent a lot of my youth in Springfield. I actually know a 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've never, 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, actually.
So, so this is a, we'll just 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 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 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 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 what we're doing is we're going 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, yeah. Well, who would do that? I mean, an administrator, I suppose.
But nonetheless, 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 to help people get to, you know, strains on the system. It's a different area of healthcare where we thought there were strains on a 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.

DEI 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 all 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, you know, 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.
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, 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. Have they attacked you and 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, JD went to Yale. So you still have two guys with Ivy League degrees in the top two jobs.
By the way, I don't think there's any, far from being shame in that, like I'm very, 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 just 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 witchcraft of transgenderism or whatever. I mean, they become like not really functioning people.
And you just wonder, like, how long does the prestige attach to those institutions, particularly in, say, China, which keeps them afloat? Yeah. 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 in 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.
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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.
I mean, gold dropped a hundred bucks an ounce in like an hour. Yeah, it's interesting how that works.
Gold, of course, is a bet against the US dollar. And the rest of the stock market went exactly in the opposite direction.
And so 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 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 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 were 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 know, 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 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 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 it's authoritarian, 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. people are totalitarians yes actually i i'm not i know a lot of people personally i'm friends with people who've been the target of fbi raids including today um alfie oaks uh who's a wonderful man he was we went visited his restaurant and shop yeah in south florida naples good man i don't know i don't know 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 i um 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 um you know don't think alfie Oaks is doing anything that warranted an FBI raid,

and I doubt he would have been raided if he had 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.

I feel like. I think the lesson from last time around is if you don't move fast, the beast ultimately will, you know, will, 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 wins behind our back early on. You know, one of the things that I think we learned from last time around is a lot of this is just early momentum, right? You've let's say we have three, all three branches.
Let's say we've got judicial branch. We have a great judicial branch right now at the top of the Supreme Court, the best we've had, certainly in our lifetime.
But you combine that with the strong electoral mandate for the presidency, a strong, decisive majority in the Senate, hopefully get a good Senate majority leader picked. And then I think Rick Scott would be great for that.
But that's a side note. It can't be John Cornyn.
John Cornyn is an aggressive liberal. And if Donald Trump wins the popular vote and 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. So 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 what 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. But you can't do that.
I think you actually can. You can't fire.
We can all be fired. I i've been fired many times i'm sure you just lost a presidential race like we've all the only group that cannot fail that has actual tenure is not harvard professors not even it's not even yeah it's federal bureaucrats no amy wax just got you know tenure is 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 10 hours a week at our expense at a far higher wage than the average American. Oh, absolutely.
So the funny thing is- But they have a moral right. 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, radical idea.
They don't go to work. Actually, a good number of them would quit that way.
Right, right. That step alone.
So you don't even have to talk about, you want to 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've said.
If Congress didn't pass it, right? So 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 the 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 there 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 of that to shreds.
And basically what they've said is, if it's a major question, if it's something that affects people's lives economically or relates to a major political issue, it cannot be written into existence by somebody who was 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.
So who could be voted out if they write bad laws? That's a beautiful thing. And I think that those were seismic in their impact.
That's democracy. That you're describing 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 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 jarcusacy 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 if this, 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, 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, yeah, 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 with 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 a hedge fund.

That was first job I had for seven years out of college and, you know, understand a way in which people will huddle around divining what the exact meaning is of a comma at the end of Federal Reserve minutes. Does that mean that they think the economy is overheating so much that they have to raise interest rates? that feeds the kind of hubris of the bureaucrat to make them think that they're 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.
Wages are generally the last thing to go up in the business cycle. If things are going really well in the business cycle, the last thing most employers want to say, I'm not saying it's the right decision or the wrong decision, but most employers, the last thing they want to have go up is the wages.
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, 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 presence of the people who populate that bureaucracy. But in order to do that, you need this industrial logic.
And that industrial logic, in my opinion, is what the Supreme Court has already given us, which is this mandate to say the executive branch, the fake executive branch, the administrative state, has written all these rules by fiat. Most of them are illegal.
Like they're actually unlawful. They're illegitimate.
And so if you have an executive branch that says, okay, we're going to recognize that most of these regulations are illegitimate, there's your blueprint for then shaving down the size of the federal bureaucracy, which is then the permanent solution to stop that bureaucracy from perpetuating this kind of illegal ramp into 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 applied to this government. Every institution exists to protect itself for its own benefit.
That's its purpose and it's demonstrable in its behavior. So, but 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%. 80%, yeah.
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 there'll be trade-offs. I'm not going to paint some sort of exclusively fake Well, one of the trade-offs is going to be 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 Loudoun County share the pain of Gary, Indiana? I don't understand.
Or Springfield, Ohio. I don't understand that.
I'm actually going to take the bright side of this. Sorry.
I'm taking the apocalyptic side. No, no, no.
I mean, I'm in the golden age mood right now. Yeah, yeah.
No, sorry, sorry. We're entering the golden age.
You can feel the resentment. It's two sides of the same coin, though.
They go right together. Send these people to Gary, Indiana or to Springfield.
We don't need external individuals to the nation to actually fill those open positions. We have 3 million of them sitting in the greater Washington, D.C.
area. They could say, well, are those people really going to do those jobs? Maybe they should, actually.
They could be far more productive than the destruction that they're doing to the country right now. It is a fact that we have more open jobs than we have people in the country.
That's often one of the backdoor arguments made for mass illegal immigration in this country. But actually, I think for rule of law reasons, you need deportation of people who are in this country illegally.
But if you get 3 million people out of the federal bureaucracy in Washington, 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 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, OK, 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 D.C. and coming 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 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. This is, 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? 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.
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Federal employees. 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 what happens i mean right that's a good i mean i'm not uh obviously but apparently people are they're watching the view what happens they're watching jimmy camille or whatever his name is what happens to all those people i mean have they reached the point of like being so totally discredited that they can't continue so here's 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 they're going to be, that's not going gonna be the job of the new government.
That's going to be something that their own spiritual advisors have to help them through. That's a separate category.
But I think that's a relatively small minority of the three plus million federal civil servants who I do think are probably dead weight, worse than dead weight, because they're actually inadvertently even doing things that are net harmful to the country. I think it's the machine itself that I think is a big part of the problem.
A lot of these people are people who individually believe that they're carrying out some 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, 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 a 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.

the 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, a year and a half's worth of their old 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 time frame 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 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- In 9-11. Yeah, post- 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.
It's the ultimate big government is is the, you know, there, a lot of money spent in the last year 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 if we get a war with Iran, then we're not cutting, we're not cutting the government at all. Interesting.
I would give that some thought. I mean, you're, 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 were never elected to set that policy, I mean, the State Department's 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 what, 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 get a bunch of people showing up to work who should never had that job, they start finding things to do that are generally damaging. And that could include even not only in our own soil, but abroad as well.
Oh, it's, I mean, my dad works at the state is upstream of the welfare state in some ways too, because it even relates to the immigration crisis. Actually, more so in Europe, though, I think it probably will eventually be directly linked to the immigration crisis here, too, where part of Europe's mass invasion, if you will, of illegals entering Europe is actually the consequence of U.S.
disruptions that we created in the Middle East. The war in Syria.
Absolutely. Yeah, 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 welfare 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- It's history. Yeah, it's terrifying.
But okay, so let me ask you about the election. Yeah, it's so dark.
I think about it but that's where we're going um 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, including this one, the number hovered between, say, 59 and 65 million votes. And then you have this weird anomaly in 2020 where it was 81.
Huh. So how do you go...
Because Biden 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 on this stuff but what i will tell you what i would say yeah yeah what i will so i think a good number of those on on the super positive side of this a lot of those people are the people who are given the permission structure whether those people or not will 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. 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. 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 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 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. Oh, that's really interesting.
No, I'm not saying there's a connection there, Vivek, 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 and what was the justification? The justification was that they're more efficient and faster, more accurate and faster.

Yeah.

And it turned out.

It seems like it takes a lot longer to get our.

No.

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 populous, second largest.

Yeah.

I think it's the largest now.

Yeah.

I think it is the largest.

And I, 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 he did this pretty fast a lot of countries do it pretty fast as i said even even i mean like you look at a territory the united states even puerto rico like 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 did we say this time around? This had to be by such a decisive margin that a landslide minus some shenanigans is still going to be a decisive victory. And that's what we got.
So my view is we can, and 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 pastor. 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 a 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 single day voting paper ballots government issued id to match the voter file period i think more or less we've solved the problem of public confidence in elections for the long run i think you solve it you solve it right there if you're against that then i'd like to offer i'd like i'd love to hear the best possible argument offered against that i haven't really heard one yet black people people don't have IDs in this country. Yeah, I think that that's a racist supposition, actually.
It'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, you know, I think if somebody's

on their way to,

you know, 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.
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Not all veterans are eligible for the type or amount of benefits mentioned here. So how did you, when I saw you 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 it was you know jeb bush was not there yeah uh 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 I made my case for why I thought I was the right candidate. I think that I was the youngest person ever to run for 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.
It just seemed kind of lame. It seemed really facile.
Yeah, but it's these things. That's right.
Everyone starts out that way, but then it gets intense. It gets intense, yeah.
And we had our sharp moments over the course of the best. Yeah, but it's these things, that's right everyone starts out that way but then it gets intense.
It gets intense yeah, and we had our sharp moments over the course of the campaign Sure, but it wasn't personal How did you do that? How did you not get mad? They all get mad at the end It was interesting I guess the whole thing wasn't an exercise that I took super personally anyway I think when 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 have, you're going to have a guy who started it, bequeaths it to his kids.
At some point along the way, there are some bumps in the road in terms of, you know, how that happens and when, and when's the right time for the torch to be passed on. Those would be legitimate disagreements, arguments within the context of family business.
I know many people who have been in that similar position. 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.
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, won, and been a successful president.

And so, you know, I said it on the debate stage.

I thought Donald Trump was the greatest president of the 21st century.

And I think it actually caused more anger from the other candidates on that stage at

me for the rest of the 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 debates actually, how many were there? This started with like 10.
You know, I, the last debate I had, it was, 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, 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 this 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 straight without filters. And it felt like that should be a winning electoral strategy.
I'm not sure it's the winning electoral strategy, but this race was just so different from any other one because in retrospect, there's literally, it's foolish for anybody, myself included, to think that anybody else was going to come out of this process other than Donald Trump as the nominee. 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, probably a million things I could have done better. But I think that being unsparing as I was, I think that I wouldn't change, but to be able to combine that a little bit more with, if there's a way for me to allow a lot of people to sort of know me the way that like my employees at my businesses know me, or my closest friends know me, 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 years since I left the campaign has been eyeopening. 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 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 the camera know who you actually are. I get it.
It's difficult. That was kind of one of the reflections.
Trump is more self-deprecatingating than he gets credit for quite self-deprecating. It's actually really funny.
It's actually what makes him funny. Really funny.
The other night in the last week of the campaign, he was pivoting against the Trump voters are garbage, Biden's comment. He shows up in a garbage truck wearing, I think you were there, wearing a, you know, Dayglo vest and he comes out on stage wearing it and he says, my staff told me they wanted to wear this.
I want to wear it. And they said to me, it makes you look thinner.
Yeah, I know. I like that.
And I said, anything makes you look thinner, I'm far. That's hilarious.
That's true. 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 tried 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.
I'm interested because they're all people I know because I'm from Washington. It does.
They're just so repulsive to me. What do you think is going on? I think there's psychological derangement it's almost like a it's like a condition that needs to be treated with like hundred percent by a priest or something totally if you're you know whatever dick cheney's repulsive little daughter or jonah goldberg or you know it's like you're not they're just not impressive people they were um 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 mean. Really mean, but true.
It's not an honest. It was true.
But in the closing days of the campaign, the Harris people kept telling us there were a lot of people like that. There were a lot of Republican women who weren't going to vote for Trump because he's too repulsive.
They wouldn't tell their husbands. They wouldn't tell their husbands.
And they were 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 it. And there with no clothes, absolutely.
There's no one there. Totally.
Yeah, 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 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 division on race, division on gender, division on gender within the household because they're fundamentally against the household as a unit anyway.
That's for sure. And so that was probably the thing that pissed me off the most actually of the Harris campaign topics.
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're going to vote for different people, first of all, I would say, absolutely not. We're not voting for different people.
Sorry about 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. 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 democratic party just distilled 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 of course 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 like they were always telling you during covid or during the blm riots the real insurrection uh which is what that was um you know go home and lecture your racist uncle or grandfather at the thanksgiving that's right that was again your family that was again destroy 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 nuke and, you know, 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 in 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 yeah i i'm not making fun of him i feel no i feel sorry i do i do too but i've never seen anyone disappear faster yeah than joe biden do you never heard a word i wonder what his attitude is towards the obama family right now towards Barack Obama than Joe Biden. You never heard a word from him again.
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 was 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 US President to say that finally when his turn came around in 2015, after faithfully serving as a vice president or whatever, to say that, no, no, no.
For eight years. For eight years going through that ignominy.
And then to have Hillary Clinton to say, no, 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 white house and then to say the same guy comes back and you know who knows if the if the reporting on this is true but effectively threatens to have him constitutionally removed from office and to lead a coup unless you bend the knee the same guy only to then watch again the woman instead who this time was nominated, last time 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, his wife, had to have been the two most, you know, schadenfreude relieved Americans in the country.
But it's in, 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 up.
It's like part of him, it's like part of him came back, right? And so- His wife wore red on election day. Oh, did she? Yeah, I mean- He wore a MAGA hat.
Yeah maga hat yeah so you know it's it's not like they were they were they're hiding it too much but um you know it's it's just a fascinating thing it's neither critical nor not it's just 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 didn't get elected

and i know for because i talked to you about it there was a time after 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 that's what it is to grow that's called adulthood yeah is there a moment like that for the democratic party do you think i 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, 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 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, Madaglesias.
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.

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 wasn't.

They were all smart

and reasonable.

You saw this?

Yeah, I don't like Matt

Wyglacius at all,

but I must say.

I don't know him.

I saw this.

I'm a non-fan and I'm willing to admit that all nine of them were great, actually. Yeah.
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 non-states 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 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 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's like Bill's 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 causes you them up.
Totally, and it affirms your hubris and like, I'm successful because I'm so great. Yeah.
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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 significance in this election was and what his significance will be going forward. Huge.
I actually haven't known him for that long. I only got to know him last year.
He gave um, he gave a dinner I was at while I was running for president. We really hit it off.
I, um, I like 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 intelligent than the US government has ever, if he can kind of do the analysis and say that Donald Trump's gonna 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 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, I've 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 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 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's, you know, doesn't lose his interest in American politics for a long time to come. You know, 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 this influence of money in politics well okay trump got outspent three to one exactly read a one exactly exactly in the swing states right so so long as we have the game and i think that this is something for our side to you know man up into as well is if you're gonna play the game like, like you got to compete actually.
And we can't just win this against the so-called successful or elites or whatever. No, like actually we are better off if we have our own cadre of superhuman heroes who are able to, with their own unique skills, be they cultural leaders or business leaders or whatever, to have our own version of our special forces as well.
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. Well, that's what I'm saying.
He has a lot to lose, but he certainly doesn't need anything. 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 it's 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're wearing an analytical hat, I think it was huge.
There's also some broader sense in which this was just destined to happen totally this was all just playing out oh i'm with you like we're gonna have like a false analytical hubris here by just like dissecting exactly no no but you're right it was just all destined it was gonna happen just gonna happen and this was all part of it playing out and you know i think you feel that i mean you were there when they won they won. even just over the last year.
I mean, I, um, and you know, I'm not mean, it would mean to commit the sin of flattering you to your face, but I think one of the things I liked about our conversations and, you know, I, um, you know, I fashioned, you know, fashioned myself as, as having some of this as well is just having like a little bit of an intuition of where things are, are little bit like just like just get a pulse of the country and and to sort of see it i think you and i had what 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.
And that- You said it many times. 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, you know, 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, like at our very best, we might kind of smell it coming, but it was coming either way. And so I think the more we remember that, that actually is, I think what's uniting.
Actually, once you see that, that's really uniting. The idea that it's not being done by us, actually.
It's being done through us.

Like, that's a liberating feeling. And in that sense, you and I or any other everyday American is united with, you know, Elon Musk to Donald Trump.
Like, 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.

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