Trump's First Campaign Manager Paul Manafort Breaks Down the Current State of the Presidential Race

So, you've been in politics, what, Ford campaign 76, is that when you started? Started, yep. Who's going to win this race? Donald Trump.
You sound pretty authoritative on that. I think it's his to lose at this point in time, yes.
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Why do you say that? Well, you look at the composition of the undecided voter. And in seven battleground states, the undecided voter overwhelmingly thinks the country has been going in the wrong direction.
They feel like they have not benefited in the last four years. They remember because Trump was president just four years ago what it was like when he was president pre-COVID.
And so they can compare his record versus the Biden-Harris record. And you look at the undecided issue agenda, it's the Trump issue agenda.
The number one issue is the economy, the inflation. Number two is the border and illegal immigration and crime.
And the third issue is safety in the world. And somewhere there's abortion.
Somewhere there is fear for democracy. But when you look at how the voters feel on the issue of democracy, it splits 50-50.
I mean, half the country is fearful because of

what Biden has been doing, and the other half is fearful because of what Biden says Trump will do, except Trump has been president. So you can't say Trump will do something beyond what he did as president before.
So the issue doesn't cut with the remaining undecideds. What cuts is the the border, the wars in Ukraine and in the Gulf.

And there he has a 10 to 12 point lead on those major issues over Harris among the undecideds. So it's kind of that simple.
I mean, so their issues, Harris's issues are Trump's personality, abortion in January 6th.

Trump's issues are the economy, the border, crime, and the threat of nuclear war.

It seems like he's got a much stronger hand than she does.

Yeah.

I mean, if she had run a different campaign, it might have been more difficult for Trump.

But she basically gave Trump his issues to be the deciding issues of the campaign. She's realized that.
I think you've seen now when she talks about the closing narrative of her campaign is Trump is unhinged, he's unstable, and she's using former Republicans as advocates to make the point. She's doing that because the undecided vote that's left out there isn't a vote that is inclined towards her for the reasons I just said.
And so she's got to peel off soft vote from Trump or people who would not be for her but don't like Trump and so they're not going to vote. And so she's trying to get that sort of, I guess, the rhino Republican, the anti-Trumpers, the suburban women, Republican women.
And so her job is to get those type of people to come out to vote for her. But the people who are undecided and are going to vote in the election are the ones that have the profile that I've described.
And so as long as Trump stays on message, they're going to break into my judgment in favor. It's because I've been around a long time.
In 1980, I was involved in the 1980 Reagan campaign at a senior level. And in that campaign, there were a lot of parallels to this race.
You had a failed Democrat president in Jimmy Carter. The issues were economic and the issues were the Iran hostage situation.
But Reagan was an unknown commodity. He'd been governor in California, but the

Carter campaign against him was he was a cowboy. He was reckless.
There'd be World War III.

But the issue agenda was an economic issue agenda, like with Trump this year. And so Reagan had to

prove himself as being capable of president. Trump doesn't have to do that because he's already

Thank you. agenda and uh and like with trump and this year and so reagan had to prove himself as being capable of president trump doesn't have to do that because he's already been president so that first hurdle that reagan had uh trump doesn't have uh although harris was trying to make that into a negative hurdle for for trump uh but once reagan was able to demonstrate he was he could be president, which he did in the only debate that he had with Carter, the undecided vote just all moved over to Trump in the last 10 days of the campaign.
Toward Reagan. I mean, to Reagan in the last 10 days of the campaign, because they saw Reagan as a strong leader and they were voting against Carter's economic record.
You've got that same kind of dynamic in this race right now. So 45 years later, I think very few people remember that the Carter-Reagan race in the fall of 1980 was considered too close to call or maybe Carter's to lose.
Correct. That is correct, right? That is correct, and it was a landslide victory.
It certainly was. I mean, it changed American politics for the next 30 years at least.
That's right. So you were in it.
Was it obvious to you that Reagan was going to win? We knew the last week of the campaign he was going to win. Our data was all very very uh very clear and uh we didn't know the landslide would be as big as it was but we knew it was going to be a big

win uh we we actually started spending time covertly on some of the senate races because we were looking to we and we we won a number of senate seats that weren't supposed to win in 1980 because the tide was that strong uh it but the but what had happened in 1980 is all the polling companies national polls shut down the last week of the campaign because it showed carter winning uh and they all thought he was going to win and uh and so there was no polling the last week of the campaign, except for us.

We were doing our targeted states.

The internal polling from the regular campaign. Right, from the campaign.

And so we saw the break.

We saw what was happening.

And so we weren't surprised on election day.

Every legacy media account I read of the state of the race today tells me that it's just too close to call. You don't seem to think that it's too close to call.
Why are they saying that? Well, I think it's a close election. I think that the undecideds, when they break, are going to break 3-2, 2-1 for Trump.
He's ahead now in all seven battleground states. And in fact, I draw your attention to start watching Virginia, Minnesota, and maybe even New Mexico, where the races have gotten close, close meaning a couple of points.
And the movement is against Harris in those states. Now, do I think they'll close

for Harris? Probably. But we could see happening in those states what we do see happening in the

seven battleground states and then decided the differences in the battleground states were

already ahead in every one of them. And so any breaking disproportionately to Trump will enhance

the lead as opposed to Virginia or Minnesota, where we need to take the lead from the breaking. But it's possible.
And the clues you see is when you look at what's happened this past weekend in some of the key Democrat Senate incumbent races in the blue wall states. in Wisconsin and in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

You have incumbent Democrat senators running who are in dead heat races with Republican challengers by public polling. And you look, they've all put up ads this weekend, all three races, where the Democrat senators are endorsing Trump policies by name in their political advertising.
Using the word Donald Trump. Using the word Donald Trump.
They support the Trump border plan. They support the Trump fracking plan.
They support the Trump tariff plan, depending on the states. But you have a Democrat supporting the Trump border plan? Yeah.
Well, that's like a violation of the catechism. That's a big deal to say something like that, I think.
And the Trump tariff plan in Michigan is not something that Harris is supporting at all. And yet, Slotkin is in her advertising.
When you see that kind of evidence, you know they're seeing in their private polling what we're seeing in our private polling, which is that the undecideds that are left in the race, probably in theirs and ours since they're tracking, are on the same issue agenda. And they wouldn't be, meaning on economics, Trump's position on tariffs in Michigan, Trump's position on fracking in Pennsylvania.
And so you see it empirically in there. You see in our data, we feel like watching the shift in the narrative that Harris has taken the past week since her Fox interview, where she now is totally on this personality cult attack and that he's too dangerous to be president, giving up all the issues.
She's giving up the issue agenda and making her race all about Donald Trump. Why would she do that? Because I think she believes she sees what we see, which is that on the main issues, she has not sold her case.
And Trump has. They view Trump as better on dealing with inflation by 12 points in some of the public polls.
They see Trump on the border by over 12 points, over 15 points over her, trusting him to deal with overseas issues by 10 points. She sees that.
So it's too late in the campaign now to change that direction. So she's got to throw the Hail Mary pass, which was the other core part of her strategy, which is Trump is unhinged and unstable.
And she's focusing on the soft vote and Republican vote or the Republican vote that's not voting, which is suburban women, and targeting them on the message and using Liz Cheney and others. So if you're pulling out the Cheneys as a Democratic presidential candidate in the last moments, I mean, first of all, you deserve to lose more than anything for doing that, but if someone had told you five years ago that the most left-wing American senator would become the Democratic presidential candidate and trot the Cheneys out, I mean...
You can't make that stuff up. Yeah.
I mean, no. And the thing is, both parties have got their base.
I mean, when Trump's getting in all the public polls, between 90 and 93% of the Republican vote, she's getting between 90 and 92% of the Democratic vote. So this is not a base election anymore.
The base, you know, but what she's trying to do is mix up the base a little bit by some of these anti-Trump Republicans who are not voting for the most part and try and peel those votes over to her because she's not confident she can win over the undecided voter in Western Pennsylvania because of where Trump's position over her is on the economy, on fracking. And this is where she failed in her debate with Trump.
And her job at that debate was to introduce herself to the country, but to also show that she had a plan. She didn't do that.
And by going dark with the media for so long, she never defined herself. And what the Trump campaign has done, using her and her public appearances and her recorded statements from 2019, as well as while vice president, we've defined her using her on her positions, and that's worked.
And as a result, you have a lot of, he's carrying the independent vote. We could carry the Hispanic vote.
Like a majority? Like a majority in a couple of the battleground states, yes. Like a majority.
He's getting 25% of the vote. So that's a history-changing change in politics, if that happens.
Yeah. And it's for a lot of reasons, but all of them make sense.
It's independent in Nevada and Arizona, it's because of the border,

it's because of the crime, it's because of the

impact of illegals on their

communities, but it's

also cultural values and wokeism

and family values.

It's school board

issues and transgender and things

like that.

Where in the Hispanic families,

it's a culturally tight-knit family situation.

These are issues that bother them.

I think Nevada's majority Hispanic now.

It's pretty close.

Yeah, close for sure.

And so the idea was that people with Hispanic last names

love illegal immigration,

but that's turned out...

It's not true.

At all.

No, because they're suffering the most. and one

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I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think illegal immigration, but that's turned out at all. No, because they're suffering the most.
And one, because of their jobs. Two, because of the impact on limited community resources.
Three, the crime is in their neighborhoods. And you've had Harris out there for three and a half years saying there's no problem.

There is no border problem.

They're not recognizing it, not even visiting it and being empathetic. And that has resonated in the Hispanic community.
And we're seeing that in the Hispanic community in places like Pennsylvania as well. And so that framework of the electorate is totally tilting away.
And some of this Hispanic vote and a lot of the black vote that's favoring Trump, it's a twofer for us because it's one vote out of the Democratic candidate, one vote for the Republican. It's not just a swing voter that's, you know, for grabs.

She's losing a vote every time we gain a black vote, you know, that she normally would have had as a Democrat nominee.

And again, the reason these people, the profile of the Trump black voter this time are black

men under 25, I mean, under 35. And it's for a reason.
They've suffered economically. They've given up on the promises of the Democratic Party.
And Trump, in some ways, is an iconic figure to them. But he definitely gets them.
And they see that he gets them. So that vote is not a vote that's going to slip away in the next two weeks as we get close to the election.
And that's why she's targeting disaffected women Republicans who don't like Trump the personality. It's just kind of weird that she'd be running on Trump's personality because it's the single most familiar fact in all American politics.
What Donald Trump's personality is like, because we've talked about it every single day for 10 years. So is there really room for movement on that question? Is there anyone thinking, oh, wow, Trump is kind of volatile.
I had no idea. I think I won't vote for him.
She's already got those orders. Exactly.
Yeah, I mean, it's baked in. And that's why these undecided voters, if you look at any focus groups that are out there, you'll see they all are saying, well, yeah, I don't like his personality, but I was better for that under his, when he was president.
And I don't know what she stands for. And I don't want to risk four more years.
And these are people who traditionally vote Democrat. Because they told us, remember, they would always remember.
I mean, it's all they talked about for the better part of a decade. Trump is a racist.
Trump is a racist. Let me repeat.
Trump is a racist. And now he's like on track to win the majority of the Hispanic vote and a huge chunk of black men.
I guess that didn't work, we can say. No, it didn't.
I mean, that could have worked if it was part of a strategy, but not worked because it's the strategy. And that's all that she's offering people who have had a very lousy three and a half years.

Do they even say that anymore? Trump is a race member? That was the only thing they said about Trump. They're not saying it that way anymore, although I think you will see in the next two weeks they will get that raw again because that's the stage that they're at in the campaign.
So I think it's going to be a very ugly close by the Harris campaign. In what way? I mean, they will be tossing around Hitler and racism and things like that as if they were not the kind of powerful words that they are.
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Yeah, they're much less powerful than they used to be, though. I remember the first time someone said something like that, called him Hitler or said he was a white supremacist or racist.

I remember being really shocked by it.

Now it's like, oh, shut up.

People are more immune to it.

Again, in my personal opinion, she's got the vote that's going to be moved by that.

Right.

That's not going to be the last 5%.

And so Trump is running a closing campaign that's dealing with what the undecideds want to hear. She is running a closing campaign that's based on fear.
Right. Trying to make the undecided voter fear Trump and therefore just resign and say, okay, I'm willing to risk four more years of this because I fear Trump.
I don't think that's a winning close. And I don't see it in the data, and I don't see it in my experience in politics of being the kind of thing in a close race, if you will, that will allow people to vote against their economic interest.
Because that's what these undecided people are saying. I've had a miserable four years.
I believe Trump can do a better job for me, but I'm going to vote against him. I don't see that happening.
Do you feel confident enough to bet on it? If I were a betting man, yes. Do you believe in the predictions markets, the betting markets? Well, I mean, I pay attention to them.
And if you look at the betting markets today, they're at the highest point in all the years Trump has been in politics saying that Trump's going to win. It's like the average, I think, today, is like 58%, 59% of the betting market is saying Trump.
And you can track how that betting market has gone since she came into the race, when she was first announced, when we went through the sugar high, and then, I mean, the betting markets followed her and were favoring her. But over the last month, as the campaign strategies have impacted the electorate at the grassroots level, you've started to see it ticking up for Trump.
And now it's dramatically up for Trump going into the close, the last two weeks of the close. And I don't see any major October surprise, as we call it, that's going to come up that can change that trajectory now.
The hurricane season is almost over. The war situation, I think, is they're waiting it out for the next two weeks to see who wins.
I could be wrong, but if Israel does something striking in Iran, that doesn't hurt Trump. It could hurt Harris.
The economy's not going to get better in the next two weeks. So there's no event that's going to change the trajectory of the race like the debate did in 1980, Reagan versus Carter, allowing the undecideds to vote their economic interest.
There's nothing that's going to change, I don't believe, that will allow the undecideds to vote against their economic interest for heirs. And again, Trump is ahead in all seven states right now by the public polling summaries.

So the foundation is there, and you also have what we call the unknown Trump factor, where historically Trump is one or two points better than the polls show him to be.

And in some cases, dramatically more than one or two points.

You look at the national polls today, Harris is up by about a point and a half nationally.

And national polls of all voters is not in a good measure any longer of what's going to happen on election day. Plus, you have people voting now.
So it's not just voting on election day. The changes that we're all seeing happen in Trump's favor has happened in contemporaneous people actually casting votes.
And one of the Harris

campaigners had the money advantage,

but they've

also been... Big money.
Big money

advantage, but too much

money advantage, meaning that we don't

need as much money as she has to win.

We were... Hillary Clinton

outspent Trump

by almost half a billion dollars

in 2016 and lost.

And so she's going to

Thank you. outspent Trump by almost half a billion dollars in 2016 and lost.
And so she's going to not be much more than, she won't be that much ahead of Trump in the end. But her money advantage and her, quote, field advantage, it was supposed to make the difference.
Well, she doesn't have a field advantage. And that's one of the myths that the mainstream media has perpetuated during this campaign.

It's that Trump has no ground game and Harris has this juggernaut.

Well, the last time I heard that was in 2016 when I was told that the campaign we had put together was a terrible grassroots campaign and that Hillary Clinton had the most professional field operation in history.

Well, we know what happened there. It's the same thing.
They're saying the same thing today. We have a very good ground.
I mean, when you look at the early voting that's happening and millions of votes have been cast by now between early voting and absentee voting, and everyone's modeling that stuff and the democrats turnout advantage on early voting is dramatically less than it's ever been again over the last eight years but guess and so we're holding our own or doing better than our own in the early voting but then guess who has an advantage on election day we do because that's where we've always had to turn all of our vote out, because we always were against early voting until this cycle. She doesn't have as good an organization for the election day as she has for early voting.
But she's not winning the margin she needs so far in the first two weeks of early voting that's happened. So the field organization isn't even an advantage at this point in time.
We've got the issue advantage and we've got more than enough money to do what we need to do in our campaign. Therefore, looking at all the pieces of an election, her race is counting on her getting people to vote against their economic interests because Trump is a threat to democracy.
I don't see that happening. I agree with you.
Looking back over the last three months, really since June, since the debate between Trump and Biden, what are the things that the Trump campaign has done right, do you think? Well, they were ready for Harris. I mean, we saw going into, after the debate in June, the possibility that Biden might not be a candidate.
I didn't believe it. I thought he would never quit.
But the campaign saw they a possibility. And so they did their research on Harris and on the other potential candidates that could have been the nominee so that when Biden did drop out, we were ready.
We had ads ready and we knew how we wanted to define all of the potential opponents we might have. we didn't think that they would get rid of Biden

and give us Harris. Because we viewed Harris as the weakest of all the potential candidates because she would have to live on the record of the administration.
But that was Joe Biden's gift to Donald Trump because Biden was so upset with the Democratic coup d'etat against him that he told them he was going to endorse his vice president when Nancy Pelosi and Obama wanted an open primary of all the leading candidates so that they could control who would come out of the Democratic convention. They didn't get that.
Biden announced on Sunday he was quitting and announced on Monday he endorsed the Kamala Harris. And then it became impossible for anybody to run against Harris.
You think that was an act of aggression against his own party? I do. Really? Yeah.
So diminished though he is, you think that Joe Biden was angry enough at Pelosi and Obama that he decided to screw the Democratic Party by gifting them Michelle? You've watched his Irish temper enough times as I have. And you know how he's always felt disparaged by the Democratic establishment, including Obama, including Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah, especially Obama. Yeah.
And he didn't want to quit. He felt, and there's a case to be made today,

that he could have been a better candidate than Harris because he felt all along that the Democratic base, which was the reason why he was trailing badly after his debate, would have no choice but to come together after Labor Day and support him, and then he thought he could beat Trump again. If you want to analyze it through his eyes, he's probably right.
The base would have come back to him. The media would have had to come back to him against Trump because they were always going to be against Trump.
And he would be a much better candidate in Pennsylvania. He'd be a much better candidate in the Midwest because he's got working class roots.
You've got an elitist Democrat liberal as the Democratic nominee when the battleground states are in the Midwest. And so you could make the case that he would have been at least as strong as Harris.

But Pelosi's strategy was never to have Harris.

And Shapiro or Whitmer or even Newsom could have had a certain appeal in the Midwest that a Harris didn't have.

So you think Obama and Pelosi never thought they were getting Kamala Harris when they pushed Biden to retire? I don't. Really? Yeah.
And that was Joe Biden's gift to them in return for the gift they gave him. Just knifing him.
Yes. But that's why Harris, but what we didn't analyze, nobody could have, is how all in the media would be to just, you know, make her into the second Obama.
Try to make her into the second, except she can't speak like Obama. She's, you know, Obama's much more articulate.
Obama stood for something that she can't stand for. Obama was going to be the first black president.
Yeah. Now she's going to be the first black woman president, but the concept— Who cares at this point? Yeah, exactly.
And she's not articulate. She's afraid of being with the media.
If they don't prop her up, she can't hold her own. And I've learned, having done enough elections, that the american people generally get it they they by election day they get it i mean sometimes we good with the you know in 2020 covid distorted everything and then the changing of the rules on voting distorted everything uh and then republicans not knowing how to deal with early voting and participating distorted everything.
Well, this is a much more normal election. I mean, the rules are the same, are settled rules.
We fixed some of the excesses of 2020 in a number of the battleground states so that voter identification is going to be important. Republicans are participating in early voting this time in an aggressive way, and we're seeing it in the early voting results.
So in a more normal election, having a California liberal who hasn't been out there running for president and trying to define herself should not be a victorious campaign. The reason she's in play is because the media has defined her for her as the saint and this turning the page.
Well, again, the American people know turning the page from what? From the Biden-Harris administration? How do you turn the page on yourself and give them something different? And especially when she hasn't defined what she's going to do. Or when she has, it's been a contradiction to what she said she stood for before.
And again, she's winning her vote. And most polls show this because even in the Democratic base that supported her, they're anti-Trump.
Because a lot of those people who weren't so anti-Trump Democrats would be voting for a Republican candidate right now, not named Trump, because of the economic failures of this administration against theirs. But Trump brings out an additional kind of voter that no Republican can get, and he's changing the composition of the Republican Party into a working man's party, working class party, to a middle American party.
I think it's finally happening. It must be weird for you, as someone who's been top levels of the Republican Party for all these years, almost 50, to see all these people you know come out against Trump and in some cases for Kamala Harris? Like the pillars of the party, Dick Cheney is just one among many.
Yes, it is. And it's because of the personality that they're coming out, but it's also because they've had their time and they're settled in their ways, and they think that Trump doesn't represent the party that they were a part of 20 years ago.
Well, he doesn't. Well, he doesn't, but a lot of the principles he does.
Yes. And so, but they've put, they've subordinated principles to how they want the party to look, which is the exact opposite of what the Democrats have done.
They don't care what the party looks like. It's principles that drive the Democratic Party and it's woke leftist principles that are not in the interest of the country.
And as a result, you've had the changing of the electorate, of the composition of the two parties, where the Democrats are now an elitist party from the coast, and the Republicans are Main Street and not Wall Street, even though their reputation is still that. And Trump is making it into a really working class party.
What do you think of that? Well, I think if you want to run a country, you have to have more than elitist as a focus of where your policy should go. I mean, that's why I got involved in politics.
As a conservative, back in the 60s, I was upset with what was emerging as Johnson kind of big government, the social welfare program, things like that. And so I was coming from a working class background.
I saw the Republican Party, not necessarily the leadership of the Republican Party, but the principles of what Goldwater was talking about as something that attracted my interest. Well, Trump has taken that to a new level.
Trump has made it into the leadership of the party, not just the focus of the principles of the party. And I think long-term, that's a coalition that can govern for a long time, especially when you take the negative part of Trump out of the equation and keep all the positives in the equation,

I think that the Democrats are either going to have to

come back towards the center

or we are going to be in power for a long time.

I mean, I think it's not inconceivable

to think that Trump is going to have a Republican Congress.

He's going to have a Republican Senate.

He could have 54, 55 members of the Republican Senate. And it's probable with him winning, with breaking the way I think things are going to break, that we'll keep the House.
And if we do that, then something very different from 2017 is going to exist. You're going to have an experienced President Trump who understands Washington a lot better than he did in 2017 when he took the oath of office.
And you're going to have a Republican Congress, controlled Congress, that's people that are part of the Trump make America great again agenda with a Speaker of the House who actually is supportive of the economic policies that Trump wants to enact versus what Paul Ryan was doing as Speaker of the House, convincing Trump not to do the things that he should have done in the first year and therefore having immigration reform and economic reforms that Trump wanted put on the back burner to never get to the front burner. That's not going to happen in so with those changes i believe the country is going to get stronger economically i think the world is going to get better get safer i think we're going to have borders again and that is going to lock in a lot of this new support that is voting for trump because they think he will be better for them but But then they're going to see that the party as a whole,

that Trump has put together, can also be better for them after Trump.

And with somebody like J.D. Vance,

and even people like Marco Rubio now,

out there talking about the Trump record, the Trump policies,

it's going to make a big difference.

And I think Hispanics will be attracted to that. I think working class Americans will be attracted to that.
And with Trump having a government of people for him, as opposed to a government of people that were not for him, but then wanted to be part of the government that he created, and then undercut him as president time and time again, that's going to be different this year. The people are going to be put in power that will implement the Trump agenda and be supportive of the Trump agenda.
And that's why to all of these former Republican Trump administration people who are now supporting Harris, they didn't support Trump in 2016. They became part of his government after he won, but they were not supporting him in 2016.
They did not buy into the Trump policies that Trump was elected on. And so when they didn't follow his direction, he fired them.
The difference is Harris's people and her staff as vice president, 95% of the people who worked for her quit on her. They didn't get fired.
They quit on her. They couldn't take her because she was such a terrible boss.
That's the difference. That's what you can expect under Harris.
She can't manage people. Trump had the wrong people in office because he didn't have a team in 2017 because he was an outsider coming into Washington, but he's got a team now.

And it's a team that believes in what he wants to do

and what he's campaigning on.

And so what he gets elected on,

unlike what Biden and Harris did in 2020

and then did as president and vice president,

Trump is going to implement the policies

he's been out there talking about.

And he's going to bring people in

who are committed to those policies,

different than 2017. And I think we have a chance to have a very good two years.
With that, a lot of these changes can start to take root. What a disaster if Trump does win.
It'll be for the Democratic Party. The second he won in 2016, well, the first thing that was resolved to put the people who got him got him there including you in prison and they succeeded um mike flynn they tried to put him in prison i mean roger stone i mean they really went and just tried to imprison the opposition and then they tried to imprison trump and i think pretty clearly stole the 2020 election that's my view um they eliminated free speech.
That's theft enough. And it didn't work.
And then he wins in 2024 after all of that. What is it like if that happens in the Democratic Party? I think the left takes over.
Interesting. Yeah.
I think who's going to get gutted here is the centrist in the Democratic Party. Really? Absolutely.
Absolutely. I think that the Washington part of the party will be dramatically controlled by the Sanders wing.
But I think Sanders, you know, the unspoken story here is the guy with the network in the states, in the Democratic Party, is Bernie Sanders.

Of course, yes.

And what you saw happen with Ronald Reagan in 1977 after he lost the nomination to Jerry Ford and Ford lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter, Reagan's network of people spent three years building in the States the Reagan organization that elected him president. Because Reagan had foreseen the future issue-wise.
I think the Sanders people are going to do the same thing if there's a debacle in 2024, but they're going to be misreading the future,

in my judgment, on the issues, unlike what Reagan did.

And so as they take control, they're going to push the party further and further left.

To the populist left, the economic left?

What do you mean by the left? Well, I think both the populist left and the economic left. I think they're going to be driven by the economic left, but the populist left is going to be the way they sell their message.
But like the tranny left, the weird kind of rich lady left, the emphasis on the sexual issues, on racial division, does that, I mean, that doesn't seem to have worked. And that's what I call the populist left.
I think the economic left is where they will frame it because it's more acceptable to the disadvantaged. And you can make that case to the illegal migrants who may be ending up getting entrenched here in one way or another.
But the left takes, so the lesson if they lose to the Democrats will be we didn't go left enough. Well, I don't know that that's the lesson that they would to them, but that's opportunity to the left within the party which is the dominant part of the party yeah interesting there's a lot of chaos out there in the world and that's why your bed is your sanctuary a place of peace and rest and with cozy earth it can be even more peaceful and more restful comfort and Tranquility are the bywords of Cozy Earth, it can be even more peaceful and more restful.
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There's got to be some reckoning though i mean they they did everything they could to stop trump and they couldn't stop him look look who's on the horizon you've got bernie sanders still got elizabeth warren still you got amy kluberger still you got gavin newsom. These are all, they've already, they've sailed that ship, their ships in that direction.
Now, can they change? Yeah, of course they can change. But the power base and the grassroots that they have to appeal to, to emerge victorious for 2028 is the left.
And they are much more hardcore than Republicans are at punishing their opposition. So I don't think there's any leadership in Washington with with Pelosi being gone now, that sort of moves towards the center, I think Obama will be where a lot of them go to.
But Obama, this is his last fight. I mean, if he loses this, I mean, if she loses, he loses.
And he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life refighting that war.

He's a former president.

He's made millions of dollars since she's left.

It's up to new leadership to take the party over.

And so I don't see him.

You don't even see Michelle Obama out there right now campaigning for Harris.

I think she will in the last two weeks. But she hasn't been out there this time.
Why do you think? There's something there. I mean, I don't know what it is, but there's something there.
Obama even hasn't been that aggressively out there, even though this was his coup d'etat. I mean, she wasn't necessarily his candidate, but this was his coup d'etat.
But my point is, I don't see Obama in the future trying to direct the Democratic Party. Pelosi will be gone.
Schumer's not a national politician. He's a Washington politician.
Hakeem Jeffries doesn't have any profile of seriousness.

The National Democrats in Washington are the leftist.

The Sanders, the Warrens, people like that.

So if Trump gets the majority in two weeks, will the Democrats, including their army of lawyers, just kind of give up?

Oh, no. And just say, you won? Look, January 6th is their playbook.
Right. Well, it was last time, too.
Yeah, exactly. So do I think that they're just going to accept the results? As Trump says correctly, Hillary Clinton is still contesting the 2016 election.
They will never give Trump the benefit of winning an election, no matter how big he wins it. But he's going to be president in January of 2025, and they're going to have to deal with that.
But they'll make it, it'll be a difficult transition period. There'll be a lot of protest.
I mean, the week after, between people running to their psychiatrist offices and people running to the streets to burn things, it's going to be a mess. Can you think of any legal mechanism they could use to prevent Trump from being seated as president in January? No.
I mean, they tried to set some of those things up when they were trying to play with electors for this time around and rules about the states not having to follow the results of the election.

But no, the system works. Our system works.
And as far as against a coup d'etat, if you will, a democratic coup d'etat. And the difference between 2020 and 2024 is you will have the media defining whatever the grievances are of the losing Democratic Party as being fair grievances when in fact they're not.
I don't know which ones they'll come up with but they'll come up with stories that are not true and that's what they're good at. Republicans accept results for the most part, which is why Trump's pushback in 2020 was so out of character for the world to understand.
Democrats always contest results. I mean, I can't remember a campaign nationally that they didn't contest one way or another something, whether it was Gore, were they lost? And so it will be a contentious transition period.
But I think the difference is if Trump has the results that I think he's going to have, he'll be close to or over 300 electoral votes. That's hard to turn over for them to fight.

You really think so?

Trump's going to get 300?

Well, I mean, there are seven battleground states.

If Trump loses all seven, I think it's something like 254.

If he wins all seven, he's at 312.

If he wins some combination in between.

And the only one where he's below 270 is where she sweeps the blue wall. And I don't see her doing that.
We could sweep the blue wall. Right now, we're leading in all three of those states.
Remind us what the blue wall is. Blue wall is Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Yeah. And the three Midwestern states.
She has to win. Why are those Democratic states? I've never understood that at all.
Those seem like natural Trump states, given the realignment between the parties. Labor has got a big hold on.
How corrupt is labor when every member of a public sector labor union overwhelmingly is for Trump? Like how corrupt are they that they're... You mean for Harris?

You know, it was for the actual, you know, what percentage of the Teamsters?

What percentage of...

Oh, you mean of the grant profile?

IBEW.

Yeah, exactly.

No, you're right.

Well, that's why we're winning those states.

Yeah.

You know, Trump has made the economic argument to the auto workers

that the Biden-Harris administration was the worst administration for them, and she'll be even worse as President Harris. And that's why the local members are there.
I mean, yesterday in Pittsburgh, the steel union members from Western Pennsylvania endorsed Trump. Now, the senior leadership of the union is for Harris.
But the rank-and-file workers, the union bosses in the regions, in the states, are for Trump. And they endorsed him yesterday in Western Pennsylvania.
So, but she has to win all three of those states. She's got a problem with the Muslim vote in Michigan.

And it's their major piece of a democratic coalition to carry that state.

They're fragmented. There's going to be a lot of non-vote voters in that group.
And Trump was endorsed by the largest Muslim Pakistan organization in Michigan last week. And they're doing that because they know that Trump is somebody who could bring peace to the Middle East.
I mean, he almost did that. If he had had a second term, we wouldn't have had this war in the Gulf.
And at the same time, the Jewish support, Trump's getting close to 40% of the Jewish support because they know that he protected Israel.

And when he says he's going to protect them, he means what he says versus what Biden says when he talks to being pro-Israel but anti-Netanyahu.

Right now in a war, you can't be both.

You have to be pro-Netanyahu and pro-Israel. Trump has credibility in the Israeli community.
He has credibility in the Muslim community. There's nobody in the Democratic Party like that.
And in Michigan, that's a real cross-pressure on Harris at the base. So the three states that she has to win to be president, she's trailing in all three.

That will have a long-term impact, I think, on realignment.

Because Trump also understands that the leadership may not be formed, the rank and file is, but if he makes the rank and file's lives better, the leadership has to start to open up and be less oppressive. And really, when you look at the public service unions and the private sector unions, there's a real break now at the grassroots level.
And the public sector unions are going to have a hard time under Trump because he's going to make changes that are going to be, that are going to call government reductions. I hope he extinguishes them, crushes them.
We shouldn't have a single public sector union in the United States. The whole idea is grotesque.

Well, it's...

Tax dollars held hostage by

federal employees or state employees.

The whole thing's nuts. They

pay for their own politicians. Yeah, and they're not

union leaders. They're

Democrats with union positions.

They run copy machines and man

some desk at the DMV.

I mean, these are not... There's not laborers.
These are people living off the DMV. I mean, these are not laborers.

These are people living off the public tent.

I mean, it's disgusting.

And living very well off of it.

Very well.

Yes.

No, that's right.

And that's why you had people like the head of the teams nationally coming and speaking to the Republican Convention.

He's a good man, Sean O'Brien from Boston.

And Trump didn't require a litmus test support. He said, come and make your case.
Yeah. And that resonates with the rank and file people that when you show respect to the union, when the union is just being, is not taking a proposition.
But that's who Trump is. I mean, he recognizes that every day is another day, and you build by consensus and communication, which is why, again, the globalists and the elitists that the State Department can't handle a guy because he doesn't read from their playbook.
And he doesn't even look at their playbook because he thinks their playbook is wrong. And frankly, having dealt with a lot of those kinds of people over my 40 years in politics, he's right.
So given Trump's position, the seven battleground states ahead within the margin, but still ahead in all of them, and given the vibe shift, Elon Musk coming out for Trump, a bunch of tech people coming out for Trump, I think most people, if they're honest, think Trump's going to win. What if he doesn't win? Will Republicans accept that result as legitimate? The answer is ultimately yes, I think.
I mean, honestly, I don't deal with that scenario now because in my mind, we're not going to lose. I mean, if we lost, how we lost would be relevant.
Yeah. And I don't believe that if you lose, you don't have a right to question,

but then there comes a point when you have to move on.

I don't know.

So how we lose would be relevant, but I don't see that happening.

A lot of Republicans think that the system is rigged against them. And I understand that.
Believe me. I bet you do.
Oh, do you understand that? But the point is you just can't give up.

And you just have to be better than you were before to succeed the next time.

And you can't complain about the past.

You have to do something about the future. One of the things that I'm actually very proud of what Trump has done in this cycle is he doesn't think you should have early voting.

He thinks election day should be election day. But he recognizes that you got to play by the rules that are the rules today.
and

it's

the equivalent

what we've done

in the past

two election cycles

of ignoring

early day voting

is like in baseball

having And what we've done in the past two election cycles of ignoring early day voting is like in baseball, having a designated batter. But since he's not on the field, you just don't let him go up to bat.
You just take him out every time that spot comes up in the batting order. That's what we were doing in early voting.
We were not participating. And the Democrats were.
And it did two things. It energized their people early.
It banked votes before the campaign was over.

So that we always, in 2020, our closing campaign was much stronger than the campaign around the convention and in September.

But so many people had already voted,

many of whom would have possibly changed and voted differently if they had only been one election day.

Right now, one of the things the Trump campaign did very well this time

is we were doing a mid-October campaign program in August and September because we knew that early voting was starting in October. And so we had to have the electorate's mindset where they normally would be on October 20th there on October 1st.
So that means we had to be defining her heavily in September. We had to be defining the differences between Trump and her in August.
And we had to be spending the kind of money that was necessary to have the penetration so that by now we're focusing on the last 5%, percent not on the 50 we need. And we've done that well.
And that's why the campaign is closing where you're starting to see the race tilt publicly towards Trump. The betting markets are tilting that way.
The stock market, I think, is pricing in. If you look at the kind of companies that are going up, they're companies that would do well in a deregulated economy under a President Trump.
So all of that's happening because our closing campaign was happening in September. And now we're getting out the vote because they're ready to vote.
We've talked to them and they're now voting. That's all stuff we gave up on last time.
We were running our October campaign last time in October. And by September, they had defined us because early voting isn't just who gets to vote.
It's how you persuade them before they vote. And they were doing their October close in September, getting their votes banked.
And we were talking to people that already voted by the time we did our closing campaign in October. That's changed this time.
Trump has done a masterful job. His campaign leadership has been brilliant at this, at putting the calendar of when people vote into the strategy of how we run the campaign.
And they've done so. And as you said to your point a little while ago, this is a guy that should have been dead five or six times as a candidate.
And he's now heading into the last two weeks as the front runner. And cheerfully.
And you're doing the same. And it does feel like that's part of the key to living a successful, happy life is dealing with reality as you find it and letting go of the past.
When, you know, you've been in DC since the entire time I was there as a very famous Republican operative working in foreign countries and all over the world, was all fine. Then you become Trump's campaign manager for like 20 minutes.
And the next thing you know, they're sending you off to prison. You got sent to prison because you work for Trump.
Nobody Republican or Democrat in DC doubted that for one second period. So I just think that's a fact.
It is a fact. It was Andrew Weissman did this because you work for Trump.
How do you let go of that and stay cheerful and forward looking? You don't seem bitter at all. We just had breakfast.
You weren't ranting about anything. How do you do that? Well, you have to have faith, which I do, have family, which I do, and believe in yourself, which I do.
And when you're advising people on all of the contradictions of politics in the world, you got to recognize that that affects you too.

And so if people have got to make adjustments because of contradictions that they see that they don't like, then I felt I needed to as well.

And look.

Yeah, but that's a lot easier to describe than to pull off.

Well, except it's over now for me. I've gone through that crucible.
And pulling it off was hard, but that's where faith and family came into account. And that was where the strength was.
Did you make a decision not to be angry? Yeah. When? Well, when I was in solitary confinement.
When I was in solitary confinement, the biggest part of a crisis like what I went through was before you're thrown into the fire. When you're standing by the fire and you're seeing the fire flames grow and the fear of being in that fire is overwhelming.
Once you're sitting in the fire, you either give up and die, literally in some cases, but certainly figuratively, or you make adjustments to how to live in the fire. And I made the adjustment that I had an incredible family, lots of good friends, some people who weren't my friends anymore, but that was fine.
That means they weren't really good friends. And my faith carried me through.
And I decided that when I got through it, when it was over, if I then was going to be bitter and angry, then that means I'd be reliving the worst parts of it all. And why would I do that? And so I decided I was going to move on.
I mean, my wife said something to me that was very prophetic in the beginning. I mean, I started my career in Washington with nothing.
I was being from a blue collar family. I really had no money at all.
I made a living. I did well.
They took it all away from me. My wife was saying to me in the process, look, we started with nothing.
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m-e-r-i-w-e-t-h-e-R farms.com slash Tucker. I watched you walk through a crowd at the Republican convention of Milwaukee this summer and absolutely treated like an old friend and hero by everybody there.
And you seemed, there was a lightness about you. And I thought, man, if I were Paul Manafort, I would just be enraged.
And you didn't seem enraged at all. You seem.
It was, it was like the family welcomed me home and a family who knew that I had given it myself for them. And there was a lot of love in that room.
I noticed. I saw it.
And it made me really feel validated that I did the right thing. Amazing.
Well, with that said, I mean this from my heart. I could not admire your attitude more.
I really could not hope that I would behave as manfully as you have and as forgivingly as you have. That said, the forces that put you in jail because you were Donald Trump's campaign manager, that's the reason, they still exist and they still have power.
And so if Trump becomes president, what does he do about that? What does he do about Andrew Weissman? I see him on television. I can hardly believe that guy has any credibility.
I mean, what Trump will do, Trump will do. But what I think he'll do, I mean, you remember in 2016, one of the rally's key campaign slogans was lock her up, lock her up.
When he got elected president, you never heard that word once. No, you didn't.
And that's because that's not who he is. He's not a vengeful man.
No, that's for sure. He could use a little bit of vengefulness sometimes.
But he's not. And he put, contrary to what Harris and Biden have said about him, he put the country first as president.
And he said that I've got to work with the Democrats. If I try and lock her up, I will destroy my ability to be an effective president.
And even when they were impeaching him, he was still working with the Democrats on policy stuff. So what will he do as president number 47?

I think he'll do a lot of what he did as number 45. He will focus on things, an agenda that will make the country better, that make America great again, which is his, because he sees, this is his legacy term now.
And he doesn't want it to be filled with the kind of anger and volatility of the first term with all the impeachments and things like that. And so I think he understands getting even is not getting smart.
And I will be surprised if he does anything but reach out across the aisle and try and pass the legislation that will make the country better.

What do you do about CIA and DOJ and these institutions which have been instruments of the Democratic Party's political agenda?

I think he understands government better than he did in 2016-2017.

And he knows the dangers that the wrong people in office can be can cause not just at the top level but inside the system as well and so i think there will be blue blue ribbon kind of commissions to you know like carter did with stance phil turner and cia and when the cia was coming through all the ir-Contra stuff and things like that, or actually not Iran-Contra, but the Watergate stuff, where he had a commission put together that cleaned up the CIA, neutered the CIA, something I thought was bad at the time, but now I realize it was probably good. Probably pretty good, yes.
And I think, not just the CIA, I think all of the departments and agencies where you have bureaucrats who have got their own agendas, not the American people's agenda, I think they will all be tested.

And that's really what he's talking to Elon Musk about.

I mean, cutting government is getting rid of not just the fat of government, but getting rid of the poison of government.

And some of the things the fat of government, but getting rid of the poison of government. And some of them are not just policies, they're people.
Or departments, I should say. Departments are defined by the people.
And I think Trump is looking to reform government. Not reform in a getting rid of anybody who doesn't agree with him, but reform government to put people, make the system work the way the system is supposed to work to protect the American people, not a political party or a political structure.
Are you confident that he's got the right candidates for, say, State Department, for CIA Director, DOD?

Well, I mean, I'm not sure who he's planning to put in all those positions. I don't know that he is yet.
I think he knows what he needs now versus what he needed last time. and I think there are enough people

who have manifested

themselves as committed to his

Make America Great agenda

which

is an agenda there are enough people who have manifested themselves as committed to his make America

great agenda, which is an agenda that is pro-American, not pro-Trump, that he'll be able to find the right people to do that. You don't seem worried that the country is going to fall into some sort of permanent conflict after November?

There'll be conflict.

But I think you can't let yourself be

governed by the fear of conflict

versus the fear of doing something right.

And

I mean, I believe in, I mean, you know,

I hear all these things, but I know Trump.

I've known Trump since 1981.

Since 81?

1981. Where'd you meet him in 81?

He was one of our first clients when

I started Black Men at Fortin Stone.

So, let's go. I've known Trump since 1981.
Since 81? 1981. Where'd you meet him in 81? He was one of our first clients when I started Black Men at Fortin Stone in 1980, after Reagan was elected president.
What'd you do for him? Well, he wanted, Roger Stone, one of my partners in 1980, handled the Northeast for Ronald Reagan in New York. And in the course of running that operation, he got to know Trump.
And Trump was always interested in politics and wanted to have sort of eyes and ears in Washington. He liked Roger.
And so he hired us to just be his political eyes and ears in Washington. And he had things we did.
But as a result, we got— Like what? There were legitimate issues that we'd get involved in in government. But— Are you just going to glide right over that? I'm going to glide right over that.
But I know him. I know what's in his heart.
I've seen the way people who work for him really respect him and appreciate him. I've seen him do things that you never hear about for people that are the doorman at one of his hotels or somebody who worked on one of his construction sites or a family of one of his families that worked for him.
He's got a big heart. He doesn't have, he's not motivated by vengeance or anger.
He's motivated by getting things done. He doesn't start fights.
He finishes them. He doesn't know sometimes it stops sooner.
But he doesn't live a life that's directed at revenge. And he's not the person that the media is trying to define him as.
No. And so I think the greater good is what's going to move him in his legacy term.
What's the relevance of cryptocurrency in this election, do you think? All the crypto people seem for Trump. Is that meaningful? No.
I do know Trump feels like the crypto world is part of the future of the economic structure of the world. And he sees the Biden-Harris administration as pushing it offshore into the hands of China and into the hands of the darker side of the economy.
And his attitude is the best way to influence the proper growth is to bring it onshore, to regulate it properly, and let it become an American industry, just like Bretton Woods did to the dollar in the aftermath of World War II. And it's as simple as that.
I mean, that seems like it's going to happen, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. Well, you said that one of the reasons people are voting for Trump or one of the issues on which he has the advantage is his stewardship of the rest of the world of the American empire, which has been in a very different place

for the last four years.

We have run the verge of global conflict

under the stewardship of Biden-Harris.

Not an overstatement.

If Trump's elected,

how is he going to prevent World War III from happening?

What does he do?

Well, first of all, he knows the world leaders and the world leaders know him. Yep.
And they respect him as a strong leader, something they don't feel about Biden or Harris. And so they know they can negotiate with him, they can talk with him, but they also know there's a fine point that there's a real line in the sand, to use the Obama line, red lines analogy.
And for example, in the Gulf, you know, with this mess in the Gulf, why did that happen? Why is the Gulf in the kind of tumult it's in right now? Because there's no, the countries in the Gulf don't trust the United States.

That's true.

I mean, that's the bottom line.

And Trump understood who the enemy of the Gulf states were, as well as the enemy of the United States.

It was one country.

It was Iran.

Biden is an apologist for Iran.

Harris is an apologist for Iran.

They buy into the John Kerry theory of Iran. and the

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They buy into the John Kerry theory of Iran. And Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Omanis, none of them buy into Iran as a country of a leader in the Gulf.
What Trump was doing with the Abraham Accords

was meant to bring peace to the region.

What he was doing with Iran from day one

was meant to defang Iran,

impoverish Iran as a political country,

and allow the people the opportunity to rise up

against the fascist regime

that the mullahs are running there.

And it was working. I mean, the Abraham Accords, if Trump had been reelected, Saudi would have signed it, Jordan was signing it, Israel was bound to it, and that was moving towards a peaceful resolution and an isolation of Iran.
When Biden became president, he immediately reinstituted as best he could the nuclear deal with Iran, giving them even more than they had and wanted, gave them billions of dollars to then use to fund terrorist activities around the world against Israel. and he told, more importantly, the other Gulf states that they can't trust the United States.
So what did the MBSs of this world do? What did the Emiratis do? They started reaching out to China. They started reaching out to Russia.
Why? Because they needed protection against an unreliable United States and they didn't want to find themselves isolated in some kind of axis of the world against them. That is literally true.
I mean, the Emirates was attacked by Iranian proxies and the U.S. was incredibly slow to respond to protect them.
These are small countries. That's correct.
Right. And so this is an area where Trump immediately has credibility as the right leader in the Gulf with everybody but Iran.
I mean, I happen to think that Iran is already measuring what it's going to be like to be under President Trump, and they're backing off certain things right now.

And they're right to do that because Trump is going to come in and reinstitute the Trump policies on Iran. I mean, there were two countries that were enemies of the United States in Trump's eyes that needed to be impoverished in order to then be brought into the world community.
Iran was one of those two.

And the other was Russia.

And he was, with Iran, the Boulos wouldn't talk to him. With Russia, Putin was smart enough to know, you talk to Trump.
And that's why a dialogue was existing that could grow into some kind of relationship. And for all of these people who accuse Trump of being soft on Putin,

one, they know that's not true.

But two, it's part of a philosophy at the State Department and in the Davos world

that if you just ignore your enemy, it's going to get better.

And Trump said, if you don't engage your enemy or your adversary or your competitor, whatever the case might be, that you're never going to get better and that things will find a way to get worse. And so that's why he would cross over the DMZ to see Kim Jong-un on his own without State Department freaking out that he decided waking up that morning that he wanted to do it.
I was with him. I saw that.
Yeah. Yeah.
That was a kind of ad hoc trip. Yeah.
But he understood, let Kim Jong-un look in my eyes. Let Putin look in my eyes.
Let Xi Jinping look in my eyes. I mean, the message he sent to Xi Jinping that was the most impactful message he sent to China during his whole presidency was when he was having the state dinner for Xi Jinping and he was sitting right next to Xi Jinping and he leaned over in the middle of the dinner and said, I just want you to know we just killed Soleimani.
If you look at the cameras, Xi Jinping's face turned white. I mean, here the president of the United States, before any of the people in that room who were part of his government, the U.S.
government, knew, Trump was letting Xi Jinping know this is how we treat our enemies. And the world got the relationship between China and the U.S.
under Trump, tens of times, but it worked. The relationship worked.
They were dealing with issues. They weren't solving everything, but they were dealing with them.
And the same thing was going on with Putin. Same thing was going on with Iran, although he wasn't communicating with them directly, but indirectly he was letting them know that we're going to impoverish you and we are going to do everything we can until you become a reliable nation of the world.
But more important than that, the way he was treating Iran was giving confidence to the allies in the Gulf that we'll be your friend and we'll be you. What do the UAE and Saudi Arabia want in the future? They're trying to bring their countries into the modern world.
They're trying to expand the petrol dollars into improving their economies. Each of them is doing a different way, but all of it is looking at how do we protect ourselves against our number one enemy, which is Iran.
And that's the U.S. What do they want? They want an umbrella of peace.
How do they get an umbrella of peace? The Abraham Accord was part of it. The Saudis would like to have the kind of commitment from the United States that we gave to Japan after World War II, where we said that we would, you are under our protection and that to have a military force there, not to be fighting wars there, but just to be under our protection because that sends sufficient signal in Southeast Asia and it'll send it in the Gulf to Iran to not mess with the Sunnis.
Is he going to end the war in Ukraine, which doesn't seem to be helping anybody? I think so. I think he understands that you cannot have this war continue.
And I think he will sit down with all sides. He's got to, I mean, I'm not giving you, saying anything out of school, but he's going to make them all understand it's in the world's best interest and their best interest to put this war behind.
And he's, there's some tools that he can use to make each side come to the

table and seriously just negotiate. But he will personally inject himself into it.
He won't give

it to a third party person to do it. He will make this on the front end, his responsibility.

And I think he believes that without getting way too complicated, all the parties that the

Thank you. on the front end, his responsibility.
And I think he believes that, without getting way too complicated, all the parties at the table, the Europeans, the Russians, the Ukrainians, all have reason to want this thing to end. And there's pieces that can, forget the public rhetoric and the public decisions, there are things that can happen that all sides can accept if they know that it's going to be pushed on them by somebody who will enforce it.
Biden's not that person. Blinken doesn't scare a person when he sits down.
In fact, they were surprised he sits at the table as opposed to in a chair behind the table. He's just not a leader.
And so that presence of the president hovering over everything, injecting himself into it, plus his relationships with all of those people. I mean, even Zelensky was there when Trump was the president the first time.
We'll have a lot more impact. Right now, there's nobody running the Ukraine peace process.
Nobody. The Europeans don't have the vision or the will to take a position against Putin that will force Putin to give in to Ukraine.
And they don't have a strong enough position against Putin that will force Ukraine to give in to... But I mean, Europe, if you look at Europe, just go to Europe, over the last almost three three years now since this war started in February 2022,

Europe has declined

in every sense.

I mean, it's just a poor,

more chaotic place than it was three years ago.

I mean, this is crushing Europe.

So I don't understand why there's

no European leader who can,

particularly in Germany, but not just,

take control

and bring this to an end because it's

killing their continent.

Who's a European leader that has stature? Fair. I mean, they're all just enmeshed in their own self-survival inside their countries.
I mean, Merkel had a sort of more European-oriented reputation, but Germany's not the one to lead Europe in a way that's— No, it's a disaster. Yeah, and there's nobody else.
There's no Thatcher. I mean, there is no one.
There's no even Berlusconi who could have, you know, pressed certain things. You know, Schultz is probably on his way out in Germany.

McCone is on his way out.

You know,

the Spanish are,

you know,

you don't even know who's in office these days.

Right.

You know,

the Italians,

Bologna is emerging.

She's becoming

one of the more forceful

leaders in Europe.

But she's doing it gradually.

She has not emerged

as a pan-European.

No,

she certainly hasn't.

But she is emerging

because she's

Thank you. in Europe, but she's doing it gradually.
She has not emerged as a pan-European leader. No, she certainly hasn't.
But she is emerging because she's been willing to do certain things. And then the Eastern Europeans are frozen out by the Western Europeans where you have some of the stronger leaders.
So there is nobody to solve the problem. Even though it's the European Union, it's really the European disunion because all the countries have their own interests.
And they use the bureaucracy of the EU to enhance their interest to the diminishment of the other members of the European Union at times. So none of them have the stature to lead a united front against Putin or against Zelensky, depending on what your position is.
Do you think that they sense that their continent is dying? No, because they've created this world and so they think it's the right world. Yeah.
I mean, that's, you go to Davos and you sit around and you realize these people live in a bubble. Yeah, they have no idea.
No, they have no idea. And, but the bubble is the bubble they created.
And so, like you see with the left here in the United States, they think, you know, transgender is the future. They think that men should be able to participate in female sports if they're transgender.
Well, same thing in Europe with globalism. They think this is the right way.
And if just everybody will do what we say, what we say, then they'll be better off. And it's that Davos mentality.
Yeah. Well, they're a joke to the rest of the world.
And I guess they're always the last ones to know that they are. So you think Trump, what would peace terms look like in Ukraine? And I should say for those who don't know, you spent, I don't know, at least 10 years.
How long did you spend working? About 10 years. 10 years working in Ukraine.
One of the most powerful outside political figures in Ukraine. Deeply knowledgeable about it.
You had an office there. Not on the pro-Russia side, I should say.
But what, given your knowledge of that country and region, what would a settlement, realistic settlement look like? Well, I mean, I think they will, a lot of the pieces may not necessarily be a part of Ukraine. It's other things that Russia might feel is important to them in Russia or in dealing with certain other parts of the world or some of their technology needs or things like that.
There are pieces to a game that will interest Putin that can facilitate getting to Russia sooner than later in a peace process negotiation. Do the borders of Ukraine change, do you think? Well, it depends on how you look at Crimea.
Ukraine still accepts, says Crimea belongs to Ukraine. Russia says, no, Crimea is now part of Russia.
I think Crimea probably stays where they currently are positioned right now. For sure.
I don't see that happening. Right.
But Zelensky and the Ukrainians say we got to have Ukraine back.

Ukraine, but that's just silly. I mean,

they're not going to give up the naval base, right? I mean,

that... Yeah, I mean,

Putin thinks one of the

biggest mistakes in the

history of the Soviet Union

was when Khrushchev, who was from

Ukraine,

in a moment of enthusiasm, gave Ukraine independence from Russia. The independence in the Soviet Union was not really independence, but it gave them the ability to be considered a country on their own, not a vassal state of the Soviet Union.
Putin never accepted that. and so when he became into power, one of the first things he wanted to do was get Ukraine back into Russia, where he thought it belonged.
As you know, Kiev was the first capital of Russia. And Crimea, which had an important military component for Russia, where they had their bases and where it was an access to the Black Sea.
That was, and it was a very Russian enclave as opposed to Ukrainian. That was the first place he struck when he saw the opportunity under Obama.
And so I think that will be I will be surprised if anything changes on Ukraine. That's too much of a swallow without Russia losing the war.
Yeah. Do you see that happening? No, I don't.
I don't see them winning the war, but I don't see them losing the war. I think that there are economic issues of rehabilitation of the country, reconstruction, because Eastern Ukraine has destroyed both the industry and the whole infrastructure.
I think Eastern Ukraine will be, in some capacity, still part of Ukraine, whether they have autonomous zones, but as a part of Ukraine versus autonomous zones, as truly autonomous, that'll be part of the negotiation. Zelensky can't give up western Ukraine, but Zelensky and the center of Ukrainian universe is Kiev and west, not east of Kiev.
And so the destruction allows for some creativity. The of the east will allow some creativity on on the resolution of how we define the geostructuring of it i don't think i don't think they give it up but there may be some kind of concessions that can be made that will save face for putin save territory for Ukraine, and get money into reconstructing that part of the world.

But there's a play there.

There is a way to get a ceasefire and to get the people talking.

And everybody wants that.

Just nobody has the leadership to do it.

Trump is the leader who can do it.

And there's the NATO factor, too, which will be relevant to Putin and some kind of commitment that Ukraine, even as part of the European Trade Association, wouldn't be part of NATO. I think that's something that's on the table.
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That's myfico.com slash free. so for the years that you worked in ukraine was ukraine joining nato something that most ukrainians wanted or that europe wanted no uk.
NATO is a political issue. Joining the European Union is an economic issue.
Right. And what the Ukrainians cared about was the economic issue.
Yes, they wanted their independence. But they weren't fearful of Russia invading before at that point.
And the Russians didn't want NATO on the border of Ukraine. Well, yeah.
So why did the Biden administration, so if the Ukrainians weren't begging to be in NATO and NATO didn't want Ukraine in NATO, which I think is all true, correct me if I'm wrong. You're correct.
Then why was the Biden administration, Kamala Harris, specifically calling in public for Ukraine to join NATO?

What would be the point of that? Because of their idiots. Yeah.
I mean, I can't justify a policy that the Europeans didn't want, the Ukrainians didn't want, and the Russians didn't want, and the U.S. was for.
Okay, so then maybe if Putin says out loud and certainly suggests it again and again,

if Ukraine joins NATO, I will move militarily against Ukraine.

Everyone knew that.

Even I knew that.

Living a long way from Ukraine.

And the Biden administration says, no, we want Ukraine and NATO and says that to Zelensky

in public in early February 2022. maybe they wanted Russia to invade Ukraine.
Or maybe they're just stupid. Because there was no, I mean, that was the red line.
Yeah. And nobody wanted it, except for Biden, you know, this macho approach to things and truly a lack of understanding.
It's not like I'm telling you anything that was a secret. This was all publicly known.
Yeah. I mean, and— And universally known in Ukraine, right? Right.
And very few people would have ever suggested that. And that's what caused, well, the Afghanistan debacle, coupled with the threat of NATO in Ukraine and the lack of respect that Putin had for anybody a part of the foreign policy apparatus of Biden that were part of the Obama government, was all that was necessary to light this spark that created the fire.
But there was no reason for it. It was an unforced error of incredible consequence.
Well, yeah. How many people do you think have died in Ukraine? All in.
I'm told over 100,000 Ukrainians and over 300,000 Russians. I don't know that, but I'm told that.
So you were there, you were working in Ukraine in 2014 when Maidan happened. We were told by our media that that was just a popular uprising against a Russian-aligned government.
It was totally organic. Now it looks like it was a coup orchestrated by the CIA.
What was it, and did you know what it was at the time? It was not organic. Okay.
It was not organic, so it would be option B then. It was, there were forces that saw an opportunity to unseat a democratically elected president, Yanukovych, who acted in ways that were anti-democratic.
And where was the Obama administration? What side were they on? They were supporting the revolt that was going on in Ukraine. Yeah, okay.
So, the U.S. State Department was on the side of extinguishing democracy, overthrowing a democratically elected leader.
Effectively, yes. Yeah.
Did you ever run into Victoria Nuland? I did. And she was, I think, living there part-time overseeing all this.

She was spending a lot of time there during that time frame, yes.

Yeah.

What was your impression of her?

That she should have been back in Washington.

You're very diplomatic.

So I think the overwhelming evidence points to her role in a coup against the Democratic elected president of that country, Yanukovych, who you work for.

And then she comes back to D.C. and gets an even better job in the Biden administration.

And then she's now retired, making a ton of money.

You, by contrast, went to prison for, I can't even remember why, and some fake reason.

That doesn't bother you at all?

Well. That seems very unfair.
Well, it is unfair. Yeah.
I mean, and not that necessarily she gets rewarded and I get punished, but we shouldn't be meddling in situations that are constitutional republics, that are democratic republics, countries that we don't like the outcome of an election.

And look, Yanukovych proved himself, in my judgment, during the term of his presidency, to be committed to Europe. there were issues he was dealing with that if they had been supported by Brussels

to help ease Ukraine's entrance

into the European Trade Association Agreement, that we wouldn't have the mess we have today in Ukraine. if we had respected the will of the people and the will of the government elected by the people

and worked with that government to bring them into Ukraine

as opposed to punish them for being the wrong guy to win the election, then there wouldn't have been the environment that Putin took advantage of that cost them Crimea and cost them the destruction in eastern Ukraine and the billions of dollars that we've spent in support of the war that could have been spent for much better purposes. How hard is it for you to sit and listen to these exact same people, the ones who overthrew a democratically elected government in a foreign country with a coup using the CIA and Georgian snipers, those people telling you that Donald Trump is a, quote, threat to democracy? That must be kind of hard to watch that.
Well, it's why I got back in the saddle of this election to elect a president,

because we can't let those people win the elections.

That's how I believe you fight.

You fight in elections.

And I believe if you—look, I'm a man of faith.

I believe that there's a divine hand in a lot of stuff. And sometimes we may not understand where it's leading us.
But if you think you know what's right, then you follow the course that is consistent with that. And Ukraine, the mess that was created in Ukraine in 2014, we're still paying the price for today.
And the solution is not to have the same people who caused the problem stay in power to manage the issue, but to change it. And by happenstance, there was an interim period between 2016 and 2020 when there was a U.S.
president who was strong enough to keep peace in that region, even though there was a screw-up in 2014 in the Ukraine that was supported by the West of changing power. And the opportunity now exists to bring that person back and that focus back and finish cleaning up the mess.
And that's what keeps me going. Not what Victoria Nuland's reward was for creating the mess, but just helping to fix the mess and clean it up for good.
It's just the unfairness level is at all-time highs. Unfairness, as we all know, is not the way to drive your life.
No, that's true. Did you ever run into Hunter Biden in Ukraine? I never did.
I heard his footsteps around, but I never saw him. You did? What was he doing there? Did you know at the time? Well, Joe Biden was the link between the Obama administration and the Yanukovych administration.
And Joe Biden was showing lots of interest in Ukraine. And I actually negotiated with his people the dearmament, the removal of all nuclear fission materials in Ukraine as part of the World Conference that was trying to collect

all the fission materials from the former Soviet republics.

But there was always more interest in Ukraine from some of his people,

which I attributed to Hunter, although I didn't know it was actually Hunter, but some of the people who was partners of his, in doing business in Ukraine. And I didn't do any business in Ukraine other than politics.
I specifically didn't because Ukraine, it's a corrupt country. Not one side or the other.
It's a corrupt country. It has a Soviet mentality.
It's getting better, but it's still, it's not good. And so I felt that if I wanted to have the influence to help bring Ukraine into the West, if I wanted to do the kind of policy things that got me involved in Ukraine in the first place, that I shouldn't do business, even though I could have done business.
I was about to say, it must have been tempting. You must have energy deals coming across your desk all the time.
I can't imagine the kinds of deals. And big money, fast money.
And I said no to all of that. And because I knew that would undercut me.
And the reason that they had trouble when they went after, when Weissman and Mueller went after me, finding something to stick me with, is because they kicked over every rock they could in Ukraine and they didn't find one single thing. And so I thought it was untoward that Hunter's firm was openly soliciting business.
And I was being asked, should we do this? Should we do that? And not Hunter himself. It was more some of his associates that I was hearing of.
And I told the Yanukovych administration, I said, look, if it makes sense to use them, they're part of a group that is the Democratic side. I'm the Republican side.
It'll help your country to have relationships on both sides. But I didn't know what they were doing.
I didn't know about the Burisma thing at the time. I didn't know some of the other activities they were trying to undertake.
But, I mean, it seems by definition like influence peddling, right? What they were doing. Well, they had the power.

They were the government,

the United States.

And,

uh,

it's one thing to do business.

It's another thing.

If you've,

if you're related to the people with power to be doing business,

the way they were doing it.

Yeah.

And the Ukrainians,

again,

because of the corruption streak in the Ukraine were first to realize the opportunity. Toria Newland announced in a hearing, in a Senate hearing, in response to a question from Mark Rubio a few years ago, that we had a bunch of biolabs, quote, biolabs in Ukraine.
Apparently been there a while. Did you ever hear anything about that or know what those were? No, I didn't know anything about that.
When you were there, when you were working for Yanukovych, how vigorous was U.S. government activity in Ukraine? Like intel agencies, military cooperation? Well, we expanded military cooperation.
Yep. We expanded intelligence operations.
The U.S. was given a listening post in parts of Ukraine that they were never given under any previous government.
The cooperation level was very high. The moving of allowing U.S.
businesses to invest easily into Ukraine was wide open.

They were, Yanukovych

had given the word, we want

to make the United States

a strong partner. So why did the

U.S. overthrow him and threaten his life?

Because of two things.

Number one, he was

the candidate of Kuchma

and the establishment in 2004

when Yushchenko won the election or purportedly won the election.

And then in 2011, after he was elected president, he did something which I vigorously told him he shouldn't do, which was he arrested his opponent,

the political opponent,

Yulia Timoshenko,

for corruption

when she was prime minister that even Yushchenko acknowledged was corruption and thought that

the indictment was appropriate of Timoshenko.

Well, Timoshenko was part of the Albright, Merkel, Clinton clique.

And they- Because she was female? Well, that was one way to define them. And they took great umbrates to Yanukovych doing that, even though he made his case very factually.
Wait, so he made Hillary Clinton mad, and that's why he got overthrown? Yeah, effectively. Well, yes, effectively, because if he had not done that, if he had not indicted Timoshenko, I think, which would have been the right thing not to do, he shouldn't have done it.
Not from a legal standpoint,

but from a geopolitical standpoint.

And given the history of Yanukovych,

it was better, as Trump did with Hillary Clinton,

to not lock her up.

Yanukovych should have just moved on and not locked up to Mashanko.

How many foreign leaders did Hillary Clinton kill or overthrow

because they annoyed her?

I don't know that. I've never tallied that up.
But you really think that that was the key mistake he made? That's what turned the West against him. If Tima Shanko had been a man and not friends with Hillary, would it have been a different outcome? Probably.
That's scary what you're describing. but So she's part of a girls club so she can't be arrested for corruption? Well...
What? I mean, it wasn't defined that way. No, but in a fact...
The point is, ironically, Timoshenko was the Russian candidate for president against Yanukovych, which is what was the cause of the corruption. Right.

And yet the West blamed Yanukovych

and accused him of being the Russian candidate.

And so, I mean, I'm sure Putin was just laughing

in the Kremlin at the Machiavellian way.

He was manipulating the West in this little game.

But that was the critical mistake Yanukovych made as president that affected a series of events that we now are still dealing with today in Ukraine. It sounds like the U.S.
government was just so way up into the internal affairs of this country, like if this country had no sovereignty, it doesn't sound like that. Still are.
Well, of course. Well, now, are you worried that this war, if it continues, could lead to a global conflict or nuclear war? No.
No. Why? Because I think it's going to be resolved.
I don't think anybody over there wants a global nuclear war, including Putin. I mean, Putin right now is living a good life.
I mean, in the sense that his economy is stronger than it's ever been. Paul Manafort, we destroyed the Russian economy with sanctions.
I don't know if you've read that. We totally destroyed it.
Well, Trump had put the pressure on and Biden undid it all. And I mean, when Trump came and became president, he shut down Nord Stream 2, which was the pipeline that was going to be the solution for Germany to become partners with the energy sector in Russia.
And he put sanctions on, some sanctions, economic sanctions on Putin for things he was doing that were causing problems. And as a result, Putin backed off of everything and was an active player, but not an aggressive player.
It was a nationalist leader of Russia. It was when Trump left office that Putin became the aggressive leader he was under Obama.

That led him to taking Crimea under Obama. And with the same cast of players now in charge of U.S.
foreign policy under Biden-Harris, he saw the opportunity to finish the job. and when Afghanistan happened and NATO became the crazy thing that Biden said was the basic goal for the U.S.
policy for Ukraine, that was all he needed. Those two things, the Afghanistan debacle and the NATO threat to justify going back, going to finish the job.
It was policy blunder after policy blunder with no forethought of what it might mean. I mean, even the polls were not pressing for Ukraine to be in NATO at that time.
And they're the front line after Ukraine, you know, dealing with Russia. And so Biden, his administration was filled with unforced errors in foreign policy.
You know, Tony Blinken, how would you describe him? Weak. He's a staff guy.
Tony Blinken is a staff guy who in the old, you know, organization book, The Peter Principle by Dr. Peter, you rise up to your level of incompetence.
Well, he's risen to beyond his level of incompetence, as has Jake Sullivan and several of the other people. They seem like midgets.
Okay. They seem like midgets.
They're staff. They're staff who now have policymaking.
They have no creativity, no strategic thinking. And so you get a lot of inconsistent things based on what paper crosses the desk and then when you have somebody like biden who was not in his best health in his during his president and who when he was in his best health according to people like robert gates never made a foreign policy decision that was right uh it compounded the the dangers that the blinkings of the world could do.
And we're seeing the world as a mess because of it. It certainly is.
Second to last question, do you hear people say that kicking Russia out of swift, the sanctions all accelerated the demise of the U.S. dollar.
Do you think that's imminent? No. Why? First of all, there's no competition to the US dollar.
The RMB is less than 1% of foreign trade. And they're the biggest economy in the world.
Russia's economy is not at all an impactful. It's a third world economy.
The euro as a European currency has value, but there are too many leaders of the European Union to ever have a consistent foreign policy, economic policy. So there's really no competition.
Look what China's been trying to do with the BRICS organization in trying to get some kind of digital currency that could be a replacement for the dollar in foreign exchange, in foreign trade. It's failing miserably because at the end of the day, nobody wants to hold the weak currencies in their treasury as part of the foreign trade system.
So it's never going to work. And this is what Trump is very smart on.
Trump's saying, okay, crypto world, this is the future economic policy potentially of the world. Well, we need to have the Fort Knox of Bitcoin sitting in the United States, not in Beijing.

And so what happens when Trump makes that statement on the campaign trail, where he says he's going to have a crypto foreign reserve in the United States? Biden immediately sells off 20% of the US's Bitcoin that it's holding. And guess who buys it? China.
and so China

Biden

in an attempt

to distinguish

himself from

Trump So it's holding, and guess who buys it? China.

But China and Biden, in an attempt to distinguish himself from Trump's new economic policy for the U.S., makes China stronger in the process. That's the kind of mentality that we deal with in this administration.
But Trump understands that having crypto regulated, having a reserve currency here, will make it become a US-based economic structure. And therefore, like the dollar, can become part of the economic power of the US worldwide So, again, Trump is seeing around the corner ahead of people's vision and has not seen the blockchain.
The blockchain is the most transparent thing you could have. So if you're worrying about money laundering and things like that, there's so many ways to uncover money laundering in the crypto world.
It's got to be regulated so things are set up the right way. Trump sees that.
He doesn't know what the right ways are, but he knows conceptually making the potential future economic means of world transactions a non-US structure is probably not good. No, probably not good.
Probably the end of something big. Okay, my final question.
You've run all these campaigns your whole life. In the final week, what are the markers, the measurements that the rest of us can look at to determine who's going to win? Publicly available information.
Well, the problem is publicly available information may not be publicly correct by design. So is that true? Okay, so let me just ask that.
To what extent are public polls manipulated to sway public opinion? Well, it's not just public polls being manipulated. It's how they're interpreted because what happens is people don't know how to read polls.
People know how to read two things. Who's in first place and who's in second place? So in a ballot, who's winning? That's all they know how to do.
And when you have a race that is arguably close and you have one side who may be losing having all of the means to communicate a different message, it's hard for American people who don't pay attention beyond what they see in morning or night at news of what it means. I have no doubt in my mind that the media until election day will say that Harris is going to win or is leading or can win.
Is it going to win? I think what will be signs of what's happening. Why would they say that, do you think? Because by defining things, they're hoping to make it correct.
Yeah. And it affects turnout.
It affects, for example, it affects motivations. Right now, the public data shows Trump winning all seven battleground states.
That's an improvement over the last two weeks. Everybody recognizes that the movement is towards Trump.
Yet you've got the media saying, because they need a hook, that Harris's new campaign strategy of just saying that Trump is unhinged, unstable, and unsafe is going to change the trajectory and the undecided votes are going to break for Trump. Well, why would that happen? There's nothing to say why it would happen other than the media is saying it's going to happen because Harris is saying it.
There is no evidence that indicates that that message is working with undecideds if you look at the data, because they're saying what's important to them is their life has gotten worse. They're not better off than four years ago.
They think Trump is better on economic policy for them personally. They think Trump is better for them safety-wise.
They think Trump is better for them to secure the border. And they're saying these are the most important issues, but we're going to vote against Trump because he's unsafe and unhinged.
That's a campaign message. That's not a direction that things are going.
The media provides the campaign message for Harris now. So that's what I mean when I say it's going to be hard to interpret unless the public polling starts to grow.
Meaning the 2% starts to be 3% and 4% for Trump in states, and the 4% has become 5% or 6%. Now, interestingly, you didn't see any national polls this weekend.
Why? I don't know. Well, maybe because the last two weeks, the national polls and the state polls were all showing movement to Trump.
And so, therefore, they take a week off, and then things start to change again. Now, if you're in the polling business, now is a weird time to take off.
There was not one national poll. It's the Super Bowl.
I mean, I think there'll be some polls. They're going to do polling this week.
And then if things are opening up for Trump, the way I think they will start to show, they'll have to start tempering their statements a little bit. But you're not going to be able to tell.
The race is close enough that there's not going to be, like with Reagan and Carter, there's not going to be something out there that says it's over. We've got 1984, when it would be Reagan won 49 states.
So I think what

you watch for is incremental changes in the ballot, but it'll be hard because everybody's

methodology is different. So you'll have, you know, a race where Trump's down one point in

place and up three points in the same place in a different poll. So you're going to be confused.
Are there any polls that you think are consistently more accurate than others? Ours. But they're not polling.
I think most likely what's going to be important going into the last week is the rhetoric of Harris. If there's no discussion of economic issues, then she knows she's lost because that's going to be the deciding vote of the last week.
But I think just watching the trend of some of the public polls will give you some sense of things. Paul Manafort,

I sure appreciate your taking all this time.

Thank you.

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