JD, Vance, thank you for this. We’re on the road. You’re in Phoenix. Yep. So where is the race right now? I mean, sincerely, to the best of. Well, first of all, before we start, who is that? This is Atlas. Atlas, come here, Atlas, come. What’s up, buddy? So this is Atlas, which I found out on the Internet a few weeks ago that he’s actually a rent a dog that was given to me by the campaign to make me seem like I’m a dog fan. How weird. You’re weird. And it’s actually hysterical to hear these lefties be like, oh, that dog.

That’s totally not his dog. And of course, we got him when he was, like, an eight week old puppy. And we’ve been. We love dogs, and he’s been our little guy, but he’s, like, so well trained and so normal. It’s, like, shocking to me that anybody would think that he’s not our puppy. But here we are. He’s on the road with you. He’s on the road with us. Yes. We have our whole family up here. My kids are, like, you know, two stories above. And of course, they woke up at, like, 430, the ass crack of dawn, because they’re on, like, east coast time, Ohio time, and here we are in Arizona.

So we’ve been up for a long time. I appreciate you doing this, but I’m gonna drink a lot of coffee during our interview. But anyway, you asked, how was the race? Yeah. So what is it? I mean, what is your sincere belief about how this plays out? I mean, look, I think we’re gonna win, and I think we’re gonna win. I wouldn’t say comfortably, but I don’t think it’s gonna be the sort of thing wherever, you know, three days later, we don’t know the results of the election. Who knows? Of course, I’ve been wrong before, but, I mean, look, the basic fundamentals of the race are 65% of Americans, give or take, are unhappy with the direction of the country.

They’re unhappy with the foreign policy chaos. They’re unhappy with the fact they can’t afford groceries or housing. And they’re unhappy, just generally, with the fact that Kamala Harris is not a real person who’s running for president. She clearly doesn’t have her own ideas about how to advance the country forward. So I think that we’re in a good spot. There was, of course, the switcheroo from Biden to Harris. And even though a lot of Americans don’t like Kamala Harris, she’s younger, and she’s not as infirm as Joe Biden is. And so that sort of invigorated the democratic base a little bit.

And you see that sugar high in a little bit of the public polling. I mean, we’re about eight weeks to go before election day, and the public polls have shifted a little bit in their direction. But what we’re seeing both when we talk to the Kamala Harris, like the journalists that are close to the Kamala Harris campaign, I mean, you know how this goes, right? You sort of give journalists some information. They give you some information. You yourself are a journalist, or at least you once were. And so our numbers, their numbers very clearly show that she’s not doing very well in the states that she needs to win.

But a lot could change, and we have to get out the vote. And there, of course, are all of these ways in which democrats have been, become very good at using both big tech but also this sort of ballot harvesting operation to try to squeeze out as many votes as possible in particular areas. So we have to do that ourselves. And I think that we’re much better positioned to do it in 2024 than we were in 2020, that there’s a lot of catching up to do. But on balance, man, when the country’s not going in the right direction and people fondly remember the presidency of Donald Trump because take home pay was going up, I think that puts us in a good position, but we still have to run our race.

But my prediction, 60 40 is that we have a relatively early night on Tuesday night, and I think the 40% is, it’s probably tight, but we still win. And you think they’ll accept that? Well, yeah, it’s a good question. Right? He’ll be like, we call this race for Donald Trump, and he’ll be like, you know, he’s the president. I didn’t vote for him, but that’s okay. Well, I think that, look, there’s only so much they can do, right? They’ve already switched out their candidates six weeks before their convention. They’ve already sort of marshaled the ballot harvesting operation, which, of course, is the story of 2020.

It’s not like, you know, it’s not ballot machines were hacked into. The story of 2020 is that they really turned on this ballot harvesting machine and they used, of course, big tech to silence stories that were negative about Joe Biden. They’re certainly going to do that again. You’re already seeing that, right? The technology sector is already fully in the tank for Kamala Harris. They’ve obviously switched out their candidates. So all the negative feelings that people had about Joe Biden don’t necessarily get translated onto Kamala Harris. They have different negative feelings, but it is different. So, yeah, I think they’re doing everything they can to ensure that Donald Trump is an elected president again.

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

Like, I mean, look, I just don’t see any evidence that these people are, like, controlling the puppet strings. And they’re going to do everything that they can. They are going to do everything that they can, but it’s not that much. So right now. Yeah, I think Donald Trump’s going to be the next president. And if he gets elected president once again, do you think they will accept that? Are you concerned? And, yeah, so this is, they’ve spent the last ten years taking full control over the us military. Yeah. Which is. I mean, I’m sorry to even talk like that, but they think that way, so it’s worth saying it.

Yeah. So that’s what worries me. Right. So you hear all this talk about threats to democracy. Right. And the biggest threat to democracy in this country is not like Donald Trump using legal maneuvers to challenge the 2020 election. The biggest threat to democracy is that the bureaucracy in Washington, DC is fundamentally misaligned with at least half the country. Right. Yes. So what I worry less about is, like, are they gonna let Trump win? Well, it’s not gonna be easy, but I actually do, sitting here right now, maybe I’m wrong, but I do feel very confident that Trump’s gonna be elected president, that he will be president.

I think the real fight is going to be when he becomes president and he tries to do things. They’re going to take him down and try to take him down in a very big way, and that’s where the real fight is going to be. And I think it’s going to look like a few different things so, number one, I really worry about the minute we start doing anything on the deportation front, like, you have 25 million illegal aliens you and I have talked about. I think it’s the biggest threat to our country. You have got to get these people out of the country.

You are going to have a reaction from the media, from the tech sector that’s unlike anything that we’ve ever seen. It is fascism come to America when we sell people who have come here illegally. You have to go back home. Right. That is going to be a major, major focal point. I think the other thing that I really worry about, Tucker, is bond markets, right? Because the country is deeply in debt. Atlas, come here. Come here, buddy. Hey, hey. Come here, come here, come here. Sithenhezen. Sit. Lay down. You’re okay. Just chill out. I know you don’t have your bed here.

He’s used to a nice plush pillow here, and he’s like, what the hell? None of my stuff is here. I know. He’s a very good dog. So the thing I really worry about on bond markets is, okay, we have, call it one point six to two trillion dollars in debt every single year in this country getting added to the national debt. And the only thing that really makes that serviceable is that interest rates are still pretty low, right? They’re about four and a half percent right now. If interest rates go to 8% and you’re actually spending way more to service the debt than you are on actual, like, good services and infrastructure for your country, like, that can become a huge spiral that could take down the finances of this country.

We’ve never had that in 200 plus years of being an american republic. We’ve never had a true debt spiral in this country. So I really worry about, do the bond markets, do the international investors, the people who are getting rich off of globalization, the people who have gotten rich from shipping our manufacturing base to China, the people who’ve gotten rich from a lot of wars, do they try to take down the Trump presidency by spiking bond rates? And one of the things that I think a lot about, and I talked to the president about this a lot, is when we think about who we’re choosing as treasury secretary, one of the things the president, of course, it’s his choice, ultimately, is we’ve got to find the guy who’s going to make sure that we can manage this country through a real time of crisis, where we get the country’s finances back on track.

That is one of the ways they could take down Donald Trump. You have to ask yourself the tools at their disposal, they’re doing everything that they can to manipulate voters. I don’t think it’s going to work. But if Trump wins, it’s not just going to be smooth sailing for four years. They’re going to do everything that they can to take down speaker one. So the key number is that interest rate. I think that’s probably the most, the most important and the most impactful way they could try to take down his presidency is by spiking the interest rates.

You saw this, by the way, Tucker. Liz Truss in Britain. Yeah. Ok. Which, by the way, like, I like Liz Truss. I disagree with her on a lot of issues. But, like, so I’m not, I’m not trying to stand up or say Liz Truss is my person. But look, she came in, she had a plan, and the bank of England, I think, made a lot of mistakes, maybe intentional interest rates shot through the roof and it took down her government in a matter of days. Of course, we don’t have the same style of government, but it would be devastating to the president if you had this bond market death spiral.

And that’s one of the things we’re gonna have to fight against when we win again. I think we’re gonna win a. Yeah, I think so, too. And I think if you don’t win, barring some dramatic, unforeseen development, it’ll be hard for people to believe you didn’t win because who would vote for more of this? But how do you prevent your opponents from spiking those rates? Well, I think one is you have to get, I mean, look, you have to have actual smart people in government. And I mean, this, it sounds so simple and it sounds so obvious, but one of the things that I think we have done wrong on the republican side is, you know, we don’t like the government generally.

Right. There are things that we think the government should do, but we want the government to be smaller than the Democrats want the government to be. And so I think that that actually creates a blind spot where the things the government does, you actually want them to be done very well, and you want them done by very smart people. And so I think you have to staff the Treasury Department with the right kind of people who can manage various fiscal problems. And then I also think that you have to be willing to actually pursue, whether you call it the Trump agenda, the America first agenda, you actually have to be willing to do this stuff even when the media and even when, frankly, some Republicans howl in protest.

Right. So one thing the president has talked a lot about, by the way, it’s not just smart policy. It’s also very smart politics is you need to penalize companies that are shipping America’s industrial base overseas, and you need to reward companies that are hiring and building in the United States of America. Right. Well, one of the ways you do that is through tariffs. You say, if you’re going to manufacture all your stuff in China, we’re going to penalize you for trying to access american markets with goods that are made by slaves in China or some other country.

Now, you do that, you both create more prosperity at home. You also raise some revenue from the companies that are just going to say, we’re staying in China, your economic policy be damned. But that actually stabilizes in a lot of ways the fiscal situation in this country. You’ve also got to tackle some of the big spending items. I mean, we still have, let me give you a crazy statistic. So in 2019, total federal spending in this country was $4.5 trillion. In 2024, it will be north of $6.5 trillion. Okay, where’s that $2 trillion difference come from, Tucker? Now, people will say, and I think they’re being dishonest and they’re being even malicious, they’ll say, well, that’s Social Security and Medicare.

You have to fix Social Security and Medicare. Well, of that Delta, man, of that difference, you’re talking about maybe $100 billion additional per year on Social Security, maybe $100 billion in Medicare. So there’s still $2 trillion that we’re spending. And what happened in 2020, Covid. Right. Covid. Blew up the american federal debt and the american federal budget deficit. And we’ve got to get back to, like, some basic common sense and some basic sanity there. And I think if we do that, you have smart people managing the bond markets at treasury and how we’re auctioning off treasury bonds.

And you actually have a, and I know Trump is committed to this, who’s committed to steering us through these very troubling financial times. Finally, you unleash America’s energy markets because that drives down the cost of goods. You do all those things in tandem and you actually get America on a much more sustainable fiscal situation. But that’s a lot. And you have to have a very strong president and you have to have Republicans who are willing to go along with it. And I think that we have that, Tucker. But it’s not easy. Right? This is the basic, we have to be good at government, even though we want the government to be smaller than the Democrats, we have to be good at government.

And I think President Trump is very committed to that. We’re going to have to see how much we can bring our fellow Republicans along. So two pretty easy, very popular ways to save money would be, one, no more subsidizing illegal immigration. That’s exactly right. We’re not going to pay people to break our laws. We’re not going to pay them to rob liquor stores or come into this country illegal. We’re not going to give them free cell phones or free airplane tickets or housing vouchers. We’re not going to stop doing that. And the second is we’re going to stop sending billions of dollars around the world to people who hate us when it doesn’t serve our interests.

Yeah. Why can’t we do those things? Well, it’s very important. Right. So this is one of the reasons why I’m instinctively skeptical. And look, I want Social Security and Medicare to be financially sustainable for the long term. They’re very important programs for our elderly Americans. But when people say the reason why we can’t have reasonable spending policies is because of Social Security and Medicare, I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s a distraction. You’re distracting from the reason that we actually have an out of control budgetary picture. That’s why I just gave you the 6.5 versus four and a half trillion dollar number.

What are we really spending money on? That is unsustainable. It’s wars. Right? It’s foreign conflicts. And you’re right, it’s hundreds of billions of dollars per year that we’re spending on illegal aliens. Now, here’s a crazy thing. I’ve been in the Senate for not even two years when I ask people how much money, okay, talk about health care for illegals, talk about Social Security fraud, talk about Medicare fraud, talk about housing vouchers, because even though illegal aliens aren’t entitled to section eight, there’s fraud in the program, and also their children are entitled to section eight. So, of course, that money flows to the illegal aliens.

Add all this up and then take probably 25, 30 million people who are here illegally, and maybe that undercounts it. How much are we actually spending per year on illegal aliens in this country? No one in our government knows, okay? I’ve heard estimates that it’s $100 billion a year. I’ve heard estimates that it’s $600 billion a year. I’ve heard estimates that it’s even higher. There are ways to estimate it, but we don’t actually have good ways to track this stuff because a lot of the money, Tucker, think about this. A lot of the money is spent at the local level.

Right? So if you’re an illegal alien, you commit a crime and you’re in a local jail cell. We’re not really counting that money from. Into the cost of having illegal aliens. But, of course, if you’re a municipality and you’re spending $40,000 a year to house some criminal who should go back to where he came from, that’s real money. Right. Or let’s take this example. Where do most illegal aliens get their health care? Emergency rooms. Emergency rooms, exactly right. So what is the. That’s why you can’t go to an emergency room. Now, why do you get sick? The wait time in emergency rooms has nearly doubled over the last few years because we have all these illegal aliens who are getting hospital services at emergency rooms.

Well, obviously, they’re not paying the bill when they get it. Who pays the bill? The american taxpayer. You add up all these costs, and I think it’s hundreds of billions of dollars that we’re spending on illegal aliens. And this is why I think it’s ridiculous for people to say, well, we can’t get America’s fiscal picture under control unless we cut Social Security from american citizens who have paid into it for 45 years. My response is, why don’t we start with the wars? And why don’t we start with not giving illegal aliens a ton of benefits and then see where our fiscal situation is after that? We haven’t done that.

Those are wildly popular ideas. I can’t imagine that they’re below 65, 70% in the polls if you were to pose that question. Probably higher. Yeah. Yeah, probably higher. But there’s no sense that any of those things are going to happen because there’s so much money behind keeping them in place. Yeah. What do you do about that? Well, I think what you have to do is, first of all, you have to go at the heart of the people who actually drive public opinion and drive the decisions that are made in this country. We don’t, Tucker, the reason why all these popular things don’t happen, like, why aren’t we deporting illegal aliens? Why aren’t we cutting off the money spigot that goes to illegal aliens? Why aren’t we stopping sending thousands of american kids to die overseas in some pointless war? It’s because in reality, right now, we don’t live in a real democracy in this country.

Right. The people who call the shots in this country have further and further divorced themselves from any kind of real democratic accountability. Right? So ask yourself, in 2008, did America have a real choice between the foreign policy of John McCain and the foreign policy of Barack Obama? Of course we did. Right? They were saying, in effect, the exact same thing for the first time in 2016, we had a real choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Ok? Of course, the american people chose Donald Trump. Despite every. Every incentive and every pressure to not choose Donald Trump, the american people still chose Donald Trump.

But, of course, what did they do? They spent the next four years trying to destroy them. The question is, like, how do we do these things? You have to make the actual levers of government power accountable to the american people. And that means you’ve got to be able to fire bureaucrats who don’t do their job. This is like, common sense. I mean, maybe take like, a very isolated. If you were to poll what percentage of Americans think that the VA should be more responsive to the healthcare concerns of american veterans, that’s probably a 95% issue. Okay? And I, you know, I’m a veteran myself.

I served in the Marine Corps. I went to Iraq. I have gone through the VA healthcare system. And by the way, 92%, 95% of the people who work in the VA are great. But as you know, in any organization, if you have 5% of people who refuse to do their job and you can’t get rid of them, they make it impossible for the 95% of people who are trying to do their job. And of course, the veterans suffer because of it. So why does the VA not work as well as the american people want it to? Because the 5% who don’t do their job at the VA are calling the shots and making it harder on everybody else.

And that basic story is true in our entire government. The joint Chiefs of Staff. Donald Trump orders the joint Chiefs of staff to do a troop rotation in Syria. The joint chiefs of Staff lie to him. They actually stagger the troop redeployments in a way where it looks like they’re obeying his orders, when in actuality, they’re actually disobeying his orders. Okay. Every single person who was involved in that decision should be fired. You have to make the government. How can the military in a democracy act? You know, the commander in chief. The commander in chief tells you to do something, control the military.

Like, that’s the nightmare scenario. That’s right. That’s right. But that. But that is part and parcel of the broader problem, which is you don’t have real democratic accountability in our government. And to get it back, the people who call the shots have to be responsive to the elected president. And this is one of, you know, Trump’s main campaign platforms. One of the main things that he talks about, and of course, I think he learned in some ways the hard way during his first four years in office, is the president recognizes that if you have people in your government who you tell to do something and they disobey you, that’s not like checks and balances.

They’re part of your government. The check and balance is the House, the Senate, the judiciary. Right. If the people in your own government aren’t obeying you, you have got to get rid of them and replace them with people who are responsive to what the president is trying to do. If you don’t have that, you don’t have a real democratic, you’ve got to be a bill nutcutter because that’s the system at stake. That’s democratic control. How do voters have any control over their government if the people they elect have no control over? That’s exactly right, man. And again, we have to remind ourselves that it’s real people who suffer because of this.

There are Americans who are dead because the joint chiefs of Staff didn’t listen to the president of the United States when he said, you need to do troop redeployments out of Syria. There are veterans who are dead because the VA does not function as well as it could because the president needs to be able to fire again, the small number, but the small number of people who aren’t doing their job. And that same story repeats itself, rinse and repeat through the entire american government. You have got to have basic democratic accountability. I think, you know, most Americans recognize, like, look, we’re fine with bureaucrats making a reasonable salary.

We’re fine with people having a good life, but they’ve got to do their job right. When you’re in public service, you’ve got to do your job. And whether you’re an elected official or an unelected bureaucrat, if you’re not doing your job, you got to get out there and make way for somebody who will. So if you guys win and you start firing people who are acting against orders of their commander in chief and against the expressed will of voters, the New York Times will call it a fascist takeover. That’s exactly right. Is, do you care? Well, I think we have to not care.

You have to care about public opinion, of course, because you have to actually make the case to the american people. But if you’re acting on behalf of the public, you have to say, I mean, look, what’s so funny about it is it’s the opposite, right? Real democracy is when the elected leaders the voters elect actually make the decisions in the government. Fascism, if it’s anything, it’s that the voters don’t get any say in how their government actually operates. So I think you have to do it. And look, man, I’ve been in politics all of two years, but there are all of these really subtle ways in which the media, the tech sector, the people who call the shots, try to manipulate the american public and manipulate political leadership into not doing the things the american people actually want.

So here, let me give you an example. Mark this down. I guarantee in 18 months or so, we’re going to have. This is going to be prophetic. So right now, according to public opinion polling, 65% of Americans give or take support. Mass deportations, meaning 25 million people here, you’ve got to send some of them back to where they came from. Okay? That’s a common sense issue. Two thirds of Americans give or take, supported. In 18 months, there will be media stories and there will be public opinion polls to back it up that actually Americans do not support mass deportations, that Donald Trump is doing all of these terrible things and he has to stop.

It’s inhumane, it’s evil, and the american public don’t support it. The same people who put those public opinion polls together are the same people who say, for example, that Donald Trump was going to lose Wisconsin by 17 points. Remember that three days before the 2020 election, Donald Trump was supposed to lose Wisconsin by 17 points and set to the side all of the debates about what happened in 2020, Wisconsin was basically a tight election. So these guys use public polls, they use the media not even just to manipulate public opinion, but to manipulate our leadership about what public opinion actually says.

So how does that happen? So those polls are fake, is what you’re saying? Oh, absolutely. They’re fake. They’re absolutely fake. And we see this. I mean, again, this is, like, very nerdy, but let’s go down this polling rabbit hole. Okay, so a friend of mine, I think, is the best pollster in America. Every race I’ve ever seen him poll, he’s way better than anybody else. Okay, so good pollster versus a standard media pollster. Fabricio. Tony Ferricio. Great guy. He’s the president’s pollster. Okay? Take a standard media poll and ask yourself, like, what are they doing? Those polls are all conducted by what’s called online panels.

In other words, they have a group of people that they go to. Again and again and again, they ask their opinion. Well, who are the people who are going to respond aggressively to online panels about what they feel about every issue of the day? A bunch of highly engaged, typically far left, typically people with professional degrees, people who are not representative of the american people at large. Right. Meanwhile, most Americans are trying to pay their mortgage and trying to take care of their kids and trying to do all the things that are necessary to live a life in this country.

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

And then you realize that that exact same poll was wildly inaccurate two years ago. Why are you making your judgments about what the american people believe based on some poll? And, oh, by the way, why don’t you express some leadership? Why don’t you just actually have a view and go to the american people and try to persuade them that your view is wise and then enact legislation in accordance with that wisdom. Right. Like, that’s how real leadership should work. So deceptive. And I think what people don’t realize is that a lot of these polls are designed not to measure opinion, but to shape it.

Yes. So they are tools of influence, 100%. President Trump said this recently in an interview where he said that the purpose of some of these polls that say, okay, you’re down 17 points in Wisconsin, so say you’re a republican voter, you want to support Donald Trump and JD Vance. And of course, the polls now are much better for us than they were back in 2020. But let’s say you want to support President Trump and you read a story that says he’s down by 17 points in Wisconsin. Why even show up, right? So there’s a voter suppression dynamic here where you try to get people to get depressed and to drop out of the democratic process.

Don’t even go and vote if the president is down by so much. The purpose of these polls is actually manipulation of both the public themselves, but also, of course, elected officials. And I think that we just have to. We have to have the courage to trust our own convictions to say, screw you, I don’t buy the polls, and to do what you think is right on behalf of the country. Sounds so common sense. A lot of, like, the leaders don’t live in the world of common sense. So you said at the outset that, you know, if the current trajectory continues, you’re pretty confident you’re gonna win.

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

That our voters are enthused, the internal numbers are good. People aren’t happy with the direction of the country. I feel like we’re gonna win, but, yes. Yeah, never know. Everything you’re saying makes sense. I think it’s demonstrable. You got to think that the Kamala Harris campaign is also aware of this, that they’re maybe not lying to themselves, who may be involved in fake polls designed to mislead others, but they are probably clear eyed about their chances. They are. And I doubt that. I just have trouble believing they’re just going to sit back and think, well, Trump’s tried hard.

People kind of prefer him. Well, it’s funny. What do you think could happen between now and election? Yeah, well, it’s funny, Mandy, you know how this works. But I’ll sort of give some insight into your. Into this for your viewers and your listeners. Okay, so I have said publicly I’ve been attacked by this from the left. I’ve said, look, Kamala’s own internal polls are not very good right now. And of course, the lefties say, well, JD Vance is the VP candidate for Republicans. Nobody in Kamala Harris’s campaign is talking to him. That’s right. By the way, Kamala Harris’s campaign is not talking to me, but they are talking to journalists.

And then those journalists want insights into what’s going on with the republican ticket. They want to see our internal numbers. And, look, the journalists are telling me that Kamala Harris doesn’t like her numbers. The journalists are telling me our campaign does like their numbers. There’s a consistency of story here. Journalists act is kind of like, it’s an information. They’re like the intelligence operatives. Right? Like some of them are working for intelligence operatives. Yeah. Journalists are electoral politics with like, the CIA as the international relations people think, just like in polling, they think, oh, polls are designed to measure what people think.

Journalists are designed to report what happened. No, journalists are players in the political system. Yes. And they do not disclose that to their readers. And you see it up close. But it’s interesting. They play the role of kind of like covert diplomats between the. Yes, yes, they do. Yeah. And I’ll tell you, I mean, in 2016, what the journalists were telling you, Washington, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is confident. But then some of them, like Bill Clinton, were very not confident. And in 2020, they were saying nobody really knows what’s going on. And in 2024, they’re saying Kamala Harris is feeling a little bit rough about her chances.

The Trump people are very, are feeling good about their chances. Look, I think we’re in a good spot, but you can’t take this stuff for granted. Right? And by the way, I think this goes in both ways. Right? If you take two rows, you have a picture, you can get demotivated. If you take too pessimistic of a picture, you can get demotivated. Excuse me. We still have to do our job. We have to go out there, persuade voters. We have to go out there, knock on doors. If you’re watching this and you want to get involved in the campaign, go and do it.

Go to donaldjtrump.com comma volunteer, become a door knocker because we actually can win this race. I think we will win this race, but not if we sit on our asses and don’t get out there and work for it. What if the hot war breaks out between now and November? Well, that’s a very good question. Look, obviously, just baseline. I don’t want a hot war to break out because I don’t think that we have a functional president right now. Right. I genuinely think that the closest thing that we have to a president right now is Kamala Harris because Joe Biden clearly can’t do the job.

The people around him recognize that. And so it’s the bureaucrats and Kamala who are calling the shots. If, God forbid, a true hot war, not just between Russia and Ukraine, but a broader regional war broke out, or not just between Israel and some of Iran’s proxies, but a broader regional war. It would scare the hell out of me to have Kamala Harris at the helm, and I think that we have to do a better job at highlighting. It’s not just Kamala Harris. We say these things about her that are true. She wanted to defund the police.

She wanted to ban fracking. She wanted to open the border. These things are all true. In fact, she is on video saying these things. But there’s a fundamental incompetence to Kamala Harris. Okay, so let me ask you, what was the Biden turnover rate among the people who worked for Joe Biden? About 78%. That’s, by the way, about medium for american politics. Right? Working in the White House is a tough job. Donald Trump did better than that. But I think Donald Trump, a lot of people have a very certain, very intense loyalty to Donald Trump, so it’s not surprising he did better.

Okay. Kamala Harris, 92% turnover. If a hot war breaks out, who is even going to be staffing the administration? If you have a person who can’t keep human beings in the executive administration of the government. Right. That’s scary. If you’re such an incompetent person that 92% of your staff doesn’t want to work for you, maybe we shouldn’t elect that person as president. Where you watch Kamala Harris give an interview. I mean, this is not a person who has, like, very well developed views about what she wants to do in the world. She’s fundamentally a cog in the wheel of a very corrupt machine.

That scares the hell out of me when that person goes to negotiate with a world leader about a hot war. So. Okay, we’re talking about the substance. Okay. I know you’re interested in the politics, too. I don’t know. Like, if, God forbid, the Russia Ukraine thing becomes a broader regional war. I don’t know if that helps Kamala Harris or hurts her. I almost think it’s, like, too grotesque to even think about because hundreds of thousands and maybe more people would be dying, and I would just be terrified for the country and terrified for humanity. I couldn’t agree more.

Obviously, I agree with that vehemently. I only ask because I wonder if there’s an incentive. I think they’re desperate. Yeah. I think they worry that you guys get back in, that you’re gonna be a little less humorless and forgiving this time. A lot of people have committed very serious crimes against the United States. They’re currently serving government like they have. They’re afraid of what happens if you win. And they should be so like, do they have an incentive to start a hot war? I guess that’s my question. Yeah, no, look, it’s a totally fair question, and I don’t know, because I don’t know that it actually helps them.

Right. Because one of the things that, look, even President Trump’s critics would have to admit, remember this, I was a Trump critic back in 2016. Of course you remember this. The president remembers this very well. He bust my balls about it all the time. And you hear these people who say, well, Trump and Biden are both too old for the presidency. And it’s like Trump’s memory is like a steel trap. Trust me, I know. Cause he remembers what I said about him in September of 2015 to an excruciating level of detail. But obviously, the president and I are very simply, I changed my mind because he was a great president.

Right. But remember back then, the thing that they said about him is that he would start a nuclear war. Oh, I remember. Right. That was the main thing that, all right, you’ve got this cowboy. He’s going to start a nuclear war with Russia or China or somebody else. And even his critics admit that in hindsight, he was actually the president of peace. Now, of course, conflicts break out, bad things happen. The president can’t control everything. But he was remarkably good at using diplomatic leverage and the threat of american power to keep the world in a place of relative calm and stability.

So if a hot war breaks out, my guess would be a lot of Americans would say, holy shit, we’ve got to get back to the guy who knows how to manage the world, not the person who’s so incompetent that she blundered us into this conflict in the first place. But I mean, look, man, who knows? By the way, it’s shocking how little we know about the guy who shot Donald Trump in the head. I mean, weeks later, months later, we still have no idea. We allegedly have no idea what the guy’s real motive is. But do I think that they are going to do increasingly crazy things to try to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president? Yes.

I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like. I think we have to be prepared for it, and we just have to do everything we can to make sure he wins. Last question. And as to what you just said, Trump gets shot in front of everybody, live, on tv, and the media bury it. But there’s also, you would think, a process in place to find out. What exactly was that? Yeah. Who was the person who did it? Why did he do it? Why was he allowed to do it? Is that process underway? I never hear Trump talk about it.

I never hear you talk about it. Like, what? When are we going to find out what that was? Yeah, I mean, part of the reason why we don’t talk about it that much is because we recognize that Kamala Harris runs the administration right now. And do we, like, do we trust Kamala Harris, Department of Justice, to really investigate this stuff? I mean, I don’t, I don’t think the president does either, but there needs to be a real investigation into this stuff. I think it’s bizarre that we don’t know anything about the guy’s motive, though I’ve heard various rumors.

We don’t really know anything about the guy’s motive. I think there clearly were some very serious security breakdowns. Some of my colleagues in the Senate have done a good job of pointing this stuff out, but unless you have an administration that’s willing to cooperate, you can’t actually do this stuff. I think he’d be much better at sniffing out what’s going on with all these security breakdowns. But, I mean, I think so heres this should be actually a media scandal. Okay, so Kamala Harris is running against Donald Trump for president. Kamala Harris runs the government right now.

And Donald Trump came within millimeters of having his life taken by a massive security breakdown. She should be using every lever of power to force insight and to force some sunlight into what’s actually been going on. What breakdown? The fact that she’s totally uninterested in it, I think is a real scandal. Her political opponent nearly got killed, and she has not used her government to actually investigate why or what security breakdowns led to him almost getting killed. The media and everybody else should be really pissed off about this because she could be doing much more than she’s doing right now.

Speaker one but it suggests, like, a level of darkness that’s hard for, for me to accept. I mean, what is that? I mean, I don’t know. Right. Is it incompetence? Is it that she doesn’t want to get to the bottom of it? Is it that if a story comes out that this guy was a left wing radical, does it help Donald Trump? And so she wants to hide the motive. Like, there are so many different explanations here for what could be going on. But look, man, I’m a realist. Do I think that we’re gonna find out what actually happened in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, before the election? No, I don’t.

Because every incentive that exists in our government right now is to hide it, is to suppress it, is to lie about it, is to cover up for various people’s failures. And because of that, look, man, I just don’t think we’re going to learn a whole lot about it. We’re going to try. And again, Ron Johnson is a great friend of mine, great Senate colleague, does a very good job. I know he is obsessed with trying to get to the bottom of the security field. How did a guy get with an AR 15 130 yards from the president? Which, as you know, that is like a potshot, right? That’s a layup for an AR 15.

It’s shocking in some ways that President Trump didn’t lose his life, but the fact that we’re not more focused on the security breakdowns that led to that in the first place. Look, man, it’s bizarre, it’s dark. And I think, unfortunately, we’re not going to learn a whole lot about it until November. And the problem is that like so many american young people in their twenties, he had no social media profile whatsoever. Never went online. Never went online. Never went online and never said anything publicly. And everybody, he was basically a ghost. A ghost who just happened to nearly kill the future president of the United States.

And, yeah, man, it’s pretty weird. It’s pretty weird. JD Vance. Senator. Senator JD Vance, thank you very much. Absolutely. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
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