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March 1, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:45
Charlie Kirk | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 84
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So I always ask the question to Bernie Sanders supporters, do you trust the government?
And almost always, they say, no, no, the government's bought by lobbyists and corporations and by the war machine.
I say, why on earth would you want to make that government bigger?
It goes without saying, conservatism, and more importantly, conservatives, have had few places to turn on college campus.
So where does that leave young conservative students?
In 2012, a determined 18-year-old kid named Charlie Kirk took it upon himself to answer that question.
His answer?
Turning Point USA, an organization whose mission is to educate, train, and organize students through their campus chapters and yearly events.
Over the past eight years, Charlie has grown TPUSA's reach to over 1,500 campuses throughout the nation.
In 2016, Charlie joined then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign, and he's been a steadfast supporter of the president ever since.
His newest book is The MAGA Doctrine, The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future.
In our conversation, Charlie and I dive headfirst into whether President Trump has been good for the conservative movement, what it will take for Republicans to hold the White House, as well as why the same Democratic candidate he hopes will face President Trump in 2020 is also the one that terrifies him most.
Welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
Charlie Kirk is joining us today.
Now, just a reminder, we'll be doing some bonus questions with Charlie.
The only way to get access to that part of the conversation is to become a member.
Head on over to dailywire.com.
Become a member.
You'll have access to all of the full conversations with every one of our awesome guests.
Charlie, thanks so much for joining us.
I just want to make it clear from the very outset that it appears that Charlie and I are on equal eye level.
There is an apple box for President Trump.
There's an apple box, there's a ladder, and I'm on stilts.
That's the only way we were able to actually make this happen.
Yes, but we see eye to eye here.
Now we're on the same level.
We'll see if we see eye to eye throughout the whole conversation.
I think we might, but we'll see.
Okay, so why don't we start with your background for people who only know you from the memes.
And this will be meme-able.
Like, just making clear, you're free to use this however you want in terms of memes, people.
Okay, now we've opened the gate.
So, Charlie, I met you when you were but an even younger Whippersnapper.
You're only 26 now, but I think I met you when you were maybe 18 years old at like a Horowitz Freedom Retreat.
And you were just starting Turning Point USA, so at 18 years old, you didn't go to college.
How did you decide, number one, not going to college, number two, going to do student activism, and number three, going to start one of the largest student organizations in the country?
Well, thank you, Ben.
It's an honor to be here.
I appreciate it very much.
I started, I had no money, no connections, no idea what I was doing.
I always had a passion for politics and for saving the country.
And I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
I originally wanted to go to West Point.
Didn't get in.
Ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me.
I convinced my parents to allow me to take a gap year before entering college.
And one gap year has now turned into eight gap years.
And the great irony of the whole thing is I run an organization that's focused on college campus outreach that I actually go into college myself.
But it's now, you know, on 2,000 high school and college campuses.
You spoke at our last event, which was down in Palm Beach at the end of last year.
And look, you know this.
You visit a lot of campuses across the country.
There's a crisis happening right now in higher education, where students are being taught to hate our country, where anti-Americanism is on the rise.
And I think conservative values and conservative ideas are being given an opportunity to really have a revival and a renaissance.
And, you know, we see that at Turning Point USA.
We see that, the work that we're doing and the speeches that I give and the visits that, you know, I partake in.
And it's been a great journey over the last eight years.
And it's been fun seeing, of course, you when I first met you, you were, you know, working and writing and doing radio.
And then, of course, that was before The Daily Wire and seeing that kind of take off.
So it's been fun kind of, you know, throughout the last couple of years, kind of seeing both entities grow.
So what is your relationship like with President Trump?
I'm of a personal and a business, like that's what that's what people kind of want to know.
Sure.
Because the picture of you in public, because I knew you before Trump was Trump.
I mean, he was Trump, but he just wasn't in the political mix nearly as much as obviously he is now.
I knew you as conservative college campus guy.
Most people now know you as kind of Trump guy online who does Trumpy things.
So how did, what is your relationship with President Trump?
And that's fair.
I wouldn't say that's the extent of everything I do, but that's definitely how people will stop and say, hey, you know the president, don't you?
Like, yeah, yeah, I do.
Look, he's been extraordinary to me, and I'm very candid and upfront with it.
He's been very good to me personally.
His family's been really good to me.
I met Don Jr.
in the summer of 2016 after I spoke at the Republican National Convention.
I felt our country was going to go in a horrible direction if Hillary Clinton got elected president originally.
I was a Ted Cruz supporter and then endorsed Trump as he was the nominee because that was what a lot of people did, including Mike Pence, who was a Cruz then Trump guy.
And I went up to Donald Trump Jr.
and I said, look, we need to do something with students and youth infrastructure.
I have a couple of years of experience under my belt.
I would love to travel with you across the country and maybe organize some student events.
And he was his willingness to do that was unusual in politics.
Usually you have to go through a hierarchy and there really wasn't much of a hierarchy in the Trump campaign in those days back in July and August of 16.
Obviously, surprising election happened and kind of it was stunning for a lot of different people.
And, you know, the president, you know, I developed a pretty good relationship with him.
And he's been he's been extraordinary in a lot of different ways.
He's delivered results for our country the likes of which I wouldn't have even predicted, you know, for the conservative agenda and for, you know, the American revitalization agenda.
And, you know, spending time with him has been a real thrill for someone that, you know, never went to college and just started this organization on a whim to be able to, you know, meet with the President of the United States and be able to, So, how do you bridge the gap between sort of what you do on college campuses and your activity with President Trump?
What I mean by that is that by looking at polls, President Trump is wildly unpopular with young people, right?
This is the one area where he is probably most unpopular just in terms of the polling data.
Now, conservatism is never supremely popular with young people, particularly people on campus, but President Trump seems to have Raised a particular level of ire with people 18 to 21.
At the same time, you're running this major campus organization.
He has people who love him on campus, no question.
There are people who just adore him.
And they wear the MAGA hats to bed.
They shower into class no matter what.
There's a fervent base for him.
A hundred percent.
So what do you think the mission of TPUSA is and how does that combine with sort of what President Trump does and where it puts you guys in the position of maximizing the conservative movement when on the one hand it gets your supporters super passionate, on the other hand Trump is such an alienating name for people who are young on campus.
It's a great question.
And look, so there's positives and negatives in any presidency when it comes to college campus outreach.
And the positives has been it's opened a huge amount of enthusiasm and interest on college campuses, where we have thousands of students attending our events, lots of opposition that comes.
And that makes the events far more exciting and with a lot more energy than it otherwise would have been.
I have a seven-, eight-year window.
I can say from the moment that President Trump got elected, College campus activism from Turning Point USA side doubled, tripled, quadrupled almost overnight, and it emboldened college conservatives to stand for conservative principles even more so pre-Trump.
And now mind you, I've been doing this for a couple decades, so my reference point is only about eight years, but I could tell you that the Mitt Romney Republican Party, We would not have kids that were doing what they are today, where they're starting students for Trump groups at UC Berkeley or University of California, Irvine.
I think that's one of the positives of the Trump presidency, is that conservatives are less afraid than ever before to say what they believe and to stand with conviction.
And, you know, the president has definitely, I think, taught us that you can punch back twice as hard to use a Barack Obama expression that, you know, you use quite often.
And I think that's one of the great positives of the Trump presidency and him as an individual, is that You have to recognize that the left is a destructive force in our country.
And I think Newt Gingrich says it best, if President Trump's ideology can be best summed up, he's an anti-leftist presidency.
Right.
And I agree with that.
And I think that if you recognize the left in media, culture, Hollywood, and academia as a corrosive force to our culture and our country, and you make them the enemy and we're going to put them in opposition, I think that's been very, very helpful to us as an organization fighting on the ground in college campuses.
So what do you do with the folks who are in the middle and convincible?
So as I say, Trump is phenomenal at firing up the base.
I mean, you see it as rallies.
You see it online.
I mean, his base is fired up.
And this is because, as you say, Trump is uniquely aggressive.
He is, as I said during the campaign in 2016, a hammer in search of a nail.
It's extraordinarily satisfying when he hits a nail.
It is not as satisfying when he hits a kitten.
But with that said, when it comes to what's happening on college campuses, how do you reach out?
And have you had any success reaching out to people who are wavering?
or is it more along the lines of emboldening people who were quiet before to come forward?
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
I'd love to get your feedback, because you go to these campuses too, and you get a lot of different questions from people.
And there are people that come to the front of the line and ask questions, and they'll say, Charlie, I like what you say, I like the ideas, just I'm not there yet on Trump.
My perspective on that is, look, I believe what I believe.
I'm going to defend the president and his agenda and what he's done for our country.
And more times than not, students will say, OK, I might not agree with all that, but I appreciate the fervency that you support him with, and you explain it better than most people would.
And that's the position that we take.
And I think the movable middle, if you will, has become more winnable than ever before because of the Marxist insurgency in the Democrat Party.
And I think that it's presenting a huge opportunity for people like you and people like me to make convincing arguments for conservative ideas.
Now, I will say, though, that the traditional conservative outreach on college campuses, let's say the last 40 or 50 years, where it's just talking about corporate tax cuts and just talking about the same sort of macroeconomic issues, it wasn't always doing the job on campuses.
What Trump has liberated, though, is more cultural issues as well.
where he's saying, you know, maybe English should be the official language of the United States.
We're going to talk about immigration.
We're going to talk about culture.
And there are a lot of young people that are deeply passionate about these issues, just outside of, you know, the discussions about GDP growth, which I care about a lot.
I mean, of course, I want a robust free market economy.
But I think the Trump presidency and Trump in general, him weighing into different cultural issues, I think has also opened the door for us to win over a lot of young people that otherwise might not be registered and not have been voting at all in the first place.
Because you spend so much time kind of defending Trump, do you ever feel the necessity on campus to separate yourself off from things that he does wrong?
Because obviously he's a human being like anybody else.
He's got his foibles, some may say more than others, at least in public life.
So when you're on campus and somebody asks you a question about something that Trump has done, of which you don't approve, do you ever feel the necessity to defend it?
Well, look, I don't agree with everything he's done.
No person would.
No person would agree with everything anyone ever does, right?
But I don't go out of my way to criticize him.
And I'm very upfront about that.
And I don't consider that to be my role, and I don't consider that to be helpful at all to the threat that we're facing up against dominant Marxism and leftism in our country and our culture.
And you and I might disagree on this.
Where I think my particular role right now is that there are not enough people doing a full-throated defense of the Trump presidency and administration, especially on college campuses.
Where it is so unusual for someone to come and say, no, President Trump might be one of the most successful presidents in modern American history.
And students will say, they're so puzzled and flummoxed if somebody says that.
And then I'll start to recite some facts and some statistics that they might not have heard.
Economic success, lowest ever black unemployment, Hispanic unemployment, Asian unemployment, energy independent, things that you and I know just off the cuff that students might not hear.
But look, I don't agree with everything that he's done from a policy perspective or position.
I agree with almost all of it, though, because a lot of it, and you've talked about this, is traditional conservative stuff.
Is stuff that we've talked about, you know, in the conservative circles for the last couple decades.
Things that people have promised and never delivered upon.
Like energy independence, like moving the embassy to Jerusalem, like deregulating the economy, like cutting taxes.
These sorts of things are traditional conservative free market ideas that have been, you know, tossed around for quite some time.
But I make the argument in the book as well, why did it take Trump to actually do this?
Like, why didn't George W. Bush ever speak at the March for Life?
Why didn't George W. Bush ever move the embassy to Jerusalem?
Why didn't George W. Bush recognize the Golan Heights?
Why was it Trump, the billionaire businessman from New York, who's a recent, you know, conservative, who at one point in his life held a pro-choice position, why would he go and defund Planned Parenthood funding?
And I make the argument it's because this is the populism at its best.
It's because the conservative movement and the people in America that supported him hold these positions and he promised to fulfill what he said he was going to run on.
And actually doing that as a president, I think is so, in my opinion, unusual and something that deserves praise.
I mean, there's no question that his willingness to violate long-held conventional wisdom, it definitely has its upsides.
I mean, people tend to focus a lot on the downsides, you know, the Twitter account and Yeah, and look, I'll give like three examples.
China is one of them.
You know, from a pure theoretical position, I'm not a fan of tariffs.
he will stumble upon a conventional wisdom and he'll say, this makes no sense.
And he'll just completely overturn it.
And it turns out the conventional wisdom was absolutely wrong.
And that definitely is one of the strengths of his presidency when he has done that.
Yeah.
And look, I'll give like three examples.
China is one of them.
You know, from a pure theoretical position, I'm not a fan of tariffs.
If we just talk about macroeconomics, tariffs or taxes.
However, from a national security position, I'm a huge fan of tariffs on China because I think China's our greatest enemy geopolitically and otherwise.
And you look at what China's done, building islands in the South China Sea, hacking our cyber grid, basically sending spies from the CCP on Confucius Institute college campuses.
President Trump basically threw up the entire chessboard on China and said, No, this entire way we've been viewing China has been incorrect.
Immigration is another example too.
Republican and Democrat presidents, both alike, from H.W.
Bush on, have just kind of had this agreement to not really solidify the southern border and just to allow unlimited amounts of green cards to be issued.
He had an unorthodox position on that.
And also culture as well.
Republican presidents of past, they did not challenge the media like President Trump has.
And I think that's been a very positive of his presidency because The media right now is as worse as I've ever seen it.
I mean, they're an activist network for the Democrat Party.
They really are.
And they go out of their way to misrepresent positions and to attack conservative values.
So one of the things that I've objected to is the conflation of anti-leftism with conservatism.
And I think that you're rightly distinguishing the two, but I think that we should be even clearer about the distinction.
Sure.
President Trump is, I agree, the most anti-left president of the modern American era.
I mean, this is what he campaigned on.
I mean, there's a reason that Rush Limbaugh, in the middle of the 2016 campaign, rechristened the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies to the Institute for Advanced Anti-Leftist Studies, really sort of as an homage to President Trump.
That comes along with some rewards and it comes along with some risks.
The reward is that it makes very clear who the opposition is, which is something that Republicans, conservatives traditionally have not done.
I'm all for it.
I think the clarification is necessary.
The risk is that anti-left is broader than conservative.
And suddenly you may be associating with people who oppose the left, but who also are not only not conservative, but oppose a lot of the ideals of conservatism.
Or you may be willing to overlook in the simple binary battle, you may be over willing to overlook activity that is not conservative in the name of anti-leftism.
So this is where you get into President Trump's heresies, bad things that he has said in the past, bad things that he has done, the fact that nobody in the Republican Party seems to give a damn about spending anymore.
I'm old enough to remember when we all cared about spending.
But you and I agree completely on this.
Yeah, and now obviously we are blowing out the spending to an extraordinary extent.
And if you criticize that, then you are accused of being an aid to the left because you are opposing a principle that is a principle of the left.
But because Trump is anti-left, then it's the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of thing.
So where do you draw the line between Forwarding conservatism and forwarding anti-leftism?
It's a great question.
I try to answer that question in the book, where I say, what is the doctrine of the Trump presidency?
You know, Monroe had the doctrine, Monroe Doctrine.
I call it the MAGA doctrine, which the argument I make is that it's a blend of conservatism, populism, common sense, and a pro-American approach.
And I look back to the Reagan era, and we had eight years of awesome conservative wins under Ronald Reagan, and H.W.
Bush undid a lot of those.
H.W.
Bush grew the size of government.
He put back bureaucrats that Ronald Reagan fired.
And all of a sudden, we kind of saw a dissent away from Ronald Reagan conservatism.
And we have to remember, Reagan was a populist, too.
I mean, Reagan was both a conservative and a populist.
I think there's dangers to populism and its furthest extent, but I don't think that we as conservatives should be afraid of it.
I think that there's a lot of positives when it comes to listening to the people and actually bringing dignity back to forgotten America.
And so what is the doctrine of the Trump presidency?
I make the argument that it's Analyzing every decision and every deeply held belief in Washington DC by the ruling class, so the wise men of Washington, and asking the question objectively, has this been serving our country well?
And then if no, what is the proper approach to it?
And by using that kind of common sense approach, he's actually come Organically to conservative positions that other people that ran on conservative positions would not have organically come to, such as standing for life.
We've been to the list.
Canceling the Iran deal.
Getting out of TPP.
Getting out of the Paris Climate Accord.
These are things that traditional conservatives might not have actually had the backbone to do that.
And it's a question I get a lot.
Like, what is the actual belief system?
What is the philosophy?
Well, what he's trying to do is really hard, which is to try to recover and renew a country that was almost in managed decline by a bipartisan big government consensus and a globalist consensus under kind of the Bush-Clinton-Obama years, which was, all right, you know, George W. Bush would be more, we'll get corporate tax cuts, we'll kind of keep the borders open, and we're going to be more hawkish on foreign policy.
Obama, exact opposite, we're going to send billions of dollars to the evil Iranians, still keep the borders open, but we're going to have anemic economic growth.
I make the argument, the doctrine that he espouses and that he believes in is one we can learn from and we should advance for the next, you know, couple decades and hopefully next century, which is, are we actually seeing results for the people that he ran to represent?
And it seems as if we had a ruling class party sent, you know, post Reagan, and Donald Trump, I believe, has positively disrupted that.
One of the questions that I have about Ideas like the MAGA doctrine is, are we trying to enflesh a skeleton that can be enfleshed in a number of different ways?
That's interesting.
President Trump has, as I've said this before, so this is no great secret.
I think that he has excellent political instincts.
I think that he also has spasms of thought.
I don't think he has a comprehensive worldview in any serious way.
I mean, this is not somebody who sits around.
He's a businessman.
He doesn't sit around reading Milton Friedman.
He's openly bragged about having written more books than he has read.
And so trying to sort of graft a broad ideological agenda onto that, as opposed to, I think common sense is a fairly good description of how he sees his own agenda, but trying to graft on an ideology.
I mean, Tucker's tried, Tucker Carlson has tried to graft on one particular ideology.
You've seen, I think, Jared Kushner try to graft on a different ideology.
I think you've seen Pence try to graft on a different ideology.
And it seems like there's this constant exercise going on in which there is sort of a skeleton of feelings and instincts that is good.
And then everybody tries to Try to put flesh on it and sometimes it looks like a lion and sometimes it looks like a chicken and it's not super clear what exactly it is.
I see where you're coming from.
I'll disagree slightly.
I think his doctrine first and foremost is from the first time he announced for the presidency, he said through instinctual observance of where the country was going is, we're not winning anymore and there's something deeply wrong with who's been running our country and how they've been running our country.
And his agenda or his doctrine and those people you mentioned have all placed more, I would say, political philosophy behind it.
But let's take a step before that is, how are we going to renew and revitalize the country?
How are we going to bring this back to a place of excellence?
And it goes back to a phrase that you and I believe and the left does not believe.
Bernie Sanders does not believe this.
Nancy Pelosi does not believe this, that we're the greatest country ever to exist in the history of the world.
It's the idea of American exceptionalism.
I know he believes that.
Yeah, that for sure.
That's why I picked that picture.
He's hugging the flag.
And that's his agenda.
It's like, I care about this like I care about my son or I care about a beloved.
And sometimes he's going to engage in braggadocia or he's gonna do things that are off the wall and atypical.
And there's been unlimited coverage of all that.
However, he goes back to a default position of, I've been elected by forgotten America, because a lot of people showed up for the first time in a long time, people switch parties, and I think there's something to that, to bring dignity to those parts of the country that have been disenfranchised by the ruling class, because our country was taken advantage of for so long.
And it's a blend of nationalism, populism, conservatism, and those two words, common sense, I think make I think that frames it up really well.
And it's also, it's challenging the ruling class consensus.
And I think there's a lot of truth to that, which is, have these people been right about what they've been feeding us the last 30 or 40 years?
Maybe about certain things, and about other things, maybe not.
And especially when it comes to these positions, such as, oh wow, we should never challenge China?
Like, really?
It seems like both parties have just been I'm kind of okay with allowing the rise to China with a couple of senators here and there that have been speaking out.
President Trump has opened and has given oxygen now to an America First agenda towards China that I think will benefit for generations to come.
So to answer your question, I think the doctrine, if you will, is that I love my country so much.
I believe it's a gift that's been given to us.
I'm going to do whatever it takes to try to save it and revitalize it.
I can't say that about Bernie Sanders.
His agenda is this place is a mistake.
It's a racist country.
It's bigoted.
It's backwards.
And I want to revolutionize it and turn it into some sort of Marxist Western European failed nanny state.
So in a second, I want to ask you about one of the biggest questions I often get on college campuses.
I'm sure you get it a lot, too, which is how much of this is just Trump doing stuff and how much of it is 4D chess?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so let's talk about how President Trump is perceived.
So I think one of the critiques that some people make of you particularly is that maybe you're giving the president too much credit on his sort of how much of this is planned.
So I, for example, love a lot of the policies that you just talked about.
I also happen to think that politics is much more veep than house of cards, and I think that everyone is basically a moron.
And so when the president says things that appear to me to be not brilliant, I will say that appears to me to be not brilliant, that I think that's kind of dumb.
You've been criticized for sort of the 40 chess model of thinking of President Trump, that President Trump is thinking three steps ahead, that when he says a thing about Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem, he's not doing that because it's just a gut instinct that he's tweeting out, but because he's actually thought through the ramifications of whatever it is he said.
Now, that may not be a fair characterization of you, but how do you think about that?
I don't necessarily think it's a fair characterization, but it's fair to say I get that accusation.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's say that.
I will say, from my time spending time around him and seeing him be able to predict things correctly, for example, he said, I'm being spied on.
People laughed at it.
Remember, he said that tweet out during transition.
Actually, it turned out that there was a lot of nonsense in the whole FISA process that he was being spied on.
I think his instincts are terrific.
And one of the things I talk about in the book, and otherwise, is that he does have 40 years of built-up experience in a wide variety of different endeavors, from pop culture, to television, to building buildings, to the woman rink, that does make him a very unique individual to be able to address this multitude of problems and these issues.
And so I ask myself the question, People should ask themselves the question too, like, is it instinct?
Or is it just kind of flying blind?
Is he just, you know, hitting things in the dark?
I believe it's instinct because if it was just flying blind in the dark, why was it that other Republican presidents that we've seen in the last 30 years were able to do what he's been able to do and have the courage and the conviction?
To be able to do this.
I'll give you some examples of this.
Why did it take President Trump to renegotiate NAFTA, the USMCA, which is great for our country, bipartisan consensus, big credit to Jared Kushner and his team that worked really hard on it.
Why did it take President Trump to be able to get, you know, to get the VA Accountability Act done or get right to try?
And I make the argument that he's not afraid to push boundaries of kind of the bureaucratic consensus in DC.
Where they'll give him no for an answer and a traditional politician that was born and bred in politics in the U.S.
Senate will probably take that more seriously.
And he's unafraid because of his experience and because of where he's been and who he is to say, when he's saying no, what do you mean by that?
And he's not afraid to push those boundaries.
I think that's a healthy thing for our country.
And one of the things that frustrates me the most about critics of President Trump, and you in no way embody this at all, but people on the left do this.
They think everything he does comes from a sinister, Machiavellian perspective.
Right.
Now, I mean, I've said this directly to Bill Maher.
Bill Maher was saying this to me, and I was like, well, which is it?
Is he an idiot or is he an evil genius?
You're going to have to pick one.
up for it wonderfully.
Now I have to give you credit for that because it's nonsense.
It's like, wait, so he gets some sort of weird pleasure for kids being locked up in cages, even though that was under Barack Obama, right?
It's like, it's either, you have to, you can't just alternate.
It's either that he's playing 4D chess and he's, you know, a Bond villain, or he's just has no idea what he's doing because you can't, you can't be one one day and one the other.
I come from the perspective that his motives are pure and his motives are good, that he does deeply care about He really does.
And he gets, when he gets the most upset, he gets the most angry, is when our country gets taken advantage of.
When he sees bad deals being brokered, or he sees us going in a direction that will make us less competitive for future generations to come.
And I talk about, quite often, you look at the rallies.
These rallies that we've seen him do, they're a political phenomenon.
We've never seen presidents a year and a half from election be able to draw 35,000, 40,000 people.
When you go to these rallies, and I encourage people to do it, there's something really unusual that happens, that very few people are on their phones texting.
They're locked into him.
And it kind of struck me after the fourth or fifth or sixth rally I went to, I said, they look at him as their vessel back to representative government.
And it might not be as, you know, as, let's just say, as pure and simple as that, but I think it works.
Because there's a lot of people, millions, tens of millions of people in this country that have felt disenfranchised by just the traditional political class.
And they see in him, in the most unusual way, you couldn't have predicted it or wrote it, a brash billionaire from New York City that has given more voice to the working class in this country than, you know, than I would say just a traditional U.S.
Senator from some of these Midwestern states and some of the states that I think have, quite honestly, at the expense of the ruling class agenda, have seen their lives not necessarily progress in the way that they saw fit.
So going into the 2020 cycle, I've seen a couple of different sort of defenses and possible defenses of the Trump presidency pushed forward in terms of advertising.
There's one that I think is less successful and one that I think is more successful.
I'd like to get your take on them.
So one that I think is less successful is the attack.
The president is a magnificent patriot who knows exactly what he is doing.
He is fully in control of everything and everything is swell because of all those things.
The other one is the ad that his campaign cut, which I think is an excellent ad, where he said, you may not like him, you may not like his foibles, you may not like all the things he tweets, but do you like your wallet?
Like, how's that going for you?
And I think that that is a more successful approach to Trump.
So I wonder how you feel about that, because do you think that it's off-putting to people, the overt defense of somebody who... I mean, people make their own decisions about Trump.
It's not like when you say, Trump's a wonderful guy, I know him personally, we get along great, we go fishing together, that people all of a sudden... We don't go fishing together.
I can't see President Trump fishing, to be honest with you.
But with that said, I wonder, you know, when you make the character defense of Trump, that seems like a much harder defense of Trump because people have their own... No, it might be.
I make it because it's true.
I make it because it's true.
I don't make it because it might be easier or harder.
I will say, though, the easier argument to make is to say, Qasem Soleimani would be alive if a Democrat was President of the United States.
This is right.
Like that.
I mean, you like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh because they wouldn't be on the Supreme Court if you had a Democrat or even a different type of Republican.
And I think the ad that the campaign cut to your excellent point, he might be the tough guy, but he's a tough guy we need.
Right.
He's rough.
Basically, the ad and I'm not putting words in their mouth.
It was he might be rough around the edges, but we need that fighter.
And I think making the street brawler argument can resonate with a lot of people because what you're doing, it's an old salesman trick, right?
You take the criticism off the table immediately.
Right, so people might, they look at the ad, they're like, oh yeah, I kind of agree with that, because that is a deep, that's a belief that people have, where they're like, I like what he does, I might not like his style, and you hear it a lot, and I hear it a lot, and, but if you take that off from branding his presidency or branding his message, and you say, wait a second, You look at what he's done, maybe there's, maybe all those things that you consider a negative, the brawler, the street fighter, maybe our country's needed a street fighter for some time.
I think that is an effective way to brand it, but also saying the left has gone so off the rails, especially when it comes to just things that should stop at the water's edge.
I mean, the Soleimani thing really bothers me, because this guy's a maniac, and he deserved to die.
He was a terrorist.
And if Pete Buttigieg is the nominee, low likelihood that happens, right?
He basically said, yeah, Soleimani would still be alive.
That, I mean, for a family in Florida that's wondering who to vote for, that's a pretty stark contrast that, like, Kassim Soleimani would be alive or not alive.
A guy that killed, you would know better than I, 500, 600 Americans, you know, in the Iraq war.
And so I think that kind of binary choice does a lot.
And I think the president is going to be really hard to run up against because I think he gets more popular, the more binary the race becomes.
Because politics is a binary choice.
It's not a referendum ideas.
It's not, do you want this water reclamation district or not, right?
It's, do you want Bernie Sanders or do you want President Trump?
Or do you want Bloomberg or do you want President Trump?
And I think as some of those match-ups, all of a sudden President Trump becomes a lot more appealing to a lot more people.
So this may be a moot point because President Trump has not been supremely malleable to criticisms of his excesses, but there are kind of two perspectives about about dealing with President Trump that we've seen inside the administration and outside.
One is the let-Trump-be-Trump view.
Just let him free.
Unchain the man.
Let him run through the China store.
He's bull in a China shop, but we need the bull.
And then there is the perspective, well, let's critique him where it's possible.
Let's try to convince him.
Let's try to talk him down.
Obviously, look, I've been of the second view.
This has been perfectly obvious.
I think that he has been hemmed in by his advisors on a wide variety of occasions, in which has been quite good for him to listen to his advisors.
Where do you come down on the Twitter is a good example.
I'm of the view, and I think a lot of people in and out of the administration are of the view, it would be wonderful to have one person read his tweets before he hits send.
Just one guy.
It doesn't matter.
Just like the secretary down the hall.
Just the janitor.
Somebody read the tweets before he hits send.
And then there are people who say, no, no, that would inhibit him.
That would stop him.
We've seen this break into the open relatively recently with regard to Attorney General Barr, who was like, can you just stop tweeting about the cases I'm handling here?
You're undercutting me.
And Trump's like, Well, I know I'm undercutting you, but whatever, man.
Man's gotta be what a man's gotta be, YOLO.
So, where do you come down on this?
So, look, I'm gonna make an argument that will be a little kind of atypical, which is there are people in this country, when you go to these MAGA rallies, you go to Iowa, you go to Ohio, they love the tweets.
They do.
For sure.
And there is a population out there.
And I don't interface with them every single day.
I interface with them more than most, and they love it.
And there is a point to this, though, and a common criticism I get And part of the rise of Bernie Sanders is the authenticity argument.
Oh yeah, that Marxism stuff, I'm not really a fan of it, you know, like the fact that our country's gonna burn.
But he really seems like he knows what, he is who he is.
I would make the argument that if President Trump became too political, became too DC, and became too vanilla, he would lose a lot of his base.
Maybe that's overestimated.
Maybe I'm overcompensating it.
Maybe I'm overhandicapping it.
But there are people that are pleased that he's the same person that he was on the escalator that he is today.
I'm not saying he's turned down from like a spinal tap 11 down to like a 2, but like an 11 to an 8.5.
And look, none of us will know the balance of how much you get and how much you lose.
I will say this, though, that he does command the news cycle better than any other president we've ever seen.
And there have been high-level quality social media tweets and trolling of the left, the likes of which is going to be legendary in the halls of Internet culture.
Seriously, though.
And if he's going up against the left with that kind of fervency and sometimes say, oh, maybe you shouldn't have tweeted this.
I say, no, no, no.
He recognizes the threat to this country.
That goes back to the anti leftist thing.
Right.
And Dennis Prager makes this argument quite often, which is if you and you recognize it, of course, they will not be stopped.
Unless they come up against someone willing to punch them back twice as hard.
And I think President Trump is that man for the moment.
And, you know, I get a common criticism from people.
They say, Charlie, you're a Christian.
How could you support this?
Right?
How could you do this?
I say, and you might appreciate this.
Well, then we got to take Samson out of the Hall of Faith.
I mean, Samson was a man who, in a prostitute's bed, God came to him and revealed to say, basically, I need you to go fight the Philistines.
And with a jaw of a donkey, he killed a thousand Philistines.
I can't teach that in Sunday school.
Right?
That's pretty brutal.
I would make the argument that Trump, for lack of a better term, was called for a moment like this to be that brutal street fighter that we really needed.
And if it's indelicate and if it's not, you know, right down the fairway, so be it.
Because there's an enemy, there's an opposition to a blessing that God gave us that is this country that is in need of that kind of street fighter.
I mean, my only critique of that would be it would still be better if Samson had not been stripping the prostitute at the time.
No, I'm not.
I'm not defending it.
I'm not.
Trust me.
But you can't dismiss the argument.
I mean, in Hebrews 14.4, he's in the hall of faith, right?
A quote-unquote hall of faith, right?
And he had his own moral indiscretions.
We all do, right?
There's different extremes.
There are different variations.
You didn't go great with Delilah.
I'm just saying, there's different, but, you know, in the Bible, you and I both, you know, consider it to be the Holy Word of God, right?
I'm not ripping on Sam.
No, I'm not accusing you of that, right?
I'm just saying, that's an instance of someone who was flawed multiple times, right?
And we see that, but he was called for a specific fight.
A specific fight to bring God's people against an opposition, which the Philistines, and to fight pretty brutally.
And now that's, I'm using that more metaphorically.
I think President Trump's going to take a donkey, you know, a jaw of a donkey.
For Media Matters, Charlie, he's not calling for President Trump to slay a thousand Democratic National Committee staff.
Right.
I'm not saying that at all.
But the analogy is that sometimes God calls impure, unusual people to go fight for righteous causes.
So let's talk about one more thing with regard to the anti-left thing.
So again, Anti-left.
All for it.
Leftist tears.
We love them.
But one thing that worries me about the anti-left attitude as opposed to the conservative attitude, and I think that you need both, right?
Conservatism is anti-left because it's conservative, not just because anti-left is anti-left, is something that you've come up against, and that is the gatekeeper problem.
So there are a lot of people who consider themselves anti-left who also happen to believe Yeah, and you and I have both denounced them publicly at events and all that.
Great question.
That's where morals come in, right?
That's where we have to say, we don't believe, you don't believe this and I don't believe this.
and what is inappropriate behavior in fighting the left?
Great question.
That's where morals come in, right?
That's where we have to say, we don't believe, you don't believe this and I don't believe this, one race is better than the other.
I don't believe that America should be, by any means, any sort of exercise in a racial majoritarian experiment.
That's not who we are.
It never has been.
I mean, the phrase e pluribus unum is part of the American trinity, e pluribus unum, in God we trust and liberty.
And so, here's where I make the argument in the MAGA doctrine, and so you have conservative values, Incorporated anti-leftism and populism, right?
But let's take it to a further extent, which is, and President Trump has denounced the hatred, he has denounced the vile, you know, insidious nonsense that is out there.
And he has, and he's gotten more forceful, and he's gotten more ahead of it as time has gone on.
Because unfortunately, they're a minority of a minority, but they're out there.
And they have real hatred for certain individuals, and I'm not going to say any names, but that's just how it is.
And I go up on college campus sometimes, I get questions that are horrible about Jewish individuals, you know, and horrible, horrible things, and I denounce them and I fight back against it.
However, that's where it comes into our moral position and our conservative position of the belief in the American Trinity.
But if you take it to a further extent, right, if we're nothing but just Conservatism on a chalkboard, right?
And we're nothing but just always saying we're in a free trade with everyone, always.
Well, what's the extent of that, right?
So the inverse would be, what if we take the other too far and we allow the rise of China to be too much?
And I can make the argument that H.W.
Bush and Clinton, so on and so forth, allowed that other extreme to happen.
And so that's where I think President Trump has balanced it.
I really do.
We have the healthy dose of anti-leftism, populism, and conservatism.
However, when that hatred comes up and it rears its ugly head, we have a moral obligation as conservatives to kick out the demons in our own ranks.
And it's something the left will never do.
They never, ever exercise the demons in their own ranks.
In fact, they embrace them.
One of the areas where you've obviously come under a lot of criticism on campus is from this specific group that we're talking about.
This has become a headline-worthy issue when they tried to do the same thing to Donald Trump Jr.
and Kimberly Guilfoyle.
And they've been approaching you on campus, and these specific criticisms Aside from the sort of just plain racism of it, it seemed to be that you're too socially liberal.
So what is your perspective on social politics?
Well, look, I mean, I believe marriage is one man, one woman.
I believe in biblical marriage.
I always have.
And I also have people that are gay on my staff, and I'm not afraid to share the stage with people that are gay.
Other individuals think, and they have said this, that gay people do not have a position in the conservative movement.
I believe that is wrong.
I believe that Dave Rubin and Peter Thiel and Tammy Bruce have a place in the conservative movement.
I absolutely do.
And I think it's so backwards that they would believe that we should somehow grow the influence of the conservative movement by the process of subtraction.
Of people that are turned off by the left, turned off by woke culture of the left.
Somehow they believe that the conservative movement should be closing its doors to people that all of a sudden might be interested in your podcast or your position or your speeches.
I march at the March for Life.
Very, very pro-life against Planned Parenthood.
I talk about it quite often.
It's an unfair accusation against me.
It just is.
But also, I won't apologize for having people that are gay on my staff, sharing the stage of people that are gay, that have served our country, and that are veterans.
It's not something I'm going to apologize for a second for.
And it doesn't compromise my Christianity, my moral positions on marriage, or my conservative beliefs.
OK, the other critique they've been hitting you with is that you're supposedly too soft on immigration.
So I want to give you a chance to respond to their charge that you are You are some sort of open borders.
Yeah, again, I appreciate you actually bringing it up because I can clear the air on it.
It's nonsense.
I said something.
Let's just say I said a position that I reclarified where I should have said it more stringently, but I believe in less legal and illegal immigration.
I support Senator Tom Cotton's act where essentially he wants to limit the amount of green cards to 500,000 a year.
I mean, I have been defending ICE facilities up against ICE protesters, building the wall, deporting illegal aliens, making English the official language of the United States.
Again, it's an unfair accusation.
And I will agree with the with the fervency that I think immigration is one of the top issues in America.
I really do.
However, if your drive for that immigration policy is rooted in hatred of another group and position, or in racial supremacy, that's wrong.
If it's from a position that, well, our country's being taken advantage of, and it's, we can't afford or take a million green cards every single year, that's a conversation I can have, and that's one I actually sympathize with.
And I agree with.
And I think we should have less legal and illegal immigration.
But again, the accusation is unfair through and through.
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Okay, so let's talk about the other movement that you've been dealing with on campus, and that, of course, is the Bernie Sanders movement.
So, young people particularly are resonating to Bernie Sanders, almost as a counter-reaction to Trump in some ways, but kind of separate and apart from.
So, Bernie is wildly popular on campus.
To what do you attribute the vast bout of insanity happening on our college campus?
Yeah, it's a great question.
I mean, look, it's very easy to be generous with other people's money.
It's very easy to want to spend other people's resources.
And look, from a very basic position, if you've never been taught that our country is a gift or a blessing, why would you want to conserve that blessing?
I mean, if you've been taught hatred of our country, that we're racist, bigoted, homophobic, backwards, then why not have a revolution against it?
And Bernie Sanders, he embodies the same college professor that's been screaming at them since they first got to college.
He's a legitimate Marxist.
He honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
And your critique of Bernie Sanders is one of the best in the entire movement.
And you asked a very simple question.
Do you believe private property is a right, Senator Sanders?
And that's a question that any honest journalist should ask him.
He's a legitimate property confiscator.
That's what he is.
He does not believe that individuals have a right, given them by God, to own property.
He does not believe that.
He believes that state first, human beings second.
He's a Rousseauian Marxist, is what he is.
And so look, students and young people, some of them truly believe that garbage.
They really do.
Not all the Bernie Sanders people do.
They actually think that he's on the side of freedom or liberty in some sort of distorted, bizarre concoction.
They think that he's actually the fighter and the crusader for liberty.
And nothing could be further from the truth.
So I always ask the question to Bernie Sanders supporters, do you trust the government?
And almost always they say, no, no, the government's bought by lobbyists and corporations and by the war machine, you know, all this stuff.
I say, why on earth would you want to make that government bigger?
And they had no response, of course, but that's the whole kind of summation of how I think you approach Senator Sanders, Marxists that support Senator Sanders, which is his whole position, his whole worldview is getting more people, more bureaucrats, and more power to the very government you say you distrust.
It seems pretty obvious that President Trump would prefer Senator Sanders as the nominee of the Democratic Party against him.
The reason I say that is because he obviously has been sort of trying to, via his Twitter account, stir up chaos inside the Democratic Party, which he's quite good at, by targeting everybody except for Sanders and suggesting to Sanders supporters that they're going to be robbed of the nomination eventually by the Democratic upper echelon.
It seems that, number one, you agree with that characterization that that's what Trump wants.
Maybe, I don't know.
I wouldn't say it full-throated though, because I've seen President Trump, you know, in interviews and time I've sat with him, have a good amount of hesitancy by saying, oh yeah, all in, let's run against Bernie.
I think Bernie could beat Trump.
I think it's really hard to run against free, and I think the media would go all out for him, especially the younger journalist, Marxist activist class.
They'd be more excited than ever to try to paint him as the salvation that America needs.
Bloomberg or Bernie, who would Hollywood go all in more for?
I think Bernie, for sure.
I think, I don't know how much currency that has in Wisconsin, but it could make some impact.
Probably from a philosophical...
choice I would much rather run against Bernie because I think he embodies actually what the Democrat Party's trying to do.
But it terrifies me.
It terrifies me because anyone could win, right?
And you and I agree with this.
Any major party nominee could conceivably be the president of the United States.
I learned that the hard way in 2016 after I lost $10,000 betting against the president.
So there you have it.
Well, yeah.
And so, because you start from a baseline, basically 40 to 42%, right?
I mean, that's just the way it is.
Luxor College, you're not running for president in LA County.
So it's not going to happen.
Or you're not running for president in Manhattan.
And so Bernie Sanders could become president of the United States.
That should horrify everyone listening to this or watching this.
He's a true committed Marxist.
He does not love our country.
He just doesn't.
He is on a mission to radically redefine and deconstruct our country from within.
You know the school of deconstructionism.
It basically is the whole school of thought is create cultural chaos everywhere and that will give rise to an authoritarian Marxist to allow them to create something that will eventually not work at all but give a lot of power to the ruling class to try to create some failed communist communal state.
I mean, it does seem like Sanders should be the one that Trump is rooting for in the sense that President Trump is a wrecking ball man, and that is his specialty.
I've always said about politics, that politics is the art of making it very difficult to vote for your opponent and making it very easy to vote for you.
And President Trump may not be spectacular at the latter, but he is phenomenal at the former.
Making it very difficult for people to vote for his opponents, that is that man's specialty.
Well, and I have to say, you know, in a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity, President Trump comes right out of the gate and says, why did he honeymoon in Russia?
I was like, yes, he's already on that.
I mean, that's a great critique, though.
I mean, why did he honeymoon in the Soviet Union?
It would take a traditional Republican, like, months of workshopping and poll testing.
President Trump just comes right at it, says, yeah, Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
And I agree with you.
I mean, he's one of the best attack dogs in American political history.
I wouldn't want to run against him.
No one would.
I mean, he's relentless.
He's a monster.
And not only is he- In a good way.
Well, when it comes to beating people up, he's incredible at it.
He also has the advantage of every piece of dirt that could ever be thrown at somebody has been thrown at him.
I've described him as a mud monster in the sense that no matter how much mud you throw on him, he just looks like mud.
I mean, like he's already made of mud at this point, so nothing that you throw on him is actually gonna make a difference.
Whereas Bernie's never actually been vetted by the media, which is unbelievable.
He's been a useless octogenarian communist for 60 years.
I mean he was 80 when he was 20.
He wasn't just a useless communist when he was 20.
He was an octogenarian when he was 20.
And now he's running for president and nobody has asked him a simple question.
The other night when Michael Bloomberg finally asked him a question about his lake house and Bernie had never been asked a question.
That's right.
of his lake house.
I mean, it was perfectly obvious that no one had ever just asked him straight to his face about the fact that he's a millionaire with a lake house and nobody else on the stage had done it and he didn't have an answer for it.
And I just thought to myself, Donald Trump is going to drive to Bernie Sanders' lake house, pry up a floorboard and figuratively beat him to death with it.
That's right.
On a public stage.
You know what he'll do?
It's going to be unbelievable.
He'll say, this is not even that nice of a house.
That's exactly what he's going to say.
He said about Mount Vernon.
He's certainly going to say about Vernon's crap lake house on Lake Champlain.
He's like, wait a second.
The view's not even that good.
He's like, I would have built it better, cheaper, and quicker, and better on time.
And by the way, by mocking it that way, it would get 10 times more visibility.
It'd be the front page of the New York Times.
President Trump says Bernie Sanders' third home is not well built.
By doing that, More people would actually know about his lake house.
I have to say that Sanders, I think he's actually in a position he didn't think he would be in.
He's more focused on his revolution and his movement than becoming president.
Eight, nine months ago, he thought he'd be in this position.
It just so happens Elizabeth Warren is so unbelievably bad at politics, like really, really bad.
I mean, she lies about everything, about her heritage, about her father being a janitor or something, a working class, everything.
And she's part of the ruling class professor, and she just seems like she's always scolding people.
And it was kind of the default position of the angry Marxists in the Democrat Party, like, yeah, I guess we still got Bernie.
He's still screaming about it, right?
You know, sure.
And because of that, He has a great grassroots base.
He's going to win.
I think he's going to win states like California and Texas.
I just do.
And he probably will be the nominee.
And people say, well, they're going to try to steal it from him.
I think that's a harder bet.
I think it's actually more likely he's going to be the nominee than they try to steal it from him.
That's my perspective.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that as long as he wins a plurality of the delegates, it's almost impossible to take it away from him.
That's right.
Because he's going to walk out of that convention and he'll just say to his people, listen, I'll campaign for the nominee, but they're all going to stay home.
I mean, they're all going to stay home.
And Michael Bloomberg's bizarre bet that if they get to the convention and he has the second most delegates, that he's going to be able to walk in with his giant bag of cash plopping on Tom Perez's desk and say, I'll spend $5 billion on this election if you just throw Bernie out.
I can't see Tom Perez taking that deal because the press is just too bad for him.
Well, yeah, and again, if you look at the numbers, and this is a flawed way to look at primaries, like, oh yeah, this person drops out and all their votes is going to go somewhere else.
It doesn't work that way.
It can work a little bit that way.
The best fit, though, is Warren and Bernie.
Like, if Warren drops out, they're not going to Michael Bloomberg anytime soon.
Like, her whole shtick, that 10% that she has, is billionaires are bad, Marxism, but a little bit lighter touch than Bernie Sanders.
And her decay, if you will, and her decline will fuel the rise of Bernie Sanders.
And, I mean, maybe there might be a Bloomberg-Buttigieg alliance that could be formed, but they're not angry enough to be the nominee.
I mean, they want Kathy Griffin, Colin Kaepernick-style anger.
That's who they are.
I mean, they want, tear it all down, Donald Trump is the worst president in American history, this country is horrible, and we're going to take it back.
Okay, great.
Get 80% of the votes in L.A.
County and have fun losing Wisconsin.
Do you think the president has a good shot of winning the popular vote this time?
No.
Last time, yeah.
So that would be the question, right?
And I admit it, as a Trump supporter, I think he might lose the popular vote worse this time than in 2016.
And thank goodness for the Electoral College.
The Electoral College is brilliant.
It's important.
It's a safeguard of our republic.
We're not a democracy.
We are a republic.
Huge difference.
And I don't think that the coastal elite cities dominated by Malibu and Manhattan should dictate our elections.
In fact, I can make an argument.
You have to go to a more diverse pockets of the country to win the presidency on the electoral system.
So I don't think he'll win the popular vote.
Nor should he try.
So basically all resources into Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan.
Not only that, like all resources into five or six counties in those states.
I mean, you're talking about West Milwaukee.
I think the black vote could have a huge impact.
I really do.
And especially if they nominate, you know, Bloomberg or Buttigieg, which again, I think is unlikely.
But I still think against Senator Bernie Sanders, I think that I think black Americans, and Jared Kushner and his team deserve a lot of credit for this, have delivered a lot of results for black America that otherwise would not have been delivered.
Criminal justice reform, opportunity zones, low-server black unemployment.
Do I think he'll win 50%?
That's probably unlikely, but 15 or 20% I think is conceivable.
OK, so let's look at the second term of the Trump administration.
So what does that look like?
Because we've seen basically no plans.
I mean, he got the tax cuts done.
Presumably he moves to make those permanent.
And he's done the judges and presumably there will be more vacancies and he'll fill the vacancies.
But we haven't really seen from President Trump what are his plans for a second term, because that Republican agenda, unfortunately, has become extraordinarily short, right?
Because spending cuts are very unpopular.
The president has basically pledged that there will be none.
He's pledged that for a long time, is that he's not going to cut Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid.
The budget that he proposed proposed some future cuts to futures, to future increases.
It's a phenomenal question.
It really is, because second terms can be really tricky.
The second term of George W. Bush was a disaster.
It just was.
It was mismanaged.
There was no clear vision.
Here's what gives me confidence, though, is that the White House is getting to a place where it's working as well as it ever has.
And I could tell you that from Jared Kushner to people that are back in the White House that are not spying and leaking on the President of the United States, where you have disloyal people that are writing books and trying to counter him.
I don't like any of that.
I think it's nonsense and I think it's garbage.
I think that you serve the President of the United States who's a vessel of the American people.
You're not there to try to leak or to try to earn goodwill with journalists.
So I have confidence that in the second term of this presidency that you're going to have a better working, functional White House than you did in the beginning stages of the first term.
But you need some really big agenda items.
And if I were to, kind of, my wish list, I would agree with you.
Size and scope of government and government spending.
We've got to get back to the Tea Party movement of deficit hawks.
We just have to.
We have to have harsh government spending and we've got to get this under control because you and I both can either experience hyperinflation or anemic economic growth or uncompetitiveness if we don't get our spending under control.
And that's what originally got me fired up about Barack Obama was the amount of debt.
And I know President Trump has submitted budgets that, you know, do have some spending cuts, but Congress is not taking them seriously at all.
And I think Mick Mulvaney being in the White House is a positive thing because he is a deficit hawk and he is a debt hawk.
The second thing is immigration.
If we do not build the southern wall and start deporting foreign nationals that are in our country, we're going to be in a lot of trouble.
I really believe that.
And this whole idea of comprehensive immigration reform, that's a talking point, I think, of the left and the soft right, just to try to get amnesty for a bunch of people so they can vote for Democrats in the future.
So I don't know how you're going to work with Congress on that, but that's going to be something that has to be addressed.
I think the third issue is taking on the tech companies.
That doesn't mean that has to be a huge amount of regulation.
I don't know what it looks like.
But if I have to say one of the top issues in the conservative base is censorship and is the tech companies just acting as if they're total authoritarians in our country.
And I'm hesitant for government regulation.
As a free market guy, I actually think regulation could help the very people that I'm critiquing more than not.
It could actually be a shield for the monopolies.
But he has to do something about that in his second term.
Okay, so looking forward beyond Trump, and I know that that's nearly impossible because Trump is not only the lodestar of sort of all politics right now, the gravitational center, he's the black hole of all media attention, right?
Everything not only revolves around it, but is sucked into it.
And so it's hard to foresee a future in which President Trump either is not president or is not sort of the directing force in the Republican Party.
But you're 26.
Yeah.
I mean, President Trump is, hell, 74.
So he's getting up there.
The man should live long and prosper.
You'll be alive longer than President Trump, barring you being hit by a car or an early case of terminal cancer.
So with that being the case, beyond 2024, what does the Republican Party look like?
Because there are these really, I think, large internecine wars that are being glossed over and papered over by the fact that there is a Republican president in the White House.
Yeah, and it's going to surface sooner rather than later.
And that's part of why I wrote the book, is what is the doctrine?
What does the future look like?
You're starting to see it right now between common good conservatism and right-based conservatism.
And I actually, I genuinely see both sides of the arguments.
And I, depends on the issue, I sympathize with one side over the other, all depending on it.
But that's going to be a huge, huge debate going into the future.
But what is the, I think that one, couple things that the Republican Party or the conservative movement can take away from President Trump, which is take the populace that you represent really, really seriously.
Don't ignore issues that might be politically incorrect that are harming people's lives, like immigration or trade, ever again.
And those are things I talk about in this book that he ran on, that the Republican Party was like, oh, yeah, we're just going to kind of get along on these issues.
Now, President Trump ran on less immigrants, you know, stricter border control and renegotiated trade deals.
I don't want the Republican Party to go back to be the party of the ruling class.
I don't want a party of Mitt Romney.
I don't.
I don't want the party of Lake Champlain on Labor Day.
Like, that bothers me, where it's just an elitist party, where it's just the same people circulating the same sort of elitist talking points.
I want to be the party of the people that shower before work and shower after work.
I want to be the party where labor unions think the Republican Party stands for them, too.
And we have disagreements on how labor unions raise the cost, and I think there's some validity to that.
But totally disenfranchising labor in our country, I think, was a big mistake, and President Trump, I think, proved that.
I don't want to be the party of the Rockefeller, Romney, Bush, you know, kind of philosophy.
And I think those arguments are going to play itself out.
Tremendously, and I think that where rights-based conservatism has really, really good points, which is you only got one gun, you make this point, right?
Don't ever do anything with this gun you don't want someone on the left to do.
Awesome point.
Where common good conservatives make the point, which is We have a declining culture and country right now, and people that are really suffering.
Why are we not doing more to help them right here, right now?
Both have validity.
They're going to play itself out, and I think it's going to be pretty heated, to be perfectly honest with you.
And to your point, President Trump being the anti-leftist president has kind of kept all that at bay.
But post-Trump, whatever that looks like, if he gets re-elected January of 2021, you are going to have a jump ball, to use a basketball analogy, the likes of which the conservative movement has not seen since the time for choosing speech Ronald Reagan back that he gave at the convention.
So, I do want to ask you one final question, Charlie, and that is, What your plans are, like what do you plan to do over the next 15 or 20 years?
Again, you're 26 years old.
But if you want to hear Charlie's final question, then you have to go over to dailywire.com.
When you do, and when you go subscribe, then you will get the rest of our conversation over there.
Now be sure to go pick up your copy of the MAGA Doctrine because it has gold lettering on it and a picture of the president hugging the flag.
So it is an exercise not only in brilliance, but subtlety.
I mean, clearly.
Charlie, thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mike Joyner and produced by Mathis Glover.
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