Why President Trump Trusted Charlie ft. Donald Trump Jr.
President Trump has millions of supporters and thousands of people desperate for his ear. So, why did he put so much trust in Charlie, and turn to him over and over for advice? Donald Trump Jr. was a front-row witness to that fruitful relationship, and in his CK Exclusives interview at AmFest he explains how Charlie could offer the president something few others did: Honest advice instead of flattery, and a deep, intuitive understanding of the MAGA base. Join future CK Exclusives recordings in person by becoming a member at https://members.charliekirk.com/ Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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All right, everybody, we're going to get started here.
Without further ado, we'd like to welcome to the stage the one and only Don Jr.
So, Don, your popularity is waning here.
I know.
I've never not filled a room at Turning Point.
This is a little bit scary.
I hope this isn't an Umen of.
Yeah, complicated business, as they say.
We have obviously pretty tight security, so we might manage to smuggle in a few folks here.
So they wrote a bigger check.
Listen, this is the members leave.
You get to do it.
That's what it is.
So thank you for making the time.
And, you know, making the time to come to Amfest, obviously, you know, weighs heavy on all of us.
This is our first Amfest without Charlie.
You were one of Charlie's closest relationships, friends.
You guys spent a lot of time together in the early days, 2016, you know, on that campaign.
So I just want to make this about Charlie and you, the time you spent together, the memories you have of him.
And so when I ask you, who is Charlie Kirk to Don Jr.?
Oh, man.
Wow.
Listen, he was just honestly a generational talent.
I think we've all probably heard the story right now, you know, already about how we met.
I've said it many times.
This guy is the smartest guy in politics.
He knows everything.
And I was like, okay, this is great because we don't know anything.
Tell me more.
Tell me more.
It's like, well, he's 20 years old.
I go, stop.
Just, you know, if there's one thing we had no shortage of, it was guys that didn't know anything.
So I was like, there's no chance.
20-year-old is like, we got plenty of that.
We got plenty of people that don't know what they're doing.
That's the only thing we don't have a shortage of.
And he said, no, no, no, you got to sit down.
And I remember Charlie came up to my office.
We met the first time in my office in Trump Tower back when that was the war room.
And we sat down.
And in five minutes, I'm like, congratulations, like you're on the road with me.
And, you know, six months straight, just, you know, campaigning everything from, you know, fundraising to literally carrying bags.
Like, we had no infrastructure.
We had no team.
We had no logistical help.
We were literally just in the wild.
And it was amazing.
And I remember speaking at the first Amfest.
And it was literally a room, I think smaller than this.
It's like 200 people.
And it was like, he's like, whoa, look, we got 200 people in a room.
I'm like, that's really good.
Because we're used to the political room where this would be a very large crowd.
And so we're like, we're overperforming.
So to see the crowd build over the last few years has just been epic.
And then just seeing what I've seen right now on social out there, knowing that it didn't just wane with him not being here is amazing.
And I mean, that's his legacy, and we got to protect it at all costs.
Yeah, we had people lining up at 10, 11 o'clock last night.
Well, they were really loud at about 4 o'clock in the morning.
I know because they woke me up.
Just people chanting USA, which was great.
I don't know if I needed the car honking at 4 o'clock in the morning.
It was an early wake-up call.
Yeah, it was a lot worse than New York, actually.
Although maybe under Mandani, it'll be worse or comparable.
But to see that, people still piling in.
Obviously, Charlie's not here.
My dad's not making it this one.
It's like, wow, to see 30,000 people in the crowd like that, that's just, he really started a movement.
You said.
You said in five minutes you knew, okay, you're on the team.
Do you remember what was in that conversation?
Honestly, I have no idea.
You know, I have no idea, but you just, the way he carried himself, I was like, you know, this isn't a 20-year-old.
You know, what he was able to accomplish, you know, in his 31 years is what would be a crowning achievement of someone's life that got to see it through old age.
He just did so much.
He just knew there was a confidence there.
There was an understanding there.
He understood politics.
He understood Washington.
And most importantly, and this is what's generally lost with all of those people, is he understood our people and he genuinely cared.
And I think that was the difference.
I mean, I've always said sort of authenticity is everything in politics.
And if you're not real, if you're phoning it in, if you're fake, man, they smell you quickly and you just go nowhere.
And so when you are real, it's a rarity, but it's why you're able to do what he was able to accomplish.
I have a question about Charlie's growth, right?
So you got to see him 2016, 2025.
How did he change?
You know, honestly, he didn't change that much.
It just, he was afforded more opportunities.
You know, people started giving him the same shot that perhaps I gave him early.
You know, it took a little longer for them to sort of recognize that talent, I guess.
But he was just an absolute workhorse.
He always got it.
And I think that's what people miss.
They're like, oh, he's great on stage with a mic.
It's like, yeah, but then he gets off the stage and he's doing a podcast.
Then he's in there with donors.
And I mean, the guy just worked harder than anyone else.
And he was so passionate about it that it didn't matter.
I mean, his energy was perhaps second only to my father, who's also sort of a similar animal that.
Charlie sleeps more than your dad does.
Yeah, he was a great night guy.
Yeah.
But he cared so much.
I mean, he took care of himself at an age where, you know, I mean, I used to, you know, if you have dinner with Charlie, you're like, you're eating grilled chicken and salad again.
I'm like, you got to like hot sauce.
Yeah, with occasionally hot sauce, add a little spice.
But, you know, he just knew that he was on a mission and he was going to do whatever he could to make sure he fulfilled that.
Yeah.
So, you know, Charlie doesn't get enough credit for being funny and how much fun he was behind closed doors.
Blake knows this well.
Blake was traveling with Charlie internationally the last couple trips he took.
You know, what are some things about Charlie that you saw that you either want people to understand about him or that you just know the world didn't really get about him?
Well, I mean, I think that's certainly one of them.
I mean, his humor.
You know, again, Charlie, you know, always try to do like the prim and proper evangelical thing.
And so that is totally not me.
I say all the stuff that maybe some are thinking but are unwilling to actually articulate.
So, you know, you could put him in an uncomfortable position, but then he'd chime in.
And it was so, you know, for me, I do it all the time.
For him, when he chimed in on those kinds of things, it was like, whoa, where'd that come from?
So, you know, it was just honestly, like I said, a generational talent.
And so, you know, as part of this movement, you know, there's not one person that's going to replace Charlie Kirk.
There's not one person that would be capable of doing that.
But if we all sort of band together, if we all have that same passion, enthusiasm, energy, and try, maybe a few thousand of us can fill those little percentage points and try to get to that 100 and keep the movement rolling.
Can you tell us a bit about the relationship he developed with your dad as the president and as a candidate, too?
Yeah, you know, my father, he's a unique guy.
He'll listen to everyone and he sort of weighs those things equally.
I mean, I think how he was able to relate to regular blue-collar Americans, people like, how is it possible?
He's a trash billionaire from New York.
It's like, well, he grew up on construction sites.
He knew how to talk to those guys.
He was a better developer, not because he listened to the guy behind a computer screen on Excel in like a gilded office, but because he spent time on the job sites with real people.
And Charlie was like that.
So, you know, they understood each other.
I mean, there's not many people in the inner sanctum of my father's sort of political circle that he sort of gets even when perhaps he's being delivered news that he needs to hear but doesn't want to hear.
You know, politics that there's plenty of sycophants out there.
There's plenty of people who tell you, oh, you know, they show up for the wins and they hide from the losses or the losses are someone else's fault and the wins that they had nothing to do with.
You know, Charlie was one of the true people that could call him in the middle of the day and break through and be like, hey, man, this is actually a problem.
And I know no one's telling you this, but it is.
And so for my father to let in, even back in the day, a 25-year-old into that circle and have sort of full confidence in what he was saying and really change his views, perhaps change the way he delivered a message, was truly unique to see.
I don't think there was anyone else that he listened to that way.
And maybe period, but certainly not age-adjusted.
And so it's interesting.
I always, when I knew Charlie was, perhaps I'd accomplished what I wanted, just to get him there was when we'd be in a random place and Charlie's calling and he's picking up on the first ring or 11 o'clock at night, 12 o'clock at night on something.
And you get the call from Charlie.
He always took that call as opposed to a lot of people where he's like, yeah, no, I'm going to send that one to voicemail.
He really broke through and he understood how to talk with and deal with my father.
He was an interesting guy and not always the easiest person to do that with.
So he got it.
He understood how to do that.
And so they had a really unique relationship.
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And that hard work you mentioned, I just think of before the election.
We're working in several states, but our biggest one is Arizona.
And I was asking, we're just talking to Charlie, are we going to win?
And he says, I can't promise we're going to win the election.
We're going to win Arizona.
I promised the president I would win Arizona for him.
And that hard work element.
A friend of mine who'd worked in the admin said one of Charlie's best traits is if he says he'll take care of something, it really does.
Yeah, yeah, no.
If he said he was going to do something, there was no, hey, by the way, did you get it done?
Are you working on this?
You just knew it was handled.
And so I remember, I'm in Arizona.
I was out here a couple days before the election with Charlie, one of the basically the last live political events I had done with him prior to the election.
And even then, we almost had to cancel event because we got called in.
Some lunatic was, I guess, threatening me.
You remember that one?
You're like, hey, we don't think we can do this.
One's like, no, we're doing it.
And I mean, we've had that so many times.
I mean, Charlie understood there was a mark out there for either one of us.
We said the things that needed to be said.
We were willing to articulate things that may not have been popular, certainly not to the radical left, even though they really resonated with real Americans.
And that was an event.
Yeah, you were there.
I mean, it was like, hey, you guys got to cancel this.
This guy's on the loose.
He's threatening your life.
And it's like, yeah, no, we're just going to go do it.
And we had no, my father wasn't in office.
We didn't have the Secret Service.
We didn't have anything, but we were just unwilling to take the loss.
That was a consistent theme.
I remember even in 16, I guess we were at Michigan State University, and it was the same thing.
You've seen this a thousand times, right?
You sell 5,000 tickets, the school gives you a room that can hold 1,000 because they don't want you to be able to get it out there.
They don't want you to be able to speak.
And then they have to make sure to let in all the radicals just to try to shut it down.
I mean, it was an active attempt to thwart whatever it is that whatever movement was sort of building.
And we got into a room, I think, probably 1,000, 1,500 people, and we're about to go on stage.
And the Michigan State Police literally pulled us aside and said, hey, we can't stop you from going, but we also can't guarantee your safety.
It's pretty rowdy out there.
And we both looked at each other and basically said, I think we'd rather get our asses kicked than give them the win and not go out there.
And we did.
And we went out and we spoke.
And we won over so much of the room that they just, it was one of the most energetic of the many college events that we had done together because there was that sort of lunacy from the left.
And Charlie did such a good job of being able to talk to them.
And I run a little hotter, I guess.
But for him to be able to start having that conversation and even the people who were reasonable.
If you went into that room with an open mind, he was able to win you over.
Everyone was not going in there with an open mind.
That didn't matter.
But we did such a good job of just swaying that tide that they basically drowned out all the hatred, all of this, and just frankly energized not just the people on our side, but the people in the middle who were saying, this is actually a really reasonable guy, and this actually makes a lot of sense.
There's been a lot of speculation after Charlie's death, and you see this kind of some infighting.
And I think people respect in a whole new way what Charlie was actually doing and kind of the glue.
I take kind of a middle approach to it, that I think we saw some of these fissures coming on the horizon.
Maybe it accelerated some of the disagreements.
Maybe he was really holding it back.
It's tough to understand.
What do you make of that?
Do you have a new appreciation for it?
Did you understand?
Oh, 100%.
I mean, listen, I'm used to the fissures.
I'm used to people doing things for clicks.
I get it.
Politics has become a business for a lot of people.
So I get that.
But I probably didn't fully appreciate just how fragile some of it actually is and how much he was able to hold that together or just put a stop to it.
But the reality is Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Tucker, Megan, Candace, they're not the enemy.
I think we have an enemy that's truly out to change the structure of our country.
They want to manipulate our children.
Charlie understood the bigger picture.
And what's nice about our movement is that we are actually willing to hear other opinions.
We don't have to sort of blindly agree on everything.
We can have those conversations.
I'm not sure I love the way some of those conversations have unfolded, certainly in the last couple of months.
But that's the difference between us and the Democrat Party.
Whereas you've seen it a thousand times.
If you're not 100% with everything, you could be a thought leader of their movement for decades and you went away on this one issue, 1%.
And you're out.
You're persona non grata.
You're cast aside despite decades of work in that movement.
We're a little different.
I think why we're able to get to things that make sense is by actually having that conversation and that dialogue.
And I thought Charlie did that so well, not just within the movement, which I think we all probably recognize he was holding together or at least stopping perhaps some of the insanity from spreading, but by literally every day opening up one of the largest platforms in the world, whether it's his podcast, whether it was just being out there in public for social, to those who hated him most and giving them the opportunity to speak, giving them the mic.
And when people heard both sides of that argument, they realized, oh, wait a second.
I mean, it's why he was so effective on college campuses, which when he's like, hey, we've got a new college campus tour since 16, I was like, are you out of your mind?
That's lost.
That's over.
We'll get them when they're 30 and they start paying taxes.
But he was able to do that and have those conversations.
And again, once people heard both sides, then they could sort of pick a lane and run with it.
And I think that was perhaps his biggest threat to the other side.
Not that he was a radical, because Charlie was like the least radical guy I know.
Not that he was a wild man because that too was not his thing.
But his threat was that he was actually so effective at winning over and changing hearts and minds that he became much more of a target.
Yeah, so one of the things that I think is really interesting about in the aftermath of Charlie's assassination is that we had Ali Bestucci here and her initial reaction was, I don't want to do this anymore.
She was like, this isn't worth it.
This isn't worth it.
She just saw her friend get assassinated.
She pulled back.
And now she's doubling down.
She's had a complete reversal on that and she's all in.
But you have gone through a lot of the same stuff.
I mean, you've been interrogated.
You've been brought before committee hearings.
You got embroiled in the whole Russia hoax.
Your dad was almost assassinated.
Now Charlie.
You've been kind of not as vocal in the aftermath of the 2024 election.
You've been doing business stuff.
And I guess what do you make of that for people that are kind of maybe they feel a bit afraid, right?
They feel a bit scared.
What is that dynamic?
What's your advice?
You know, I get it.
I guess perhaps I've been a little bit more grown accustomed to sort of the threats or the lawfare or the political persecution side of stuff, doing 50 hours of congressional testimony for treason.
It's like, oh, it's a crime punishable but death.
That's like my average Tuesday at this point.
We've seen the threats.
I've opened the sort of exploding white powder envelopes at my house on multiple occasions.
I guess what I tell those people is, I get it, I understand, but think of what the alternative is.
That's what they want, right?
They want us afraid.
They want us silenced.
They want us unwilling to speak.
They want to turn us from the unsilent majority back to the silent majority.
And you could see for the last few years, if those people with the persecutions, and I get it, when you lose your bank accounts and you lose your this and you're being investigated, it certainly, the natural tendency would be to run from some of that.
But if you actually have these feelings and you want your children to grow up in a country that they recognize, you actually don't have a choice because as rough as it can be, I think the alternative is of just giving up and ceding this to the most radical factions of our country.
I think the end result of that is far worse than any of this.
And we've seen it can go very extreme.
So I understand, I'm not being glib about that, but we don't have a choice, and we just have to keep going and do it.
That's a great word, Don.
And actually, I've been grateful to your family for a long time, but in the aftermath of what happened with Charlie, that gratitude has reached new heights because I see it in three dimensions.
Thank you.
You guys have literally put up with unimaginable circumstances and threats and lawfare and trying to bankrupt the Trump org.
I mean, it's just, what haven't they thrown at you is where we're at.
Yeah, that's a much shorter list.
Yeah, it's a much shorter list.
But, you know, again, I think for us, you know, we have that same sort of mentality.
You know, if you have to choose between fight or flight, we just fight.
And, you know, we were lucky enough to, you know, when they went after us with the banks, we sort of went all in on crypto.
We came up with solutions to the problems that we were facing.
And I think a lot of people realized that if they can do it to Trump, they can do it to anyone.
But if they will do it to Trump and they will do it so flagrantly and so obviously, who won't they do it to?
And I think that brought a lot of people out of the woodwork.
I get it.
If you don't have that platform, if you don't have that balance sheet to be able to fight back financially, if you don't have any of those things, I could see that being much more daunting to the average person.
But again, I think they realize that if you don't fight now, there's no coming back.
There's no coming back from a communist takeover.
That's just degrees of bad at that point.
And so I think you almost needed to see that because when I started this and I was a business guy from New York City and it was great and I used to get invited to the cool person parties and you're like, well, America, I realized pretty quickly that initially I was sort of fighting for the America I believed in and always thought existed.
And this is just a little bit of something.
And I realized fairly quickly, and I know Charlie and I had this conversation a lot.
It's like, we weren't actually fighting to preserve an America that existed.
We were fighting to create an America that should have existed, the idea of our founding fathers, the things that they wanted.
That had been gone and bastardized for far too long.
And so everyone has this notion of their country.
It's like, no, no, no, man.
We're so far beyond that and so far gone.
We're not fighting to preserve something.
We're fighting to create something that should have always been.
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We have 10 minutes.
We can take questions.
So this is your opportunity.
Right there.
Do we have a mic, Emma?
All right, she's coming.
Let's do it for the mic.
So we get in on the pod.
Folks at home can hear the questions.
Paul Berg, one of my pledge masters from college, so he could ask some serious questions about hazing.
My name is Daniel, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say anything.
I come from Chicago, Illinois, 20 minutes from where Charlie was born and raised, from Lake Zurich.
As a brother in Christ, I never hurt so much when I heard the news and with you all and pray for you guys.
Thank you.
As involved with my church and politics locally, words of encouragement for me as I'm not going to back down from evil as it rears its ugly head, especially in Illinois, people say that it's lost, but I want to fight the good fight and the battle there because it's my home as well.
God bless you.
A little bit for Charlie as well.
What could I do there locally?
Just words of encouragement, truly.
I know I'm going to lie in my hope with God, who is the ruler, but simply.
So I think, you know, honestly, anything to stay engaged, right?
I mean, I think we've always, we've made this sort of mistake and we're coming up onto midterm cycles.
Like, well, Trump's not on the ballot, so I'm going to stay home, and it doesn't really matter.
Like, no, it matters.
Everything matters.
You know, it's not about winning a presidential seat or a Senate seat or even congressional stuff.
I mean, we got to win everything down to dog catcher.
We've seen what they've tried doing, you know, what's happened to our education system when the radical left control school boards.
Get involved in those things.
These local elections with a little bit of effort, matter.
And we never did that.
We were building businesses or something like that.
Our mindset was, we want government out of our lives, so we're not going to focus on it.
But we've seen how each one of those things has been taken over, subverted, and weaponized against us.
That we just have to get involved really across the entire board.
The biggest thing is we just can't cede any single aspect of these things.
And while Illinois, I came from the People's Republic of New York, there are still these pockets that we can't just give up.
If you do that, we can move mountains.
If you get involved, you do so effectively.
I think so much can actually change.
I think that local politics aspect has been something that's forgotten for so long, but frankly, it could be more important than even the bigger picture things that get all perhaps the glitz and the glam and the rallies.
But just have to stay involved.
You have to get to your friends.
You have to be, as we were sort of talking about earlier, you have to essentially become unafraid.
When you start talking, when you open up those doors to people, it's even, honestly, even when I was in New York, I mean, the amount of people that would come by, like, hey, great job, you know, sort of thumbs up under the coat.
They don't want anyone else to see it.
You start having these conversations with people, and they're like, oh, wait, I can actually do that.
When they see you actually be able to fight through some of that stuff and come out on top, it changes the mindset.
I mean, I talk about my father as being perhaps the most resilient man in the history of American politics.
I mean, when he got into this thing, he had no chance of winning a primary.
He wasn't going to make it two weeks.
It was a marketing stunt.
Then he got into a general and he had 0% chance of winning basically onto election day.
Then he wins, and then they're going to impeach him.
They got him this time, and the walls are in the walls are closing in.
The walls are closing in.
I was like, I don't know.
The walls were closing in three days ago when they released pictures, 95,000 pictures for Jeffrey Epstein.
He's in like four of them, and they were all like public pictures at events with adults, but they black out the face to make it seem like it's there.
And then, you know, now all of a sudden there's 4,000 pictures of Clinton behind the scenes with minors, and it's like, you know, but people will never even hear those things.
You know, they'll never know about those things.
It's what you guys are doing on this show, what perhaps I do on my podcast on Rumble.
It's just like getting the information out that no one else is going to put out there.
Once you start having these conversations and people realize that that stuff is going on, man, just opening that door for them to walk through a little bit.
It's not easy to always be the leader, but when you do, so many people will follow.
And when they start having that dialogue and they can do so respectfully, like Charlie did so well, you can really change the game.
And so the biggest thing is just stay involved, get everyone involved.
No task is too small.
All right.
Next question.
My name's Kathleen.
I'm from Alaska.
And just really appreciate, Don, you, and your family.
Don't want you to give up.
Stay in the game with us, please.
We need you.
We don't know how to give up.
Okay, good.
But I just want to say in answer to his question, so many other people, you don't have to get involved.
We need people involved in the electoral process, but I asked someone on the left, a longtime Alaskan, who was the fish czar for Alaska for off-our waters internationally.
And I said, if you were king for a day of Alaska, what would you do?
Because he served under Governor Wally Hickel.
And he said, if I were king for a day, I would stack boards and commissions.
Every city, every state has boards and commissions for every subject under the sun.
And you don't have to get elected for that.
You just have to put your name in the hat.
And you can get appointed.
And if you stack boards and commissions, which is the ground level of entry to everything else, and it covers the subjects, you can be a voice that gains more voice.
We did, I was on a board and a commission for federal overreach in Alaska, and it was amazing what we were able to accomplish.
So I just encourage people, that's an entry-level way to get in.
100% right.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, Mr. Trump, for doing all you do.
I heard something here at Turning Point USA that was very disturbing about Pastor's son in South Korea.
He's been in prison for over 105 days for being a Christian and preaching the gospel.
He rose up at mega church from a mud hut.
And I think it would be awesome if you could maybe put some pressure or talk to your father about putting some pressure on South Korea to get him out of prison.
I actually just heard about this, Bettina.
I bet.
Literally just sent it to me yesterday.
So, you know, I write about that, but I've actually been over to South Korea a bunch.
I've spoken at, I think, one of the largest evangelical church in the world.
And obviously, there's, you know, it's not easy to be evangelical in South Korea even.
But I know there's a lot of that stuff going on.
I just heard about the story yesterday for the first time.
So I'll look into it.
I've been with Pastor's son probably, it was two weeks before or a week before Charlie was assassinated.
It was a week before.
Not even.
Not even.
Four days.
I think I may have actually met him when I was in Korea.
It was sort of a rapid fire in the sons today.
The sons are here.
And yeah, we're going to get those notes to the administration for sure.
Yeah, we are.
And Don, you can help.
Yeah, it's a grave injustice what happened to him.
He basically said something political.
And in South Korea, you're not allowed to do that if you're a Christian.
Mr. Trump, how are you today, sir?
Doing well.
Wonderfully.
Like you, I'm also from the People's Republic of New York as well.
But putting that to the side, Charlie Kirk absolutely was and still is to this day my hero.
And I was just wondering, what advice would you give to a person like me to help uphold the wonderful legacy that he left behind in terms of his pursuit of civil discourse and trying to bridge divides and reach out to people on the other side of the aisle?
Just get out there and have the discourse.
He wasn't used to doing that when we started in 1916.
He just started doing it.
It wasn't a thing.
It wasn't popular.
There wasn't the prove me wrong type tours that didn't exist.
We sort of just created it on the fly by having those things.
And so again, just that willingness to get out there, the willingness to have those conversations, you can do that respectfully.
You don't have to do it from an attack perspective.
And I think when people see that and they start, you back things up with actual facts, you'd be surprised.
I was frankly surprised how many people you can win over who may not agree on much on a lot of these things, but you've seen it.
One of my favorite montages that our team put together was from some of these tours.
I think Emma actually put it together where it was like all these people kind of would say, Charlie would give a hat.
Do you want a hat?
Because you came and you disagreed, and if I convinced you, and you can have a hat if you want.
And he'd be like, give me the hat, give me the hat.
And there's this montage of all these kids getting convinced.
And you put that on social media and it was multiply that by probably millions.
Thank you, Mr. Trump.
Thank you.
All right.
Last question.
Thank you, Mr. Trump.
So my name is Matthew.
I was born in the Bay Area in 1996.
And so I grew up, all these leftist institutions taking over our schools.
And I grew up as a young man where I was made to feel evil because of my identity, basically because I, you know, even though I hadn't done anything.
And so my question for you is, you know, there are a lot of young men who are angry and frustrated and resentful because of the direction that the messaging has taken and the economy.
And, you know, things are just very hard.
And so do you have a message for these young men who are angry and struggling?
Well, I think you should be.
I mean, I spoke about it a lot on social media this week.
You saw sort of, you know, for the last 20 years, the implementation of DEI.
I mean, if you were a young white male, especially, it's like, didn't matter if you were qualified to go to an Ivy League school, you weren't getting in.
You weren't getting the promotion.
You know, there's literally a generation or two of men that are going to have a hard time ever achieving that full potential because they were essentially shut out of the workforce.
They were shut out of academia.
But I think those people still had that potential.
It was pulled away from them in many respects.
But I think like everything else, you just have to keep going.
There's no way to undo that, unfortunately.
But I think with that potential that they had, I think there's other ways that you can do things.
In the world in which we live right now, there's such a dynamic change with AI and everything going on right now.
I think there's opportunities to take those talents and be able to gain back those losses that were so unfairly taken from you.
But I get it.
We're trying to end that right now.
My father signed some EOs this week to stop that sort of essentially reverse racism that was going on against everyone.
And you weren't going to get those jobs.
You weren't going to get into those schools.
You weren't going to get the promotion.
But you were privileged.
And if you were pissed about it, then you're a racist or something.
It doesn't have to make sense.
When they control the media, when they controlled the narrative, when they controlled all of social and tech, it didn't matter that you're just bitter.
And you should be, but that doesn't mean you should give up either.
I think there's a lot of potential.
You just have to get back out there and do it in an unconventional way.
And Charlie and the Trump family, you guys are great examples because a lot of people think Charlie was like created in a Petri dish by billionaire donors or something like this, the RNC.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
He massed.
You're going to get me in trouble here, Dan.
Too soon?
Too soon?
I'm sorry.
Thanks, John.
I've heard it all, man.
I've heard it all.
Yeah, that was a great interview until then.
Yeah, so thanks for derailing us.
I'm trying to get you backstage, John.
So we, you know, but Charlie basically had the door slammed in his face more times than it was opened for a long, long time.
And he just was an entrepreneur about it.
He was so disruptive and he worked so hard that eventually he just forced the door to break down in front of him.
And you guys, you think about your father's presidential run, I mean, he had to, it was a hostile takeover.
You had to force the way into the apparatus of the GOP.
And so, whatever those barriers are, I mean, I just believe Charlie is the living embodiment of he was just so dogged and so determined that it wasn't gonna, he wasn't gonna be told no.
And I think that's the perspective we have to have in this country.