A year ago, if someone had told you you'd be at CPAC and working with the president to absolutely shred the government, the swamp, whatever you want to call it, would you ever believe that?
Yeah, I mean, I thought we were sort of heading for a point of no return, really.
Until that's why it was so essential that President Trump win the election and that there be a Republican majority in the House and Senate, which thanks to you, that has been accomplished.
unidentified
Yeah.
I want to ask you, one of the biggest questions I have for you is, you've been, you know, politically, you weren't really on one side or the other for a long time.
Yeah, I mean, that whole cancel culture and, you know, it's trying to stuff freedom of speech and infringe upon, just in general, infringe upon people's personal freedoms.
You know, they just want state control, state control of what you say.
They want to, you know, take away your guns.
And the reason they want to take away your guns, so there's nothing you do to oppose them.
So it's sort of like, you know, I just like, we just need to restore the fundamental elements of what made America great, which is freedom and opportunity.
unidentified
We're seeing a lot of these freedoms disappearing in the West.
It's not just about America.
We're all watching Europe and knowing that they're about 50, 100 years ahead of us, right?
I would say that watching what you're doing with Doge is just people love it.
I mean, I've always looked at the government and I've always looked at the government.
I've seen this big machine that, and you just know that they waste because they don't care.
There's more money coming.
They don't care.
You're cutting all this out.
Everybody in this country knows that the government is full of waste, fraud, and abuse.
And you're doing the work and the Americans love it.
Watching their reaction politically to this, I can't believe how bad they are at responding to this.
I don't know how you're going to sit there and scream and complain because they're cutting waste out of the government and try to win another election.
Yeah, like literally, you see these sort of fake rallies where there's hardly any people, and the media will frame it and get all six people in the frame, but there's like nobody else is there.
It doesn't have popular support.
But then you learn that there's hundreds of billions of dollars going to these so-called NGOs.
And it's your tax dollars that are funding things that are fundamentally anti-American.
unidentified
And they're propping up their narrative.
A lot of that government money has been propping up a left that I don't think is as strong as they made it seem.
Yeah, I got a lot of criticism, and people said, well, that privacy is a huge idiot from a, you know, like, look, you know, you voted for whatever, $44 billion, and now it's worth like $0.8 cents.
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, so all of all the sort of federal money going to media companies is what helps explain why the legacy media all says the same thing at the same time.
And I like that mean where they're, because they're always saying like threat to our democracy, threat to, but if you just replaced democracy with bureaucracy, it makes a lot of sense.
I talked to the president, he's supportive of that.
And so it sounds like that's something we're going to do.
So as we're finding savings, that's going to translate directly to reductions in tax.
unidentified
Yeah.
I mean, I think they fired 6,000 people at the IRS today.
And I think Lutnick said last night that they're talking about shutting down the IRS.
And I think it's fair.
I think people should realize this is, I mean, the amount of money that we send Washington like five or six trillion a year, that is such an ungodly amount of money.
I mean, what are they doing?
They say like a trillion seconds is like 30 years or something like that.
I mean, that's how much we send them, and they seem to never have enough.
People ask me, what's the most surprising thing that you've encountered when you go to DC, you know, when you're in D.C.
And I said, well, the most surprising thing is the scale of the expenditures and actually how easy it is to, just when you add caring and competence where it was absent before, you can actually save billions of dollars, sometimes in an hour.
It's wild.
unidentified
And then they scoff at it and say, oh, a few billion here, there.
I mean, the way they're talking about it, you can see they don't care.
It's such little money compared to how much they're used to wasting.
But obviously, it just shows that they really lack empathy for the average taxpayer who's working hard, paying taxes, and then they say, oh, a million dollars doesn't matter.
unidentified
I'm like, I think it matters a lot for people, you know?
I was like, how did you put all those thugs in prison without dying?
Because it seems like that would have been not easy, you know.
unidentified
Well, the president has, one of his top attorneys is now investigating, I guess, Chuck Schumer for threats against SCOTUS, a congressman on the Democrat side, who's saying, you know, basically saying we're going to bring a war to you, like a fight to you.
I mean, the rhetoric, you guys are screwing with things that are not supposed to be messed with.
Like, we did just, we just did like a check the database on Social Security, like says, how many Americans, alive Americans eligible for Social Security are there?
And according to the database, it's over 400 million.
But they managed to get $200 billion out of the country.
I'm like, what?
unidentified
Didn't we notice that?
Let me ask you, let's do immigration here for a second.
You know, there's this move now that Trump's latest thing is that he's going to cut funding any kind of money that ends up in the hands of illegal immigrants.
So if you're funding these sanctuary cities and states, that's how they thrive, right?
They're paying for these hotels.
That's all federal money.
If you've got a hotel in your city in New York, you've got all these hotels full of migrants.
That's not state money.
That's the feds are covering that.
He's going to cut all that.
It's really hard to deport 15 million people.
And it seems like the move now is, let's see if we, especially at the rate that we're going, it seems like the move now is, let's make it so that they leave on their own.
If there's no longer a dole system for them, if they can't get their hands on hotel rooms and money, they're going to go back, especially if there's no work.
Well, I think it's really important for people to understand that the Biden administration sent any possible money that they could, if there was money they could send to facilitate and amplify illegal immigration, they sent it.
They took money from FEMA, meant for helping Americans in distress, and sent that money to luxury hotels for legal immigrants in New York.
That is an outrage.
They actually did that.
And not only that, even after the president signed an executive order saying it has to stop, the female, the sort of whatever, deep state bureaucrats still pressed send on $80 million last week to go to the Roosevelt Hotel in New York and other places last week.
And now they're mad that it got stuffed.
and they're like trying to sue to have it be restored.
It's like the gumption isn't unreal.
unidentified
You think they're creating a new voter class?
Would you think that was the goal when they opened up the borders for four years?
Create a new voter class and get them citizenship, get them in.
So if the incentives, fundamentally, if the probability that an illegal is going to vote Democrat at some point, whether it's cheating, but eventually they can become citizens.
But if the probability is like 80, 90%, just look at California, which is supermajority Dem, then the incentive is to maximize the number of illegals in the country.
That is why the Biden administration was pushing to get in as many illegals as possible and spend every dollar possible to get as many, because every one of them is a customer.
Everyone is a voter.
So the whole thing was a giant voter importation scam.
Yeah, and then we found that there was like a $100 million contract given to some guy in London, actually, oddly enough, for the CVP1 app.
So they're flying illegals into the swing states.
And if you've got like a margin of victory of maybe 20,000 people and you fly 200,000 illegals into that state, it's not going to be a swing state for long.
I remember when they would do the electric car stuff, they would always try to box you out, even though you have the only electric car anybody wants.
Yeah.
You said, I think, this week, that you think that Biden left these astronauts up in space because he didn't want to give you an opportunity to save them, make NASA look bad, make the private sector look better, make you look good.
The Biden administration was attacking the next level.
I mean, the Department of Justice or Injustice under the Biden administration was, I mean, they were suing SpaceX.
They were suing SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers.
And we're like, but it's actually illegal for us to hire asylum seekers because we're Rocket technology is covered under ITAR rules, which means it's an advanced weapons technology.
And so we can only hire permanent residents or orchestra citizens.
So we're damned if we do, we're damned if we don't.
So how can they sue us for not hiring asylum seekers when it's actually illegal for us to do so?
But nonetheless, there was a big Department of Justice or Injustice case about this against SpaceX.
So obviously it was an antagonistic situation.
And those astronauts were supposed to be up there for eight days and now they're up there for eight months.
Does that make any sense?
And we obviously could have brought them back sooner, but they didn't want anyone who supported President Trump to look good, basically.
That's the issue.
unidentified
A lot of them are saying right now that the reason that you want to get into Social Security, that you want to get into all of these different into Treasury and things like that, is that you're looking for personal information and you're trying to make more money.
I've never met anybody as rich as you that cared less about money in my life.
Every time I hear a story about you, you're sleeping on a couch of some other guy in a city that you could buy the entire thing.
No, actually, I mean, listen, like, if I steal some Social Security, I can finally buy nice things.
unidentified
And on that same question, they're also talking about you guys are going to end Social Security, you're going to end Medicare, you're going to end these things.
I don't imagine that conversation has been had with the President, and that's the plan.
No, in fact, the actions that we're taking with the support of the president and the support of the agencies is what will save Medicare, what will save Social Security.
Ending a war always means you have to compromise, you have to negotiate with an enemy or an adversary.
That's just what it is.
And right now, they are lambasting the president for trying a different method to a war that they haven't been able to end for three and a half years or three years.
They're saying Trump's blaming Zelensky for the invasion.
How do you process all of the negativity toward him for trying to end this war?
Well, first of all, I think we should have empathy for the people dying at the front lines.
That's the most important thing.
And people have been dying.
It's like, how many more years is this supposed to go on?
And imagine if that was your son, your father.
What are they dying for?
What exactly are they dying for?
The line of engagement has barely moved for two years.
This is a whole bunch of people dead in trenches for what?
And I'll tell you what for what.
It's like for the biggest graft machine that I've ever seen in my life.
That's for what?
It's unreal.
Like the amount of money that is being taken in graft and bribery is disgusting.
And so what's actually happening is that those poor guys are getting sent into a meat grinder for money.
That's what's actually going on.
unidentified
and needs to stop and that's I mean that's it seems I mean Trump is so pragmatic on this it just He's just looking at it and he's saying it's Ukraine, it's not our country, it's not a NATO ally.
I just want to see people not dying.
I want to see on both sides.
I mean, think about how many young, so many young men have died in Ukraine that the army is starting to age out.
The military is aging out.
You've got 40 and 50-year-old guys fighting in a war because there's nobody left that's not killed or maimed in their 20s.
That's the reality of it.
Think about how many people that is.
If you're a humanitarian at all, you just got to end the war.
Like, you didn't ask the question, but I think it's worth nonetheless, maybe just elaborating on something, which is, you know, I grew up in South Africa, but my morality was informed by America.
unidentified
I read comic books, you know, played Dungeons and Dragons.
C-SPAN's coverage of the Conservative Political Action Conference continues this morning with remarks from Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, former Arizona Senate candidate Kerry Lake, and White House Deputy Assistant Sebastian Gorka.
It gets underway live at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2.
And more from CPAC this afternoon with Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, and others.
That's also live on C-SPAN 2 beginning at 3:15 p.m. Eastern, with additional coverage on our free mobile video app, C-SPAN Now, and online at c-SPAN.org.
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