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Dec. 23, 2024 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
01:02:52
Happy Festivus: Airing Our Grievances and Stopping The Swamp w/Sean Davis | TRIGGERED Ep.201
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Thank you.
Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
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And today is December 23rd, also known as Festivus.
So, we'll be doing an airing of the grievances, and we'll be joined by Sean Davis from The Federalist, so it should be a fun one.
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Well, guys, joining me now, the Federalist founder and CEO, Sean Davis.
Good to have you back, man.
Sean's always a great voice for those of you who don't know, so that's a big one.
Well, it's good to be back.
Thank you for having me.
My pleasure.
So, Sean, first and foremost, thanks for taking the time.
As I mentioned in the introduction, we're going to be doing a Festivus airing over the grievances.
Obviously, we're now in a position to actually address these grievances on January 20th, but on their way out, you know, the Biden team, the swamp, the The military-industrial complex, they want more war, more mass illegal immigration, and much more of everything that benefits D.C. and much more of everything that the American people voted against on November 5th.
What's your assessment of the risks to be aware of over the next four weeks and how quickly we can right the left's wrongs here?
Yeah, man, if we're doing an airing of the grievances, we're going to need like a 10-hour podcast here.
How many weeks do you got?
Yeah, the thing to watch out for is I think the swamp, it's pretty cunning and it's pretty clever.
We saw that really after the election in 2016. You know, Donald Trump goes in and wins an election.
It's pretty clear.
It wasn't particularly close.
And then immediately they started plotting to destroy him and hijack his presidency, maybe prevent him from being inaugurated.
And I think even those of us who are pretty cynical were really taken off guard and taken by surprise.
And so I think we should keep in mind the lessons of 2016 as we move through, you know, this last 25, 30 or so days before we get to inauguration.
These people are evil.
They believe they're entitled to rule us.
They believe they have a divine right to power.
They have no morals.
And they'll do literally anything they can with power they have at their fingertips to crush us, to crush President Trump.
And so I think we need to be watching them all like hawks and assuming that every little time we see a head pop up, every time we see a little movement in the distance, we need to know that they're plotting To take down the rest of us.
They don't believe in democracy.
They don't believe in representative government.
They believe they have a right to rule.
And so I think like a cornered animal, they are at their most dangerous right now for the next 20-25 days as they prepare to lose power.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's nuts.
What do you see as the most sort of egregious examples of all of this right now?
I mean, we're seeing more and more, you know, last week as it relates to, you know, the CR. I know the Federalists had some very stern reality checks for, you know, Speaker Johnson and other Republican leaders.
Like, it doesn't seem like we need to just give Washington everything that it wants to get this thing done.
That doesn't seem to be in line with what the American people actually want.
No, there's this weird thing that happens where no matter how the elections go, no matter who we vote into power or no matter how kind of transformative the change is, Washington just keeps doing what it wants to do regardless is if elections don't exist and they don't matter and the people are irrelevant.
I think a good example of the nonsense from the deep state over the last couple of weeks is all this drone stuff.
They're obviously lying to us about everything.
We know they're lying.
They know that we know they're lying, and yet they just keep on doing it.
And it's probably some sort of stupid explanation that's going to embarrass someone, and so that's why they don't want to tell the truth.
But to me, that's such a perfect example Just tell us what's going on.
It's not hard.
We're responsible.
We're all adults.
And yet you come up with these completely absurd lies that everyone knows are fake.
And to me, it's just a sign of total disrespect of the people that they think we really just have to take what they tell us and go with it, regardless of how silly it is.
Yeah, I mean, they really do act like aristocrats, right?
Whether it's the deep state or Congress, we just know better.
You're not entitled to any information or any knowledge.
We will raise your taxes and or our debt levels at $35 trillion to keep funding this stuff and keep you in the dark.
But it's crazy.
I mean, at this point, it almost feels and again, from all sides, it feels like just simple disdain from the for the American taxpayer.
This is their money.
This is our money, not government's money.
And they don't feel like there's any accountability to the American people.
Yeah, you know, and it's easy to look at what happens and be tempted to say, oh, well, this is a one party problem.
This is the Democrats.
You know, Republicans are fine.
But that's not true either.
In the last week or so, I saw Mitch McConnell go out complaining about Trump, complaining about the election, saying, oh, you know, we have to do more than to manage America in decline.
This is a guy who's been in power for like 800 years.
Yeah, they blame Trump for problems like for years before Trump was ever in power.
It's truly shocking.
I mean, he gets to carry the brunt of their gross incompetence and gross negligence over the last like five decades of their hegemony and power in D.C. Exactly.
And I went and checked the numbers.
So I guess Mitch McConnell got elected in 1985. He's been in Republican leadership pretty much my entire adult life.
Our national debt when he got into the Senate was $1.8 trillion, which is still an insane amount of money.
It's grown 20x.
While he's been in Congress, we pretty much only lost wars as long as he was in Congress.
And as best I can tell, the only time America hasn't been in decline, either culturally, economically, militarily, in my adult lifetime, was the four-year span from 2017 to 2021. And this dinosaur has the audacity to come in and pretend like somehow he has personally been given a mandate to block whatever Trump and the Americans want to do.
I find it so disgusting.
And I think it's important for people to understand You know, the enemy here isn't Democrats.
The enemy isn't Republicans.
The enemy are these career people in politics, whether it's, you know, media people, deep state people, politicians.
It's these careerists who believe they have a right to rule us.
They're the actual problem here.
Yeah.
And again, the mandate for the American people is so clear, right?
What they want is they want transparency.
You know, Doge is getting all this reaction because everyone wants to know how the sausage is made.
We've been lied to for so long, so aggressively.
No one believes any of it anymore.
And yet it's like, it doesn't matter.
We still know better.
You know, the elected bureaucrats and the unelected bureaucrats all sort of seem to agree on that.
If you're in Washington, D.C., if you're part of that swamp, we're just going to know better and we're going to do our best to keep it business as usual.
And that's the only thing the American people don't want.
They voted for Trump and Elon Musk and the rest of Trump's cabinet to show them exactly what they've been missing, and they couldn't care less.
No, they couldn't.
I remember when I was a really young staffer for Tom Coburn in the Senate 20 years ago, and Coburn did this great thing where he hired a bunch of young kids who we hadn't been there long enough to know that you weren't supposed to do certain things.
We actually still believed in certain principles and we thought we could change Washington.
And I remember we would do stuff early on and all the people who'd been there for 30 years would kind of tut-tut at us and they'd look down their nose at us and they'd say, excuse me, that's not how we do things here.
And then we would respond, yeah, that's why everything sucks.
It's why you're ruining America.
And I'm constantly trying to get back to that attitude of, like, kind of being too naive to know that's not how things work.
Because that's actually how you get change done, is you go in there and you do the things that people say you're not supposed to do.
And it makes you wildly effective.
That's what Elon's been doing.
That's why I love Doge.
And that's why they're so afraid, because it's like, once the government realizes, once everyone realizes, hey, they're wasting trillions of dollars, probably legitimately a trillion dollars a year, maybe more, that all of a sudden changes.
So many of these jobs, they're just meaningless.
Keeping with the Seinfeld theme of Festivus, it's like George Costanza in that episode where he doesn't even know if he's been hired or not.
It's like office space.
The guy with the stapler in the basement, he was fired years ago, but he keeps getting payroll.
He just keeps showing up.
I guess it doesn't really matter.
Can we fix it?
How bad will the resistance be to that, etc.?
That's such a great example you bring up.
I remember when I worked on the Hill, there was a somewhat famous like middling economist who worked at the Treasury Department and thought he was God.
And he ended up being a total turncoat and it ended up getting canned.
And the story at the time was he was wandering the Treasury building, like moving from vacant office to vacant office for like weeks or months to avoid getting fired.
And it was like straight up Costanza from that job.
Yeah, what I love from Elon is you have this guy who's succeeded in literally everything he's done in ways that I find is totally mind-blowing.
And now he's sunk his teeth into the federal budget and he's decided that's going to be his next project.
And I just love the energy that he is going in there with Doge.
He's not playing by the old rules that everyone plays by.
He's got a completely new team.
He's got Vivek in there.
It's kind of the first time I've been truly excited and optimistic about reform in Washington in 10 or 15 years.
Because you've got a guy in there who's never failed at anything, who's decided this is the next project.
And it's odd.
I'm getting old and cynical, and it's nice to kind of be optimistic and hopeful.
Again, I've not felt that in a long time.
Yeah, and again, I think this is someone, obviously, with the brain capacity to figure it all out.
And again, even if the swamp puts up that fight, the second the people understand exactly what they're fighting to preserve, the waste, the fraud, the abuse, the grift, the graft, all of it.
It's like there's going to be sort of a mental revolution in our country.
There's cynicism for the government.
And again, I'm not naive.
They're going to put up a fight.
They're going to try to stop it.
They're going to do everything in their power.
But when the people see what these guys are fighting to protect, the lengths they're going to protect that kind of waste, I think it backfires grossly.
I think they almost just have to go along with some of it or risk just being all totally voted out because this is not little stuff.
I mean, this is trillions and trillions of dollars when you hear about the people not showing up to work and they don't know where the lights are on in the buildings.
And, you know, they're still getting paid.
They're probably making money on other jobs while being full time government workers because they're working from home and they've never been to the office.
It's really, man, it doesn't seem like they'd be able to put up that much of a fight.
They will try.
Don't get me wrong.
Again, I'm not naive, but but there is a point where, like, I imagine it's so bad that once people get even a fraction of it, permanent Washington is finished.
Oh, yeah.
And you talk about buildings.
My goodness.
The number of federal buildings that are completely vacant, beautiful buildings, ton of history.
They're built well in expensive cities because, of course, government never sets itself up in low cost of living small towns.
It's always got to be the big city.
Maybe hundreds of billions to be saved by selling these buildings off or leasing them out to people who actually want to use them.
Or better, keep the buildings.
Actually make people go to work so they actually do something.
And the ones who refuse, those are the first people you cut and you can actually get rid of that.
You know, no one's going after After four years of working from home, half these people are not going back to their D.C. crappy job if they actually are forced to show up.
If they're not sitting there playing with their children and walking their dog all day long rather than actually doing their job.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think sometimes it's just a matter of telling people, you're coming into work today.
That's all it'll take to fire them.
It used to actually be really, really hard to fire a federal worker or force them out because they got these amazing benefits.
They got this huge pension.
But apparently now, like having to put on pants and get in the car, I think that's going to be a bridge too far for millions of them.
What do you think about this Biden bill, where it's like, here, we're going to make a deal for 42,000 federal, just to protect their ability to work from home.
I mean, again, it seems to just, you know, be a punch to the face of the American public, who's literally, like, Doge was one of the biggest things that they were voting for.
And it's like, no, no, no, we understand that.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, you know, I know it's Joe Biden signing it, but no one actually believes he came up with that regulation or even believes it.
It's clearly...
Designed by the Democrats to protect their bureaucratic stranglehold on the swamp.
But do the American people see through that?
Is this something Trump can circumvent because it's inside that sort of 100-day window where you're just like, nope, we're undoing this nonsense?
What do you see there?
Yeah, I have a hard time believing that that's something that can never be undone.
You know, a Congress can't bind a future Congress.
A president can't bind a future president.
So this idea that somehow Biden, by himself, the only person on Earth who can do it, can negotiate through space and time for eternity in a way that you can't undo some ridiculous government federal employee union contract.
I just have a hard time believing that that can't be undone.
I mean, all it takes is Congress to go and do it, for starters.
Yeah, doesn't the fact that they're just doing it and tell us everything we need to know?
I mean, the fact that they're desperately, with three weeks left against a mandate on November 5th, against all this, doesn't it tell you everything you need to know about the Democrat Party?
Yeah.
And you asked early on kind of about the risks.
And I'm thinking as you're talking, one of them is that there is so much insanity.
There's so much waste.
There's so many people who just aren't doing anything that it's actually easy to overwhelm people with all the insanity to the point where they kind of just shut down.
And it's like the shock and awe version of government waste.
If we just do so much of it that it's like whack-a-mole, they'll never be able to stop it.
I kind of feel like that's their strategy right now.
Just do as much nonsense as possible and they'll never be able to find all of it and eventually they'll be so frustrated they give up.
Yeah, I mean, and they'd probably be right if it wasn't someone like an Elon, right?
I mean, you know, he sort of accomplished, you know, impossible tasks.
I mean, you look at SpaceX and what it's doing, it's like, they're now like ahead of NASA, which has been doing this for 75 years, funded privately, you know, like, he's the one guy that could probably actually do it, doesn't care.
Those sort of roadblocks are just...
You know, it's just another challenge I think he's willing to accept.
So I'd ask you, Sean, what does reform look like to you in minute one?
Oh, wow.
You know, day one, minute one.
I think reform is, you know, everyone's back at work.
Everyone knows what job they're supposed to do.
Each agency does only what's constitutional and only what's within its statutory purview.
We have a border that's secure.
We have a military that doesn't exist to, like, foment completely bizarre trans nonsense.
You know, like, maybe they exist to kill people and break things.
When I was growing up, my dad was career military.
He's like, yeah, that's what we're good at.
We're good at killing people at breaking things.
And that's the one thing they never seem to be allowed to do, It's always got to be this nation-building nonsense.
It would be nice if we had a deep state that only existed to protect the American people, an intel apparatus that didn't think its job was just to spy on us and manipulate us.
I mean, there's like a million different things I think that they can do on day one that will materially make America better for the long term.
I guess, you know, one of the biggest changes is the power and the passion of the MAGA base, right?
In 16, you had a lot of people that, like, now that's expanded.
It's expanded demographically into, you know, a strong part of what used to be the Democrat base.
We see it with the cabinet picks and the Senate.
Talk about the shift and the microphone the bass now had.
I see it a lot.
It looked like the swamp was going to get a scalp with Pete Hegseth.
And all of a sudden, the bass was like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We're not allowing that, aided and abetted by guys like me and you and other vocal forces.
But that didn't exist in 2016. Talk about that change and that shift, because I think it's really important where it's not just...
You know, hey, it's the president of the United States.
I understand he's the duly out of the president.
But when it's the base and they get it and they see what's going on and they start being vocal, how long can Washington sort of flail in the face of that kind of awareness?
Yeah, it's huge.
And I think Twitter or X is a big part of it.
You know, I think personally, that's a big reason Trump won in 2016 is he found this new way of going over and beyond the heads of all the people in corrupt corporate media.
And it was Twitter.
And that's why the deep state worked so hard to basically take it over to censor everyone on social media, whether it was Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.
It's why they were terrified when Elon came in and said he was going to buy it.
And It's such a powerful tool for the people that I don't think anything that's happened over the last year happens without that.
And it's because, you know, I agree in a in a member of Congress's office, they can choose to not pick up the phone.
They can choose to not listen to the voicemail of the tens of thousands of people.
They can choose to just never go back to their state, stay in Washington the whole time and never be confronted by their own voters.
Twitter, X, it reopens that line of communication between the people.
We're the actual rulers of this country.
It's not the people in permanent Washington.
It opened up a line for us, the bosses of the country, to our employees, who are the senators and the members of Congress.
It's actually why they hate it.
You should have heard the complaints I was getting in the last couple weeks about what we were doing on the Hegsack nomination.
Senators were furious about the pressure they were getting as a result of the stuff you and I and other conservative media were doing because they thought that the way it worked was they tell us how it goes.
And we kind of did that scene in Batman where Bane puts his hand on the shoulder of the guy and he says, like, who do you think is in charge here?
It's not you.
It's us.
Yeah, I mean, that one was sort of amazing, again, because it looked like this, and you couldn't give them that scalp early, because if they got Pete Hegseth, they'd just start working on RFK and Tulsi and all these people that, you know, again, even different political ideologies years ago, but that just sort of came to light.
But the Hegseth one was amazing, because it's like, how dare you question our willingness and ability to rely on unnamed sources that made this versus actual named sources?
People that were there in the room who are willing to put their name on paper and sign it with an affidavit format saying, like, none of this is true.
It's nonsense.
They were going to try to tank a great patriot based on, you know, a few people.
I mean, this is Russia, Russia, Russia all over again.
It's like, we're going to believe the anonymous sources, not reality, not anything that makes any sense.
We're not going to follow Ackman's razor.
You know, the most likely answer probably is.
And, you know, I say they sort of learned it.
I call it ETP. Education through pain.
The base stepped up.
They called it out.
And they made it very clear that if these guys were going to do that, they were going to have a problem the next time they ran for re-election.
And it was a dynamic shift in a couple days' time where, hey, most of the media was cheering and or hoping for some of these nominations to be dead, and that ain't the case anymore.
Yeah, and Pete, he's such an interesting example, and I think he represents something that terrifies the deep state and the corrupt Washington cabal because of the transformational changes in his life.
He was a guy who went to war, you know, after 9-11, after the invasion of Iraq, went in super rah-rah, I think like most people who did, and then realized, wait a minute, our lives are being tossed away by people who don't care for us for objectives that they don't understand.
And it was a really embittering thing for him.
Every veteran that I'm friends with who was in Iraq or in Afghanistan, they went through the same thing where they look back at the last 10 to 15 years and the people who put them there with utter disgust because of the disdain and total lack of regard they had for their lives and their sacrifices.
And then you also saw these transformational changes in his personal life.
You know, I happen to know him somewhat well.
He is a very faithful, committed Christian.
He's a wonderful dad.
And this is someone who they, you know, in previous years, they might have been able to manipulate.
They might have been able to push around.
But given the things that have happened in his life, he is a man transformed.
And a man transformed is a mortal threat to Washington.
He is a deep danger to them.
And they thought if we can get rid of him, if we can take out the strongest guy of the whole bunch, we can have the run of the land for the next four years.
Trump doesn't have control of the Senate.
It's back in Washington.
I mean, that would have been a very dangerous thing.
And, you know, it's not over till it's over.
But like, I think if you rolled over and gave them that win early, you know, it would be over.
I think he, I mean, his joke, he's a friend of mine as well.
I think he sort of joked, hey, I'm sort of a reformed neocon because I was a rah-rah guy about these things.
And, you know, we're defending America.
Dude, I was You know, in 2016, when they did the Russia, Russia, Russia thing to me, I was like, well, there must be something to it.
It's the FBI. Like, there has to be some truth to this stuff.
Like, you know, I must have missed it.
I'm kind of a newbie to all of this.
Ooh, the CIA said it.
I'm like...
No, no, no.
I used to think I was fighting to preserve the America we know and love.
No, no, no.
It's the opposite.
I'm fighting now to create the America we thought actually existed, but has been subverted by these evil and powerful forces inside the D.C. swamp.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I was talking to friends after election night about the massive cultural change that seemed to happen immediately.
And it was like the entire country kind of had a walk to Damascus moment.
Scales had been put over their eyes.
And then immediately they just all fell.
And suddenly everyone started talking about the stuff that we had been talking about for years.
You know, the deep state is totally corrupt.
Pharma's trying to poison us for money.
The people who were running tobacco took over the food supply and then they're putting all kinds of poison stuff in there.
These were the things that people were talking about in our daily lives.
They weren't political people.
They weren't political obsessives.
We were working on a project here a couple weeks ago where the guys who were helping us were talking about how excited they were about RFK getting all the crap out of the food.
Something happened culturally that was so much bigger than an election, so much bigger than politics.
And it's the one thing that I find really so inspiring is it's not just us political dorks talking to each other and going round and round.
It's everyday normal people who were wise to the nonsense probably a lot earlier than we were, and they were just quiet about it.
They're the ones that are energized.
It's an exciting time right now.
Yeah, so I guess the follow-up to that is like, you know, how do we sustain all of that, right?
Obviously, you know, the Federalist is a big part of that.
You guys have done an incredible job.
Your Twitter feed is amazing.
I mean, and then there's, you know, guys like me and Charlie Cricket Turning Point.
I mean, there are people now with big followings, far more so than most of the people in government, willing to talk about it.
But how do we make sure this has legs?
I mean, a big part of my whole focus in the last few months, from before the RNC and on, was, hey, it's not just another four years of Trump and then we go back to the old ways.
We need a runway.
We need a bench.
We need people who are able to do this and continue this movement in perpetuity.
It's a big part of my whole push for J.D. Vance.
But how do you think we sustain this to keep that pressure on, to make sure that these are permanent changes, not sort of a four-year, well, we'll flip the switch off and we'll go back to neocon warmongering and deep state nonsense for the rest of eternity until we collapse the civilization?
Yeah, I think the most important thing is personnel matters.
Personnel is policy.
And that goes for a presidential administration who a president appoints and hires.
But it also goes for Congress as well.
And you can't have people in Congress who just want to do the same old stuff and get the kind of change you need.
And so it's really important that the The bad people, they got to go.
The dead weight, the people who are fighting against us, we got to find ways to get rid of them.
Maybe it's a primary, maybe it's forcing them out.
I think that's the most important one.
So that's step one.
And then step two is, it's really important to show people progress.
You don't want to squander this moment where everyone has so much hope and optimism and then not do anything with it.
There has to be regular, demonstrable progress where it's, we're cutting out this program, we're cutting out that program, we're reforming this.
You can't, it's about more than winning an election, and so many people in Washington, especially Republicans, they think the election is the finish line.
Like, oh, we got there, we won, we're good.
Now we gotta do it, yeah.
Yeah, no, that's the gun going off at the start of the race.
Like, that was the easy part.
Now we got to do the work.
And so we have to show the American people, we have to show, you know, our audience and your audience, we're actually making progress because if we don't, people are going to say, oh, it's just same old, same old again.
I'm going to go check out.
And then the permanent uniparty wins.
So, you know, I have a feeling I know where you're going to go on this one, but I've been talking about for a while, and I'd love to get your thoughts.
How should the Trump White House remake or restructure the press briefing room?
It seems like, you know, the usual suspects in the front seat, they've been clearly acting as, you know, actors of the Democrat Party, basically their marketing department.
It seems there's so many either smaller publications or independent journalists that would never be able to get a seat in that room that have been right, that have exposed some of this nonsense to the American people that made such a difference in this election.
What are your thoughts on all of that?
Now, that's a great question.
And as you suspected, I have lots of thoughts.
So right now, there's a monopoly on that press room, and it's held by the White House Correspondents Association, which sounds very official and fancy and austere and all that.
They gotta go.
You can't give a monopoly to this completely corrupt cabal of Washington Democrats who exist entirely to either support Democrat policies or take out Republicans.
And they decide who gets in that room, where you sit.
They basically decide whoever gets to ask a question.
They give the impression that the press secretary can pick.
But when you've stacked the deck in there, When it's 100% political activists designed to do the bidding of the Democrat Party, there's no objectivity there.
There's no impartiality there.
Yeah, so I think there needs to be a competitor to that.
Maybe it's somebody who comes in and basically supplants the White House Correspondents Association.
Maybe you have them jockey for position, but I think there needs to be an independent White House Correspondents Association for independent media, like the Federalist or Breitbart.
Rumble, you know, why shouldn't Rumble have a seat in there?
How about the biggest podcasters in the world?
I mean, some of these guys have 10x the audience of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
And they've been objectively right far more often than that.
Clearly not as politicized.
I mean, why shouldn't those people have access to the same kind of questions?
Because if we're about transparency, if we're about getting it all out there, shouldn't everyone have a shot at that?
Absolutely.
And especially the people who've been right about stuff, they should get on the front row.
Like, I want to see my colleague Molly Hemingway on the front row asking questions.
She's not a pushover.
Like, she demands answers.
She wants honesty.
You don't just want, like, fluffers in the front row there.
You want real journalism.
You want actual people who care about the truth and care about facts asking the questions.
And the problem is, all the people there now, they represent the Democrat Party.
That's all they care about.
You know, at The Federalist, all we've ever cared about is representing the people who read us.
We don't exist to tell them what Washington wants.
We exist to tell Washington what the people want.
And that's what you need in there, in that briefing room.
And it's something that, you know, professional Washington, the completely corrupt White House press corps, they'll fight it tooth and nail, but they're a huge problem.
Maybe even a bigger problem than everything else, because the Democrats in the deep state, they can only get away with the nonsense they do because they have the media providing air cover for them.
Yeah, I mean, and again, I'm not about blocking anyone else out of that room.
Let them report what they want.
But to show the contrast is so important.
So even if it's just an expansion of that room, allowing for other voices, again, clearly not as corrupted, clearly not as politically biased.
I think the American people would want that.
And I imagine the White House press corps is going to rebel greatly against that.
But do they have all the power?
It's just like a union contract where you can't break it and they can prevent that?
Or can my father just expand that and just say, fine, we're adding 50 more seats.
Here are some of the people.
There's a rota of people going in and out to give other people a chance at these things, especially You know, if you're going to do a press briefing on some of the stuff they do with health, I mean, shouldn't you have people who are actually experts in that, not just people who are White House correspondents that may not know anything about the issues, may not understand what's at play, may not understand just how broken some of these things may be?
Yeah, my understanding is the president can control what happens there.
It's the White House.
The White House belongs to the president.
And my understanding is that there's a contract between the White House and the White House Correspondents Association governing access to and different responsibilities in that briefing room.
And I think the president should be able to go in there and set those terms however he wishes.
And if the White House Correspondents Association doesn't like him, well, then they just don't need to be there.
What else would you be doing to get out there the truth?
All we want is for people to see what's actually going on.
All we want is that transparency.
What are the other things that have perhaps been neglected for a while, perhaps obviously intentionally neglected for a while?
What are the other things that we could do to have the right information out there for people to digest?
Well, one thing that's super frustrating being in right-wing media is there is a tendency for all the big leaks, the big important news.
Yeah, we knew the New York Times sucks, and yeah, we know CNN is corrupt, but we're still going to have our press people go out and feed the stuff to them, and they get all the big stories, which allows them to set the narrative every single day.
That's one thing that really needs to change.
Yeah.
Those stories, those tidbits should be given to Daily Caller and Daily Wire and The Federalist and Breitbart and The Washington Examiner and Real Clear Politics.
Why is anyone going to The New York Times?
Like, no one cares about them anymore.
And in fact, there was an article out last week where they interviewed, I think, the digital chief or one of the press people in the Kamala Harris campaign who was frustrated that Going to the New York Times and doing their interviews with the Washington Post, it didn't help them at all because everyone already assumed they were completely in the tank for Democrats.
So there should be a cost to that.
They should be frozen out.
They shouldn't get stories anymore because if all they're going to do is lie and collude and peddle nonsense, the way to take away their power is to take away their ability to really get information and get leaks from people in Washington who honestly should know better by this point.
Yeah, and by the way, moving the press briefing room like, you know, more than 35 feet away from my father's office where they're just hanging out there, you know, taking people out for steak dinner so they get those kind of leaks, which they then manipulate is a big deal.
I got a lot of heat in the press, you know, when I first started talking about this a couple weeks ago, saying like, yeah, this is a no-brainer because I simply want more voices.
But the legacy news outlets, they want fewer voices.
They want to be the only voice.
And that, to me, is a really big difference.
I mean, you see that right now with what's going on on Twitter.
Like, the leftists, I'm leaving!
Well, why?
Well, it's a right-wing platform.
No, it's like 50-50.
You know what else is 50-50?
Like, the rest of the country.
But they were so used to having that monopoly on information.
They were so used to the algorithm suppressing a thought that opposed the chosen narrative that they can't actually handle being in an actual fair fight.
They're used to having the entire weight and force of big tech, of social media, of legacy media.
You know, trillion dollar institutions sort of just backing up their lives and they can't handle sort of, you know, objective debate, which is really scary.
And a perfect example of that was this conversation between Chris Eliza, who used to be with the Washington Post and CNN, and Chuck, whatever his name, Chuck Todd.
And they were complaining about the settlement between ABC and President Trump.
ABC and George Stephanopoulos had lied about Trump.
And by the way, I got to say- By the way, I negotiated that settlement, so I have a little- I was like, listen, we can take depositions for the next coming months because we know there's probably something there.
We can make this go away and let's get back to business.
There is more important stuff figuring out.
I mean, the fact that ABC News writes a $15 million check, whatever it may be, I don't know.
I think that's sort of a solid admission that they were wrong.
But the reality is we should be suing 30 other agencies for doing the exact same thing.
Well, yeah, and they were complaining.
I was going to say, your dad's nickname for Stephanopoulos, by far, is my favorite of all of them.
I think he calls him Slopadopoulos, which just makes me laugh out loud when I hear it.
But Selyza and Chuck Todd were complaining, like, how can journalists do their job when stuff like this happens?
Yeah.
Well, that's easy.
Don't lie unless you think your job is lying about Republicans and making crap up.
But that is their job.
I mean, that's literally—that has been their stated purpose in Washington, D.C. for the last few decades.
And so, yeah, they're upset that they can't do their former job.
It's not what everyone else thinks their job is supposed to be.
No one can objectively say that.
But it's what they've gotten away with for far so long.
I mean— And they did it over and over.
I mean, you could theoretically go back and do the same thing about Russia, Russia, Russia, but, you know, they have a source that said, I mean, they've tried doing it to me, it's like, we've got two sources that said this, like, well, here's everything that happened, here's 12 people that were actually in the room, like, run with it, I'm gonna sue you.
And you can see when you do that, you actually push back.
They're crushed.
Not because they actually know the truth right now.
It's because they don't have the gotcha.
Look at the me versus Hunter Biden thing.
It's like, I'm the worst human being in the world.
I get it.
I'm not the upstanding citizen that Hunter Biden is.
But it's like, this has been a narrative that's been going on for so long.
And now, hopefully, some of that is at least broken.
Yeah, the Hunter Biden laptop thing from 2020, I think...
It just illustrated how totally corrupt these people are because there was no basis for them going and banning people and censoring people.
And yet they were shocked that anyone was like kind of bothered by that.
Oh, you're you're upset that we banned and you're opposed for saying stuff that's true.
Oh, that's weird.
They cannot handle it.
And it's why do they go to this stupid blue sky nonsense where nobody but the most deranged fever swamp.
It feels to me like an aggregation spot for the pedophiles of America.
The people who believe that MAPS, minor attracted persons, are upstanding citizens.
And it's not something they should be in jail for.
We must understand that this is just sexuality, Sean.
It's crazy, man.
You see the clips from that place.
I sort of want to join just to see the insanity.
I mean...
If we could get law enforcement to focus on those kinds of things rather than arresting grandmas who bought Bibles or a MAGA hat, I imagine there's a plethora of sick and deviant people hiding out over there.
It's almost like if you're there, it's almost like a default to me, but what do I know?
Yeah, yeah, that place is a mess.
I went and created an account just to look at it, and I spent like five seconds in there, and it was like being in the comments section of a 2008 Daily Coast blog post.
Wow.
And man, it was disorienting.
And of course, Liz Cheney's over there now.
She's exclusively posting on Blue Sky.
And it's pretty clear that Liz Cheney is a criminal based on the stuff that we found out on the January 6th testimony and the witness tampering.
And I'm sure she'll get her preemptive pardon from the Biden administration.
I imagine that was part of the endorsement, although I think the endorsement of the Bidens by the Cheneys was probably very helpful to us because it just explained the irony and the hypocrisy of where today's Democrat Party is after spending the last 30 years calling them war criminals, but minor details.
That was probably my favorite storyline of the whole 2024 election was the rebirth of the Cheney family, who was the most hated family in all of politics for like eight years in the 2000s.
And now Kamala Harris's closing argument is going around with Liz Cheney, who's basically Dick Cheney without the charm and warm personality.
That was wild.
Yeah.
Hard to believe.
They should go quail hunting together.
Just kidding.
That's not an...
You know, I'll get the...
Oh my God, Don Jr. calls for violence.
It's like...
But, you know, I guess you take it even a step further and you look at the ratings.
You look at the demo numbers for these, you know, mainstream media networks.
I mean, it's a disaster.
Americans are literally voting with which channel they go to and why they watch.
When you look at the rise of independent journalism, that's sort of scary.
Is the entire model dead?
By the way, this even goes for a lot of conservative media.
Is that sort of traditional legacy media dead?
Can they salvage it?
Can they salvage it without a serious come-to-Jesus moment?
Because I'm not sure they even can at this point.
Yeah, I don't think it's dead yet.
I think it's absolutely on life support.
When you look at the audience demographics for all of cable news, I think the average age is like 70 or 75. And so look, I love people in that age group.
My mom and dad are there.
They love watching cable news.
But, you know, people our age are not watching it.
People in their 20s, they're not watching it.
They're watching podcasts, they're on TikTok, they're on X. So I think that medium is absolutely dying.
And I think what happened in 2024 with all the podcasts that President Trump did, that was kind of like the coming out party of independent media.
Because they're so influential.
And the reason they're influential is everyone, all those big hosts, they're totally authentic.
They're not reading scripts.
And it's a real demographic.
Like you said, you know, people watching cable, it's the same, you know, in the case of CNN, like 300,000 people every day, you know, 400,000 people every night.
You know, even on the conservative side, the same 2 million people.
People like, you know, I got banned from some of the biggest names in conservative media for two and a half years.
And like, you know what it did to like my following in it?
Zero.
It didn't change anything for me because it's like those people were already following me.
They watched me, you know, 30 different ways.
There's a reason we won the 18 to 29 demographic in some states or, you know, came pretty close to 50-50 across the country.
That's unheard of for conservatives.
But it's because the landscape has shifted so far and being willing to embrace that and also, more importantly, having the capability of doing that.
I mean, you know, watching James Carley, why didn't Kamala do Rogan?
It's like, well, he's an Incapable of having a conversation for an hour, let alone three hours.
It's not going to work.
People see through it.
Authenticity is the number one thing, I would think, in politics, in terms of being able to build your thing.
And if you have none of it, you cannot hide that for three hours.
It's not possible.
Yeah, and it's an interesting switch that's happened.
I think kind of when the whole Skype Zoom thing started taking off, it looked a little amateurish.
You didn't have the beautiful production value of the big cable networks, which we had kind of assumed was so prized by everyone.
And then as, you know, Rogan gets bigger and Theo Vaughn and Andrew Schultz, It's not the production value of these things that are bringing people in.
It's the actual content.
They're having a real conversation about real stuff with a real person.
And I remember Joe Rogan talking about how it worked after he did the podcast with Trump.
And he's like, look, hour threes are all the magic happens.
You can have your defenses up for an hour.
They might stay up for two hours.
But by the time you're three hours in, the real you is finally going to come out.
And that's what people actually want to see.
Two minute clips with makeup and your hair done and it's perfect lighting and a great backdrop.
They want to see the real you and what you actually believe.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I always said, I mean, even, you know, sort of during the Republican primary, there's people that were going different directions and whatever.
And I was like, I don't know.
No, man.
Like, wait till you see them in long form.
And when I say long form, then I was talking about 40 minutes or so, you know, 30 minutes.
You know, you become the big boy.
You got to be up there.
But, like, anyone can look like a rock star in a 30-second clip, you know, cut up by an influencer dunking on some local reporter.
But to do it in a long form is really important.
I mean, yeah, the three-hour, that really long-form format, I think you're right.
Yeah.
You can't keep it going for that long.
People get it.
They understand what's happening, and they're waiting for that breakthrough.
I mean, I think my father's interview with Rogan at three and a half hours or whatever.
I mean, even Rogan was like, wow, that's different.
And when someone else isn't willing to do it, even more so.
I mean, I got more commentary on that.
I know the Andrew Schultz interview with my father.
I mean, I spent like an hour on the phone with Andrew the day before that interview.
He's a friend of mine, and I was just like...
He's like, hey man, give me some stories.
I'm like, oh boy.
This is where we get in trouble.
But I was like, here's a story about my dad, like, you know, busting on a, you know, a party I had like freshman year of college, you know, on the floor of Trump Tower where I told him it was gonna be like five to seven people and it was like 200 people and like just wild.
And it was funny and it was also humanizing.
If you're able to do it, if you're able to have that kind of fun, again, the authenticity shows.
And by the way, I think it also shows, you know, endurance.
You know, what Joe Biden was lacking.
People knew that if the phone rang at three o'clock in the morning when the shit hits the fan, so to speak, Joe Biden was not going to be capable of doing that.
They're watching Trump at 78 do three hours plus having a good time still joking about it.
And they're like, you know what?
I think it instills confidence that you're capable of doing that, that you have the energy to be able to do that.
I think Joe was impressed with that.
I know I heard the similar commentary about J.D. Vance.
The other side, Tim Walsh and Kamala, even if they wanted to do that, and he was going to open the door for them one way or the other, and I think that's totally fair and just, they knew they didn't have it, and therefore they avoided it.
Either way, it was a loss.
Yeah, it's funny you bring up the example of the party story.
I got emailed and texted that clip from Schultz like 500 times from people.
And it was crazy how much traction they got.
And there was something about it because you see the outside from the Trump family.
Billion dollars, non-TV, and big towers, and he's the president.
And it almost seems like not real.
Like, these can't be real people.
And then, no, it's a kid getting busted by his dad for throwing a party he shouldn't have been throwing.
Like, everyone's been through that.
You're totally normal people.
Yeah, and the punishment wasn't a punishment.
It was not ever mentioning it again.
I was like, this has been like 25 years ago.
I was like, Andrew, I just want closure.
He's like, so can Don Jr. get some closure on this?
Well, you're like, nope.
It was far more effective in so many ways than anything else.
And I'm always reluctant to do this because the media is going to say, but what kid hasn't had a party in their teen years or college years or whatever that maybe got a little aggressive?
The thought of my father kind of coming up there in his underwear, basically being like, what's going on here?
A bunch of moron-like college kids going...
What just happened?
It was pretty funny.
So it's like one of those, like, I understand what the media, and of course they tried, but it didn't work because people saw through it.
It was like, that was a really funny story.
I was getting blown up for two weeks about that thing.
They're like, that's hilarious.
Did it actually happen?
Like, of course it actually happened.
Like, it was amazing.
Yeah.
And the other thing about these long podcasts is when you're on them, I'm on them a lot.
You have your own.
You're obviously doing it a lot.
We kind of tackle it from the perspective of, well, what am I going to talk about for three hours?
What am I going to talk about on this?
The thing it actually shows is whether someone can listen.
You can't do three hours sitting across the table from another person and succeed at it if you're not a good listener.
And I've been around your dad.
I've interviewed him.
The man is an incredible listener.
And that's something that's hard to come across in typical TV interviews.
But if you're going to be a successful politician, if you're going to be a good executive or a good leader, you have to be a good listener.
You can't sit there for three hours with someone and have a conversation if you're not a good And I think that's an understated thing that a lot of people picked up that nobody's really talked about.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's also sort of like the art of storytelling itself and being able to actually give people something to believe in and relate to that makes, it's like, oh, wow, like this is a guy that actually understands it.
It was interesting, you know, listening to my father talk about, I guess he was talking, you know, civil war.
I mean, you know, people are like, wait a minute, like, He's not just the guy that sort of brash on Twitter and talks crap.
He's like, wait a minute, there's actually a lot more substance to this guy.
He knows what he's talking about.
He understands history.
We all know that if you don't have an understanding of history, the bad stuff tends to repeat itself.
And it's like, wait a minute.
Trump actually gets that.
He sees it.
So the three-hour interview, it's not something you can do in seven minutes on Fox News where, you know, you got to bang out the five soundbites and, you know, you get cut off to go to commercial break.
It's like you see that depth and the depth is so important because that depth gives people the confidence that, okay, you know, when it does go bad, this is someone who does understand it.
It's not just what I've seen in, again, short form.
Yeah, and you want to talk about history.
History is like the ultimate decoder ring for running a government.
All of the answers, or maybe not all of them, most of them you can find in history.
Somebody before you has faced a similar challenge, and it's amazing what you can learn about what they did right or what they screwed up.
And hell, Joe Biden doesn't know what happened yesterday.
And this guy is somehow going to be a leader?
Like, I'm not sure he knows what he had for breakfast this morning.
Zero chance.
Zero chance.
Like...
Yeah.
No, it's amazing.
I mean, again, I just hope that all of that continues because it is critical.
We do have to have leaders that actually understand what's going on.
I will say, you know, my father's biggest political liability is, frankly, that he does have a lot of actual empathy.
He's got these incredible stories of helping people.
He doesn't like to show that.
He's got like an old school mentality.
He's like, well, if I show that, it looks like I'm weak.
And when I'm negotiating with Putin or Xi or the mullahs or whatever it may be, You know, it puts me in a bad light in terms of at the negotiating table, but I'm like, but yeah, you also got to win an election.
You got to get people to understand that.
So I think, you know, those podcasts, honestly, like the comedic stuff was even more so, you know, the Theo Vaughn and, you know, him asking about like, you know, cocaine and what it actually does.
It was just like, it was funny and it was like real and it changed.
It was a dynamic shift that regular people were like, okay, you know, this guy isn't what he's been made out to be in the media.
No, he's not at all.
When he was talking about advice, he's like, you know, stay away from drugs, stay away from alcohol.
That's stuff that all parents have struggled with.
You know, we all probably know someone, either family or friends, who struggled with something like that.
And to see someone talk about it personally because of what he went through with his family, again, you're like, this is a real guy.
He's a real human and he has real emotions.
And in real relationships.
And that's just not something that ever comes across in normal TV, not on The Apprentice, not on news programs.
But when you actually have people like Theo or Rogan who are interested in him as a person, who want to hear him tell his stories, you're never going to get that from CBS, from Norah O'Donnell or Slopidopolis.
They don't care.
They just want to make you look like a villain.
Yeah, that was my thing.
With my father, for me, even as a kid, no smoking, no drinking, no drugs.
Every day before going to school, I saw a young kid.
I didn't even know what those things were really, but he really did always reinforce that stuff.
I definitely drank my fair share.
Contrary to media belief, apparently, according to the internet, I'm the biggest co-kid in the world.
I've never even tried it, which is sort of amazing.
You would think by now, if I had, there'd be pictures everywhere.
You know what I mean?
Like, you wouldn't be able to get away with it in the light, especially with people looking for it.
But it's like, I was literally, like, adjusting a Zin pouch the other day on TV down at, like, the SpaceX launch.
Like, Don Jr.'s rubbing cocaine on his gums!
I'm like, does that even...
I don't even know if that does anything, but, like, I'm like...
By the way, if I was on TV standing next to Elon and my father, I was like, I should get points for just balls.
But it doesn't matter.
And so, again, the long form kind of lets you get to the bottom of all of these things.
And again, it's amazing that I am allegedly the greatest cokehead in the history of America.
And yet, like, Hunter Biden is just a guy with, like, addiction problems.
It's different.
It's not the same.
It's sort of incredible to see sort of just the ignorance of all of these things.
And I think it just further explains just how far the narrative has fallen.
I mean, hell, they found cocaine in the Biden White House.
They tried blaming it on me?
Sean, this was last year?
Like, I haven't been in the White House in literally three years, and they're like, it's leftover from Dodger.
I'm like, the White House?
The most secure, like, house in the world?
With cameras everywhere?
Hundreds of armed guards?
Like, it's mine?
Like...
You have the world's greatest crackhead living there, but no, no, it's mine.
With all the surveillance cameras, with all of this, they can't figure out exactly who it was.
I mean, they have partial fingerprints, but we just don't know.
Does anyone believe this anymore?
Yeah, I assume they had trouble, like, getting the prints off of it because the marker that said Hunter Biden's cocaine on the baggie had, like, smudged the fingerprint.
We don't know what to do.
He's on the balcony, like, you know, tweaking out.
You've probably seen the video.
He's, like, grabbing his nose and going crazy, and his eyes are on.
They're like, yeah, we don't know who that Coke belonged to.
Couldn't be the most famous cokehead on Earth.
No idea.
My goodness.
Well, Sean, thank you very much for joining us as always.
Guys, check out Sean Davis on Twitter.
Follow him on The Federalist.
Again, you know, these are the guys that are actually telling the truth.
They're the guys that are exposing so much of what's out there.
So, you know, Sean, thank you for that.
Keep doing it.
And I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about in the future.
Well, thank you.
God bless you.
Keep the faith.
Keep strong.
And let's start putting some points on the board in about 30 days here.
Let's do it.
Thanks, buddy.
Sean, thank you.
That was great, as always.
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