Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - A Look Back on 2025

Jan. 1, 2026 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr

02:03:50

A Look Back on 2025 | TRIGGERED Ep.304

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	So, if you follow politics, you know everyone's got an opinion.
	But on polymarket, you actually get real odds on what's likely to happen.
	Polymarket is a prediction market where people trade on real events back and forth, elections, debates, policy moves, just about everything.
	There's a polymarket for just about everything, and it doesn't stop at politics, guys.
	There are markets on the economy, tech, sports, pop culture, and much more.
	It's all live, it's transparent, and it gives you real-time indicators on what people think is going to happen.
	Okay, it's a big deal.
	I dealt with this in politics where people are doing polling every day, you know, and they ask a question 97 times till they get the answer of whoever's paying them for the answer that they want, rather than actually trying to get to the truth.
	So, give it a look at polymarket.com, see what's actually happening.
	I think you'll be really impressed with the accuracy.
	I think actually it's the difference between the left and the right that is kind of built in there.
	Because in terms of practical politics, one of the first rules is that when your opponent is making a mistake, you should not interrupt.
	And that's generally what happens on here.
	When the radical leftists are spewing total nonsense, you can kind of guide them into their inconsistencies, but really you can just let them speak.
	They're going to hang their own arguments with their own rhetorical rope.
	And at the national level, I think that's exactly what's happened in the last five years.
	Really, you could say that's what's happened for the last 50 years as the left has become so extreme.
	But especially you think about the last five years, record numbers of illegal aliens crossing the border under Biden, Biden basically welcoming them for that.
	Obviously, the trans craziness, the social policy, even the foreign policy has just spun so out of control.
	The left has just made so many mistakes.
	They've so exposed themselves that the American people broadly turned on them in November.
	And it's going to take a lot for the left to unwind that.
	Frankly, now it seems to me they still haven't really learned any lessons.
	The one kind of moderate Democrat in the Senate isn't a force anymore, Joe Manchin.
	So I don't know.
	They haven't really learned their lesson at all.
	And I say, great, let them speak, put them on TV, have them say everything they believe.
	Have them lose their minds when your father and Elon are exposing graft and fraud at USAID.
	Have them defend that.
	For goodness sakes, have the left defending plastic straws.
	Love it.
	That's a 90-10 political issue.
	You guys want to defend the indefensible?
	Be my guest.
	Yeah, and we saw so much of that.
	Margaret Brennan had a couple of great ones.
	I guess it was with JD when it was like, well, they only took over, radical Venezuelan gangs only took over a couple of buildings in Colorado, JD.
	And then it was with Marco this week.
	And I mean, listen, free speech led to the rise of Nazi Germany.
	I'm like, I mean, where are they getting these history books?
	It's wild.
	And they keep doing it.
	So it's not just the, you know, the dumbest of their movement.
	These are the people that they think of as like their thought leaders.
	And they don't get it.
	I mean, I love that, to your point, like, let them keep making the mistake.
	Let them keep talking about it.
	But it's actually shocking that they could be that ignorant given where the world is right now and what's going on over the last four years.
	Well, this is what makes me think they're going to keep making these mistakes through the midterms, through the next presidential election.
	Even you mentioned Margaret Brennan on CBS, and she in particular keeps making these mistakes, trying to defend USAID spending.
	Didn't work out very well.
	But Michael, who wouldn't want to send $7 million for trans Elmo cartoons in Guatemala?
	I mean, it's great use of taxpayer funds when we have crappy roads, crappy healthcare, crappy education, our country's falling apart, people are getting murdered in the streets.
	I mean, isn't that still great use of funds, Michael?
	Come on.
	Well, the framers spoke so highly of transgender Argentinian Elmo.
	I think it's literally in the Constitution.
	Of course.
	Where?
	Of course.
	It's there, I can tell you, Michael.
	They keep doing it.
	And you alluded to it just now, but Margaret Brennan suggesting her words, not mine, that the Holocaust was caused by an abundance of free speech.
	And you think, you know, look, I'm not the greatest scholar of the Second World War, but seems to me in 1933 in particular, you had at least three or four major provisions out of Nazi Germany that severely limited free speech and civil liberties.
	Ms. Brennan, can you have any example to the contrary?
	And of course, they can't offer one.
	You know, Ronald Reagan famously said, the problem with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.
	And they keep going back to that.
	I mean, I think this is the most tedious aspect for people left, right, and center in America, that for the American left, including the mainstream, every moment is 1930s Germany.
	Every Republican is Hitler.
	Every policy is about to bring about the Holocaust.
	And people know it's not true.
	They're completely sick of it.
	Believe it or not, other things happened in history beyond the Second World War.
	And of course, the irony is the people who constantly compare every event to the Second World War don't even know that much about the Second World War.
	You know, they're just exposing a lack of knowledge and political sophistication that is stunning, but which is really delightful if you're on the right side of things.
	Yeah, like you don't have to be a World War II scholar to know that, of course, like Hitler started banning guns.
	He was burning books.
	They limited free speech.
	I mean, that was like the beginning of the rise of Nazi Germany.
	So it's literally the opposite of what she said.
	And anyone who's taken like, you know, sixth or seventh grade like world history would know that.
	And yet they conveniently either forget or don't know or don't care.
	All equally bad.
	Exactly.
	And, you know, there is a reason that the left has sought to censor people.
	You saw this when JD was lecturing Europe.
	Europe has been even more egregious about this, banning, effectively banning right-wing political parties, prohibiting people from praying 50 meters away from abortion clinics.
	I mean, really, really crazy stuff.
	But you saw it here too in the abuses under Biden, the DOJ going after Catholic parishes, arresting pro-lifers in front of their seven kids, calling parents terrorists and domestic extremists.
	So we've seen it pretty substantially in America too.
	Why is it?
	This is where debates like the show that I just went on that's going viral, this is where I think you see why they're censoring it.
	Because if a debate is able to happen in public for everyone to see, a fair fight where both sides can be heard, be that on a YouTube interview show or be that in a presidential election, if it's a fair fight, then the right side is going to win right now because the left has lost the common sense.
	And so thankfully, we were able to get a little foothold into social media, which so tried to destroy your father in 2016 and 2020.
	Once you get just a little bit of that exposure, you are not only going to win over the choir and your core base, you are going to win over, as we saw, the majority of Americans.
	Yeah, I mean, it's why the left, they were such Elon fanboys until he helped level that playing field.
	You know, when they had the entire weight and force of social media, I mean, and they still do across the broad spectrum of apps or whatever you want to look at it at.
	When you have the entire weight and force of mainstream media, and then you have a government backing it up and or subverting truth, whatever it may be, through USAID, funding all sorts of other levels of journalism.
	I was always shocked that, frankly, that elections are as close as they are.
	I feel like if I was running the other side with the resources that they had, with the operatives that they had that are all home team, all functioning as the marketing department of the radical left, I'd be like, elections would be like 99.9 to like 0.01.
	Like it wouldn't even be close.
	And yet they were still close because the ideas were always absurd.
	They never made any sense.
	Once you had a little exposure to that, they freaked out because they realized that they're losing badly.
	And it's the first time they've lost the cultural wars, even with the handicaps that they were giving themselves for all these years, perhaps in certainly my lifetime.
	Well, and think about this.
	Elon Musk put his money where our mouths are, $44 billion, to purchase the smallest major social media platform.
	We get lost in Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.
	We all think it's kind of the same.
	No, Twitter is by far, or at least was before Elon really made it much better, but it was the smallest one by far compared to Facebook and Google.
	Just getting that tiny foothold into the social media was enough to shift the entire dynamic of the election.
	Just cleaning up one agency of the federal government, USAID.
	The left loves to say now it's less than 1% of the federal budget, which first of all is a lot of money when you're considering the United States federal budget.
	But in any case, sure, okay, it's just one agency of the federal government.
	Just one agency with all of that graft, all of that abuse, all of those payoffs to fund not only foreign liberalism, but domestic liberalism.
	I mean, just to use one example, when you've got the taxpayer dollars, you pay your money to the IRS, the IRS funds the federal government, federal government gives money to USAID, USAID gives money to the Tides Center, the Tides Center funds BLM, BLM goes down, burns down your neighborhood, starts extorting corporate America to further advance leftism, and it's this hideous feedback loop.
	That's like one tiny little example.
	The moment you start shedding a little bit of light on this, I think the people, even those of us who were aware that there was serious corruption, are just astounded by the sheer enormity of it.
	Yeah, I guess all these left-wing narratives really collapse on themselves.
	Once you reduce the conversation down to basic truths, there's a lot of sort of cognitive dissidents on the left.
	We're seeing it all play out in very obvious ways.
	What are some of the other most egregious examples that you've seen play out where you're actually, you can't even believe that you're having the conversation?
	Well, I can believe that the left has gotten this extreme because their ideas have consequences.
	And so left unimpeded, they're going to go all the way from, you know, Gloria Steinem in the 70s saying a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, all the way to a woman really can become a man.
	And the reason that that particular ideology has really overtaken public discourse is because it's just so obviously ridiculous.
	And on certain issues, you can negotiate and meet in the middle.
	You know, the left wants to steal all of our property.
	We want to keep our property.
	All right, we're going to meet in the middle and have a 35% tax rate.
	Not ideal, but you can, or on gun rights.
	We want to keep our guns.
	The left wants to take our guns.
	They take some of our guns.
	You can meet in the middle sometimes, unfortunately.
	On an issue like human nature, there's no meeting in the middle.
	Either a boy can become a girl or he can't.
	It's not like you can suddenly become the opposite sex at age 19 and a half or something.
	It's either true or it isn't.
	So that's one reason that I think that issue has really taken off.
	It's the same reason that the immigration issue has taken off is because as you say, Don, you don't need a PhD in philosophy or history to understand that nations need borders.
	A border is literally the thing that delineates a nation from all of the other nations.
	So when you have the left with their genius experts coming out and saying, well, actually, you know, we don't really have a border.
	And actually, the law technically doesn't mean that you can distinguish, you know, you just think, hey, shut up, man.
	I'm pretty sure we can enforce basic immigration law.
	And if one's political ideology runs contrary to all of our common sense, the left thinks that means there's a problem with our common sense.
	In reality, it means there's a problem with that political ideology.
	And if the voters have the opportunity to vote that out, which was a little unclear because the left wanted to take your father off the ballot in this past election.
	But because they fail to save democracy, though, Michael, we're going to not let you vote for people to save democracy.
	And then when the person we do elect stops performing, we're just going to replace them without an election, also to save democracy.
	Exactly.
	I mean, you saw this just at the Munich Security Conference that JD caused this big ripple at, is he said, you know, democracies don't have firewalls.
	And I think a lot of Americans are not familiar with this term.
	Germany, and therefore Europe, has this so-called firewall to prevent right-wing parties and even ordinary conservatism from rising in Germany, which is the leader of Europe.
	And JD pointed out, he said, all you guys here, you prattle on and on about democracy, but you're afraid of your voters.
	You're afraid of your constituents.
	You won't let them speak online.
	You arrest them.
	You have midnight raids because they say something you don't like online.
	And then you have a political order that actually formally kicks out the right-wing parties through a so-called firewall.
	You learn about resilience because everybody has to fight through getting beat or everybody has to fight through getting taken down and show real toughness.
	And you learn about respect because after you spend six minutes beating the tar at each other, you have to stand up and someone gets their hand lifted in the air and you shake hands and walk off the mat.
	So I think a lot of what's great about America, we see in those high school gyms in Pennsylvania.
	And that's what the column was about in the Wall Street Journal.
	And I think it's emblematic of, I think, the community and a set of ideals that your father really hit on the campaign.
	And one of the reasons I think he has such a great following in Pennsylvania.
	I mean, you also read an ad during your campaign about how wrestling taught you to make the hard choices.
	What are those hard choices right now in the U.S. Senate?
	And what will your benchmark be for success in this Congress?
	Well, you know, I've got a whiteboard in my office, and on it, I have the top 10 things I promised.
	A lot of the same things of your dad, some different things that were Pennsylvania specific, but a lot of the same things.
	And I literally look at that whiteboard when I come in every time and say, okay, what are we doing on that?
	Okay, fentanyl legislation.
	We propose that.
	Okay, term limits.
	What are we going to do on that?
	Okay, getting the economy back on track.
	What are we going to do to have energy dominance?
	What's the permitting reform agenda?
	I'm looking at that list to say, hey, that's what I promised.
	And I want to hold myself accountable to everything I promised.
	That's the first and foremost, because I was very specific in the campaign.
	Your dad was incredibly specific.
	I was too.
	We got – I think he won and I think I won because people knew what we were going to do.
	They had known him before, and he had obviously done great things in his first term.
	For me, I think they were betting on the promise.
	So I want to deliver on the things I promised.
	I want to help your dad deliver on his incredible agenda as an important voice in the Senate.
	And I want to be the guy that when Pennsylvanians think of my name, they say, that guy is everywhere.
	He's fighting for us.
	He's working for us.
	Nobody's working harder.
	And I want them to know, and this is genuine, Don, that I feel honored and privileged to do it.
	I genuinely do.
	I've had a great life.
	I've been very fortunate.
	I feel like this is really the honor of a lifetime to have this chance.
	Well, that's awesome to hear you.
	So tell us a little bit more just about the book, why you wrote it.
	Where can everyone go get a copy to check it out?
	Learn a little bit more about the senator from Pennsylvania who's on our side of the fence.
	Yeah, thanks.
	This is a book that we wrote long.
	This was during COVID, you know, when kids weren't going to school and all that stuff.
	And we have six daughters, 24 to 18.
	They were a little bit younger then.
	And we realized that they were not going to school, coaches, teachers.
	They didn't have any interaction.
	And Dean and I started to talk about the fact that whatever success we've had in life was due to a couple of key people.
	These were the mentors that helped us become who we were.
	And so we started to think about that.
	And we started to, and in my case, it was a football coach.
	Was a junior sophomore in high school, not a particularly good football player.
	I was sort of the bench warmer.
	And the coach got fired, and a new coach came in and he watched all the films from the previous games.
	And I get pulled in, you know, in the last quarter something.
	And he came to me and said, Listen, you got real potential.
	You're going to be the starting linebacker, but you got to perform well in the camp.
	And I worked my butt off in football camp that summer.
	And at the end of this is my junior year, at the end of my that's camp, he made me the co-captain of the team.
	When I say this was shocking, this was beyond what I could have imagined.
	And I went on and I became an all-state linebacker and everything else.
	And that helped me get into West Point.
	That guy changed my life.
	He saw something in me that I didn't see in myself.
	The same with Dina.
	So we started to call people, some friends of ours, most of them very successful people.
	And they all had somebody who had believed in them, who had helped them become who they are.
	And so the book is about not the famous people.
	It's about the people that helped make them famous.
	I love that.
	Sarah Huckabee's in there.
	She talks about a certain Donald Trump, your father, who, when she was getting the tar knocked out of her and all these horrible insults, pulled her aside and said, You're beautiful.
	You have so much to offer.
	You're so talented.
	Go out there and don't let him see you sweat.
	Made a huge difference to her.
	Saty Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, one of the most prominent CEOs in the world.
	He talks about this manager at Microsoft that pulled him out of obscurity, saw something special in him.
	His name was a guy named Doug Bergham.
	So over and over again, you have people that made all the difference.
	And so the moral of the story is you don't have to be a famous person to change the world.
	You can help by helping someone else find their path to greatness.
	And so that's what Dean and I wrote about.
	And she had a great career in business and had created a number of big mentoring programs, very successful.
	So the two of us decided to do it together.
	By the way, if you could make it through a losing campaign, a winning campaign, and writing a book together and staying married, that's a good sign for the future.
	Yeah, that's a hard metric.
	It's hard to, yeah, these are hard things to do, especially.
	The book is the hardest.
	The book is absolutely the hardest.
	So tell us again, what's it called?
	Where everyone can find it?
	Yeah.
	It's Who Believed in You, and it can be found at whobelievedinyou.com.
	It comes out April 1st.
	You can pre-order it on Amazon.
	And we think people are going to help them think about, hopefully, help you and others think about who believed in them.
	The one theme that jumped out of this, all the people we talked to, we probably interviewed 25 people that are in the book.
	Many of them said, man, I don't think I told him.
	I wish I would have told him.
	Now they're gone.
	Now I wish I would have told him.
	So anybody listening to this, if there's somebody who changed your life, now's the time to tell them why you still can.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	I think that's great advice.
	Senator Dave McCormick, thank you so much.
	Really appreciate it.
	Great seeing you, buddy.
	And I'm sure I'll run into you somewhere on the road.
	Looking forward to it, Don.
	Thanks so much.
	Be well.
	And our dad was a baseball and football coach.
	So that's what we did.
	That's what we gravitated to.
	And so everybody came over.
	You know, I didn't go to New York.
	I wasn't invited to New York for the draft.
	Not that I would have win anyway.
	And we just had a, you know, a big party.
	And, you know, later down the road, I never thought that an NFL player, of course, it's Maker Mayfield, would do a, you know, I thought he did a hell of a job of recreating that draft day photo to go through the trouble he went through.
	It actually, I thought it was pretty cool, not knowing that jorts and the old cordless phone, which our kids have no clue about any of that.
	Enough, not even a little bit, you know, they're carrying cell phones, and we thought the coolest thing was we got rid of a cordless phone.
	I mean, you got a cordless phone in the house, but you couldn't walk in the next room and talk because you'd lose them.
	Yeah, it is basically a corded, cordless phone.
	But yeah, exactly.
	So, but you were, I mean, you were actually drafted by the Falcons, right?
	But you, you ended up in Green Bay.
	Uh, I guess Packers GM Ron Wolf traded a first-round pick for you.
	Uh, what sort of confidence uh did that inspire?
	I mean, that's that's a pretty big deal.
	And what do you remember about those first few years in Green Bay?
	Because you were you're there a while, yeah.
	So, so I'll back up, and I was drafted with a 32nd pick by the Falcons.
	The pick after was 33rd pick was the New York Jets.
	First, that was their first pick in the draft.
	They had traded away their first-round pick.
	So, their first pick in the draft was right after Atlanta's pick, and they were going to take me.
	Ron Wolf was assistant GM at the time, I didn't know him.
	So, Atlanta takes me.
	I go to Atlanta, and I always tell the story because I think it says a lot about my year in Atlanta.
	So, I was drafted on a Friday.
	We had a mini camp the next morning in Atlanta.
	So, I was living at my mom and dad's house down on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
	And there were two flights out of Gulfport, Mississippi to Atlanta: one in the morning, one in the evening.
	The morning when I was scheduled to be on, it was delayed a couple hours.
	I get to Atlanta, the guy picks me up.
	Uh, one of the scouts, his name was Danny Mock, picks me up.
	It's just he and I, we got a long drive to Sewanee, Georgia.
	And I'm saying, uh, Danny, man, this is not good.
	I'm late.
	My first practice.
	He said, Brett, it was out of your control.
	This is a mini camp.
	It's no big deal.
	Coach Glanville will be happy to see you.
	So I get there, they're out on a practice.
	I run in, I grab my shorts, a red jersey, my helmet, and I run out.
	Danny waits for me.
	When I walk out there, Glanville has got his back to me, and he's got a windbreaker on.
	I'll never forget.
	He sure had the old coach's Bermuda shorts on.
	He had a horn in his back pocket and a cowboy hat.
	Danny said, Hey, coach, coach.
	So he turns around.
	He says, and he's got sunglasses on.
	And he says, I got your quarterback here.
	And he says, Mississippi.
	I said, Yes, sir, coach.
	He says, What school are you from?
	And I said, Yeah, I'm thinking to myself, Hell, he just drafted me.
	Surely he knows what school I'm from.
	You know, and I say, I'm from Southern Miss, coach.
	And he says, Damn it, we drafted the wrong guy.
	We wanted a guy from Mississippi State.
	And I was like, Am I supposed to laugh at this?
	Or is this a joke?
	And it never got better from there.
	It only got worse.
	So, needless to say, at the end of that year, I got traded to Green Bay, who had hired or fired their head coach and GM prior to the end of that season.
	And I didn't know this, but Ron Wolf, we played the Jets that year.
	I was with Atlanta late in the year in Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta.
	And Ron Wolf came down in pregame to watch me throw.
	I had no clue.
	I didn't know I was on, you know, on alert that someone was potentially looking to trade for me.
	And he gets the GM job at Green Bay.
	And he said his first order of business after hiring Mike Holmgren as the head coach was to trade for me.
	And I was, you know, what's so cool about the whole thing is I'm drafted in the second round.
	I don't play my rookie year.
	So I do nothing to earn the right to be traded for a first round pick.
	So it's really like you're drafted in the second round, you do nothing, you end up getting back in the draft, but this time drafted in the first round is basically what it amounted to.
	So the best thing about Atlanta was it got me to Green Bay.
	You know, you just never know.
	Yeah, no, I mean, stranger things have happened, but yeah, it's a great one.
	And it may obviously go down as a legend in Green Bay.
	I know you have some funny stories about learning the nickel defense.
	What was that process like?
	How are you able to read defenses so well?
	I started all four years at Southern Miss.
	And I don't say that braggingly.
	I say that because we were not really a throwing team.
	We threw it some, but I was never taught because our offense was not a complicated system.
	Most of the time we ran toss suite, option.
	And if we threw it, it was like a sprint out, you know, something that you didn't have to read.
	So no one ever taught me the various defenses.
	You know, I knew what cover two was.
	I knew what cover three was.
	I knew what man coverage was.
	But it really, in the offense at Southern Miss, it didn't really matter because you called a play and you ran it.
	You didn't check out.
	Very rarely did you have audibles and things of that nature.
	So when I got to Green Bay in the West Coast offense, and Mike Honggren, who had coached Joe Montana and Steve Young before coaching me, it was what I considered very complicated.
	The playbook was like this thick and formations, motions, check with me's, audibles.
	I mean, it was overwhelming.
	So I end up getting not really thrust into Don McCowski gets hurt in the second game.
	They put me in.
	Am I ready?
	I would have told you, yeah, but I was far from ready.
	So, you know, I'm running around, they're blitzing.
	We had it picked up.
	I didn't know we had it picked up.
	You know, I wasn't waiting around.
	I was just running around like a chicken with his head cut off.
	And I would always hear him, you know, I was not one to sit in the meeting rooms and coach would be going over stuff.
	I would say, coach, coach, you talk about, you know, they're doing this and that.
	I was never one to do that because I was really embarrassed.
	I'm a starting quarterback.
	How can I be asking questions about stuff that I don't know?
	So I just played dumb and relied on ability.
	But I would hear him talk about nickel and dime all the time.
	And it was like, I hear this all the time.
	And Ty Debmer, a good friend of mine, you probably hunted with Ty.
	You know, I felt comfortable asking him questions because he would ridicule me too much.
	One day I was like, Ty, I need to ask you a question.
	He's like, yeah, what is it?
	I said, I keep hearing him talk about nickel and dime.
	This is like three or four years in.
	Plenty of time to learn what it is.
	But Ty's like, are you serious?
	I'm like, yeah, I hear them talk about nickel.
	They're bringing nickel in or dimes coming in.
	And when you see dime coming in, we want to run to that side.
	And I'm like, I'm just curious.
	What the hell are they talking about?
	And he said, well, nickel is basically you take a linebacker out, you put in a DB.
	And I said, what's dime?
	He said, you take out two linebackers and you put in two DBs.
	And I go, that's it.
	And he goes, that's it.
	And I go, who gives a shit?
	You know, I post complicated.
	That's how that all played out.
	But I'm proof that you don't have to know all the ins and outs of the game to be successful.
	By the way, I think that's like anything else, whether it's banking or otherwise.
	I mean, these guys talk and they talk in the acronyms, you know, ABC.
	And like, if you just say the words, it's like, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about.
	But you know, they sort of make you feel foolish by not necessarily articulating what the actual stuff is and just talking in the banking speak.
	So, yeah, I think that's probably pretty common.
	And I'll tell you a funny story.
	My freshman year at Southern Miss, I'm starting.
	I'll never forget.
	We're playing Memphis State.
	This is 1987.
	Now they're Memphis, but then they were Memphis State.
	And my quarterback coach was a guy named Jack White, great guy.
	Now, this kind of tells you what kind of offense, you know, our system.
	So we're watching the film of Memphis State, and they're blitzing like crazy.
	And I'm like, I'm 18 years old.
	You know, I'm bulletproof, but I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, this could, I mean, this is a jailbreak every time they're playing someone.
	And so I say, Coach White, what do I do if they blitz, if I see blitz?
	And he said, I'll tell you what you do.
	You make some shit happen.
	And I was like, now that I can deal with.
	That's the kind of coaching points I like.
	Sweet.
	Give me some, you need to check this, check that, move this guy around.
	You make some shit happen.
	And I said, I can do that.
	That's amazing.
	So speaking of interesting coaches, you had mentioned your dad was a coach in high school.
	What was that like for you?
	I mean, you know, I can't imagine that always being easy, although it obviously worked out.
	I mean, you're an NFL legend.
	How did that shape not just your football view, but perhaps your worldview?
	Well, it was tough.
	He was way tougher on me.
	And I got two brothers, as I said earlier, my older brother and my younger brother both played quarterback for my dad as well.
	What's kind of funny about the whole thing is he threw the ball with my older brother.
	He threw the ball with my younger brother, but we threw maybe once or twice a game with me.
	So I'm like, what am I, a chopped liver?
	But he was so hard on me.
	I can't speak for Scott or Jeff because I was not there, but I don't think he, maybe he saw something in me that he didn't in the other two.
	And the other two both got scholarships and played in college, but he was a hard ass on me.
	And the good thing about that was the more he pushed me, you know, some kids will go the opposite direction.
	They'll just say, it's shit on it.
	You know, it ain't worth it.
	I'm tired of you riding my ass.
	It drove me to work harder.
	And maybe that's what he saw in me.
	If he said, you know, you can't do this, I'd say, oh, yeah, well, I'll show you.
	And we butted heads a lot.
	I have a dad a little bit like that myself.
	Luckily, he didn't fully break me.
	So I guess it worked out in the end.
	But there were times it was probably pretty close to breaking it.
	Well, there's no doubt your success and my success are due in large part because of our dads.
	There's no question about it.
	And like it or not, it's like this younger generation today, and I blame the parents rather than the kids.
	They're a softer generation.
	We want everything for our kids, you know, that we didn't have or we always wanted.
	And you want to protect them from evil.
	And granted, some of that is good, but you got to kind of learn the ropes, the hard ways.
	You got to let them fail a little bit.
	You got to let them fail.
	You got to let them get their ass kicked every once in a while.
	My dad, if I got in trouble at school, my mom and dad taught at the same, where I went first through 12th was all right there together.
	So I go 12 years without missing a day of school.
	And everyone's like, holy crap, really?
	It's kind of hard to skip when your mom and dad are driving you to school every day.
	Exactly.
	But, you know, along with that and the discipline that my dad, you know, I can't tell you many times, Don, I would say, dad, let's throw the ball.
	And he says, look, you let me worry about running to plays and calling the plays and running this team.
	You do what the hell I tell you.
	Now, I didn't like that, but if he were here today, he would say, damn sure it worked out pretty good.
	Yeah, no.
	Yeah, sometimes they get the last word, even if they're not there to enjoy all of it.
	But yeah, that's, I, I, yeah, I can, I can relate a lot.
	Speaking of fathers, my father was at the NCA Wrestling Championships recently in Philadelphia.
	And so much of the greatness of America, I think, can be found in sports like wrestling or football or these contact aggressive sports.
	What sort of lessons have you learned from sort of each chapter of your career from high school to then Southern Miss to playing professionally?
	Yeah, you know, the different phases or times from high school to college is a big leap socially, fitting in.
	But, you know, I think with football, it really you go onto a team, you walked into the locker room the first time.
	I'm 17 years old, and you were the big dog where you just left.
	Yeah.
	And you're just a guy.
	You got tape on your helmet that says FARS.
	They don't even spell it right.
	Your name's not the easiest one.
	They just come up with.
	They still get it wrong.
	And that's that.
	I understand that.
	And I think to your question, the good thing about football in the team aspect of it.
	So, you know, when I came in to Southern Miss at 17 years old, I'm last on the totem pole.
	Guys were busting my balls, giving me shit.
	And I didn't particularly like it, but it's part of the process.
	But then all of a sudden, I ended up starting the third game as a 17-year-old.
	And they needed me to perform.
	And all of a sudden, I was one of the guys.
	And the same can be said as I went on to the next level.
	And then to play 20 years, I really had a chance, Don.
	Most guys, it's over before they want it to be.
	And they never had a time, really a chance or much time.
	You know, the latter part of my career, I was actually being a TV timeout.
	People sometimes would say, Brett, what are y'all talking about in the huddle?
	You know, when they come back from a commercial break.
	And I said, you would be surprised.
	Sometimes it's like, check out that dude over there on the front row.
	You know, what a dip shit.
	Or it may be.
	The cheerleading squad.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Look at the girl that's topless and it's 35 below.
	You know, they're going to be gone the next day.
	They're going to fall off.
	You know, I mean, crazy stuff.
	But oftentimes I was, especially in the latter part of my career, I would sit there and I'd be just thinking about it.
	I'm like, this may be the last year that I'm in this stadium.
	And being able to really just soak in the moment.
	It never, you know, it wasn't like when it was over, like, why didn't I enjoy it?
	I had a chance to really, because of those 20 years, you think about grade school, first through 12, how much first grade to senior year?
	It's dramatically different.
	Now you go 20 years of National Football League as a first year guy to, you know, all of a sudden, you had kids.
	I had a grandson at 40.
	And it looks totally different.
	But I was able to really soak it in.
	And when I look back, I don't go, I wish I would have done this, or I wish I would have done that, or I regret this.
	Fortunately for me, I don't have those regrets because of the longevity.
	So what helped you with that longevity?
	I mean, 20 years in the NFL, I mean, that's almost unheard of.
	I mean, it happens, you know, but I mean, what's the average career span?
	It's like three, four years, right?
	I think it's three years.
	Yeah.
	I mean, what let you go 5X?
	Well, I think there's still, I think there's two things.
	The toughness that my father instilled in.
	I'll never forget.
	I was playing Little League Baseball and I slid into second and I got tagged out and I was embarrassed.
	So I laid there like I was hurt.
	And my dad was not my coach.
	He was in the bleachers.
	And of course, he and my mom didn't come out there.
	But after the game, my dad said, if you ever do that again, you'll sit out there until you rot because I will never come out there and get your ass off the field.
	Now, if you're really hurt, that's a different thing.
	But, you know, and I can't tell you how many times after that, you know, that moment that them tell me that resonates just as if he just told me.
	And I can't tell you how many times on the field I was, you know, high school, college, bros, where I was, yeah, I was dinged up.
	And I really, that, that moment would just be right there.
	And it's like, get your ass up.
	There's a difference between being hurt and injured.
	Yeah.
	And your team is counting on you.
	The one thing I would say more than anything he instilled in me is the team is way more important than one guy.
	And that is so true, especially in football.
	And so I got my job because the guy in front of me hurt his ankle and came out.
	And I come in and he's probably thinking, I'll screw it up, which would have been a good assessment.
	But I did.
	And he never got his job back.
	Nothing he did or didn't do.
	He got injured.
	So I can't tell you how many times I said, if you lay down on this field, you're giving someone else a chance to take your job.
	And I would say, keep in mind how you got your job.
	It can happen to you.
	So I would get up off the turf every single time.
	That's really, I mean, by the way, it's sort of what happened with another great, like Tom Brady.
	I mean, I was watching that game when the Patriots were playing when Drew Bledsoe was taken out.
	And I was watching it with a bunch of guys.
	We were in like Hunting Camp, and I was watching it with a bunch of guys from Massachusetts who affectionately referred to as mass holes.
	And for them, it was like the end of the world.
	I'm like, well, I didn't really watch Patriots football, so it didn't matter.
	I didn't think of Drew Bledsoe as this thing.
	And this young kid quarterback comes in, Tom Brady.
	And who would have known that what was the most devastating things for these like die-hard fans was actually the start of the dynasty?
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, Kurt Warner is another one who's a friend of mine.
	He was with me in Green Bay for a year.
	Trent Green gets hurt.
	They said our season's over.
	He leads them to the Super Bowl exactly like Tom Brady.
	And there's two lives affected.
	The one who got hurt and now has to find a job somewhere.
	And the one who takes that moment, seizes it and runs with it like those two ran with it.
	And so it's a tale of totally two different stories.
	Yeah.
	I mean, that story about your dad is great.
	Yeah, I've had some similar ones with mine like that, that they just, you know, you don't know why, but it resonates.
	And it's a driving force that makes you keep going.
	So that's pretty amazing.
	You had mentioned sort of, you obviously have such a love for Wisconsin, the fans over at Green Bay.
	What was so special about playing at Lambeau Field for you?
	I mean, it's really a sort of a small town with a football team.
	What is that like in Green Bay?
	It's not like New York, right?
	There's other things.
	That's the epicenter of everything, isn't it?
	Football.
	I mean, it was, and I say this all the time: it was if you were there to play football, that was what you really wanted to do, then there's no better place in the world to play football because they started off the evening news with the latest on the Packers.
	They ended the news with the latest on the Packers.
	What happened to the Prime Minister?
	You know, everyone knew who you were.
	I mean, it's a small town, so if you went out and ate, everyone knew about it, but that was okay.
	The people, and I think for me, it was a perfect fit because they're blue-collar, I'm blue-collar.
	And I, you know, I didn't play the game for them necessarily, but I played it like they would have played it had they got a chance to play.
	And I can't tell you how many times, more so today than any other time in my life, even though I'm 15 years removed from playing.
	I get this probably more than anything.
	The game is missing the enthusiasm and the excitement that you brought.
	You would throw it was like I hear this one often: every touchdown pass you through, and I threw 500 something, every touchdown pass you through seemed like Christmas morning to you.
	It was the greatest thing, and that's true.
	Um, you know, when I first heard that, I was like, you know, I never thought about it, but I was just excited about the last one as I was the first one.
	And there doesn't seem to be that joy and excitement much in the league anymore.
	But I think fans in general, whether you like me or not, could relate to that, how I played and the enthusiasm.
	Because I was always, you know, very thankful that I got an opportunity to do what I always wanted to do.
	And on top of it, make great money.
	I'm like, can you believe they pay us to do this?
	I would do this $50.
	And I played that way.
	And I think the people of Wisconsin in general are that type of person, blue-collar, hardworking, love their deer hunting, love their football.
	And, you know, it was a perfect fit.
	Yeah.
	Do you think that, you know, sort of the money in the game?
	Obviously, you did very well for yourself in the game, but it seems like, you know, every five years out, it's like an exponential shift towards more money when you look at some of these contracts being signed.
	Do you think that has a role in sort of that change in the game to you?
	Yeah, you know, I do, Don.
	I really do.
	To what percentage, I have no idea, but I think and the same can be said for college.
	NIL, I can't say that I like it.
	It is what it is.
	But I think you take out of the equation, the bonding of the team, the transfer portal, the $500 million contracts.
	There's not a lot to strive for.
	If you get a guy that has a tremendous contract like they're giving, but plays the game like he's 12 years old, you really found something special.
	So I do think it's drastically affected the game today.
	Yeah, my daughter's a great athlete.
	She's ranked, I think, in the top 75 in the NIL overall already.
	So, she's treating it sort of like a business or as a way to monetize that for a future.
	I love that for her.
	In a team sport, it does seem like it's problematic, right?
	You draft a great quarterback, you bring him to a college, he learns the game, someone offers him 10x bit more money, you leave, you break up that entire dichotomy that the team was formed around this one player.
	And it does feel like it'll create a lot of chaos.
	I get it.
	I think the NCA was definitely taking advantage, you know, of the name, image, and likeness of all of these people for a long period of time.
	But I don't know that what they came up with doesn't create, again, total chaos and the inability to sort of grow someone well, because if they keep flipping out each and every year just for the next best offer, I think it probably does that player a disservice despite the money, but also everyone else that the team is building around them.
	Absolutely.
	And I don't know Nick Saban personally, but his retiring press conference, he said it so clearly.
	It used to be about mentoring and seeing the maturation of a kid as he goes from a freshman to graduation and on to the pros.
	And he said, you know, I would go into these homes and I would talk about what I would do with your son and how I would build him up over the years.
	And he said, then it became, how much are you going to pay me, coach?
	Yeah.
	It had nothing to do with all the stuff that led him to be a coach.
	It was all about what am I going to be paid?
	Not even am I going to start?
	You know, just what kind of car are you going to give me?
	And I just don't see any good in that.
	Well, it also feels like it would, it's going to aggregate, and you've forgotten more about this than I'll ever know, but it's also going to aggregate, you know, the top talent exclusively, you know, to the top, you know, five, 10 schools that can actually pay that.
	And some of those other schools that could be great football schools just aren't going to even get a shot at that talent to be able to.
	So you're just going to have this sort of like three dominant teams that have all the best players.
	And again, maybe it doesn't matter if they're not working as a team.
	Maybe that overrules that talent per se.
	But yeah, it feels like it's going to cause a lot of problems there as well for some of these smaller programs that have produced incredible players over the years, but it may not be, you know, it may not be Michigan, you know, it may not be XYZ school.
	Well, I'll say it in relation to me.
	I started as a true freshman at Southern Miss.
	And had the NIL been around, and I got one offer.
	That one offer was Southern Miss.
	So it was an easy choice for me.
	And I often think about it, I get asked, what do you think you would have done had the NIL been in play then?
	Let's just assume we're back in 1987 and I end up starting.
	And at the end of that year, my body of work was good enough that Alabama or LSU or O Miss or Mississippi State, all the regional close teams said, we're going to go for this kid.
	We're going to offer him 500,000.
	Now, my mom and dad were school teachers.
	My mom taught special education in Mississippi for 35 years.
	My dad was the driver's head and coach for 35 years.
	And as you know, Mississippi's bottom tier and teacher salary.
	So that would have been a hard thing to not take.
	Correct.
	But I may not be talking to you today because I may have gone there and just slipped through the cracks, wasted $500,000 like in three years of walling it maybe in a year because that very easily could happen.
	And then I'm scrambling around trying to find a job somewhere, teaching school and coaching high school football.
	And what would have been is just a, you know, a former dream.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, there's something to be said about like not letting 19-year-olds have unlimited sums of money because like that I remember when I was 19, it's like, I think the best thing my parents did, and I'm not saying I wasn't blessed, I'm not saying I wasn't spoiled, but like it wasn't like, here's whatever you want, because like kids are going to make really bad decisions more often than not.
	Yeah, you know, you're absolutely 100% correct.
	You can't blame the kid.
	A 19 year old kid just buys a or is given a, you know a Lamborghini.
	Yeah, you can't blame the kid.
	But what?
	What is that teaching him in a positive way?
	I, I don't, I don't need to regulate.
	I mean, it's the wild, wild west uh, Ncoua right now, no question.
	What Brett, you know, what role, if any, does, you know, faith play in all of this for you, when you reflect on your successes and how you're fighting this battle now with Parkinson's and working nonstop for better treatments and a cure?
	You know, how hard is that?
	Can you find peace sort of in this new calling?
	Absolutely.
	And, you know, growing up, I'm a Catholic kid.
	My mother and father, we always went to church.
	And it was, you know, as a young kid, sometimes it doesn't resonate with you.
	I mean, it was like something we had to do.
	It was a chore.
	In addition to doing what's good for our country, it's an important opportunity to sort of reset reality on what these things actually are.
	Yeah, I'd argue the Biden administration canceled plenty of visas of people that actually could be the next astronaut, the next nuclear physicist, the next, because they probably weren't reliable Democrat voters.
	But I think more importantly, as you and my father have both made very clear, gangs like Trend de Laragua, part of Maduro's narco-terrorist regime who've influenced violence on American citizens, murder, as well as the Venezuelan people.
	This isn't just a foreign problem.
	It's an American one.
	And it's right in our backyard.
	What else do people need to understand about how deep this really goes?
	Because this isn't just, hey, they got rid of a couple people.
	I mean, this seems to me like a serious op designed to really undermine and hurt America at the base level.
	Yeah, no, there's no doubt that it was used as a tool against it.
	I think mass migration has been weaponized against America.
	I think as the years go on, as the months go on, as we learn more about it, there'll be evidence and proof of that out there.
	There's no doubt there was a concerted effort, among other things.
	I mean, there was a lot of people already wanting to come for a lot of reasons.
	On top of that, I think you had a concerted effort to push people towards the United States.
	It's not unprecedented.
	You know, in 1980, Fidel Castro opened up his mental institutions.
	He opened up his jails and he basically flooded the United States with criminals from Cuba.
	And we paid an extraordinary price for it.
	So it's not unprecedented.
	In the case of Trendadagua, that was a prison gang inside of Venezuela.
	The Venezuelan regime pushed them out of the country, knowing that many of them, first of all, they destabilized all kinds of countries neighboring in the region, but ultimately wound their way up here to the United States.
	And we saw that trend begin probably in January of 2023.
	We started to see uptick in people arriving.
	It was actually Venezuelans that were telling me this, people here in the country.
	They were saying, look, these people that are coming now, they're members of gangs.
	And at first you kind of think, well, how do you really know?
	But they were right.
	They were absolutely right.
	And we started to see that.
	And you started to see them in the unlikeliest places.
	It wasn't like they were all coming to Miami.
	They actually were going to places like Chicago and New York and Aurora, Colorado.
	And, you know, it's sprinkled all over the country.
	And then the crimes began.
	So there's no doubt that this was a concerted effort by the Maduro regime, not just to drive these gang members out of their country, but to drive them towards the United States and to inflict the price on this country.
	And it's right out of the Fidel Castro playbook.
	Yeah, well, Maria Corina Machada won 92% of the vote there in an open primary despite brutal repression, censorship.
	I mean, I had her on the show two, three weeks ago.
	She was talking about, I mean, if she went to a restaurant, because she couldn't even fly, driving to a campaign stop, they'd shut down the restaurant for even serving her.
	I mean, she's clearly the choice of the Venezuelan people.
	She was banned from the ballot, but even her surrogate, Edmundo Gonzalez, still won the election by 40 points.
	I mean, That's not like some of these things here where you say, hey, you know, you won by basis points.
	Where are the games?
	I mean, that's pretty decisive, even, you know, in that regime.
	Would you say the Venezuelan opposition today is more unified and credible than perhaps we've seen in the past and that can actually effectuate real change going forward?
	Well, they're as brave as they've ever been.
	And she in particular, Maria Carina Machado is an incredibly brave woman.
	I mean, and I'm not criticizing anybody when I say this, right?
	But if you look at the Venezuelan opposition, a large percentage of the well-known figures in it are now living abroad.
	Because there comes a time where your family's life is threatened or they force you out of the country or you leave, you travel overseas to go give a speech and they don't let you back in.
	She has stayed, but she's in hiding.
	You know, they're looking, they're hunting her down every day.
	Like they're trying to get a hold of her.
	They've tried to arrest her a couple of times.
	Incredible bravery.
	One of the bravest people in the world.
	And I don't think people know enough about her.
	But people have to understand.
	I mean, being in the political opposition in Venezuela at this point is a life-threatening circumstance to be in.
	I mean, they will put you in jail.
	They've jailed everybody around her.
	And these are not like normal jails.
	I mean, these are atrocious conditions that they're in.
	So it's not a government.
	The Maduro regime is not a government.
	They govern territory because they have the guns and they have the security forces.
	But it basically is a narco-terrorist organization with strong ties to Iran, strong ties to narco-trafficking.
	And they just happen to control territory.
	They don't even control all of Venezuela because the border regions with Colombia are controlled, openly controlled by narco-guerrilla terrorists.
	So, yeah, I mean, you know, if they had a real election in Venezuela, Maduro would lose, like he did, by a lot.
	But obviously, the way they stay in power is they kill and jail the people who don't agree with them.
	Well, you know, I know the Biden administration, I mean, these were regimes that were largely on the ropes until we shut down our own energy production, the Keystone Pipeline, and allowed Chevron to make a deal with the Maduro regime, which gave them the cash that I'm sure was siphoned off and or funneled through back to the regime to keep them in power.
	I mean, I can't think of a more glaring example of basically giving a lifeline to literally a terrorist dictator than what we saw in the past.
	How do we reconcile that that even happened in America, despite sort of party differences?
	I mean, it's so flagrant and that the fact that the media won't even talk about that, won't even talk about this.
	But if we do anything here, they're so vocal about any kind of change in what was ultimately a failed policy that boosted up a dictator.
	Look, in foreign policy, we want to be mature and realistic about it.
	You're going to have to deal with some bad people, right?
	You're going to have to deal with people that you don't like, people that you don't agree with, but for the purposes of foreign policy, peace, and all that kind of thing, you have to deal with them.
	The problem is you can't do it in a stupid way.
	And that's what the Biden people did.
	They went to Maduro and they said, okay, we're going to do a deal.
	You promise to hold elections, free and fair elections in like nine months or whatever, and we will immediately lift sanctions and allow you to start producing oil and getting paid for it.
	It was a side deal, by the way, because they only announced that they did this deal with Chevron.
	What they didn't announce was that Chevron, with a side secret deal, was allowed to pay the Maduro regime royalties.
	It accounted for over 25% of all the revenue going into that regime from oil.
	So they did that deal.
	Well, they didn't have, you talked about the election.
	The election was fake.
	They didn't have an election.
	And after that, after that, they left the deal in place.
	They left it in place, even though they violated their word on holding free and fair elections.
	I think the way they were going to do it, and I don't think at this point you can do it, you say, first you have free and fair elections, then we'll lift the sanctions.
	And even if you do it the way that the Biden people did, at least, you know, if they don't, if they break their word, you know, undo the thing, you know, stop allowing them to get money.
	But they didn't do any of that.
	So I think it's one more example of stupidity in our foreign policy, which other countries look at and say, well, hell, they got away with that.
	We could be able to get away with whatever we want as well.
	It's really both weakness and stupidity.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm not a foreign policy wonk by any stretch, but I know enough about negotiation to say you don't give up all your leverage.
	You don't give the other side everything that they want before you get to the table to figure out what it is that you want.
	You keep maximum pressure on them so you can actually effectuate real policy changes.
	Yeah, well, if I want to put it in real estate terms, you don't get to say, okay, pay me for the building and I get to keep the building anyways.
	Exactly.
	And that's, you know, and that's pretty much the deal they made.
	It's like, here's all this money for your, we want to buy your hotel or your property.
	We're going to send you all this money for it.
	But by the way, you get to keep the hotel and the property.
	You get the money and the hotel.
	That's what these guys got.
	They got to keep their dictatorship and their deal.
	But obviously, you know, President Trump is a very different kind of president and that's over now.
	I agree.
	Mr. Secretary, could you talk about the impact of your successful leadership and what appears to be a broader pivot into the Western hemisphere?
	We've seen comparisons to the Monroe Doctrine.
	Can you talk about the opportunities to shake up the foundations of communism in the Western hemisphere and build strong, long-lasting American alliances in our backyard, whether it's with Bukele in El Salvador, Mille in Argentina, Maria Carina Machara in Venezuela, hopefully eventually, and perhaps others.
	What does all of that look like to you?
	Yeah.
	Well, the baseline is the United States wants to be friends with our friends, right?
	So for a long time, if you were a U.S. or pro-American ally in the region, we kind of ignored you and in some cases actually treated you bad.
	But if you were an irritant like Nicaragua or Cuba or Venezuela, then we made all these deals with you to make you happy, right?
	So we made deals with the people that hated us and we either neglected or sometimes were outright hostile towards the countries that were pro-American.
	So we reversed all of that.
	And you can, and look, I mean, maybe I'll miss a country here, but you talk about places like Guyana, Argentina, Paraguay, Costa Rica.
	You know, the president of Panama is very pro-American, meaning, you know, he wants to be our ally and our partner, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic.
	So we've made a concerted effort to reach out to these countries that have governments and leaders that want to be aligned with the United States, not just on regional issues, but international issues, and figure out a way.
	We want those democratically elected leaders to go back to their people and say, hey, there's benefits to being friends of America.
	Here are the benefits.
	At the same time, it allows us to clearly define the countries that have governments that are enemies of the United States, unfortunately, in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and obviously the regime in Venezuela.
	So we identify these.
	And then others, you know, we've got some tough issues to work through, like with Mexico.
	On fairness, you know, I think the Mexicans are doing more today against the cartels and against migration than they have ever, ever done ever before.
	And obviously, the credit goes to President Trump for being very strong about that.
	But that's an example of how positive engagement has allowed us to get things, has allowed us to reach a level of cooperation with the Mexican government that we never had before under previous presidents.
	Great friend of the show, investigative reporter John Solomon.
	John, thanks for being here.
	Yeah, great to be with you, Don.
	Big day.
	Yeah, it sounds like it.
	And I guess, guys, this is apparently a lot of this.
	I guess you just got it a few seconds ago, so we may be breaking some serious news today on the show.
	But John, this is a massive story on the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party's 2020 election fraud plot.
	Can you give us the big picture and then we'll go through each detail piece by piece?
	You bet.
	So the same country that sent those scientists in with the pathogens a few weeks ago that could wipe out our crops, the same scientists that hid the origins of COVID-19 at the Wuhan Institute for Output.
	And created it.
	Yeah, and created it.
	Lab created it.
	We now know that DIA had concluded in June 2020 that it was created.
	That same country had a plot to try to hijack the election and steal it from your father and give it to Joe Biden.
	Why do we know that?
	That's exactly what the FBI had.
	The FBI developed a source.
	It was a new source.
	They were still vetting them.
	This source told the FBI in August of 2020 that China was mass-producing fake U.S. driver's licenses, shipping them to Chinese students and residents, both here illegally and legally in America, so that they could go get fake mail-in ballots and hijack the election.
	And the report specifically stated that the goal was to help Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
	Now, it goes out for a few days to the intelligence community like a normal intelligence warning would go out, and then it's suddenly recalled, which is such an odd thing.
	It very rarely happens.
	And the reason for the recall is we want to just re-interview the source again, and then it never surfaces ever again.
	It never gets investigated.
	It's never looked at.
	We now know, last night for the reporting I did, that about a month after this report came out, the Customs and Border Protection Agency, a separate federal agency, intercepted about 20,000 of those fake Chinese driver's licenses coming in in the mail into the United States.
	In other words, the source was corroborated.
	What they had said actually came true.
	But that didn't stop the deep state from turning a blind eye, not further investigating this.
	Kash Patel late last night turned these documents over to Senator Charles Grassy, who first heard about this episode from a whistleblower.
	It is now corroborated.
	And just a few minutes ago, I got the actual Intel report language.
	I can read some of you when we get a chance.
	Okay.
	Well, yeah, listen, just so we're clear.
	So they found 20,000 driver's licenses coming in.
	That doesn't mean they didn't find lots of others.
	And I think if I look at the margin of error in some of these states, I mean, you know, whether it's 2016, last election, I mean, this last one was a little bit more of a blowout.
	But in 16 and 20, I mean, entire states were decided on, you know, 8,000 votes, 15,000 votes.
	So 20 being just one shipment, and presumably they didn't put all their eggs in one basket and just, you know, get unlucky that they were caught.
	You know, that could have been the entire election was decided on 45,000 votes in 2020.
	If they got a couple of these shipments in, you know, that could have been the margin of error by itself.
	You're exactly right.
	And the fact that we don't know the answer is the crime here.
	The FBI didn't do its job.
	Instead of continuing down the path of investigating, corroborating, when they hear from the CPB, reopening it, all right, maybe you pulled it back, reopened it when the CPB finds the licenses.
	Nope, they swept it under a rug.
	And then after the election, remember that famous 60-minute story where the guy from the Homeland Security Department said, this was a perfect election.
	No foreign interferences.
	He said he looked in the camera and said that.
	We now know there were two foreign interferences, this China plot and an earlier plot by Iran to hack a database, steal the identities of tens of thousands of American voters and use it to try to influence the election.
	So we rely on that one.
	That's a new one.
	Well, let's see how much time we have.
	We got to get into that one.
	But what I want to know is, you know, all these guys that did that, you know, in their pompous, you know, arrogant, self-righteous ways, I mean, Chris Wray was FBI director during this period of time.
	And if I recall correctly, didn't he testify before Congress that there was no interference?
	So when he said that, were they already aware of these things, right?
	Because I mean, now with the newly declassified intelligence reports, we know they were recalled.
	Did they get recalled?
	Because at the exact same time, Christopher Wray testified to Congress that there were no known plots from foreign interference.
	So this looks like a cover-up.
	Do we know the timing of when his testimony and when the initial discovery was?
	This gets recalled in early September, and then Chris Wray is testifying in September at an oversight hearing.
	Now, Chris Ray is not on the communique here.
	It goes out to agencies.
	We don't know if Chris Ray knew, but people inside the FBI absolutely knew and would have known that the testimony Chris Ray was giving was inaccurate based on what they had just gotten from his Chinese source.
	Selena, it's been a little while since I ran into you in Pennsylvania.
	Yeah, I did run into you in Pennsylvania.
	You were at a chocolate factory and you are having a really good time.
	Well, you know, listen, if you're going to be campaigning, you're going to be working that hard.
	You have to have a little bit of a good time.
	And I think that usually works well when you're authentic and you're having a good time.
	People get it also, which is probably somewhat helpful in politics as well.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Well, thank you for joining today.
	I know you were just feet away from my father back almost a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, when shots broke out in Butler.
	Take us through that sequence of events and how it really shaped your new book.
	So that, you know, I think it's important to say people running for president don't go to places like Butler.
	Yeah.
	And they go to places like East Palestine.
	And I had written a story right before he went the day before saying, why does he go to Butler?
	I understand that.
	And these are the people, and your father and I have talked about this numerous times that he has a connective tissue to.
	And he feels as though both parties have left them behind for generations.
	So that day I was set to interview your dad.
	When you're a journalist, there's a level of expectation that things are going to change.
	And things changed several times that day.
	Chris Lasavita texts me, Zito, you got five minutes with the president.
	I'm like, okay, well, I know your dad.
	I know I'd get more time.
	Yeah, that could turn into an hour really quickly with him once he gets going.
	It really does.
	And then I get to the farm, the farm show complex.
	I should tell people that Butler is very near and dear to my heart.
	My family first settled there in the 1750s.
	One of the founding families of Butler, Pennsylvania.
	So I know this place really, really well.
	So I get there.
	It's hot.
	It's hot as heck.
	I bring, see, it hits 100 that day.
	And there's no trees to cover you.
	There's nothing to go to any shade to get to.
	And I bring my daughter.
	She's a photo journalist.
	She's going to do the photos.
	And we drag my poor son-in-law, who's like a finance guy, right?
	But we vainly believed that he was going to hold all the equipment and we would stay nice and, you know, we wouldn't get sweaty.
	Well, that didn't happen.
	We were a mess by the end of the day.
	But once we get there, about two hours in, I get a text from Susie Wiles.
	She's today, she is the president's chief of staff.
	At the time, she was the other co-campaign chair.
	And she says, Hey, Selena, we're going to have to make some changes.
	And as a reporter, I'm thinking, well, it's probably going to get canceled.
	And when you're at a rally, these the internet like breaks down.
	So you don't.
	Yeah, the Secret Service, there's all sorts of jamming stuff.
	You can never, you can never live stream.
	I always try to do it, you know, just for various social, just to give people that sort of firsthand experience of it.
	It just usually never works well.
	Yeah.
	It never works.
	So I thought, oh, well, it's not happening.
	And then the rest of the text comes through.
	And she goes, How about five minutes after?
	And I'm like, fine, I'll roll with it.
	And then like three or four, I mean, I'm there for ever.
	Now, three or four hours later, your father's plane has landed.
	He's in the back of the stage area.
	If people aren't familiar with this, this is called the click area.
	This is the area where the president will meet with local law enforcement, firemen, paramedics, police, state trooper.
	But also they pull, I always find this very lovely.
	I wish more people saw this.
	They always pull people from the event just to go back and meet the president, shake his hand.
	He talks with them, he hugs them.
	It's a very endearing moment.
	And so he's back there.
	And I get a text from Susie and she says, so change of plans.
	And I'm like, there it is.
	It's canceled.
	And it wasn't canceled.
	She said, how would you feel about going to Bedminster and doing the interview on the plane?
	And I'm like, well, okay.
	I didn't have that on my bingo card.
	Come in.
	That's an upgrade.
	Yeah.
	He said, the president really wants to talk to you about Pennsylvania.
	I said, I'm all in.
	And so five minutes before he's supposed to come and get myself, my daughter, my son-in-law, Michelle Picard III, and his name is very, very important, comes running back.
	He is the campaign advance man.
	So it's go time.
	I'm like, okay, they changed their mind again.
	So we race through the crowd.
	We get behind the stage.
	We're standing there.
	We're at the end of the click line.
	And I look at Picard and I say, where are we doing this interview?
	And he's like very sheepish.
	He's like, I actually don't know.
	So he goes around and he asks the president and he comes back and he says, he just wanted to say hi to you.
	We're still going to Bedminster.
	So I'm making my way around the blue curtain and I can hear your dad.
	I can hear your dad.
	He always says my name the same way, Salina.
	He like exaggerates the E.
	And he gives me the same greeting he always gives me.
	Look at that hair.
	Guys, doesn't she have the most beautiful hair in America?
	And of course, it's a room filled with state troopers.
	And I'm so like, I'm so awkward, right?
	I just want to like crawl inside myself.
	Listen, I mean, I'd say it's solid bag of hair, though.
	I mean, it's a, it's a, you know, hey, as a Trump, I don't make fun of hair because, you know, one day I could wake up if those genes ever kick in, it could be a total disaster.
	So I'm just, you know, I go with it.
	So, so he's like, he asks, he remembers my grandchildren's names.
	He asks about them.
	He asks about my kids.
	And he said, I'm really looking forward to talking about Pennsylvania.
	I really am looking forward to this interview.
	It's going to be great.
	Now, at that point, as most people know, there's a sort of sequence that happens with music.
	And I know Lee Greenwood's song is next.
	And so I'm ushered out of there quite quickly.
	And Picard doesn't know what to do with me.
	So he says, you know, you're just going to have to stay in the buffer.
	The buffer is that well between the president's stage and the people that are attending the rally.
	And he goes, you just go in through the buffer and make your way over to the other side because you're just going to hop in the motorcade.
	I'm going to be able, I'm going to need to grab you and Shannon.
	I said, okay.
	So your dad comes out.
	In fact, if you look at the cover of Butler, my daughter took that photo.
	Oh, wow.
	And it's very significant why we chose that as the cover because it says so much about what he tells me later.
	And so we get out there.
	He goes, if people were following me on Twitter that day, I had video and pictures, people in the stands, your dad, make our way sort of over to the other side because I don't like logistics.
	I don't want to fail at them.
	I want to make sure I'm exactly where they told me to be.
	And your dad does two things that he never does.
	A chart comes down.
	Now, if there's ever a chart, the chart is always on the other side of him.
	And it's always at the end.
	And it's pretty rare that there's a chart anyways.
	So this chart comes down.
	It's a digital chart.
	And I'm thinking, I said to my daughter at the time, I'm like, what is he, Ross Perot?
	Like, yeah, he's never, that was the odd thing about that day.
	I noticed that too.
	It's like, yeah, I've been to a, let's call it, you know, what, just shy of a billion rallies.
	I've never seen him use like a PowerPoint presentation.
	Like, he's never done it.
	You know what I mean?
	It's not his style.
	Yeah, it's not his style.
	And then he does something else.
	And I'm sure you know this about your father.
	The relationship between him and the people that attend is very connective.
	There's a lot of connective tissue there.
	It's very transactional.
	And what do I mean by that?
	Well, he feeds off of their energy, but they also feed off of his energy, right?
	It's very mutual.
	So your dad may turn his whole body to face a different part of the rally, but he never turns his neck.
	He never turns his neck.
	The chart goes down.
	I forget the words that he says.
	He turns his neck and it's pop, pop, pop, pop.
	Goes right over my head.
	Now, when people say that time slows down for them in the midst of something that's traumatic, I will say that was also the case for me.
	And it almost seemed to have my, I remember just feeling out of body, not out of body, but just almost had a 360 feeling of my place.
	And I remember seeing the blood go across your face, your dad's face.
	I remember him, I mean, I'm just a few feet away.
	And I see him grab his ear.
	And then I see him take himself down.
	And I remember making a mental note.
	He didn't fall.
	He wasn't knocked off of his feet.
	He was able to take himself down.
	That's a good sign.
	And then he's surrounded at the same time, he's surrounded by a sea of blue suits, right?
	The Secret Service, his field people, they put a protective stance around him.
	There's another four shots.
	Now, I'm still standing.
	There was a part of me that was saying, God gave you a gift.
	You are someone who recounts history and you have a purpose in this moment and you need to live up to that.
	And obviously it was a conversation with myself, right?
	But I remember thinking that so vividly.
	So my recorder is still on.
	I always have my recorder on when your dad has a rally, not because a transcript doesn't come a couple hours later, but I think it is important as a journalist, not just with presidential candidates, but also with people, to catch the nuance when someone says something.
	Because if you don't do that when you're writing the story, it can come across in a very different way.
	Yeah.
	You're interviewing.
	I've seen that a lot where it's like, you know, if you play the video or the audio of me saying something, it clearly means something, but you put it in print, you change the punctuation a little bit.
	You know, a question looks like a statement.
	A statement looks like a question.
	They can manipulate that very, very easily in print.
	Yes.
	And I wouldn't do that to your father.
	And I wouldn't do it to anybody that I interview.
	I wouldn't do it to the car service guy.
	I wouldn't do it to the mechanic, right?
	That's my obligation as a reporter.
	So I forget that the recorder is on.
	It's in my pocket.
	At that moment, Michelle Picard III, like 28 years old, cancer survivor, just comes flying over and knocks me down.
	Like, get down, get down, get down.
	And he protects me.
	And I'm thinking, I just met this kid six hours ago.
	Yeah.
	Like that's next level, right?
	In terms, it tells you a lot, you know, about who your father surrounds himself with and who that he makes part of, whether it's his cabinet or his administration or the people that just work for him.
	And so I can see your dad from the angle I'm at.
	I can see your dad.
	I can see, I can hear the conversation.
	I know the shooter is dead.
	And then I know that your dad's okay because he's, this was kind of funny.
	If it wasn't so tragic, it was funny.
	He's fighting with them about putting his shoes on.
	When I saw all of it, even when he came back up, I was like, I told him, like, I was like, that was the most badass thing I've ever seen.
	I'm not sure it's the smartest tactically because who knows if there's another shooter, but like he was not going to not get up there and show that level of resolve, which I think, you know, people now understand.
	And I think it was a big turning point in an election because they're like, you know what?
	I want that representing me, not word salad combala.
	It's important that you point that out because the next morning, your dad calls me at ODAR 30.
	And the first thing he says is, Selena, this is Donald Trump, President Donald Trump.
	I'm like, yeah, like I don't know it's you, right?
	He's got a distinct voice.
	Yeah.
	Announces his name.
	He said, I just want to make sure that you are okay, that Shannon is okay and Michael is okay, meeting my daughter, a son-in-law.
	And I'm really sorry I didn't get to do that interview with you.
	I was like, I did something.
	My parents are going to be so mad at me when they read the book.
	I said, I swear like a truck driver to the president of the United States.
	I never swear.
	And I said, are you bleeping kidding me?
	I didn't say bleep.
	I said another word.
	And I'm like, you have been shot.
	I'm like, that is so kind of you.
	And I'm not worried about an interview.
	And your dad would go on to call me seven times that day.
	And very powerful conversations.
	We talked a lot about, you know, I suppose other journalists would have handled it in a different way, but he'd been through a traumatic experience.
	And I did too, not to the extent that he had, but certainly just being a witness to history, right?
	Yeah.
	And so your dad starts talking to me, asking me, but I think he was more asking himself, like, why did I turn my head, Selena?
	Why did I put that chart down?
	And then he comes to a conclusion where he says, that had to be God.
	That was the hand of God, wasn't it?
	Yeah.
	And that's why I said, I mean, when you look at all the shortcomings, I'm sure we'll get into that shortly with the failure, this, that.
	I mean, I don't believe in that much coincidence, but, you know, watching him go to a chart that he never has done before, all of those things happening in that instant.
	I remember when I was talking to him about it either the next day or whatever.
	And he was like, well, you know, 130 yards, pretty far shot.
	I'm like, no, I mean, I came from a competitive, you know, shooting background and everything.
	I was like, no, that's like missing a, you know, quite literally a 100-yard shot prone from a roof for 10 minutes.
	It's like, that'd be like missing a, you know, a six-inch putt, you know, on someone's head.
	And he's like, I was like, yeah, dad, it's not golf where, you know, if you get it within 10 feet of the hole, it's a, you know, it's a great shot from 100 yards.
	It's a little different in shooting.
	Like, if I couldn't hit a golf ball every time at 100 yards, I'm doing something really badly wrong.
	Yeah.
	He, Don, this is, this was the part that I think is the most important part, not just in terms of his character and understanding the moment, but also redefining American politics and the coalition that has formed around him.
	Because I said to him, Why did you say fight, fight, fight?
	Because I could see him.
	The crowd was saying USA as he's getting up and he says USA a couple of times.
	I don't even know if he remembers that.
	But I remember, and he was not saying it out loud, but he was repeating what they were saying.
	And then he turns around and he says, he's like to the Secret Service, wait, And he says, fight, fight, fight.
	So I said, why did you say that?
	And this is a part of him that I think more people should know.
	He says, in that moment, I wasn't Donald Trump.
	I was representing the country, the presidency, and all the grit, all the exceptionalism, everything that the country stands for.
	I had an obligation to show that strength.
	I had an obligation because the people there would have would have, you know, there could have been chaos.
	There could have been a stampede.
	So an obligation for the country is watching this.
	We are a resilient, strong country.
	And as that, as that, in that moment, I'm not representing me.
	I'm representing what America stands for.
	Yeah, you know, it's interesting you say that because I had two people, because obviously that was right before the RNC.
	You know, basically that was Saturday, I think Sunday night we went to the RNC or Monday morning, we went to the RNC and we were there for a week.
	And two separate people came up to me at the RNC and told me this thing that you're sort of saying as well.
	And I didn't even realize if he was conscious of it or not.
	But he goes, your dad saved a lot of lives that day.
	And I go, what are you talking about?
	What do you mean?
	Like, he got shot at.
	But how did he?
	He goes, when he came back up and he did that fight, fight, fight thing, everyone just calmed down.
	He goes, you know, I was on the highest level of one of the rafters and like people were trying to stampede.
	This thing was going to collapse and crush people in the wake.
	The second he did that, it was just like a calming force across the entire, you know, the entire field.
	Everyone just sort of stopped and we're in the moment and it allowed things to settle down, which was kind of amazing.
	I never thought of it.
	I never thought of it until that, but like two separate people came and said it and you seem to be sort of saying the same thing.
	Yeah.
	I talked to him two weeks ago and we went back to that.
	And he said, yeah, you know, that's why I did it.
	I thought it was the right thing to do.
	And to your point about the crowd, it was fascinating to me.
	And that did happen.
	The crowd immediately calmed down.
	People evacuated quietly.
	There was no screaming.
	I mean, obviously there's a medic there.
	The medic is with Corey and Helen and the other two men that have been injured.
	They were very seriously injured as well.
	They almost died.
	But they left quietly.
	And the Secret Service took me to the back of the stage where the click room was.
	I think because of that sort of iconic photo of me with that cowboy boots on and Picard on top of me, I think they thought I had been injured and I didn't know that, which is possible.
	There are people that get hurt and they don't know it because the adrenaline.
	The adrenaline kicks in.
	You don't even feel it.
	Yeah.
	And so I didn't go out until an hour later.
	Well, we walk out and we see this farm field.
	It's so quiet.
	And there's a wheelchair just sitting in the middle of it.
	And the farm field, you know, Pennsylvania really well.
	We have these, Appalachia, you have these rolling mountains.
	So the farm field rolls just like the rest of the train.
	And that's where the parking lot was.
	Now, there were at least 50,000 people there that day.
	So that means there's anywhere between 15 to 20,000 cars there.
	They were all still there.
	Oh, wow.
	And people were out of their vehicles.
	They were hugging.
	They were singing.
	I get chills when I think about how people behaved in the moment.
	I actually have never even heard that.
	I didn't realize that.
	And obviously, that's not a story the media is ever going to tell because they want to vilify every Trump supporter and every sort of America first patriot and all that.
	But that's pretty incredible, actually.
	I had no idea.
	They were sharing water.
	They were sharing food.
	If someone's phone wasn't working, they were calling loved ones for them to let them know they're okay.
	And we were down there for another hour.
	So that was a total of two hours that they were down there.
	It was the most beautiful thing that I saw.
	And I remember thinking, and I wrote this in the book, they disparage these people so much, bitter clingers, Bible holders, you know, clinging to a past life, angry, resentful, deplorable, garbage, right?
	Extremist.
	And I thought, and I've always thought this, now it's because I'm from Pennsylvania, it's because I've never left Western Pennsylvania.
	These are the best people in the world.
	And they showed that in that moment.
	There's no cameras rolling, right?
	There's no benefit for them to behave in a certain way.
	And I really thought that your dad, because he did that, not just in that field, but also in the rafters, but also across the country, could have been incredibly different.
	That moment changed American politics.
	There are two moments in the past year and a half that changed American politics that I think people just haven't understood the depth of it.
	One of it, one of them was when he went to East Palestine with JD.
	I was on that trip.
	Yep.
	I remember.
	That was an ugly day.
	Typical Appalachia, right?
	Like gray sky.
	It's like sleet, snow.
	You don't know what's in the air.
	You don't know what's in the puddles, right?
	But your dad comes rolling in with bottled water, buys all the law enforcement McDonald's.
	But most importantly, he walks around town.
	Now, my family is from East Palestine.
	Oh, wow.
	My great-grandfather was a farm boy and a coal miner from East Palestine.
	He even ran for office as a free silver Democrat, which today would be a Republican.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	And, you know, it's a village of 1800.
	Nobody else cared.
	But your dad, that moment changed because in that February of 2023, your dad was probably at the lowest point in terms of polling with DeSantis, right?
	And he was down, the New Hampshire poll had just come out a couple of days beforehand, and he was down to DeSantis.
	And I wrote the story that day.
	I still have, like, it has water stains on it on the paper as I was writing my notes down.
	I said, if everything changes for him, it happened right here.
	This is his inflection point.
	Two weeks later, he's ahead of the polls and he never looks back.
	Some lunatic called it a threat to try to keep us from going on the stage.
	Again, we went out there anyway, without fear.
	Charlie led the way.
	His message was clear then, and his message is clear now.
	We won't back down.
	We won't be intimidated.
	And one of the most important points yesterday, I think, was made by Erica Kirk, who showed so much courage.
	That's not easy, guys.
	It's not easy to do it if you didn't just lose your husband, the father of your two young kids, 11 days ago.
	No, it was hard no matter what.
	But she showed a lot of courage, just even being able to get up there.
	Because after Charlie's assassination, we didn't see violence.
	We didn't see rioting.
	We saw revival.
	We saw people go to church.
	We saw turning point chapters popping up all over the place.
	And as I posted on X, that is the biggest fact-check true I've ever seen.
	Most of all, God's mercy and God's love have been revealed to me these past 10 days.
	After Charlie's assassination, we didn't see violence.
	We didn't see rioting.
	We didn't see revolution.
	Instead, we saw what my husband always prayed he would see in this country.
	We saw revival.
	That sort of all tells you everything you need to know, right?
	Things aren't being burnt down.
	We're not destroying property.
	There's no looting.
	We're seeing a new American revival happening right before our very eyes.
	And that's a big deal, guys.
	That's exactly what we need.
	People are finally waking up across the board.
	Because as my father said, Charlie's murder was not just an attack on one man or one movement.
	It was an attack on our entire nation.
	I actually believe it.
	It was an attack on our entire civilization.
	Check out DJT on Charlie here.
	Every single American should take a long, hard look at the twisted soul and dark spirit of anyone who would want to kill a young man as good as Charlie, to kill anybody, but to kill a man like this.
	He didn't deserve this.
	He didn't deserve this.
	Our country didn't deserve this.
	And anyone who would make excuses for it are just out of their mind.
	Charlie's murder was not just an attack on one man or one movement.
	It was an attack on our entire nation.
	That was a horrible attack on the United States of America.
	It was an assault on our most sacred liberties and God-given rights.
	The gun was pointed at him, but the bullet was aimed at all of us.
	That bullet was aimed at every one of us.
	Indeed, Charlie was killed for expressing the very ideas that virtually everyone in this arena and most other places throughout our country deeply believed in.
	But the assassin failed in his quest because Charlie's message has not been silenced.
	It now is bigger and better and stronger than ever before.
	And it's not even close.
	This isn't just about singing kumbaya.
	It's about understanding the moment that we're in and understanding what exactly we are up against because I think we've lost sight of that.
	That's why I probably got in trouble, probably by some people.
	I guess some people understood it.
	But when I said, you know, watch the video of Charlie getting shot.
	I can't do that.
	It's terrible.
	It's like, I don't know.
	You have to.
	And it is brutal and it is gruesome.
	But you have to understand exactly what we are up against because it is not the same as you and I in a disagreement.
	It's sick.
	It's deranged and it's evil.
	And actually standing up for this country and the values that make this nation so great, that's a big deal.
	Stephen Miller did not hold back.
	He was fire.
	Sending a message to the extreme left that they have no idea the dragons they have awakened.
	Check this out.
	Hello, turning point.
	Hello, Patriots.
	Hello to our fearless president, Donald J. Trump.
	And hello to millions of Americans all across this land who are gathered in sadness and sorrow to mourn Charlie Kirk, but also to dedicate ourselves to finishing his mission and achieving victory in his name.
	The day that Charlie died, the angels wept, but those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts.
	And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.
	When I see Erica and her strength and her courage, I'm reminded of a famous expression.
	The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength.
	And the warrior whispers back, I am the storm.
	Erica is the storm.
	We are the storm.
	And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.
	Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello.
	Our ancestors built the cities.
	They produced the art and architecture.
	They built the industry.
	Erica stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up city, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves and the darkness into the light.
	The light will defeat the dark.
	We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil.
	They cannot imagine what they have awakened.
	They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us.
	Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.
	And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have?
	You have nothing.
	You are nothing.
	You are wickedness.
	You are jealousy.
	You are envy.
	You are hatred.
	You are nothing.
	You can build nothing.
	You can produce nothing.
	You can create nothing.
	We are the ones who build.
	We are the ones who create.
	We are the ones who lift up humanity.
	You thought you could kill Charlie Kirk.
	You have made him immortal.
	You have immortalized Charlie Kirk.
	And now millions will carry on his legacy.
	And we will devote the rest of our lives To finishing the causes for which Charlie gave his last measure of devotion.
	You cannot defeat us.
	You cannot slow us.
	You cannot stop us.
	You cannot deter us.
	We will carry Charlie and Erica in our heart every single day and fight that much harder because of what you did to us.
	You have no idea.
	The dragon you have awakened.
	You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization, to save the West, to save this republic.
	Because our children are strong, and our grandchildren will be strong, and our children's children's children will be strong.
	And what will you leave behind?
	Nothing.
	Nothing.
	To our enemies, you have nothing to give.
	You have nothing to offer.
	You have nothing to share but bitterness.
	We have beauty.
	We have light.
	We have goodness.
	We have determination.
	We have vision.
	We have strength.
	We built the world that we inhabit now, generation by generation.
	And we will defend this world.
	We will defend goodness.
	We will defend light.
	We will defend virtue.
	You cannot terrify us.
	You cannot frighten us.
	You cannot threaten us because we are on the side of goodness.
	We are on the side of God.
	And to my friend, Charlie, to my brother Charlie, I know you are looking at us right now.
	I know you're watching Erica right now.
	I know you're watching your children right now.
	And I promise you, my friend, I promise you, my brother, we will prove worthy of your sacrifice.
	We will prove worthy of your time on earth.
	We will make you proud.
	We will finish the job.
	We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil.
	And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good.
	And we will achieve victory for our children, for our families, for our civilization, and for every patriot who stands with us.
	God bless you.
	God bless Turning Point.
	God bless Erica.
	God bless the Kirk family.
	God bless our heroes.
	And God bless the United States of America.
	Thank you.
	I don't want to hear any BS about both sides.
	It's not both sides, guys.
	It's one side.
	One side wants to save America and the other side wants to apologize for America.
	One side wants to burn down your street.
	Our side wants to rebuild it.
	That's a fundamental difference, guys.
	We got to make sure we understand that.
	One side wants to have a debate and dialogue.
	The other side wants to shut it down with threats of violence.
	As JD closed out his remarks yesterday, may our Heavenly Father give us the courage to live as Charlie lived.
	That is what we must do for Charlie.
	You ran a good race, my friend.
	We've got it from here.
	So, guys, we've got it from here.
	But that doesn't happen by sitting on your butts.
	We have to act.
	We have to be out there.
	We have to stay engaged.
	We have to understand what's at stake.
	And we must never, ever, ever give up.
	We have four top 10 captures on the FBI's most wanted list this year alone.
	That equals the number of the entirety of the Biden administration.
	That means four of the worst criminal animals on planet Earth were captured by Donald Trump's FBI in nine months.
	On top of that, we have seized enough fentanyl, 100 to kill 127 million Americans.
	That's up 23%.
	Our work on violent crimes against children is historic.
	We have found, identified, and discovered 6,000 children this year alone.
	That's up 30%.
	We have dismantled human trafficking organizations looking to enslave our children.
	That is up 14%.
	And we have also, this may be one of the most proud stats when it comes to protecting our youth, especially online.
	Nihilistic violent extremist networks like 764, praying and mutilizing children and causing them to commit suicide online and things like animal crushing.
	Our arrest in that category is up 590%.
	These numbers are because the mission of this FBI is simply to get after people who are looking to destroy our way of life, harm our children, and destroy our youth.
	And the fact that President Trump came in and gave me one mandate, get out there and deliver accountability for the American people and make sure our neighbors are safe.
	These are just some of the numbers we're talking about.
	The murder rate, lowest ever in modern history, and the most violent offender arrests by 110%.
	I mean, people have to take a pause at those numbers.
	Those statistics don't just happen if we did one case.
	We are doing tens of thousands of cases across the country and around the world.
	Our espionage arrests, Don, those from Iran, Russia, China, and elsewhere looking to spy on us, we've arrested 40% more spies in the United States.
	We're also taking on agro-terrorists who are importing seeds into this country in funguses and pretending to be researchers at places like the University of Michigan and looking to steal our agricultural seed so that they can supplant that and go overseas and take it away from us.
	We are on a full-scale mission to protect the American public, and we're going to finish this December strong.
	We've already operated Operation Summer Heat to historic results, safeguarding cities like Memphis, which was an FBI-led effort to get out there and absolutely crush violent crime.
	And we're never going to stop defending the homeland.
	So these statistics, Don, while we can rattle them off, that is nine months of putting foot to ass and crushing it for the American public.
	By the way, it's actually a really big deal.
	And I sort of do this for a living at this point.
	And I didn't know half of those things.
	I think there's definitely things that people want action on, especially the online cadres.
	And I get that.
	But I think, just honestly, in hearing that right now, because God knows I'm one of those people for a lot of these things.
	But in hearing all of those things and not knowing about it, that's actually amazing.
	I think we all probably have to do a better job of highlighting some of those things because that's ultra critical for Americans.
	That doesn't mean we stop wanting some of those other things, but I think we can't let some of the noise of all of that essentially discredit that work.
	Because like I said, I do this every day.
	I follow it intimately.
	And I literally only knew of about half of the things you just rattled off.
	And those are actually really big statistics.
	So well done.
	Well, lesson learned.
	I got to come back on your show and do it more often.
	Well, I think we just got to get that out there on a lot of the messaging.
	I mean, listen, there's people, and hey, it's really germane to me.
	Obviously, the shooting of my father, people want to know information about that.
	And I think you'll do a great job with that.
	You have some of the stuff around JSICs.
	This is the big one, obviously.
	But those other stats on a day-to-day basis are such a huge deal.
	And again, I don't know that anyone actually knows about it.
	So I think we collectively have to highlight those things because it's easy to sort of say, well, I want this, this, and this, but not know that that's actually going on.
	Again, I do it for a living and I'm shocked that I didn't know it.
	And so, you know, for those who get frustrated online, I think, you know, I may get it, but like, I think you also have to give credit where credit is due on those other things because those stats, not just the numbers, but the improvement in the percentages relative to your predecessors is a really big deal.
	No, absolutely.
	And that doesn't mean we're taking our eye off the ball.
	Look, you're talking to the guy who was the chief investigator for RussiaGate, the ultimate weaponization of our law enforcement in the United States history.
	Well, I know a little bit about it.
	Yeah, and you know a little bit about it.
	And I do too.
	And we're talking to the guy.
	Look, we're the ones that uncovered Arctic Frost.
	In terms of transparency, this FBI has produced 40,000 pages of documents to Congress in nine to 10 months alone.
	Let's put that in perspective.
	My predecessor, Ray, produced 13,000 pages in seven years, and Comey produced 3,000 pages in three and a half years.
	We're committed to transparency, but we're also committed to these investigations.
	We have ongoing investigations, as you know, of Russia Gate and Arctic Frost.
	And yes, we did indict folks like James Comey and Letitia Jane.
	And I know they're going through the legal challenges, but notice one thing that's not happening in those cases.
	Nobody in there is challenging the substance of the work.
	They're trying to throw it out on some procedural error.
	And I don't believe they're going to be successful.
	We're not done with those cases.
	Our partners at the Department of Justice are not standing down and bending the knee.
	You're going to see, in my opinion, more investigative work continue to lead to more prosecutions because in order to end the weaponization of justice, there has to be full accountability, not just with transparency, but also with people being held to justice in a court of law.
	And we're going to continue to do that.
	Look, they built this disease temple over the course of decades.
	And in 10 months, we've already taken a sledgehammer to it.
	But that doesn't mean we're done.
	And that doesn't mean we're not doing the work.
	It just takes a little bit of time to unravel the deep state that they built here.
	And we're doing it.
	And the Jan 6 pipe bomber is a piece of it.
	You're right.
	But it's not all of it.
	But I want the American public to know we keep speaking in court when we can.
	We're going to continue to show up to court.
	And we're going to continue to make people like Comey and Brennan and Clapper and Page and Strzok and so many others answer for what I believe are their acts of criminal conduct because that's exactly what they did when they weaponized law enforcement, went overseas, borrowed information from some hack in England about Russia, infiltrated our FISA court, lied to a federal officer, and illegally surveilled your father during a presidential candidacy.
	You think I'm going to let that go?
	Yeah.
	Well, and senators and congressmen, only Republicans in Arctic Frost.
	I mean, that's a really big deal.
	Again, the media is never going to talk about it, but I mean, you know, talk about a threat to democracy.
	Can you talk generally about the process of conducting investigations?
	Again, whether it be the pipe bomb or Arctic Frost or any of these others that are, you know, all crazy.
	You know, all of this does take time, especially when there's documents literally being found in burn bags in random places hidden inside the FBI headquarters.
	I mean, how shocking is it to know that under Comey Ray, there seemed to be a deliberate effort to hide the truth?
	I mean, that's clear as day to me.
	It was an arrogance.
	These people thought that we would never look or find these materials because they had it set for destruction or they put it away in some vault.
	Remember, the Arctic Frost case, where they also targeted not just senators, but staffers, including myself, when I was done being a staffer and on the campaign trail for President Trump, they decided, hey, let's go target him.
	Remember, they put my name in the search warrant, the bogus search warrant for Mar-a-Lago.
	Nobody else's name, mine in that WhatsApp search warrant that the judge signed literally over WhatsApp to unlawfully raid your father's house in South Florida.
	We are the ones uncovering those documents.
	We delivered them to Congress.
	We want to work with the American people.
	This is a dual track that no FBI has ever taken.
	Everybody just said, wait, We could do that and not turn over anything.
	But we are going to turn over as much as we can without jeopardizing the investigation.
	That's exactly what we did in the pipe bomber case.
	We provided what we could to Congress in a timely fashion.
	And now look at the moment where we have arrived today, an actual arrest, which is what every American wanted.
	And that's the balance that I have to strike for this FBI.
	And I get it.
	We get some heat for it in the online spaces, and that's okay.
	But look at the results, not just this result, but the historic results of the first year of the Trump presidency of the FBI.
	They are literally the best numbers the FBI has ever put up.
	And that's because we're moving agents out into the field by the thousands.
	We're giving ourselves a new headquarters building.
	We're saving the taxpayer $4 billion.
	We're giving the men and women of the FBI a workforce that they can believe in and restoring public trust.
	And remember, when I inherited this FBI, their public trust rating was less than 40%.
	That's like congressional levels.
	We've got a lot of work to do to restore it.
	And putting out documents is one way, but putting out these arrest numbers and conviction numbers, in my opinion, is the best way.
	And we're only nine to 10 months into my tenure and we're going to keep going.
	I love what I'm doing by building up my own channel and having my own.
	I can do my own schedule and everything like that.
	But I think what's cool now is you're seeing my journalism actually create a change in the world.
	I mean, that's like the whole point of doing journalism is to create change.
	And so it's kind of funny when you get invited to the White House and then after that, everyone's calling you a Fed.
	It's like, well, wasn't that the whole purpose of that journalism was to bring enough awareness to create a change?
	Right.
	And so like now my journalism is creating change, which is really cool.
	And I think I'm in my like acquiring knowledge phase in life where I'm just taking in everything, whether it's going into the White House and doing a roundtable and meeting and listening to what the president had to say, or if it's talking to some homeless person on the street about the addictions of fentanyl, is eventually just to use all that knowledge to then be able to form my opinions.
	And I'm not trying to push my opinions on people right now.
	And I'm just more show more so just showing them things for what they are.
	But eventually I'd like to maybe create a change or get into politics because I can't be on the streets forever.
	You know what I mean?
	Well, I mean, a couple more hundred million view videos and you're not going to be able to surprise anyone anymore.
	No, exactly.
	They don't even protest anymore.
	It's just like, it's wild.
	In the time that you've been doing this, how much do you think the media landscape has changed in your mind?
	You're living this in real time.
	You're seeing it.
	You're forcing them, even if they're sort of begrudgingly doing it, you're forcing the mainstream media to talk about this because it's too big a story to totally ignore.
	They'd lose what's left of their already waning credibility.
	But how have you noticed the media changing because of sort of independent journalists like yourselves actually being the people that are breaking real stories when it you know it used to be the legacy media that they were supposed to be doing it?
	Yeah, it's always funny to me like when I go to events and I see somebody with some press badge and they got this huge camera, this massive backpack, and then there's just me with my camera.
	And I usually either have like my mom filming it or my cousin or my friend.
	And I end up like doubling them or tripling them in views because it's more authentic and real versus somebody who has to then send that video to somebody, then they send it to somebody, then they approve it and then they post it.
	And so you're seeing people like we're done with the BS.
	Like nobody, like nobody wants some twisted narrative on things.
	I just watched someone 60 minutes go to Sekot, which I did a year ago, first ever American to go inside of Sekot.
	And then they're using my video and then they're talking about how unjust it is for these prisoners to be inside of solitary confinement.
	Meanwhile, those people are literally what killed the what killed an innocent life.
	And it's a white liberal telling people like, oh, this is unjust, unhumane, that they're putting prisoners inside or gangsters inside of a prison who literally killed people.
	And so people don't care about that anymore.
	It's like the Cindy Sweeney interview.
	Like we're all just like, no, like that's not how it is.
	Yeah.
	You know, the fake outrage is pretty incredible.
	And I imagine if those people were living in their houses or in their neighborhoods, they'd probably have a problem with it.
	But as long as it's not in their backyard, it doesn't really matter.
	It's just like they're not even in tune with reality.
	Like they're not in tune that, yeah, maybe small fraud is not a good thing to be happening.
	Like, oh, that makes sense.
	Fraud in general is a bad thing.
	I think we could all probably agree on that.
	Except for in 2425, because if it's, you know, fraud that, you know, somehow, you know, lets their TDS, their Trump derangement syndrome kick in, then I guess that kind of fraud is good or the usual, like, well, it's not really happening.
	It's happening, but it's not really bad.
	It's happening.
	It's actually really good.
	All the way down to like, you're racist.
	You know what I mean?
	Like, it's amazing.
	The chain of progression is always the same.
	It's amazing what President Trump has done because it's like he's this person who has became so polarizing to the point where even if something makes perfect sense, they won't rationalize it.
	Like, maybe don't take Tylenol when you're pregnant.
	Oh, I'm going to start taking Tylenol when I'm pregnant.
	Like, it's crazy.
	Like, your dad is such a savage in that aspect of the, that he's literally became a figure to where even if he does say the most common sense thing, people will then not believe it.
	No, it's, it's not.
	Nick, we hear the word accountability a lot.
	Uh, you know, what does accountability for this fraud look like to you?
	Uh, you know, what should happen next, um, in your opinion?
	Yeah, what would happen to you if you stole $10 million?
	I'd be in jail for a long time.
	You'd be in jail, right?
	So I think we're all hoping that these people will be like, can you imagine if Tim Waltz gets put in jail, right?
	Well, I heard there were whistleblowers, at least on the food program fraud, where there were whistleblowers, and he was like, he basically threatened them.
	They didn't get promotions.
	They lost accountability for pointing out what was then perhaps the largest fraud scheme in America going back years.
	I mean, I remember a time when whistleblowers were beyond reproach and they could do anything right as long as they were whistleblowers against Trump.
	Now, they turned out to all be liars and hucksters.
	We figured that out after years of investigation, they spent $50 million on Russia, Russia, Russia.
	It seems like accountability means two different things depending on who's the one that's actually committing the crimes.
	So I think the accountability we want to see happen with this is we do want to see people actually be held criminally for what they've committed.
	If you stole $10 million, you'd be in jail.
	If I stole $10 million, I'd be in jail.
	So therefore, if Tim Waltz is accountable for, let's just say, even a million dollars of this fraud, whether he has to spend 10 days in a prison cell or however many years a judge finds him guilty for, that's what he should have to do.
	And same with all the other fraudsters and all the other corrupt politicians who allowed this to happen.
	Like it's time to take it serious.
	And this is such a pivotal moment for the current administration to make, to really show like, okay, we're holding people accountable for what they've done.
	Yeah, like I saw Cash put out a thing on it.
	They've been looking into this for months.
	And I guess the thing is this, it's not just the people at the daycare centers or the people taking that check.
	Where's the money going?
	Where's the other funding?
	I mean, this is complicated stuff to track down because you really can't just take out the one daycare center or the 50 or the 100 that are there.
	You got to see where all this other stuff is going so you can uncover what is probably a much larger corruption case than even what you've discovered, which is, again, billions of dollars in my opinion, probably at least.
	But it seems like it's going so much further than that.
	And it all probably ties back to some sort of Democrat fundraising apparatus where these businesses are then making sure that they're electing the people and the Democrats so they can keep perpetuating these fraudulent policies.
	And it's just a never-ending vicious cycle.
	Yeah, it is a never-ending vicious cycle.
	But I think if they do go after the person who's most accountable for this and who has even said that organized crime, he's even admitted to organized crime.
	And Tim Waltz has before the fraud.
	So he's known about this fraud for a long time.
	So if they go after him and then continue to go after everybody else, then you'll see massive change and you'll see real accounting be held.
	Yeah, no, it's nuts.
	What are the next ones you're working on?
	And if can you give us any hints?
	Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are messaging me to go to California, Ohio.
	There's a lot of fraud.
	And now if I show up to some, I'm sure all these people are like, I'm public enemy number one forum.
	So I'm like, how do I do this?
	I got some stuff up my sleeve, and I have more videos and ideas and whatnot, but I'll continue on the path where I'm at.
	And now we've just unlayered a whole new because everyone knew about fraud, but to this level, it's crazy.
	Yeah.
	So, Nick, you know, thank you for all that you're doing, man.
	Where can everyone follow you so they can see all your work, so they can get this message out there so they can make, you know, just make it be known.
	Let people understand what's actually happening.
	I mean, the truth shall set you free.
	Where can they find you?
	Yeah.
	Everywhere, it's just Nick Shirley on all platforms.
	Okay.
	So, guys, check out Nick.
	Really incredible work, man.
	Really impressive for a kid your age that's not a kid, I guess, 23, but when you're old like me, everyone's a kid at this point.
	Never thought I'd be that way.
	But, you know, keep up.
	Keep it up.
	It's really, it's brave.
	It's important.
	And really, really proud of what you're doing, man.
	Thanks for being on and keep up the great work.
	Thank you.
	Appreciate you.
	Be well, buddy.
	Well, guys, thanks for tuning in.
	This is exactly the kind of story we're going to keep covering.
	The stories the mainstream media won't touch.
	So just remember to like, to share, to subscribe.
	Spread this episode around because the American people deserve to know where their money is going.
	They need to know what's actually happening.
	You can turn on your mainstream media source, and if they give this a few seconds, I'd be shocked.
	They'll cover for it.
	They'll come up with excuses for it.
	You know what's happening.
	We've seen this all before.
	So make sure to share it.
	Click that like button right now before you leave.
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