Jan. 10, 2024 - Loomer Unleashed - Laura Loomer
01:48:22
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| Time | Text |
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| Thank you. | |
| Hey everybody, Laura Loomer here, live with Joey Manorino. | |
| Hello, good evening. | |
| We are live from Iowa once again. | |
| Yes, I've been in Iowa all week, as has Joey. | |
| Tonight is a very special night. | |
| It is officially the five-day countdown to the Iowa caucus, which is going to be taking place here in Iowa on January 15th. | |
| And tonight, President Trump is in Iowa, where he's being hosted by Fox News for a town hall. | |
| At 8 p.m. | |
| Central and so I thought what better way than to have a Trump Town Hall watch party and also a meet-and-greet to meet all of these amazing MAGA patriots who are here behind me. | |
| You can see we got the we got the flat screens up, we got the projector up, we have pizza, we have meatballs, and I have Ron DeSantis. | |
| It's pretty much over in five days. | |
| He will be irrelevant to pretty much everyone, which he kind of already has been for most of the race, but it will be the official pronouncement of his political death. | |
| Absolutely, and Joey and I have spent the entire day together. | |
| We just got back from Vivek Ramaswamy's press conference, and there was also a protest inside the Iowa State Capitol. | |
| No eminent domain for private gain, and it was great because, you know, you had Vivek Ramaswamy there, you had Congressman Steve King, who's on his way right now to my watch party, and also you had the Iowa State Director for President Trump. | |
| A lot of Trump supporters at this event. | |
| Yes, expressing their support for Iowa farmers and everyday Americans who are facing the threat of eminent domain where the government comes in and essentially they confiscate your property for pennies on the dollar. | |
| It was really great to see not just Vivek Ramaswamy there but also a ton of Trump supporters including a lot of Trump caucus chairs for the Iowa caucus. | |
| Right and it's very important to point out Vivek had some stuff to say about you and he really came out and defended you hard against Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis who unjustly threw you out of the events and he said an investigative journalist is allowed at my events and shame on them for not Allowing you there, so I thought that was a big deal. | |
| Yeah, and they actually had protesters climate change people showed up to protest and Instead of you know throwing them out like Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley would have done but they actually gave the lady the microphone make a deal with it, you have 60 seconds. - Well, in fact, yeah. - And he said it's important that we respect free speech in America. | |
| And I showed up wearing my Trump hat. | |
| I showed up in my Trump hat, in my Trump scarf, and Vivek was completely fine with it, even though it's well known that I'm a Trump supporter. | |
| But I respect the fact that Vivek is pro-free speech. | |
| I think that he is definitely laying the groundwork to be a nominee in 2028. | |
| I do believe Trump needs to be our nominee in 2024 so that we can take America back and save our country and right this wrong of a stolen election. | |
| But the vague is certainly, in my opinion, the number one contender for 2028. | |
| Well, we need a future of the movement. | |
| The movement can't end after Trump's second term. | |
| The movement has to continue. | |
| And we thought For a little bit, most of the people thought Ron DeSantis would carry the movement forward. | |
| I know you never actually were on that train, but the majority of people said, all right, we got Ron for 28. | |
| We don't have Ron anymore for 28. | |
| Ron showed us that he is not who we thought he was. | |
| He did a good, decent job in Florida for COVID. | |
| But the rest of the foreign policy and the rest of his attitude and who he's surrounded himself with really disqualifies him for future races. | |
| So we now have Vivek who can take the movement forward afterwards. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And, you know, some breaking news right now. | |
| Chris Christie is dropping out, actually, of the GOP presidential primary. | |
| Yes, he is. | |
| Interesting timing, five days before the Iowa caucus and just a couple weeks before the January 23rd New Hampshire primary and he actually got caught on a hot mic today in which he said that Nikki Haley's gonna get smoked by Trump and he also said in this hot mic audio that Ron DeSantis called him petrified and said that Donald Trump is going to win Iowa and so I take that as an endorsement of President Trump from Chris | |
| Well, Chris Christie doesn't endorse anything but the KFC buckets, and this is a man who stayed with Trump for four years, supporting him, pseudo-supporting him. | |
| He did debate prep with him, and then when it became politically expedient, he got in the race and tried to do nothing but tear him down. | |
| Chris Christie is a pathetic politician. | |
| He actually helped Obama win in 2012, if you remember. | |
| He had the Bridgegate scandal. | |
| He's done nothing good with his life ever. | |
| And he campaigned with Obama in New Jersey as well. | |
| Yeah, he's a fat... | |
| Never mind. | |
| And he sent his friends. | |
| He also, he had a guy by the name of Dominic Santana, who was a political operative and a friend of Chris Christie's, who dressed up in a con man outfit and stormed President Trump's motorcade. | |
| Really? | |
| He was friends with Chris Christie, yes. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| He is a Chris Christie supporter. | |
| Yes, well, I heard rumors that Chris Christie might be coming here tonight, and that's why the kitchen is completely ready for him. | |
| They have stored many, many pounds of food, just in case Chris shows up and gets bored. | |
| We have pizza here. | |
| Come on out if you're watching. | |
| We're gonna be here all throughout the town hall. | |
| So if you live in Iowa and you didn't know about it, we're in Grimes. | |
| Drive safely, it is snowing, but we have free pizza, free meatballs. | |
| It's our last chance to really stick a fork in the meatball known as Ron DeSantis. | |
| And so we are getting ready in about 15 minutes. | |
| President Trump is going to be taking the stage live on Fox News with Brett Baier and Martha McCallum. | |
| From Des Moines, Iowa, where he's participating in a town hall. | |
| Yeah, and I'm not going to be soft on him. | |
| Bret Baier, he's a pretty tough one, so it should be entertaining tonight. | |
| Trump always goes right back at them, but it's sometimes nice, because the soft interviews are nice, but I like to see back and forth. | |
| I like to see him go at the journalists. | |
| So he might have to. | |
| What's really interesting is that, you know, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis also had their town halls with Martha McCallum and Brett Baier. | |
| But they were given the 5 p.m. slot. | |
| And so it goes to show you how weak of a candidate both of them are because they can't even get a primetime slot. | |
| The only one that was able to get a primetime slot for the town hall was Donald Trump. | |
| Because let's be honest, nobody really gives a shit about Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. | |
| You can just watch old Dick Cheney speeches if you want to hear Nikki Haley speak. | |
| And Ron DeSantis might be the most boring person to ever run for president in history. | |
| So, you remember the space when he announced? | |
| No charisma. | |
| No charisma. | |
| It failed, yeah. | |
| Yeah, and it failed. | |
| And literally, that was the high point. | |
| It all was down from there. | |
| Well, we have a lot of really interesting people here in the room tonight, and we're going to be watching President Trump's town hall, and in between commercial breaks, we're going to be interviewing people. | |
| Like I said, we have Congressman Steve King, we have several of the Iowa state representatives who have endorsed President Trump, who are here tonight with their families to show support. | |
| And people are trickling in still, because it is snowy and the roads are icy, so people are taking their time. | |
| I'm surprised anybody came out. | |
| It's amazing, the Iowan spirit. | |
| It's pretty full here. | |
| And with all that snow, nothing stops the people of Iowa. | |
| It's amazing to see it. | |
| Yeah, and big shout out to Destination Grill as well. | |
| If you live in Iowa or you're coming to visit, really amazing event venue. | |
| So if you're looking for events, the food is amazing, the owner is pro-Trump, and he believes in free speech. | |
| I mean, this is an owner who comped us tonight. | |
| A lot of, yeah, a lot of, he comped us the space because he supports Trump, but he believes in free speech, and he's hosted Ron DeSantis here for events, Vivek Ramaswamy, and when I said that I wanted to do a watch party here, he, you know, in the spirit of free speech, decided to comp some pizzas and drinks tonight, so really a big shout out to the owners here at Destination Grill. | |
| Amazing venue space, amazing food, so you're gonna want to check them out in Grimes, Iowa. | |
| Absolutely! | |
| I love the pizza and you know I'm a tough critic. | |
| I lived in Italy for a while so this is actually really good stuff. | |
| I like the meatballs. | |
| Yeah well I haven't tried the meatballs yet but we'll have to do that. | |
| We shall see how that goes. | |
| So be sure you guys, I believe this is on the front page of Rumble right now, and be sure that you share the link live. | |
| We are live right now. | |
| We're going to be having the camera, you know, we're not going to be talking the entire time, but we're going to have the camera focused on the attendees tonight as well as the big screen screen behind us so that you can see President Trump's town hall. | |
| And we're going to be doing some commentary as well, some interviews and a lot of great people here. | |
| And if you live in Iowa, be sure that you commit to caucus. | |
| You can go to ia.DonaldJTrump.com to learn all you need to know about how to caucus for President Trump if you live in Iowa. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's a really involved People from outside of Iowa, like me, I didn't realize you can't just walk in and vote at any time of the day. | |
| You have to show up at a certain time to a certain place and really get organized to do it. | |
| So it takes a lot, but that's what you call dedication and I'm glad to see that people are so engaged in it here. | |
| And I know that Casey DeSantis, Casey Jill Black, whatever she likes to call herself, Ron's wife, encouraged voter fraud. | |
| She actually got in a lot of trouble for telling people from out of state to come and caucus. | |
| And so that's voter fraud. | |
| And it received a condemnation from the Iowa GOP that had to actually issue a statement saying that you cannot caucus for Trump unless you live here in Iowa. | |
| And so remember, you can only caucus for President Trump in Iowa if you are an Iowa president. | |
| This is not a blue state. | |
| You must be a citizen of the state to vote. | |
| And a citizen of the country, which is not the case in every other place. | |
| In New York, they want non-residents to be able to vote in elections. | |
| And they're going to try to make it legal. | |
| So, we've got a crazy country. | |
| We've got to save it, Laura. | |
| We've got to save it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| They do. | |
| a Democrat watching and you are sick and tired of the mess that Joe Biden has created and you live in Iowa and you want to become a Republican and vote for Trump, they actually have same-day registration on the same of the caucus. | |
| And so you can walk in and vote for Donald Trump and change your registration to Republican if you are an independent or a Democrat watching tonight. | |
| So just like I said before, go to ia.DonaldJTrump.com to get all the information that you need. | |
| Right. | |
| And it's really great. | |
| We have these amazing little signs. | |
| Check these out. | |
| We got the Trump 2024 signs. | |
| Look at how nice these are. | |
| And what else do we have? | |
| They're great. | |
| We got plenty of stuff. | |
| We have those little, show us those little green things over here. | |
| This is the President Trump back-to-back Iowa champ, 2016, 2020, and most likely 2024, unless they pull some shenanigans, which they really can't beat this landslide coming in Iowa. | |
| But Trump 2024. | |
| We have koozies for, I don't know, I don't know. | |
| I'm sober, Donald Trump's sober. | |
| I don't drink, but... I drink wine. | |
| If you do drink, there's koozies, but you can also use it for coffee or tea. | |
| So that's really nice. | |
| With the QR code, it probably takes you how to go to the website. | |
| The Trump merchandise is awesome. | |
| He really puts together some great stuff. | |
| But nothing ever will beat the classic MAGA hat, ever. | |
| That is iconic all around the world. | |
| Or the Trump beanie. | |
| The Trumpini's awesome too. | |
| But you can walk through cities in Europe, Latin America, anywhere in the world and that MAGA hat, somebody in some city will have it. | |
| That, I'm gonna steal from you. | |
| I also have my Trump 2024 scarf that I'm rocking here tonight. | |
| I'm staying warm. | |
| That will go missing from Laura soon because I really need that. | |
| I got to rock that when I go next week to Europe. | |
| See some people get really triggered because they're still a little brainwashed with the Trump stuff. | |
| We have a lot of great people here tonight. | |
| What are you excited to see? | |
| I'm excited to see basically what he's gonna say if there's anything new that they're gonna come up with as far as the questioning about the case because what people are not talking about enough in this election is Donald Trump cannot run a campaign like he wants to Because he has to go back and forth to court. | |
| He's back tomorrow. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| Like, check this out. | |
| Trump's in Iowa tonight for the town hall, and then immediately tomorrow he has to go to New York for closing arguments. | |
| And then the judge today, Arthur Ngoron, was just being malicious. | |
| And in the email thread that I posted between Trump's lawyers and Arthur Ngoron, you see the judge just being so spiteful and saying, well, no, now you don't get to give your closing arguments. | |
| And mind you, President Trump's mother-in-law, okay, Melania Trump's mother just passed away last night. | |
| And usually, if you have a death in the family, you're able to reschedule your court dates. | |
| And anybody with a heart would, you know, not express opposition to that. | |
| But Arthur and Goran is a communist. | |
| Oh, he's a piece of dirt. | |
| So our prayers go out to First Lady Melania Trump with the death of her mother and President Trump, the death of his mother-in-law. | |
| It's just awful what the Trump family has been subjected to. | |
| But you know, Rhonda Santos, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and really every other Our candidate has been able to stay here for weeks at a time and like get comfy, get cozy in their hotels. | |
| And Donald Trump constantly has to travel because he's being harassed. | |
| This is harassment. | |
| And that's just a preview of what's going to happen in the general election with him too. | |
| So what we're going to have to do is it's going to take people like us, people who really support to actually get out there. | |
| We're going to have to be holding events because there's no way he's going to be able to do everything on his own with what they're going to try to put him through. | |
| So if you are a Trump supporter, Get involved and get active now, because we're gonna have to carry that message forward. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And be sure that you show up on Monday, because that's what's most important. | |
| Monday, every vote matters, you guys. | |
| Look, don't get overconfident in thinking that Trump's gonna win. | |
| No. | |
| Pretend like we are five points behind, just so that you get everybody you know to get out and vote for you. | |
| Yeah, because Chris Christie dropping out is a trick. | |
| I know we're all celebrating, haha, the fat man lost, he can go back to being the Michelin Man little representative, but the fact of the matter is, Haley is allegedly trailing him really closely in the polls. | |
| With Christie dropping out, if people push behind her, Trump could be in trouble in New Hampshire. | |
| So there is no room for complacency whatsoever when it comes to this race. | |
| They will try every trick in the book. | |
| They want him out of power. | |
| They want him gone. | |
| So if you think that you can just take it easy and rest on your laurels, not going to happen in this election. | |
| Yeah, we can't take anything for granted, you guys. | |
| And so listen, we are officially about five minutes out from the Trump Town Hall, so we're going to get everybody settled. | |
| We can see right now they have pre-programming on Fox News, or Faux News, as I like to call them. | |
| Yeah, they're our frenemies. | |
| We're going to get ready, and for the stream we're just going to have the camera panned on the audience, and then in between commercial breaks, of course, we are going to provide our commentary. | |
| But we wanted to have a continuous live stream so that people can see what's going on. | |
| Yes. | |
| And of course, if you're running late, no worries, come on in, grab some pizza, get some meatballs, make yourself comfortable. | |
| We're going to have a great time tonight, and it's your chance to meet me as well, even if you're not interested in voting, you know? | |
| You just want to come on out and meet me. | |
| I'll be here probably till about 9 30. | |
| Anyone who wants to meet you will be very interested in voting on Monday as well. | |
| Don't think there's really much crossover with that crowd. | |
| We hope so. | |
| We're gonna get the audio blasted now so that we can get ready for for President Trump to take the stage now and stay tuned be sure that you're reposting this live link share it on true social share it on X follow me on X and truth at Laura Joey Manorino U.S. | |
| Instagram X and I have somebody on Truth Social who stole my username so I'm not there right now but we'll get that sorted out. | |
| You'll get that sorted out for me actually because I'm sure you know them. | |
| To thank the sponsor of tonight's stream, Gold Co. | |
| You know, one of the reasons why we need President Trump back into office is so that we can make our economy great again. | |
| Under Joe Biden, the dollar is losing tremendous value, and so you want to visit Gold Co. | |
| today. | |
| That's lumerlikesgold.com and learn how you can back up your wealth and your assets with precious metals like gold and silver. | |
| They're also offering up to $10,000 in free silver right now while supplies last. | |
| So go to loomerlikesgold.com. | |
| Loomerlikesgold.com. | |
| Gold Co., of course, is a big sponsor of free speech programming like Rumble, and I'm really grateful that Gold Co. | |
| is so invested in supporting my free speech activities, which is why all of you should support them as well, because you want to provide financial security to yourself and your family. | |
| So again, Go to visit Gold Co. | |
| and the link is loomerlikesgold.com. | |
| That's loomerlikesgold.com or if you call them, mention that Laura Loomer sent you. | |
| So we are about to get started. | |
| We're going to put the microphones down and get the audio blasted because we are two minutes away from President Trump taking the stage. | |
| So stay tuned and we will be back soon and I hope that you will enjoy the wash party. | |
| Thank you so much for tuning in. | |
| He can show the American people, Hunter Biden can, that he is present and available. | |
| Hunter Biden is tired of being kicked around and maligned in the public eye. | |
| So the public relations objective here was to make the point Hunter Biden is willing to answer any questions the committee had. | |
| Today's spin was that Hunter won. | |
| And only idiots think that Hunter wants to answer questions. | |
| These hijinks are just going to force Republicans to fast-track impeachment. | |
| So this spring you'll have Trump in court, and it'll be counter-programmed with Biden's impeachment hearing. | |
| And if Trump wins the election, Biden will pardon his son during the lame duck. | |
| And if Biden wins re-election, they'll ride the tax cases out for a no-jail-plea deal or a midnight pardon. | |
| But the effect this is going to have on America's confidence in our political system and our judicial system It's only going to invigorate American populism. | |
| Let's bring in South Carolina Congressman Nancy Mays. | |
| She's a member of the Oversight Committee. | |
| Congressman, why didn't you just say, alright Hunter, game on, call your bluff, here's a glass of water, let's do the interview right now. | |
| Well, if you saw how many times the Democrats interrupted me in the hearing today, they didn't want to hear anything that I had to say, none of the facts that I had that I was throwing out there to Hunter Biden. | |
| I was the only Republican who was able to take him head-on because he fled as soon as it was over there for less than 10 minutes. | |
| And can you imagine, Jesse? | |
| That if this was one of your millions of viewers that defied a congressional subpoena, showed up and spit in the face of Congress by not coming before us, by not doing the deposition, and then walked out, you would be held in contempt of Congress, your viewers would, and they'd be thrown in jail. | |
| But instead, if your last name is Biden, it's a completely different standard. | |
| Whereas years before, with Trump and the Trump family, whenever they were subpoenaed, They showed up. | |
| Don Jr. | |
| showed up how many times to a congressional subpoena? | |
| Dozens of hours before Congress, with depositions, because Donald Trump and every member of his family follows the law in this country, which is what we're about. | |
| And yet today it's complete hypocrisy. | |
| Congresswoman, it's not even about white privilege, because if Don Jr. | |
| had brought a film crew in there and gave everybody the middle finger and bolted, he would have been in shackles. | |
| This is Democrat privilege. | |
| Is he even allowed to bring a documentary film crew to a hearing about holding himself in contempt? | |
| I believe the committee tried to shut it down. | |
| I don't believe that is allowed in a hearing like this. | |
| And like you said, this was a PR stunt gone awry. | |
| The American people knows what this was. | |
| This wasn't real. | |
| This is for his movie. | |
| And this was all completely fake. | |
| And the other thing that I want to make the point about today is that I was the only member in the hearing today that has held both the right and the left accountable. | |
| So whatever the standard is in this country, Both sides got to be held accountable, and I pointed out the hypocrisy of the left on this issue. | |
| Every single one of them, because of how they voted in the past with congressional subpoena power, should have voted to hold Hunter Biden in contempt, but they're too scared to do that. | |
| Oh yeah, they're all hypocrites, all these people are. | |
| So is the full House going to hold Hunter in contempt, and does that mean that Biden's Justice Department is going to have to arrest him? | |
| I pray that we do. | |
| Everything is there. | |
| He should be held in contempt like we've done with others in the past, but it'll be up to a particularly corrupt DOJ to throw him in jail and indict him on it, because all we can do is refer charges once it gets out of the House. | |
| All right, so it's not going to look good if he's voted to be held in contempt, and Biden's Justice Department, who I believe they arrested a bunch of Republicans who were held in contempt, doesn't lay a hand on poor little Hunter's head? | |
| The former president and the GOP frontrunner, and we note once again that none of the campaigns have input into who was invited, what the questions are that will be asked tonight. | |
| Thank you for being here, Mr. President. | |
| We appreciate you making the track. | |
| And before we begin, we want to offer our condolences to you and the former First Lady Melania Trump for the loss of her mother last night. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Great woman. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| We do want to note that today there was some breaking campaign news. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| It's clear to me tonight that there isn't a path. | |
| For me to win the nomination. | |
| Which is why I'm suspending my campaign tonight for President of the United States. | |
| I'm going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be President of the United States again. | |
| So that was the big news. | |
| Late today, the former governor of New Jersey dropped out of the race in New Hampshire. | |
| You saw it there. | |
| There's a lot of speculation now that there could be a combining of forces of the people who supported him. | |
| He had about 12 percent there. | |
| And by some estimates, you're ahead by an average of 14 in the RealClearPolitics average polling in New Hampshire. | |
| So if that 12 goes to Nikki Haley, she could give you a run for your money there. | |
| Well, you know, you have Democrats in New Hampshire and they vote and you have independents in New Hampshire in large numbers and they vote. | |
| And I have polls that show me leading by a tremendous amount in New Hampshire and a lot in Iowa and nationwide we're leading by almost 60 points. | |
| So I'm not exactly worried about it. | |
| I understand New Hampshire very well. | |
| I've won it twice. | |
| And did very well with New Hampshire. | |
| I love the people. | |
| They love me. | |
| I think we did a good job for New Hampshire economically and even from the standpoint of the military taking care of the vets. | |
| And I think we're going to do very well in New Hampshire. | |
| Now, you know, Chris Christie was in and he got a hot mic I heard about. | |
| I thought actually the biggest story wasn't the fact that he dropped out. | |
| Nobody cared too much about that. | |
| He had a hot mic where he was talking to somebody about the weather and he happened to say that she doesn't have what it takes, she'll be creamed in the election. | |
| And, I mean, I know her very well and I happen to believe that Chris Christie's right. | |
| That's one of the few things he's been right about, actually. | |
| So you don't think it changes the dynamic much? | |
| I don't know if it does or not. | |
| Look, we're winning tremendously here. | |
| I think we're 20, 24 points up. | |
| I brought some polls if you want to see them, you know, just in case. | |
| But I think we're 24, 25 points up. | |
| But New Hampshire's interesting. | |
| It's a great place, a great state, unbelievable people. | |
| But they allow independents and Democrats to vote in the Republican primary. | |
| You say, what's that all about? | |
| So it's a little bit false in that regard. | |
| But even with that, I think we'll win substantially. | |
| Mr. President, we want to get to our first questioner. | |
| Robert is an optometrist from Ankeny. | |
| Robert, where are you? | |
| Do you know which way you're going to caucus on Monday? | |
| Yes, I do. | |
| Okay, can we ask you? | |
| I'm going to vote for the third time for President Trump. | |
| Oh, I like him. | |
| I knew I liked Robert. | |
| What's your question for the former president? | |
| I just wanted to say also thank you, President Trump, for your support of the vets. | |
| My wife and I and my oldest son are all veterans of the United States Army. | |
| We appreciate it. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Some of my friends that supported you in 2020 are not this time because they believe a Trump presidency will bring four years of chaos due to your haters. | |
| What is your response to them? | |
| Well, I think, first of all, I'm glad you're asking the question. | |
| And I'm very glad that you started off by saying you're with me, because I want you on my side. | |
| I figured maybe Fox would have written that question if it was just the second part of the question. | |
| But just so you understand... We didn't write any of the questions. | |
| You all wrote the questions, just to be clear. | |
| We'll figure that one out pretty soon. | |
| But they have chaos now. | |
| They have chaos at the border. | |
| They have chaos in the military. | |
| People are going woke. | |
| We have the greatest military in the world, except for the top, where they want to, you know, turn this beautiful thing we built. | |
| We beat ISIS, knocked them out. | |
| It was supposed to take four years. | |
| I did it in literally three months. | |
| It was supposed to take four or five years. | |
| But we have chaos now. | |
| Look at today with Hunter Biden going into Congress and just sitting down and the bedlam that's been caused. | |
| Today you have Chaos. | |
| We have, I think, more with Joe Biden. | |
| He can't put two sentences together and he's representing us on nuclear weapons with Putin and Xi and all of these very smart people. | |
| The media hates when I say they're smart. | |
| But let me tell you, they're very smart and they're very cunning. | |
| And I think he had very little chaos. | |
| I think most of the chaos was caused by the Democrats constantly going after me. | |
| And remember this. | |
| Remember that with phoning Russia, Russia, Russia. | |
| I mean if you look at Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, everything was phoning. | |
| The Pfizer warrants, the lying to Congress. | |
| They had chaos. | |
| They were the ones that caused the chaos. | |
| We didn't have chaos. | |
| We got the biggest tax cuts in history, the biggest regulation cuts in history. | |
| I had no wars. | |
| I'm the only president in 72 years. | |
| I didn't have any wars. | |
| And they love that narrative, but they use that narrative because they have nothing else. | |
| Now, the new narrative they have, as you know, is I'm going to be a dictator. | |
| That's going to be the new narrative. | |
| Because a guy like Biden, there's nothing he can run on. | |
| Everything he's turned out, it's turned out badly. | |
| The border is a disaster, the worst border in history. | |
| I think the worst border in the history of the world. | |
| We had the best border in the history of our country. | |
| We never had a border like that. | |
| So I think we had very little chaos. | |
| I think we had tremendous success. | |
| And frankly, until COVID came along and then we did a great job on that, too. | |
| We never got the kind of credit that I got on the economy, but we had the greatest economy in history. | |
| And you take a look at our numbers. | |
| The numbers were so much better than they are right now. | |
| We had no inflation. | |
| We were energy independent. | |
| We were so we had so much energy. | |
| We were ready to start supplying energy, selling energy to Europe, Asia. | |
| We would have started to pay down our debt. | |
| And then when COVID came along, we had to do a little bit of a course change. | |
| But we had an incredible four years. | |
| Again, the greatest economy in the history of our country with no inflation. | |
| Pretty good. | |
| So I just want to follow up. | |
| Yeah, thank you for your service and for your question. | |
| Thank you for being here tonight. | |
| One of the things that Ron DeSantis said in a town hall this week was that it might feel good to Republicans to vote for you and support you in the primary, but he felt they shouldn't leave the general election, potentially up to 12 jurors in a D.C. court. | |
| What do you say to him about that? | |
| Well, it's a witch hunt by its weaponization. | |
| If you look at it, it's election interference by Biden because he can't win it fair and square. | |
| So he's doing that. | |
| And interestingly, you see what happened in Georgia with Fannie Willis and a million dollars almost to her boyfriend is the prosecutor of Trump. | |
| That one's blown up now. | |
| It's horrible what has taken place. | |
| But it's very interesting when you look at Ron's numbers. | |
| He's practically out of the race. | |
| In fact, a lot of people say he's leaving the race after Iowa because he's doing so poorly. | |
| He's also doing very poorly, as you know, in New Hampshire. | |
| I mean, really poorly. | |
| And I'm leading Biden in every single poll that's been taken over the last month or two. | |
| I just see one. | |
| I'm leading in Michigan by 11. | |
| That's great. | |
| The autoworkers are smart. | |
| They know that Biden has sold them down the tubes. | |
| With the electric cars, all electric car mandate, the craziest thing I've ever heard. | |
| And they're going to all be made in China too. | |
| So I think when you look at what we've done, we are doing a great job and we did a great job, and that's why I'm leading in the polls by 60 and 70 points. | |
| You know, in recent days, you seem to issue a warning that if in the courts, and even the US Supreme Court, if they didn't treat you fairly, I'll say what Donald Trump won't. | |
| Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system. | |
| bedlam in the country. | |
| And in the last two days, at the same time, in the last two speeches, President Biden is focusing his campaign on the threat to democracy and political violence. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| I'll say what Donald Trump won't. | |
| Political violence is never, ever acceptable in the United States political system. | |
| Never, never, never. | |
| All right. | |
| So to Robert's question, this is clearly a focus of the Biden campaign. | |
| So can you say tonight that political violence is never acceptable? | |
| Well, of course, that's right. | |
| And of course, I'm the one that had very little of it. | |
| Take a look at wars again. | |
| I didn't start. | |
| I wasn't involved in wars. | |
| We beat the hell out of ISIS. | |
| We won 100 percent. | |
| We brought our troops back home. | |
| Look at look at the violence that we've had. | |
| Look at the violence we have recently. | |
| But when you say Bedlam, What do you mean? | |
| I think you're Bedlam. | |
| I think you look at Joe Biden. | |
| It's Bedlam. | |
| You have a man who can't lead. | |
| You have a man who can't find his way off a stage after he makes a speech that lasts for about two minutes. | |
| No, I think Bedlam is Joe Biden. | |
| I think that he's using this. | |
| This is just a political ploy. | |
| Trump is a dictator. | |
| He wants to be a dictator. | |
| You know, it's interesting. | |
| I did a show. | |
| Sean Hannity. | |
| Did you ever hear of him? | |
| He's a very nice man. | |
| And he said, essentially, You're not going to be a dictator, are you? | |
| Tell me. | |
| I think he was trying to give me a nicer question than maybe you guys would. | |
| He meant it very well. | |
| I said, I'm going to be a dictator for one day. | |
| We're going to do two things. | |
| The border. | |
| We're going to make it so tight you can't get in unless you come in legally. | |
| And the other is energy. | |
| We're going to drill, baby, drill. | |
| After that, I'm not going to be a dictator. | |
| After that, I'm not going to be a dictator. | |
| And the press picks it up. | |
| So I said, I'm going to be a dictator for one day. | |
| They cut it. | |
| They go, I'm going to be a dictator. | |
| But they cut the rest of the sentence. | |
| No, no, I am not going to be a dictator. | |
| I'm going to manage like we did. | |
| We were so successful that the country was coming together. | |
| It was actually coming together and coming together well. | |
| It was a beautiful thing to see. | |
| And we're going to do that again. | |
| By the way, that's why I have the poll numbers that I have, because the people, I think this audience is an example. | |
| I mean, I asked, I asked a question, I said, How many people came last night? | |
| How many people came the night before? | |
| And I got a very honest answer. | |
| Not many compared to what we have. | |
| We had a great crowd and have a great crowd. | |
| We want to hear from some more of them. | |
| We do have a big crowd tonight. | |
| That's absolutely true. | |
| So let's hear from Jane Jack, who is a teacher from Rhodes, Iowa. | |
| Jane, thank you so much for being here. | |
| And you said that you plan to caucus for DeSantis, but you're not completely decided. | |
| Is that right? | |
| No, I am firmly, I will be caucusing for DeSantis, but I will say, Mr. President, I am extremely grateful that in your first term you accomplished so many great things, but it was also with the help of many great people. | |
| Since that time, you have publicly criticized and personally demeaned so many of them. | |
| If you're given four more years, how will you convince good people to take the risk of working with you? | |
| So I have a lot of people that want to work with me. | |
| I have people calling. | |
| Just as I'm getting on the stage, I had a call from two of the very most important people in the military who want to come to work for me. | |
| Everybody wants to come to work for us. | |
| We're going to have no trouble. | |
| We had great people. | |
| We had a couple that were not great. | |
| Stiffs, as I would call them. | |
| But that's true with anybody. | |
| But now I've gotten to know Washington. | |
| I've gotten to know the people. | |
| I know the best. | |
| I know the smart ones, the dumb ones, the weak ones, the strong ones. | |
| And I think you're going to see something like you've never seen before. | |
| And the people in this room know it. | |
| We did an amazing job. | |
| And the reason we have support is because of the job we did. | |
| You like Ron DeSantis, but he wouldn't even be around today. | |
| He'd be working in a pizza shop or perhaps a law firm if I didn't endorse him. | |
| You know, I endorsed him, took him from nothing to winning an election, and I was all for him. | |
| And then one day he said he had run against me four years later after I got him in and I said, That's not a loyal person. | |
| We can't have that. | |
| That's not a loyal person. | |
| So I think you'll be very impressed with what we're going to do. | |
| We're going to have the greatest economy in the world, which we don't right now. | |
| We have horrible, horrible inflation. | |
| And you know, you're never going to get that 30 percent down. | |
| You might even it, but you're not going to get it down. | |
| So, but thank you very much. | |
| I appreciate it. | |
| Let me just ask you a follow-up on that about who would be in your cabinet, in your administration. | |
| If you are the nominee, which I know you expect to be, who would be in the running for vice president? | |
| Well, I can't tell you that really. | |
| I mean, I know who it's going to be. | |
| Give us a hint. | |
| I'll give you, we'll do another show sometime. | |
| Well, what about any of the people who you've run against? | |
| Would you be open to mending fences with any of them? | |
| Oh sure, I will. | |
| I will. | |
| I've already started like Christie better. | |
| Christie for Vice President. | |
| I don't see it. | |
| I don't see it. | |
| That would be an upset. | |
| Christy for Vice President. | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to announce... I do want to get to this other question before we move on to the big issues, and that is Jacqueline. | |
| She is from West Des Moines, and I think you said you're undecided, or you're making your decision. | |
| That's correct. | |
| And do you have a couple people that you're looking at? | |
| Trump and Vivek. | |
| Okay, and what's your question tonight for the former president? | |
| My question is, I would like to know, what do you plan to do in your next term that you didn't quite get finished during your first term? | |
| Well, one of the things would be energy, even though I set records on energy, but I was going to be energy dominant. | |
| We were energy independent, and we had your bills down low. | |
| We had your gasoline for the car down to $1.87 a gallon. | |
| We had it down even lower than that at some points. | |
| Now it's at $4 and $5. | |
| That's not acceptable. | |
| Your home heating bills are four and five times higher than they were with me. | |
| So I'd be doing that. | |
| I'd be doing... I'd finish up the wall. | |
| You know, we built over 500 miles of wall. | |
| That's one of the reasons we had the great... And we got Mexico, by the way. | |
| We got Mexico, very importantly, to give us 28,000 soldiers free of charge. | |
| That's more money than anybody can even imagine, free of charge. | |
| And we also remain in Mexico policy, not remain here, remain in Mexico. | |
| So we did a lot of great things, and I would just say we're going to just keep expanding. | |
| We rebuilt the military. | |
| We even did something that hopefully nobody in this room needs so but right to try where we're able to use space age medicines that won't be approved for four or five years that work in many cases and I've saved thousands and thousands of lives with right to try. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| So we're going to take a quick break. | |
| We're going to go talk about the economy when we come back. | |
| That is the number one issue in every poll on voters' minds. | |
| So join us when we come right back with lots more questions for President Trump. | |
| Good to have you here, sir. | |
| Thank you. | |
| My name's Brian Halfweir, and because of TikTok, I have the power to educate people. | |
| All right. | |
| Well... | |
| There's part one of the town hall. | |
| It's an excellent night. | |
| President Trump is out there and he's answering all the questions. | |
| And you know, the thing that strikes you most about President Trump is the personality. | |
| We're just going to keep talking here. | |
| I can't talk in front of Trump because I live in Florida, but I wanted to come out to support President Trump and, you know, just express my gratitude to him because he really is the greatest president we've ever had. | |
| And I want to recognize as well... Yes? | |
| I want to thank the owners tonight of Destination Grill, both of them who are here tonight, who were so generous to actually comp their venue tonight. | |
| And also... Mark, do you want to say a few words? | |
| Mark actually donated all of the food here tonight. | |
| All of the food and all of the drinks and his venue space tonight. | |
| It's a beautiful venue space. | |
| He's a Trump supporter who believes in free speech. | |
| He's actually hosted events here for Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis, but he is a Trump supporter and when I flew in from Florida and said I wanted a place to host a watch party for everybody who couldn't get inside the Fox News Town Hall, he was more than welcome and he said, come on in and let me Let me do what I can to help. | |
| So if you want to say a few words about your business before we get back. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And take care of Goldstall families, catastrophically used service members and first responders. | |
| Go to T2T.org. | |
| It only takes $11 a month to make a positive impact. | |
| Thank you, Mark. | |
| I also want to take a moment to recognize elected officials and previous elected officials who have joined us tonight. | |
| We are honored to have Congressman Steve King here with us tonight. | |
| Congressman Steve King has always been a strong supporter of President Trump, He's endorsed Vivek on the issue of eminent domain, but he has assured me that when President Trump wins the Iowa caucus, that he will be giving President Trump his endorsement. | |
| And so, you know, Steve King has always been a man of integrity and honor. | |
| He was one of the first to endorse me when I ran for Congress. | |
| And I think that means a lot that, you know, he can have differences on one issue, right, this issue of eminent domain, but still come out to support President Trump tonight and support free speech. | |
| And he's always been a fighter. | |
| and I'll tell you, he's the best congressman your state has ever had and probably will ever have. | |
| So... | |
| And so we're here. | |
| We have, from what I understand, we also have some state representatives. | |
| If you're a state representative here, please stand up if you came tonight to support. | |
| What's his name? | |
| Mark Cisneros, who's a member of the Iowa House of Representatives, who has endorsed President Trump. | |
| So thank you so much for coming out. | |
| And I know there's more people on their way as well. | |
| It's just that it started to snow pretty heavily right as the event was beginning. | |
| But I also want to say thank you to the Trump campaign. | |
| This is not a Trump campaign event, but they were gracious enough to Welcome back to our town hall with former President Donald Trump live from Des Moines. | |
| Let's get back to some questions. | |
| Yeah, let's get right back to our questions. | |
| This one's from Shelly Flockhart. | |
| There she is. | |
| Hi. | |
| Shelly, thank you for coming out tonight. | |
| What are you thinking about Monday night and who you're going to support? | |
| And what's your question for President Trump? | |
| He's sitting right there. | |
| Oh, thank you. | |
| I knew that. | |
| I knew that when I looked at you. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| Yes, so my question is, you're a business owner, I'm a business owner, I own a small business and time is money. | |
| Would you ever allow a shutdown in the future? | |
| A shutdown in terms of COVID? | |
| Or a shutdown in terms of budget? | |
| Because, you know, they're talking about a budget shutdown right now, but you're talking about a COVID shutdown. | |
| Correct. | |
| No, I wouldn't. | |
| And I never did. | |
| I let the governors make their decisions. | |
| And some of them, like from South Carolina, you know, Henry McMaster and, frankly, North Dakota, a few of them. | |
| Tennessee, they didn't shut down at all. | |
| Florida did shut down. | |
| Ron DeSanctis shut down. | |
| Or, as he's known, Ron DeSanctimonious. | |
| He shut his state down very violently, actually, and shut the highways down, the roads down. | |
| But we had... I'm a Federalist, in a sense, because that's the Federalist way. | |
| No, I didn't actually have a shutdown, despite the fact that some people wanted to, and some people didn't want to. | |
| But we had some great governors, and the governors that did the best job were Republican governors, and they were the ones that didn't shut down. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Love you. | |
| Appreciate it. | |
| But a lot of people say, you know, that you listen too much to Dr. Fauci. | |
| You were president at the time. | |
| Could have perhaps influenced keeping things more open. | |
| And of course, Ron DeSantis would definitely argue with your characterization of how he handled it. | |
| But if you go back and look at the records, you will see that the biggest fan of Dr. Fauci was Ron DeSanctimonious. | |
| He was a big fan. | |
| He said, I go by exactly quote, I go by what Dr. Fauci said. | |
| He said that two months in, all the way through. | |
| And that eventually changed when it wasn't, you know, that wasn't the dessert of the day. | |
| But Ron DeSantis was a big Dr. Fauci fan, and nobody wants to cover that. | |
| I say it every time. | |
| I don't care if he was or not. | |
| But, you know, when they hit me with this question, Dr. Fauci was not a huge factor in my administration. | |
| He became a much bigger factor in Biden's administration. | |
| He was there. | |
| He was somebody that was in government for 40 years. | |
| He did it for 40 years. | |
| So long time and what do I say, you know, you've been doing this for 40 years, get out. | |
| But he wasn't a big factor with me. | |
| He was a really big factor after I left. | |
| You know, on an economic shutdown, you said this week in an interview that if there's an economic crash, that you hope it happens now. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That you don't want to be Herbert Hoover. | |
| I don't want to be Herbert Hoover. | |
| You're not saying you're hoping for a crash, just to be clear. | |
| No, I think this. | |
| I think the economy is horrible, except the stock market's going up. | |
| And I think the stock market's going up because I'm leading Biden in all of the polls. | |
| Every poll. | |
| Every single poll for the last... | |
| With states that normally are not easy to lead. | |
| You know, when you're leading in Pennsylvania, you're leading in Michigan, you're leading in Wisconsin. | |
| We're leading in virtually every state of the swing states. | |
| And overall, we're leading by a lot nationwide. | |
| But I would say this. | |
| We have a situation which I believe the stock market goes up because I'm leading. | |
| I think if I wasn't leading, the stock market would be 25% lower. | |
| And I think, frankly, if I didn't win, I think the stock market would crash. | |
| But you said, when there's a crash, I hope it's going to be during this next 12 months because I don't want to be Herbert Hoover. | |
| Well, I think there will be a crash if I don't win. | |
| And I say that, and I do not want to be Herbert Hoover. | |
| Do you know who Herbert Hoover was? | |
| 1929, he was the president, and that was not a good time to be. | |
| I don't want to be Herbert Hoover. | |
| And I won't be Herbert Hoover. | |
| So with regard to, you know, when Governor Haley was here the other night, she talked about the $8 trillion added to the debt when you were president. | |
| How do you address that? | |
| Very easily. | |
| We were doing better than anybody has ever done for two and a half years. | |
| And then COVID came along. | |
| We were getting ready to start selling oil to Asia, to Europe. | |
| We're going to pay down our debt, where we were at that time at like $29 trillion. | |
| Now we're $36 trillion. | |
| But we're going to start paying down our debt. | |
| We're going to do things that nobody could believe. | |
| You take a look at Saudi Arabia. | |
| You take a look at some of these countries. | |
| Take a look at Russia. | |
| I mean, Biden drove up the cost of energy. | |
| That's what caused inflation. | |
| But it's also what caused Putin to become rich enough to go and prosecute a war. | |
| And he never even talks about it. | |
| He's the one that caused that war, both rhetorically and by the fact that he drove up the price of oil to $100 a barrel, which is getting close to record. | |
| And Putin was making a fortune. | |
| He's the only guy who made a fortune during a war. | |
| If he didn't have it—I was at $40 a barrel. | |
| If he was at $40 a barrel, Putin wouldn't have done it. | |
| Now, he wouldn't have done it for another reason—me. | |
| He wouldn't have done it. | |
| But he also wouldn't have done it because he couldn't have done it because oil wasn't high enough. | |
| At $100 a barrel, he made a lot of money. | |
| And he's making a lot of money because it's so high. | |
| And it's also what caused the inflation. | |
| Because energy is so big, it's such a big deal, that when energy goes up, if you make donuts, if you make hamburgers, if you... anything you do, you have trucks that deliver your product, you have to heat your stoves, your ovens. | |
| Anything you do, it's all energy. | |
| And we had the highest cost of energy in history. | |
| You know, when they talk about New Hampshire, New Hampshire has the highest price of energy, the highest cost of energy of any state in the nation. | |
| They should vote for me because I'm going to cut their energy price in half. | |
| So when Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis hit you again and again on this $8 trillion figure and call you a big government republic, what do you say? | |
| I say very simply, we were starting to pay down debt. | |
| We were going to pay down a lot of debt when COVID came along. | |
| If I didn't inject this country with money, You would have had a depression the likes of which you've never seen. | |
| You had to inject money. | |
| We gave businesses that were going bankrupt, temporarily bankrupt, but they needed money. | |
| We helped businesses. | |
| If I didn't do that, you would have had a depression in this country. | |
| That was a very good investment. | |
| And now, what they should be doing, instead of the kind of debt that they're building at record levels, they should be paying down their debt, and they ought to go into the energy business instead of this green new scam business that they're in. | |
| But what about the future? | |
| What about cutting spending? | |
| $34 trillion in debt. | |
| You know, let's look at what you would do in terms of getting that number down. | |
| What would you get rid of? | |
| We have a lot of cutting, but we also have a lot of income. | |
| We have more liquid gold under our feet, energy, oil and gas than any other country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia, more than Russia. | |
| And when I came in, we were number four. | |
| When I left, you know, not that long a period of time, four years, we were number one by a lot. | |
| And we were soon going to double up Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. | |
| And we were going to make a lot of money. | |
| We have a lot of potential income. | |
| DeSantis wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. | |
| Nikki Haley wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. | |
| Nikki Haley wanted to raise the age from 65 to 74, 75 or 76. | |
| But only for young people in their 20s. | |
| I mean, that's going to run out of money. | |
| That's what they say. | |
| So at some point, someone has to address it, right? | |
| That's what they say when it starts. | |
| They say only for young people. | |
| It's only for young people. | |
| And then it doesn't work for young people and they end up getting up to people that are of the age where it matters. | |
| No good. | |
| Alright, let's go to Kim, a small business owner from Brines, is that correct? | |
| Kim, where are you? | |
| That is correct. | |
| Do you know who you're caucusing for Monday? | |
| I am proud to say I am a caucus captain. | |
| For? | |
| President Trump. | |
| With a white and gold hat. | |
| I have that white and gold hat. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| That's beautiful. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| What's your question for the former president? | |
| You've said that you can take care of the border in 24 hours after taking office. | |
| How will you gather the several millions that have already entered our country illegally and return them to their country of origin? | |
| Great question. | |
| It's not sustainable for our country. | |
| We have millions and millions of people here. | |
| It is not sustainable. | |
| Did you see in New York City with it getting the regular students out and they're putting migrants in their place. | |
| We are going to have the largest deportation effort in the history of our country. | |
| We're bringing everybody back to where they came from. | |
| We have no choice. | |
| We have no choice. | |
| You know, Denise is here as well. | |
| Denise, where are you? | |
| You know, Denise came to our... | |
| She came in saying that she was, if I remember correctly, you were leaning towards President Trump. | |
| But you did say you heard some things last night that you liked. | |
| So where are you tonight? | |
| I spoke with a lot of my really close friends after last night. | |
| They were all up and wanted to know how it went. | |
| And we got back to President Trump. | |
| I love you! | |
| You just mentioned, I think, something that you're concerned about. | |
| What's your question? | |
| You just answered part of it, that our kids were displaced in New York City, in the place of illegal migrants. | |
| So, what I want to know, in the spirit of making America great again, can you do something about the sanctuary cities? | |
| Well, they're going to be ended because the Democrats are going to end them because you can't sustain it. | |
| If you look at New York, you have a mayor of New York who now is really hostile to the administration because New York City, that's my place. | |
| I love New York. | |
| It's gone. | |
| It's had a tough time. | |
| The previous mayor was the worst mayor in the history of our country, de Blasio. | |
| Do you ever hear of de Blasio? | |
| The worst. | |
| But what's happened is We cannot, this country cannot sustain 15 or 16 million people because I think that's the real number. | |
| I think by the time his administration ends, and hopefully quickly, it's going to be 18 million people. | |
| That's bigger than New York State. | |
| That's bigger than just about every state other than one or two. | |
| Eighteen million people. | |
| Remember this. | |
| Many of those people come from jails and prisons. | |
| Many of those people come from mental institutions and insane asylums. | |
| And many of those people are terrorists. | |
| You know, I saw on Fox the other day, it was horrible but beautiful because from my standpoint, in 2016, They had no terrorists that they know of that came into the country. | |
| None. | |
| You know, I had the travel ban. | |
| They call it the Trump travel ban. | |
| They tried to make a big deal. | |
| The Supreme Court very intelligently approved it. | |
| Without that, we would have had blowups. | |
| We had no terrorist attacks at all during my four years. | |
| We had the Trump travel ban. | |
| And by the way, Iran was broke. | |
| Iran was broke. | |
| I said to China, if you buy oil from Iran, you're not dealing in here. | |
| They immediately dropped. | |
| India, France, Italy, all of these countries were buying from Iran. | |
| Iran would give out billions of dollars to terrorists. | |
| They had no money. | |
| I watched a Democrat congressman the other day on one of the shows. | |
| And he said, I'll say one thing about Trump. | |
| He said, Trump, I'll say one thing about Trump. | |
| When he, uh, when he did that number on Iran, they were broke. | |
| They were absolutely broke. | |
| When I left, they were broke. | |
| They had no money. | |
| There was no money for Hamas, for Hezbollah. | |
| There was no money for anybody. | |
| They had no money. | |
| And you would say that too. | |
| I mean, I think even the two of you would say they were absolutely stoned. | |
| And you know how much money they have now? | |
| In three years, under Biden, they have $250 billion. | |
| Again, the energy business is a big business. | |
| And not to mention the five hostages that they paid $6 billion for, not to mention they got $10 billion for supplying some electricity to Iraq, which, by the way, they own. | |
| And Iraq has $300 billion. | |
| And essentially, it's a subsidiary. | |
| It's a subsidiary of Of Iran. | |
| It should have never happened. | |
| Iraq—remember I used to say a long time ago when I was a civilian—now I'm sort of a civilian, but I think I'll never be quite a civilian again. | |
| I'd love to be. | |
| But I used to say, don't go into Iraq. | |
| Don't do it. | |
| Don't do it. | |
| But if you're going to do it, keep the oil. | |
| Remember, keep the oil? | |
| They didn't keep the oil. | |
| So they have $300 billion. | |
| And we have nothing. | |
| We have nothing. | |
| You know, they used to say about wars, to the victor belong the spoils. | |
| We go into someplace, we obliterate it, and then we leave. | |
| We are run by fools. | |
| We're run by stupid people. | |
| But we ran it very smart for four years and we won everything. | |
| We won everything. | |
| Mr. President, you're talking a lot about policy. | |
| You get questions about what a second term is going to look like. | |
| When you're in your rallies, you spend a lot of time talking about retribution. | |
| And so there are questions about how much a second term of a Donald Trump presidency, second term, would be about retribution and looking backwards and grievances and how much would be looking forward. | |
| Well, first of all, a lot of people would say that that's not so bad. | |
| Look what they did. | |
| Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. | |
| The FBI Twitter hoax. | |
| The 51 intelligence agents hoax. | |
| All of these different hoaxes that they did. | |
| I mean, you know, a lot of people would say that's probably quite normal. | |
| I'm not going to have time for retribution. | |
| We're going to make this country so successful again. | |
| I'm not going to have time for retribution. | |
| And remember this, our ultimate retribution is success. | |
| When we had just prior to the China virus coming in, if you don't mind, I'd like to be accurate as opposed to COVID. | |
| It is the China virus. | |
| It came out of Wuhan. | |
| And I said a long time ago in your show, it came out of Wuhan. | |
| They were saying it came out of caves, bat caves, 2,000 miles away. | |
| It came out of Italy. | |
| It came out of France. | |
| No, it came out of Wuhan, the labs. | |
| And I don't, and by the way, I don't think It was done, I think it was done out of incompetence. | |
| That's what I think. | |
| I believe that a scientist went out, said hello to his girlfriend, and that was the end of that. | |
| She died, and then people started dying all over the place. | |
| But who knows? | |
| Who knows? | |
| I can tell you one thing. | |
| I got along with President Xi. | |
| But I took in $400 billion in tariffs and taxes from China. | |
| And one of the reasons China's not doing so well today is because of those tariffs. | |
| And Biden wants to cut them. | |
| You know, he got paid off by China after all, so he wants to help the people that gave him a lot of money. | |
| But he's a Manchurian candidate in a true sense. | |
| He got money from China. | |
| He got money from Russia. | |
| You remember the debate where Chris Wallace, how is he doing, I wonder, but Chris Wallace, when I said, when I said to Biden, I asked him a question. | |
| I said, how come you got three and a half million dollars from the mayor of Moscow's wife? | |
| And Chris Wallace wouldn't let me ask me. | |
| I said, why are you stopping this? | |
| Now it's turned out to be a big deal. | |
| I got three and a half million dollars from the mayor of Moscow's wife. | |
| I tell you this, we're going to have a success that's so great that I won't have, hopefully, I won't have time for retribution. | |
| There won't be retribution, there'll be success. | |
| Mr. President, before we wrap up this, you know, there is this report, House Democrats, documents that say that nearly $8 million in payments to your businesses from foreign governments, China included, Saudi Arabia, while you were in office. | |
| They say Article 1 of the Constitution says you can't accept money from foreign governments while president. | |
| Would you pledge to divest from your business in the second term, as other presidents have done? | |
| That's what they're reporting. | |
| I own hotels all over the place. | |
| I don't get free money. | |
| Somebody rents a hotel room, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| Much money I gave back. | |
| In fact, I didn't have to do it. | |
| You know, George Washington was a very rich man. | |
| People don't know that. | |
| In his essentially White House, which wasn't built, but they had an office, he had a business desk and he had a country desk right next to each other. | |
| You're allowed to do that. | |
| I didn't do it. | |
| I put everything in trust. | |
| And if I have a hotel and somebody comes in from China, that's a small amount of money and it sounds like a lot of money. | |
| That's a small. | |
| But I was doing services for that. | |
| People were staying in these massive hotels, these beautiful hotels. | |
| Because I have the best hotels. | |
| I have the best clubs. | |
| I have the best clubs. | |
| I have great stuff. | |
| And they stay there, and they pay. | |
| I don't get $8 million for doing nothing, like Hunter. | |
| I don't get $500,000. | |
| I don't get $500,000 for doing a painting. | |
| It's not a bad idea, I guess, if you can get away with it. | |
| When I heard that, when I said, there's no way they get away with that. | |
| But they got away with that, I guess. | |
| They got away with it. | |
| We have, you know, there was an Amalia Minch lawsuit against me where the radical left sued me for that, and I won the suit. | |
| And the judge said, they go to his hotels, what's he going to do? | |
| There you go. | |
| We want to hear more from Iowa voters. | |
| We're going to take a quick break. | |
| We'll be back here in Des Moines with more of our town hall with former President Donald Trump. | |
| President Trump. | |
| Another town hall. | |
| Another great, great segment over here. | |
| And we are here. | |
| We almost ran late because we're with some fabulous people. | |
| There's some people running for office, some people in elected office. | |
| Tons of energy in this room. | |
| And Laura's still out mingling because there's just so many people to talk to. | |
| If you're watching, talk about it in the chat. | |
| What is your favorite moment been of the town hall so far? | |
| There's so many moments. | |
| So much happening. | |
| And the fact of the matter is, the energy right now in the Republican Party is with the America First movement. | |
| The only two candidates that are talking America First are the only two that anybody really cares to vote for. | |
| DeSantis and Haley. | |
| Our frauds, and they're having a debate. | |
| I just found this out as I'm on this livestream. | |
| DeSantis and Haley are right now having a debate. | |
| It's a throwback to 2004, because that's the policies that they're bringing to you. | |
| They're bringing to you George W. Bush on steroids. | |
| We don't need those guys in the party anymore. | |
| Christie understood that he wasn't getting anywhere, so he ran his fat ass back. | |
| To wherever he came from. | |
| And I feel bad for the grocery store that is going to have to supply that stress binge eating that's about to go on. | |
| Chris Christie is out. | |
| He won't be VP. | |
| He won't be VP of anything. | |
| Maybe of the supermarket at the local place, but... And here is the fabulous Laura Loomis. | |
| It's going great, right? | |
| We have Congressman Steve King who just showed up and you know he's endorsed Vivek Ramaswamy but he has assured me that when President Trump wins the nomination that he will be supporting President Trump, right? | |
| Steve King is great. | |
| And they gave him a raw deal. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| Yes, absolutely. | |
| They definitely did. | |
| He was the original America First in Congress. | |
| I believe we can get him over here for an interview. | |
| I think he was one of the first. | |
| You want me to go grab him? | |
| You want to go grab Congressman Steve King? | |
| Yeah. | |
| We're going to get Congressman Steve King. | |
| He's absolutely a great one. | |
| And we need more people like him. | |
| We need more fighters like him. | |
| We need more fighters like Trump. | |
| We just need fighters. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| We're so tired of being lied to and so tired of people like Speaker Mike Johnson. | |
| I hate to say it. | |
| I was right about him. | |
| Who get in. | |
| Did you hear he's having a fundraiser with Speaker Boehner? | |
| Right now? | |
| In February, he'll be having a fundraiser with Boehner. | |
| Of course. | |
| And I, you know, I want it to be right. | |
| I said, Boehner's great. | |
| No. | |
| Not at all. | |
| Alright, here is the Iowa legend himself, Congressman Steve King. | |
| We're live on air right now. | |
| Great to be here with you, Laura. | |
| Thank you so much for making time. | |
| I know that we saw you earlier at the Iowa State Capitol where you were there endorsing Vivek Ramaswamy. | |
| You've always been a supporter of President Trump's, but I understand the issue of eminent domain is very important to you. | |
| But we don't hold it against you, you know, because we need leaders for the future. | |
| And while I support President Trump for 2024, I do think that Vivek would be, you know, a great candidate in 2028. | |
| Well, and we know this, that I've never been anti-Trump. | |
| You've never been anti-Trump. | |
| I've always been pro-Trump. | |
| Always. | |
| And so now, but I want to see Vivek step up because he's the strongest voice on property rights, the strongest voice on constitutional rights. | |
| And I'd love to see President Trump step in and take that same position. | |
| I think he believes that. | |
| And if he would just use his megaphone between now and the caucus night, he could kill off that boondoggle CO2 pipeline that's trampling our property rights right now. | |
| And I hope he does that. | |
| I hope so as well, and I know that President Trump has, you know, spoken out about this issue. | |
| He spoke out last week, and hopefully, you know, I know that you committed to me when I asked you, well, you know, if President Trump wins the Iowa caucus and he's officially the GOP nominee, which I believe he will be, you said that he has your full support and endorsement, right? | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| Yes. | |
| There isn't one iota of hesitation when it comes to that. | |
| And furthermore, as two people that have been, well, Three people. | |
| You've been run through the gristmill. | |
| I have been run through the gristmill. | |
| And President Trump, he's been through one that is ten times worse than mine, which was pretty bad. | |
| Maybe it's a hundred times worse. | |
| But when you see something like that happen, the American people need to rise up and say, that's the end of that. | |
| We are not going to tolerate you doing that to our candidates. | |
| And for him to walk through this minefield, this gauntlet that he's going through, the lawfare gauntlet, all of the tricks of the trade that are being used, we need to shut that down. | |
| We need a president that shuts that down. | |
| And Trump has the biggest reason to do that. | |
| And if he's a little bit vindictive on those evil people that are working against America, that's fine with me. | |
| Go find them all and perp-walk them out of here and clean it up and put our country back on a sound foundation again. | |
| Great, and you're hitting the campaign trail this week, right? | |
| You're with Vivek all week, and then what's going to happen after January 15th? | |
| What are you going to be doing? | |
| Well, I don't know. | |
| I'll probably sleep in. | |
| I don't actually know. | |
| If there's a ride that goes to New Hampshire, I'll just have to see what that looks like. | |
| I've made that gig before. | |
| Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. | |
| Yeah, I would like to raise the funds to come out here for Iowa. | |
| I'm an independent journalist, so if we can also raise the funds for New Hampshire, we will. | |
| I like those people in New Hampshire. | |
| They listen well. | |
| They ask questions. | |
| They want to hear what we have to say. | |
| They're good people, too. | |
| Some people think they're more astute than Iowans when it comes to policy. | |
| I'm not going to buy that, but they're very astute. | |
| They are. | |
| Well, wonderful. | |
| I think we're getting back from the commercial break now, so anything you want to promote while we're on here right now? | |
| Well, I'd say that if people are interested in my book, which you know I was going to bring it up, but when I was, let's just say, politically less by Kevin McCartney, Liz Cheney, and some of those others that have since bitten the dust, I wrote a book about the whole saga of that political lich party that they had on me that lasted for about two years. | |
| The title of my book is, Walking Through the Fire, My Fight for the Heart and Soul of America. | |
| And it can be found at my website, steveking.com. | |
| They go to steveking.com, come to my warehouse with my autograph on it. | |
| Wonderful. | |
| Well, thank you so much, and we're going to resume coverage now of Trump's town hall, but it's always such a great time to see you. | |
| And nobody's done more in that regard than me. | |
| Now, I happen to be, for the exceptions, like Ronald Reagan, with the life of the mother, rape, incest. | |
| I just have to be there, I feel. | |
| I think probably 78% or so, Paul, about 78%. | |
| It was Ronald Reagan. | |
| He was for it. | |
| I was for it. | |
| But I will say this. | |
| You have to win elections. | |
| Otherwise, you're going to be back where you were. | |
| And you can't let that ever happen again. | |
| You've got to win elections. | |
| If you look at it, Iran, DeSantis, I don't know what he really believes, because, you know, you never know with a politician. | |
| And he's just another politician, as far as I'm concerned. | |
| But his poll numbers have gone down to a level that he's going to be out of the race very soon. | |
| He's going to be out very soon. | |
| You know, I watched him last night. | |
| He's standing up with his shoes, his fancy shoes. | |
| And he's going to be out of the race within, you know, a lot of people say before New Hampshire. | |
| I don't know if that were the reason. | |
| I hope it wasn't the reason. | |
| I hope it's for other reasons. | |
| I can see a lot of other reasons why he shouldn't be. | |
| But he's doing very, very poorly. | |
| It happened to coincide with that, because a lot of people say a lot of, you know, if you talk five or six weeks, a lot of women don't know if they're pregnant in five or six weeks. | |
| I want to get something where people are happy. | |
| You know, this has been tearing our country apart for 50 years. | |
| Nobody's been able to do anything. | |
| And again, you can only ask that question, and you ask it brilliantly. | |
| And I understand exactly where you're coming from. | |
| I love where you're coming from. | |
| But we still have to win. | |
| elections and they've used this, you know, we have some great Republicans and they're great on the issue and you would love them on the issue. | |
| And a lot of them have just been decimated in the election, decimated. | |
| I mean, absolutely. | |
| So we're going to come up with something that people want and people like. | |
| I would love you to, first of all, you have to go with your heart, okay? | |
| You have to go with your heart first go with your heart your mind go with it But you do also have to put in there a little bit you have to win elections But if it weren't for me with Roe v. Wade you wouldn't even be talking about this up You wouldn't be asking that question because would write back. | |
| I remember this they're the radicals. | |
| We're not the radicals because they'll kill a baby remember I had the debate with crooked Hillary Clinton and I don't call her crooked anymore. | |
| I use that now for Joe Biden, as you know. | |
| I call her beautiful, Hillary. | |
| She's a beautiful woman. | |
| But in the debate with Hillary Clinton, I said, they said, you know, she's willing to rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month. | |
| And you know, I never heard this. | |
| It happened to me. | |
| It just came to me during that debate. | |
| I didn't go up there thinking I was going to say that. | |
| And she even winced. | |
| Nobody wants to see that happening after a certain period of time. | |
| Nobody. | |
| They're the radicals because they're willing to kill the baby in eight months, nine months, or even after birth. | |
| If you remember the former governor of Virginia where he said, you kill the baby after the ninth month or even after it's... | |
| You set the baby aside and you have a conversation with the mother. | |
| And of the conversation, can you imagine? | |
| But these are the radicals. | |
| We're not the radicals. | |
| We are not the radicals. | |
| But we're living in a time when there has to be a little bit of a concession one way or the other. | |
| And I think, you know, I want to get it right. | |
| I have to get it right. | |
| But without what I did, you would never even be asking that question, because there was no chance that that was going to happen. | |
| For 54 years, they campaigned on that issue, and nobody pulled it off but me. | |
| So I think you're going to be happy in the end. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Thank you very much for that question. | |
| Let's go to Beau. | |
| Beau, you're from Madrid, Iowa? | |
| Uh, Madrid. | |
| Oh, I'm so sorry. | |
| I knew I could get through every city I thought. | |
| Uh, well, Madrid. | |
| Uh, do you know how you're gonna caucus? | |
| Uh, Trump, 100%. | |
| Oh, I like him. | |
| Alright, you do have a question. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| How would you de-escalate global tensions and keep the United States out of foreign wars? | |
| Yeah, do it through peace through strength. | |
| You know, I just saw something where I was the only president for 78 years, no war started. | |
| Now I wiped out ISIS. | |
| You know, I did a thing that was — I won't go into names, I won't go into specifics, but we did a thing that nobody thought was possible. | |
| Did it very quickly. | |
| I withdrew from Syria. | |
| I withdrew from Iraq. | |
| I withdrew. | |
| They want to put people back. | |
| We're in countries that don't even want us. | |
| We're with countries that a lot of you never even heard the names of these countries. | |
| You know, there's a great leader — in my opinion, he's very strong. | |
| Some people would say it's terrible to say that, but he is — Viktor Orban. | |
| He's the prime minister of Hungary. | |
| And they asked him, what would you do? | |
| There are wars all over the world right now. | |
| He said, what I do is make sure the American people vote for Donald Trump for president, because when he was president, China feared him. | |
| I don't want to be feared. | |
| But he used the term. | |
| I'm not using the term. | |
| President Xi is a very tough cookie. | |
| But I think they did fear us. | |
| China feared him. | |
| Russia feared him. | |
| Everybody. | |
| I even got along with Kim Jong Un. | |
| You know, getting along with people with hundreds of nuclear weapons is not a bad thing. | |
| You know, they want to make it like a bad thing. | |
| It's a very good thing. | |
| But peace through strength. | |
| They didn't want to mess around. | |
| It would have never happened in Ukraine. | |
| Russia would have never gone in. | |
| Would have never happened. | |
| The recent attack on Israel would have never happened. | |
| A hundred. | |
| I mean, zero percent chance that was going to happen. | |
| They see a weak president in our country, and they did something that was unthinkable. | |
| So we're gonna have peace through strength. | |
| We're not gonna have to fight. | |
| So, on the other side... With that being said, you always have to be prepared. | |
| And I rebuilt our entire military. | |
| And think of it, Biden gave $85 billion worth of our military to Afghanistan so stupidly. | |
| Brand new tanks and planes and everything. | |
| 700,000 rifles and guns. | |
| 70,000 vehicles, many of them armor-plated vehicles. | |
| And by the way, people died. | |
| Thirteen great soldiers died. | |
| I've gotten to know the families very well. | |
| Many horribly hurt. | |
| And hundreds of people killed when you include both. | |
| Hundreds of people killed in the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. | |
| So I really appreciate the question. | |
| And I appreciate very much that you're with me. | |
| And I'm with you, too. | |
| Thank you. | |
| So, from the other side of the party, there are many like Governor Haley who said that you are now more of an isolationist than you were. | |
| And that you got many concessions from NATO members as president to increase their defense budget. | |
| Hundreds of billions of dollars. | |
| But there's a real concern what a second Trump term would mean. | |
| Would you be committed to NATO, for example, in a second Trump term? | |
| Depends if they treat us properly. | |
| Look, NATO is taking advantage of our country. | |
| The European countries took advantage of... I want to use a word starting with an S, but I don't want to do it because I see some young, very good-looking children in the audience, and I assume they're watching on television. | |
| But they took advantage of us on trade, and then they took advantage of us on our military protection. | |
| Of the 28 countries at the time, only 8 countries were paid up. | |
| We were paying the difference. | |
| And I went to him and I said, if you don't pay, we're not going to protect you. | |
| And they said, do you mean that? | |
| I said, I mean that. | |
| And the next day, billions of dollars poured into NATO. | |
| The reason they have money right now to prosecute what they're doing with helping Ukraine is because of the money I got them. | |
| So, you know, peace through strength. | |
| Mr. President, we appreciate your time. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Thank you for being here in Des Moines. | |
| Good to have you with us tonight. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| So we're going to be right back with just a quick final segment right after this time out. | |
| Stay with us. - Let the weight of the day fall away. | |
| Give your cares and worries over to God. | |
| Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall... For Lent this year, instead of chocolate, give up worry and anxiety with a 30-day free trial of Halo. | |
| My name's Ryan Haffner, and because of TikTok, I have the power to educate people. | |
| Yeah, well, we're here wrapping up this town hall. | |
| We're about a little bit halfway through. | |
| I'm here with Representative Steve King, one of the best here in Iowa. | |
| And what are you thinking of the night so far? | |
| Well, one thing, it's snowing pretty hard out here. | |
| It's snowing really hard. | |
| I guess you guys are used to it here, right? | |
| Well, it hasn't snowed all winter hardly, but yes, we get used to it pretty fast. | |
| I know there's very few cars in the ditch. | |
| Right. | |
| So that says that they didn't forget how to drive in this. | |
| Right. | |
| And the other thing I think is it's supposed to snow for the next two days or three days. | |
| Really? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so that's what my wife tells me, and her name is Weather Woman. | |
| Right. | |
| So, but if that happens, and if it stays snowing like it is now, Well, I think the energy in the party is with the America First, the Trump, the Vivek, the Haley's and the DeSantis. | |
| We've had that forever. | |
| and we'll go, ah, it really doesn't matter that much to me. | |
| Right, right. | |
| That means that the solid Trump supporters, the solid Vivek Ramaswamy supporters, they're going to turn out, I think, in greater numbers than the folks for the election. | |
| Well, I think the energy in the party is with the America First, the Trump, the Vivek, the Haley's and the DeSantis. | |
| We've had that forever. | |
| I don't think it really inspires anybody to get out there because we've heard the same canned lines for just about ever. | |
| Well, and this has shaped itself. | |
| You couldn't see it when it started. | |
| Right. | |
| But it's shaped itself to become a binary decision here. | |
| Yes. | |
| And on one side is America First, MAGA. | |
| Right. | |
| And that's Trump and Bebake. | |
| Right. | |
| And on the other side, it's DeSantis and Nikki Haley and the establishment, the elitists and the right-o's. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And the Uniparty people. | |
| Right. | |
| If I wanted to elect a Democrat, I'd just wait until November and vote for Biden. | |
| I don't need to vote for Haley to get one. | |
| Well, I just say this, that if you like the way things have been going, then you can see a little more of it if you go in that direction. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But if you want to save this country, it's going to have to be either Trump, Vivek, or both of them. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And that would be the ideal situation right there. | |
| It would be. | |
| Because them teaming up would be one of a kind. | |
| Vivek, I've been with him the last few days, as you have, and you've been with him a lot longer, the last few months. | |
| And what do you think, what stands out to you the most about that whole campaign? | |
| Mr. Michigan? | |
| What stands out to you most about the big campaign? | |
| Well, one thing is the number of stops that he's having. | |
| The energy that's there. | |
| Right. | |
| And I know from, I learned this about myself when I started a construction company back in 1975. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Somebody's got to provide the momentum for the crew, for everybody else. | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| And if you just sit back, not much happens. | |
| But if the lead person is the one that's the most energetic, Wow. | |
| does the most work, that puts out the most, Vivek is providing that momentum for this campaign. | |
| Wow. | |
| Right. | |
| And he is driving it. | |
| He's full of energy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And his stops are going to be something over 390 stops in Iowa. | |
| Wow. | |
| And I think that's a record. | |
| Wow. | |
| That's incredible. | |
| I remember that Rick Santorum in 2012, I remember him saying this at a speech in Lyon County afterwards. | |
| He said, well, he said, I did 385 speeches in Iowa. | |
| And he won the caucus in 2012. | |
| I remember that, yeah, he beat by like 65 votes or something. | |
| Even less, I think, maybe 40. | |
| But he said, And he was looking at this crowd, about 400 people in this dinner when he was speaking. | |
| It was Lyon County, the northwest corner of Iowa. | |
| And he looked out over the crowd, and he said, 385 speeches, and, Margaret, I see you sitting back there. | |
| If you hadn't been there that night in Montgomery County, 180 miles away, is where it's from, actually. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If you hadn't been there in Montgomery County that night, there wouldn't have been anybody there. | |
| Wow. | |
| So a one-person crowd, he remembered that, though. | |
| Right. | |
| And the rest of them were, of course, better. | |
| You don't need to have big crowds. | |
| No. | |
| But Bake's got a lot of them. | |
| Well, I think what's important is that in Iowa, it's really, it's super retail politics. | |
| It is one-on-one. | |
| And what stuns me about the people of Iowa is they don't ask typical questions of their politicians that are giving them their speeches. | |
| They're asking deeply involved questions. | |
| And the people here really understand it. | |
| So with all that being said, what do you think is going to happen on caucus night? | |
| What are your predictions, if I can ask? | |
| Well, I don't think it's a question that Trump's going to win the Congress. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And his numbers are solid. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He's making sure his presence is known. | |
| He's got a very good organization. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yes. | |
| All that put together. | |
| Then, but I do think that DeSantis and Nikki Haley, their numbers at, say, 14, 15 percent that we're seeing on a regular basis. | |
| I don't think they've got much chance to eclipse those numbers. | |
| Yes. | |
| I think they diminish. | |
| Yes. | |
| And Vivek will outperform expectations. | |
| Yes. | |
| So he could double or triple his expectations. | |
| He's the guy that will come out of Iowa with the most momentum, I believe. | |
| Momentum, yeah. | |
| And Trump out of there, sailing along on top, and the rest of them looking up at him. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But that momentum in New Hampshire could really do it for Vivek. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Here you go, Laura. | |
| So, it's a great event so far, and I want to take a moment as well to thank our second sponsor of tonight's event. | |
| We are sponsored by a product called BiOptimizers, and they are a supplement company, and one of their products is a magnesium product called Magnesium Breakthrough. | |
| And so I want to thank BuyOptimizers.com, and you can use BuyOptimizers.com slash Loomer as your code. | |
| Code Loomer at checkout for up to 10% off. | |
| You know, we're living in a cancel culture society, Congressman, and so it's really important that people support products that support them. | |
| Yes, of course, and so if you are interested in improving your overall health and wellness, I encourage all of you who are watching and enjoying this content right now, we are the number one stream on Rumble. | |
| We have over 12,000 live viewers who are watching, and of course, you know, we want to continue providing you these streams. | |
| streams out in the field. | |
| I'm going to be covering President Trump's rallies this weekend. | |
| So be sure that you check out the products at bioptimizer.com slash loomer. | |
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| You know what it's like stressful. | |
| It's really stressful being in Congress. | |
| It's really stressful being in politics. | |
| And these magnesium supplements reduce your cortisol levels. | |
| So we just wanted to take a moment to thank the sponsors. | |
| So I'm I'm always thankful for any stress reliever that we have. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I've been through my share of the stress, and found a way to manage it. | |
| But one of the other things is, even if you feel the stress, never let them see you sweat, Laura. | |
| Oh yeah, definitely. | |
| That's in your book. | |
| It is, isn't it? | |
| That's in your book. | |
| That's philosophy, and my father taught me that too. | |
| Never let them think they're getting to you. | |
| And don't let them live in your head rent-free. | |
| Live in theirs rent-free. | |
| I think that we are. | |
| I think I do that pretty well, you know? | |
| I think you may be the world champion. | |
| Yeah, showing up to Nikki's events and Ron DeSantis' events with them calling the police on me. | |
| I think I do a pretty good job. | |
| You do too. | |
| I think you are too. | |
| Do you think you're ever going to run for Congress again? | |
| You know, it's unlikely. | |
| And the reason I say that is because my wife has been running the show for 25 years of my absence. | |
| And when I came home finally, she was glad to have me home. | |
| She spent about a year reminding me that I'm retired. | |
| She's given up on that now. | |
| Oh, please. | |
| You're not retired. | |
| No, I'm not. | |
| I can't stay out of it. | |
| Hey, I have the receipts, Congressman. | |
| I got video of you today not acting like a retired person, giving speeches, talking to people, taking selfies. | |
| That's not what retired people do. | |
| Well, you know, I do. | |
| I love these people. | |
| Exactly. | |
| God has given me a gift. | |
| I love people. | |
| And the ability to interact with them and help them out, encourage them, lift them up. | |
| And I draw energy from other people. | |
| It's not, they say they draw energy from me, I draw it from other people too. | |
| It's always a two-way thing. | |
| And so all that interactivity and all the ways that we've been able to help people over the years, wherever it might be, and I had my staff, 17 of them, and their job was to help people. | |
| And so we did a lot of that, and now as I go around the district, almost invariably somebody stands up and says, thank you for, and they explain what it was, they give me credit, it was usually my staff that did it, but that's what our object was, to help just make this world a smoother place. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And more or less open the doors for people so they can just walk through with low stress. | |
| And I didn't realize either how many places I had been, how many things I'd done, how many countries I'd been to, how many different levels of government and business and for politics and personalities. | |
| But all of that experience gives me some insight so that people don't know how to navigate that. | |
| And they come to me and say, well, what do I do? | |
| And it's kind of surprising. | |
| I have a lot of answers for their conundrums. | |
| But it's because they haven't been confronted with that as much as I have been. | |
| So that's what I do. | |
| I help people. | |
| I developed, I call it a very highly successful consulting company. | |
| Okay. | |
| Which means I've got far more work than I can get done. | |
| And the big reason is, I don't let anybody pay me. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, you're not going to be corrupted then by the special interests, right? | |
| And these crony capitalists. | |
| That's right. | |
| But you've always been a man of integrity and honor, and so what did you think of the town hall? | |
| I mean, I know you're very popular, so I don't know how much of it you got to watch, but what did you think of the town hall, and what do you think about what's going on in Iowa? | |
| Oh, I like this. | |
| We've got a nice rhythm in here, and good people, and they're enthusiastic, and we did a little program a little while ago recognizing many of them. | |
| And I walk in here and I find some friends that I had seen before that are actually good friends. | |
| Well, everybody loves you. | |
| The only people that don't like you are the GOP establishment, but you're still wildly popular. | |
| Nobody actually believes you're a white supremacist, Congressman. | |
| Well, I don't think so. | |
| You know, I was talking to a New York Times... Kevin McCarthy does, but look, he's gone. | |
| He's gone. | |
| When he did that, I sent out the soundtrack to Another One Bites the Dust. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, how great is it, though? | |
| That's your retribution, right? | |
| If we could get Donald Trump back into the White House, and then also now all these terrible people that try to destroy your life. | |
| Kevin McCarthy, Tom Emmer, all these people are officially on the shortlist, right? | |
| So it's nice. | |
| I think it's great. | |
| It's a good form of revenge, right? | |
| I'm a fan of retribution and revenge, and I think that Kevin McCarthy got what was coming to him. | |
| Let me add a little biblical to that. | |
| Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. | |
| Yes. | |
| But he makes no prohibition on getting some satisfaction. | |
| Yes, I believe we are both getting a lot of satisfaction. | |
| You know, I never asked you in person. | |
| What did you feel? | |
| Where were you when you got the news that there was a motion to vacate McCarthy? | |
| I mean, that must have been a really amazing day for you. | |
| You must have been so elated. | |
| Did you go out? | |
| Did you celebrate? | |
| Did you party? | |
| Did you have a nice dinner with your wife? | |
| Well, I did watch what was going on and I sent a bunch of texts in there to my former colleagues. | |
| And they let me know, too, that in the first election of McCarthy as Speaker, those 15 rounds of votes, they said that my name was there in those negotiations throughout. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because McCarthy would try an argument, they'd go, No, we're not buying that. | |
| You did that to King. | |
| You're not doing that to us. | |
| And so they kept pushing that back at him. | |
| Well, now the decision to vacate the chair, part of what he did to me is what motivated them, because they knew they could not trust him. | |
| The facts were not going to get in McCarthy's way. | |
| I've had people that know McCarthy well say to me, and I'll say in a brain-trust environment, McCarthy will look you in the eye and lie to you and he doesn't care if you know he's lying. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| That's a level of brazenness that I don't have. | |
| I define him as a narcissistic abuser. | |
| Yes. | |
| Clinically, that's somebody that they are the center of the gravity for the world. | |
| Nothing is relevant unless it's relevant to them. | |
| And then it's defined by how it's relevant to them. | |
| And they manipulate people's minds. | |
| They might do it with a carrot and a stick. | |
| They might praise them and lavish them with praise and hand them benefits and all those things. | |
| Or they might punish, punish, punish. | |
| Or they might do hot and cold running water. | |
| But the strategy is always to empower the narcissistic abuser. | |
| That is Kevin McCarthy. | |
| And he played those cards all the way up to the point where he face-planted on the floor. | |
| And I honestly, I personally think that Kevin McCarthy retired early from Congress to diminish the House majority because he wants Democrats to take back control of the House in the middle of our election year to screw President Donald Trump. | |
| I really do believe that because we have a one-seat majority right now. | |
| We have a one seat majority right now. | |
| That's pretty tight. | |
| I guess it does, right over the course of the year. | |
| One seat majority. | |
| It puts a one seat majority in. | |
| And another thing that Kevin McCarthy did, he raised lots of money. | |
| I mean, $200 million or so that he managed within the funds. | |
| And I saw him doing this. | |
| He would go out, and he had an affirmative action program. | |
| And it was, I'm going to find people that fit the minority categories, and I'm going to give them money. | |
| Right. | |
| and run them in primaries against other people that are just principled conservatives like you and I are. | |
| Right. | |
| And so what he was doing was he wasn't just dumbing down the Republican conference, he was moving the center of that thing to the left. | |
| He was moving to the left saying he was doing it because he wanted a conference that looked like America, that sounded like Bill Clinton's cabinet back in 1993. | |
| But instead it really was about the ideological component of that, They were rhino enough to vote for McCarthy, and I saw this happen in Texas. | |
| I got behind, I'll give his name, Roland Lopez, a solid, principled conservative, and he should have gone to Congress, but McCarthy found a person that fit his minority category more strongly than Lopez, put a million dollars in there and said, stay in your basement like Biden, we'll get you elected, and he did. | |
| There's a vote for Speaker when that happens. | |
| That happens over and over again. | |
| And so, we need to have, first of all, this party, this Ronna McDaniel party, and the Kevin McCarthy party. | |
| She does need to go. | |
| But they were configuring this thing for something other than our platform. | |
| I want them. | |
| What happened to the meritocracy? | |
| Republicans have to be for meritocracy. | |
| We've got affirmative action. | |
| We're trying to get people in. | |
| They have DEI, affirmative action. | |
| It's out of control. | |
| It is. | |
| We've got to get rid of it. | |
| We've got to get rid of it. | |
| And I've been opposed to that for a long time. | |
| And going clear back when there was, let's see, I got to meet her actually. | |
| One of them, the University of Michigan affirmative action cases. | |
| And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion on that. | |
| And that was one of the times I disagreed with her. | |
| She was a gracious lady, and I got to count her as a friend. | |
| But she came down on the side of her. | |
| I got to meet her, actually. | |
| Sandra Day O'Connor was a commencement speaker at my boarding school. | |
| And gracious, to a fault. | |
| And I can't think of anybody more gracious than Sandra Day O'Connor. | |
| Yeah, I remember when I was a teen, I was like 16 years old and I snuck into the back room because I was so eager to meet her and I wasn't supposed to be back there and the administrators were like, what are you doing? | |
| You're not supposed to be back here. | |
| And I remember she was gracious and she said, Oh no, it's okay. | |
| And she's like, Oh, what's your name? | |
| And you know, it's, uh, That's her. | |
| You know what I do, I loomer people and I always was so excited, but I got to meet her. | |
| But the decision that she came down with, wrote the majority opinion on was, well, we kind of need this yet because we've still got racism in the country, but maybe in 25 years we can get rid of it. | |
| And I go, no! | |
| The Constitution is what you're ruling on. | |
| You're not ruling on the movement of society. | |
| That's got nothing to do with it. | |
| You have to come down on the fact that are people going to have equal opportunity or are they not going to have equal opportunity. | |
| Right. | |
| And so now here we are nearly 25 years later and you're seeing these decisions come down that are getting rid of affirmative action. | |
| We've got decisions in Texas that the universities in Texas closing down their diversity offices because the legislature has prohibited any of this further affirmative action. | |
| And now you have the presidents of elite universities like Harvard resigning, right? | |
| Under pressure. | |
| And I think that we're maybe going to see a rejection of DEI, right? | |
| Because people are now getting nervous about the kind of social chaos, right? | |
| And conflict that DEI brings. | |
| And the safety concerns, especially as it relates to this recent story that just broke about the airliner, right? | |
| And the plane that had a hard landing. | |
| I don't know if you heard about that story as well. | |
| But a lot of people are now starting to say, you know, I think we're tired of this DEI, you know, bullcrap. | |
| We need to get back to meritocracy, right? | |
| We need to get back to a system of merit. | |
| Well, who was it that when they got on, it might have been Muhammad Ali, when he'd get on a plane and he'd look in and he'd see the pilot and he would think, hmm, I don't want to have an affirmative action pilot. | |
| He also said, Muhammad Ali, I love the way he characterized things. | |
| It was just pretty simple. | |
| He was wiser than he got credit for being. | |
| He would say, well, don't worry about not having the integration part of this thing. | |
| Bluebirds fly with bluebirds. | |
| Blackbirds fly with blackbirds. | |
| That's their choice. | |
| But I'll say, here's something about humanity is that people gravitate towards like kind. | |
| And you can define like kind in a number of different ways. | |
| But, for example, we gravitate together because we love our country and the Constitution and we're conservatives. | |
| Real recognizes real, as I like to say. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Real recognizes real. | |
| Yeah, real recognizes real. | |
| But, you know, the unreal recognize each other, too, and they flock together. | |
| Yeah, birds of a feather. | |
| Uh-huh, birds of a feather. | |
| And I watch this once in a while. | |
| We used to have family reunions, and my mother's family, there were five kids, and each of those kids, my aunts and uncles and my mother, had five kids. | |
| And so we'd do a family reunion, and there would be five picnic tables for the nuclear families. | |
| And they all sat together. | |
| Part, part, part. | |
| And I thought, I'm here for a family reunion, I'm going to go sit down with these. | |
| And I'll go sit down, pretty soon I'll be talking to one of them, not the rest of them, because they go reform at another table. | |
| Well, okay, I'll go try another family, and we'll do the same thing. | |
| I mean, it wasn't that... | |
| It wasn't that they were rejecting me. | |
| They were just more comfortable in their own family unit, even in a family reunion. | |
| That taught me something about like-kind. | |
| And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. | |
| It's human nature. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, it's been wonderful having you here, and I'm sure I'm going to see you a lot these next few days. | |
| And where do you plan to be on caucus night? | |
| Where are you going to be? | |
| I don't know yet. | |
| No? | |
| The most important place I could be, I suppose. | |
| In the past, though, I've gone to wherever the largest caucus is and given a speech there. | |
| Okay. | |
| And last time, in 2016, when it mattered, it was in Perry, Iowa. | |
| Had a large caucus there for the whole county, as I recall. | |
| And so I'll see, but what happens is, in my own home county caucus, everybody knows me there. | |
| I probably don't impact very much of anything, but I'll have to tell them, put me in as a delegate, will you? | |
| So they'll take care of me, I believe. | |
| Wonderful. | |
| Well, I think that, you know, we're wrapping up our programming for tonight. | |
| The town hall is over. | |
| Everybody had a really wonderful time. | |
| I think that, you know, there's a lot of enthusiasm, right? | |
| There's a lot of enthusiasm here for President Trump. | |
| There was a lot of enthusiasm today. | |
| at the Vigramaswamy's press conference. | |
| And regardless of whether people agree or not, the great thing about this country is that we have free speech and we're able to have these conversations. | |
| And so I really want to thank you for coming out tonight. | |
| I've always really admired you and thought so highly of you. | |
| And I wish that you were back in Congress. | |
| I really do. | |
| Well, you are a vigorous personality, and I want to thank you for hosting this tonight. | |
| Of course. | |
| It adds a lot to the caucus process, and you're here in Iowa, and you're not just watching it. | |
| You're living it, and you're pushing it, and you're driving it. | |
| Well, and I wish that there wasn't, you know, torrential snow downpour right before the event started, because unfortunately Only a few people had to cancel because of the snow, but, you know, I do what I can, you know, and I want to come out and I want to meet everybody. | |
| I'm a grassroots person and so I want to do my part to take our country back. | |
| I don't want to live in a communist country. | |
| Let's just keep pounding away on those leftists and those idiots and the rhinos. | |
| And then we have to take on the World Economic Forum. | |
| Yes. | |
| And I just had this conversation back in the back of the room, but of all of the existential threats that we have, and there aren't many for the greatest country in the world, but China, Russia, the World Economic Forum is the number one most existential threat to the United States because they seek to break down our entire economy, our civilization, our constitution, our family life, every component of what makes America great is under assault. | |
| And we have to push back on that and eventually take them down. | |
| And we will. | |
| I do believe that. | |
| So let me just say, the number one enemy to the World Economic Forum is Donald Trump. | |
| I would say so, yes. | |
| Donald Trump. | |
| The number two enemy? | |
| Vivek Ramaswamy. | |
| Yes. | |
| Number three might be Bobby Kennedy Jr. | |
| Well, you know, I don't know. | |
| I have a lot of reservations about him trying to push for a contingent election. | |
| You know, pushing for a contingent election? | |
| Because I don't want Congress deciding who our next president is. | |
| And Kennedy is pushing for a contingent election. | |
| Yes, his whole entire strategy, as he just announced recently, is investing $15 million into getting on the ballot in key states so that they could push for a contingent election. | |
| And I think that that is the most globalist thing that you can do. | |
| It deprives the American people of their ability to actually select their own president. | |
| But yeah, I would agree that Donald Trump is the number one enemy to the World Economic Forum, which is why I support him. | |
| But it's been a great event. | |
| I want to thank you, of course, for coming out. | |
| And again, where can people follow you, Congressman, if they want to follow you? | |
| They can go to steveking.com. | |
| That's my website. | |
| And there, if they'd like to pick up a book, Walking Through the Fire, that comes right out of my warehouse with my autograph on it, and I ship them out myself. | |
| Yeah, and it's a great book. | |
| I've read it myself. | |
| A wonderful book. | |
| I believe I got one of the first copies. | |
| You gave it to me at the American Renaissance conference, actually, in Tennessee. | |
| But with that, thank you so much to everybody who tuned in. | |
| Thank you to Rumble. | |
| We were on the front page of Rumble tonight. | |
| We had thousands of views. | |
| We had over, I believe at one time, over 13,000 live viewers, which was a lot. | |
| Again, please be sure that you're reposting this link so that people who didn't get to watch it do get to watch it. | |
| If you're watching and you couldn't come out because of the snow and you do want a caucus for President Trump, go to ia.donaldjtrump.com. | |
| Be sure that you're following me. | |
| Of course on X true social getter and gab at Laura loomer and then once again I want to thank the sponsors of tonight's live stream Gold coat so go to loomer likes gold comm loomer likes gold comm and again by optimizers comm Slash loomer use code loomer at checkout for up to 10% off and also I would like to thank the co-owners especially mark of | |
| Of our venue tonight, Destination Grill. | |
| They were very generous to open up their facility and provide food and beverages and an event space and a live streaming location so that we could have this amazing watch party. | |
| So if you live in Iowa or you're visiting Iowa, please be sure that you decide to become patrons of Destination Grill. | |
| Great food, great people, really nice event space as well. | |
| You had a nice time, right? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Good food, good people, good service. | |
| And that's all you can ask for. | |
| So I will be seeing you guys later in the week. | |
| Stay tuned to my ex and true social account at Laura Loomer for updates on where I'm going to be. | |
| I'm going to be confronting candidates. | |
| I confronted Ron DeSantis today. | |
| I also had a really nice interview with Vivek Ramaswamy and I'll be hitting the campaign trail with President Trump and covering his events this week too. | |
| So be sure you download the Rumble app and follow Rumble.com slash Laura Loomer so that you never miss an episode and never miss an update. | |
| Thanks, Laura. | |
| Yeah, thank you. | |
| So I'll see you guys soon and be sure you make a plan to caucus for President Trump if you live in Iowa. | |
| Monday, January 15th. | |
| Go Trump! | |
| See you guys soon. | |
| There is a young female journalist, conservative journalist, by the name of Laura Loomer. | |
| If America's men acted like Laura Loomer, our problems would be fixed in about five minutes. | |
| Chained herself to Twitter? | |
| Is she chained? |
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