President Trump fills up Madison Square Garden in New York City, Democrats give us the grossest campaign ad I've ever seen, and Joe Rogan gives us the three-hour sit-down with Trump that we have been waiting for.
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Ep.1604
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As you can tell from my deep gravelly voice and luxurious majestic beard, I am not Michael Knowles.
I am Matt Walsh because I'm here to tell you about the biggest news of the week, of the month, of the year really, which is that Am I Racist?
My film is streaming right now on Daily Wire Plus.
You can go to dailywire.com.
And use code DEI for 35% off annual subscriptions to watch what is in fact...
Hey, you guys have me?
What are you doing?
Does Nashville have me?
Michael, I'm doing the show.
What are you doing?
Are you sitting in my studio?
I am sitting in your studio, which is a much more elaborate setup, I have to say, than mine, which I'm a little upset about.
It is.
It took them about six years to make it.
I knew something was off because in that very art deco kind of avant-garde wallpaper, the flannel really stands out.
I go to New York for about 36 hours.
I come here to check out the Trump rally.
I thought maybe my friend Matt Walsh was going to join me.
But instead, no!
What happens?
You take the opportunity to seize my decadent little studio and promote what?
Because you've got a movie coming to the platform today?
Is that what you're saying?
I do, in fact, have a movie coming to the platform.
In fact, it's on the platform right now at dailywire.com.
It was the number one documentary, number one grossing documentary of the decade in theaters.
And lots of people have been asking, when can we watch it at home?
Can we watch it?
And now you can.
Worldwide, in fact.
There's fans of this that want to watch this movie all over the world, and now they can right now, which I thought was going to be the subject of your entire show.
So even if you're taking over...
It might well be, actually.
Because I was informed by The View and all the liberal media that what I attended yesterday was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.
So before Kristallnacht 2 takes place, do we have a clip from Am I Racist?
What do you feel in your body when you hear the term white people?
I feel a little cringe about it.
White, straight, cisgender man is the top of the pile.
I'm on the top of the pile.
It's me.
Can I just propose a toast?
Raise a glass if you're racist.
To racist.
That was really weird.
Don't deny that you're racist.
Try not to be racist, but also don't realize that you're...
Until we're willing to talk about these things, healing can't really begin.
My daughter's four years old.
She's still watching Disney movies and choosing a white princess.
Have you talked to her about that?
All the time.
Is racism inherent to whiteness?
Yes.
Yeah, probably.
Well, yeah.
Joining us now is Matt, certified DEI expert.
Did race exist as a reality before?
We made race exist.
Does that make sense?
It does make sense.
What do you mean?
What you're doing is you're stretching out of your whiteness.
This is more for you and less for you.
Am I racist?
Now streaming only on Daily Wire Plus.
Rated PG-13.
You know, that trailer reminds me, Matt, that I actually saw one of your 17 black friends in the city last night.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the work, okay?
I'm going to hope that you're not in my studio when I get back.
I am going to sit here and I am going to do the work For the next 41 minutes or so, everyone else in the meantime should subscribe to The Daily Wire to watch Am I Racist?
And occasionally to watch Matt Walsh hosting my show in his flannel and his beard in my studio.
Matt, thank you for being here.
Thank you, Michael.
Go get the movie.
Go watch the movie.
I had people all over New York, actually, Talking about the movie, because every right-winger in the country, it felt like, descended on Manhattan Island yesterday.
This was absolutely wild, hot on the heels of President Trump's extremely revealing three-hour interview with Joe Rogan, which we're going to get all the way through.
We have so much to get to today.
Hot on the heels of all of that, President Trump rounded up his final campaign push with the wildest political rally I have ever seen, from near or from far, at Madison Square Garden.
I've got the tea.
I'm Michael Knowles.
It's The Michael Knowles Show.
President Trump filling up the most legendary events arena in the United States to capacity.
It was completely insane with probably over 100,000 people outside.
And meanwhile, Kamala Harris and the Democrats broadly are running a pro-masturbation 30-second campaign ad to try to get young men to vote for herself.
So the two campaigns really could not be more different.
There's so much more to say.
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The Madison Square Garden rally, which many people said could not be done because New York is a Democrat state and Trump is a terrible, evil fascist and everyone was going to hate him and there's no way he could fill up Madison Square Garden.
I mean, he floated this rally a while ago and he actually pulled it off.
People said it was stupid for him to hold the rally, even if it could be pulled off well in the final week of the campaign.
What's Trump doing campaigning in New York?
He's not going to win New York, they say.
He should be in the swing states.
The whole thing was genius.
It was an incredible political rally.
The genius of holding it a week before the election is that it felt like another RNC. You know, the Republicans had their convention.
Their convention went so well.
Their debate went so well that the Democrats got rid of their nominee, replaced their nominee with Kamala Harris.
Then they had their convention.
That gave them some momentum.
The MSG rally felt like another mini-convention.
It was pretty wild.
It was pretty star-studded.
It was just a spectacular event.
Filled up completely to capacity.
I couldn't even get poor Professor Jacob in.
I was sitting as close as you could be without actually being on the floor, like where the speakers were and Elon was there.
And even that little floor area with serious VIPs, we're talking Elon, we're talking JD Vance, we're talking real dignitaries.
Even that with standing room capacity, you really couldn't move.
All the way from that level, all the way up to the rafters, there was really not a seat to be found.
It went extraordinarily well.
We were told in the lead-up to this rally by people like Hillary Clinton that this was going to be a Nazi rally.
And you know, one other thing that you'll see next week, Caitlin, is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.
I write about this in my book.
President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany.
So I don't think we can ignore it.
Okay, and you hadn't heard about this, of course, because Hillary wrote it in her book and nobody's reading her most recent book.
Hillary seems really confused here.
For instance, she's saying there was a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939, and she's calling those people neo-Nazis.
But in 1939, they weren't neo.
They were actually just Nazis.
And there was a rally that had swastikas up that was in support of the Nazis over in Germany.
That's true.
There was such an event in 1939.
There have been other events at Madison Square Garden.
I'm not sure if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats know that.
There are like Knicks games.
So if Trump holding a rally at Madison Square Garden was reminiscent of prior events, such as a Nazi rally, does that mean that the Trump rally yesterday was also reminiscent of a Knicks game?
Was it reminiscent of that Billy Joel concert I went to in 2005?
Was it...
No, it was...
It was its own thing.
And even Jonathan Karl at ABC News has had to admit this.
Even the liberal media.
Jonathan Karl, I guess he was at the event yesterday, he said, I was there for six hours.
He said, the MAGA movement is its own movement.
This is a real movement.
Trump has put together a real thing.
The place was packed and outside was flooded.
They were actually broadcasting it on the screens outside.
It was really magnificent.
And so, of course, the Libs compare it to the Nazis because the Libs always compare Republicans to Hitler and the Nazis and all the rest of it.
However, I was thinking, sitting there in that room, how unjust it is to make the comparison to Hitler and fascists and Nazis and the things Democrats always do when they're talking about us.
And it's so unjust because I move in very conservative circles, but I also move in some liberal circles as well.
I'm from New York.
I lived in Los Angeles.
I went to a very liberal university.
I've been around a lot of libs.
And I can say, I think with a little bit of objectivity, I don't think with too much bias, You see much more charity and much more grace and much more kindness and much more friendliness and much more balance and much more moderation and much more good humor at the right wing rallies, at the MAGA rallies, than you do at the left wing events.
I'm not saying you never hear an untoward remark at a right-wing event.
But broadly speaking, these people are really good people and they come in and they leave the place better than they found it.
And when you go to left-wing events, there's a lot more shrieking.
There's a lot more talk of hatred.
There's a lot more vitriol.
There's a lot more invective.
There's a lot more damage done to venues.
It's...
I know I'm a right-winger.
I've got my prejudices and I've got my allegiances.
But it's so deeply unjust to make those kinds of comparisons about the right wing because they're just really good people.
They're extraordinarily diverse.
They're geographically diverse.
They're racially diverse.
They're culturally diverse.
And they're just good.
They're good people.
I don't know how else to put it.
In as much as people can be good, they're really good people.
It was a beautiful event.
I'm not going to pull a lot of clips from the rally.
I think many of you probably watched it yesterday.
If you didn't, you know, it was six and a half hours or something, so we would be here all day.
However, there are two points that Trump made during his speech that I really want to hit on because they were impressive.
The first one is, Trump says, we need to change the tax code such that if you care for a family member, you can have a tax deduction.
And I think this is so smart.
This is a great example of a pro-family policy that is simple.
It's easy.
I don't think it would require too much to push it through Congress.
Maybe some of the fiscal hawks won't like it, but I think they should like it.
Right now, when you have aging family members or family members with disabilities, you can deduct certain medical expenses and certain care expenses if you go out and hire some random person to take care of your relative, but not if, you know, Grandma and grandpa take care of a relative, and not if you are caring for a brother or sister.
You can't deduct that on your taxes.
But it's much better for the family members to care for the family members than to go out and just hire some random person.
And so I thought that was a really simple way to advance a pro-family policy at a time when marriages are collapsing, at a time when the birth rate is plummeting, at a time when we need a family policy in America.
I thought that was brilliant.
The other point that Trump made that I loved is he said that we need legal penalties for people who burn the American flag.
And there are going to be some on the right who don't like that proposal.
They're going to say that it's a matter of free speech to burn the American flag.
That is a relatively novel idea.
There have been some very serious jurists who have advanced the idea that burning the flag is protected political speech.
Antonin Scalia among them.
But the pre-Scalia, you know, pre-recent decades understanding of burning the American flag is that it was not protected by the First Amendment.
There were all sorts of laws against it going very far back in our country.
And as you may have noticed, if you read my book Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, I think that that was a healthier country.
Thank you very much.
Even from afar, I like that we get my bell.
We were a healthier country when we had standards and norms and taboos that were out in the open and that were good and that were enforced by the culture and by the law because the law is a tutor.
And what Trump is advocating here is actually a return to a deeply conservative policy.
And it's actually important because signs matter because they signify things and they signify meaning.
And we have a crisis of meaning in America.
So I thought it was good.
There was a lot of other great stuff.
Those were two things that stood out to me that a lot of people weren't talking about.
There's so much more to say.
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Enough about the rally.
I want to turn to At least an on-par, at least an event that met that standard of the rally in its significance in the final couple weeks of the campaign, that is Trump going on Rogan.
Kamala could never.
She could never.
I bet a lot of you have listened to the Trump-Rogan interview.
It's quite long, so maybe some of you skipped around.
I'm going to try to fly through this because Trump, on his feet with the most prominent interviewer of our time, is revealed so much about himself.
Rogan opens up the interview and he reveals something about what Trump reveals about the political system.
Rogan opens up the interview by referencing Trump right before he really hit the national scene as a presidential candidate.
Trump, when he was launching his presidential campaign not that long ago, whatever it was nine years ago, going on The View, and Rogan pointed out how strange it is that he was warmly received by all those liberal women.
Donald Trump is a billionaire, a real estate mogul, and a television star.
But does he really want to add President of the United States to his resume?
A lot of people would like him to.
Please let's find out and please welcome my friend Donald Trump He's giving them hugs, kisses, Joe Behar
The audience loves him.
Whenever you're on with us, we're very happy.
Whenever you're on with us, we're very happy.
My friend Donald Trump, that wasn't 20 years ago.
That wasn't 30 years ago.
That was about nine years ago when Trump started running in 2015.
I love that Joe opened with us.
This was so insightful.
Because it reveals something that Trump reveals about the system, which is that the system is fake.
And Trump is able uniquely to reveal this fact about the system because Trump has been a celebrity since the 80s at least.
Because Trump was the toast of the town.
Because Trump is not from Texas or Tennessee.
Trump is a New Yorker.
Trump did not come from some church movement.
Trump did not come from pro-life activism.
Trump did not come from any of the traditionally right-wing areas of politics.
Trump was a TV star and a real estate mogul and a playboy billionaire.
And New York and not even just New York, a lot of New York still loves Trump.
The liberal establishment loved him as recently as when he declared his candidacy for president.
And then, when he was running, and he started to do well, and then certainly when he beat Hillary Clinton, the system had to turn him into a Nazi.
So Barbara Walters, my good friend Donald Trump, and Whoopi Goldberg there kissing him, and Joy Behar kissing him, they just had to, like robots, they just had to get the upgrade to their software, boop, beep boop, sorry, nope, Trump, evil now, and it all had to go away.
And it reveals how artificial that system is.
It reveals how disingenuous those accusations about Trump and really about all the Republicans are.
Because they're not just calling Trump a Nazi and the Trump rallies Nazi rallies.
They did it to Mitt Romney.
They did it to John McCain.
They did it to George Bush.
They did it to the other George Bush.
They did it to Ronald Reagan.
They do it to everyone.
Trump just uniquely can reveal how silly that is.
So then, the next really revealing clip I saw from the Trump-Rogan interview.
When Trump is discussing the moment he gets there into the White House...
And he talks about what he first noticed.
We get to the White House, and now it's a little bit before dark.
Beautiful.
And we went up to the president's quarters.
They call them the presidential quarters.
And I'm standing in this beautiful hallway.
You know, it's funny.
Nobody ever talks about the White House as being beautiful inside.
You know, you think it's going to be everything's going to be all metal doors and stuff.
It's not.
It's so beautiful.
I made my money largely on luxury.
The hallway is like 25 feet wide.
The ceiling heights are...
It's so beautiful.
Beauty.
Beauty.
I think he's being totally sincere here.
I think he's being sincere much, if not most, if not all the time.
Sometimes his sincerity gets him in trouble a little bit because he's not politic about the way he discusses issues.
But here, he sounds as sincere as I've ever heard him.
He says, you know, first thing I noticed is just how beautiful it is.
The hallways, the wood, the ornamentation.
It's good to be attracted to beauty.
Because beauty is one of the transcendentals.
Truth, goodness, and beauty.
And when you're attracted to beautiful things, you're more likely to encounter the truth and goodness.
When you're attracted to true things, you're more likely to encounter beauty and goodness.
They kind of lead you one to the other.
Today, the left wants us to be attracted to things that are not beautiful.
They're trying to upend our standards of beauty.
They're trying to tell us that things that are grotesque are really beautiful.
That things that are out of place are really beautiful.
Not to look at beautiful women, that's somehow sexist and misogynistic, but to look at men who dress up like women, who are grotesque caricatures of women.
We're told that's actually beautiful.
We're told that really unhealthy lifestyles are beautiful.
But Trump's saying, no, no, no, look, the thing that struck me that really resonated for me was beauty.
Remember Trump had that great executive order, the Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again Act.
Where he wanted them to have neoclassical architecture.
It tells you that whatever you want to say about Trump, people always say, oh, he's defective in this area.
He's defective in that area.
I like him, but he's got the...
You know, his apparatus is still working pretty well.
You can say, look, I don't read all the political philosophy books, but I'm attracted to beautiful things.
And I can sniff the difference between the truth and BS. And I want to do good stuff and not bad stuff.
And I'm not going to allow ideologies to twist me into a pretzel to call good evil and evil good.
That is a really admirable quality in politics.
It's obviously served him well.
There's so much more to say.
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Trump moves on to his biggest mistake.
He says his biggest mistake is he hired some bad people.
And he said, look, I had to hire a lot of people.
I didn't know anyone in Washington.
But that was the biggest mistake because everyone...
No matter what they say about him in the campaign, no matter...
Everyone is a shark in Washington, D.C., and no matter what they say, they want power.
Look, everybody wants it.
By the way, no matter what you do, but it's very dangerous to pick somebody outside of a politician because a politician's been basically vetted for years.
You pick a business guy...
And they've never been vetted at all and they're, you know, the head of a big company or something, but they've never been vetted.
You know nothing about his personal life.
You know nothing about where he's been.
When you put them in, it's a little bit dangerous because all of a sudden they get checked up and you hear things that you say, wow, this is not going to work out too well.
So it's very dangerous.
Picking people that are outside of politics is somewhat dangerous.
So, he's saying, look, all these people, they all want power.
They all want the position.
They're all trying to get in there however they can.
But, what's the alternative?
If the knock on the first Trump administration was that Trump picked too many swamp creatures, too many people who were too deeply involved in politics, Trump is rightly pointing out, okay, the thing about people who are involved in politics is, they have been vetted.
I think this explains why Trump is attracted to really famous people, famous celebrities, and also...
People who have been in politics a long time, people who have been very successful in politics, because there is a natural vetting process.
The scandals are going to come out.
They're going to have taken the blows.
They're going to have been bloodied a little bit.
We're going to see if they can survive.
He says at various points in the campaign, he goes, I hate excuses.
I'm not making excuses.
But he says, this one is a little bit of an excuse.
Because if you pick people totally from outside of politics, well, the political establishment can eat them for lunch, usually.
But if you pick people from within politics, these are people who have often made concessions.
Picking people that are outside of politics is somewhat dangerous, he says.
This is a commentary also on himself.
This is why they attack Trump so much.
Because they liked Trump.
They liked Trump when he just kind of did what they wanted him to do and he was getting all the top ratings on NBC with The Apprentice and he had his real estate and his neckties and his watches and his golf courses.
And so everyone likes him.
He plays nice.
He writes checks to Democrat politicians.
But then when he really gets involved in politics...
In a way that they can't control, that's breaking orthodoxies on the left and on the right.
He's upending everything.
That's dangerous.
So they try to throw everything at him.
You know, he hit on a waitress in 1972.
They try to throw everything at him.
He had a phone call with the president of Ukraine, which is Trump's job.
It's his job to talk to foreign leaders.
They try to impeach him.
They try to imprison him.
They establish the justification to assassinate him.
Because they recognize something that Trump is admitting is true.
Namely, when you pick people for positions of power who are outside of the political establishment, it's dangerous.
Then, another wonderful little tidbit here with Trump.
He explains his personal feelings toward people who worked for him, who served in his administration, who then go on the liberal networks to attack him.
And his answer is not what you would expect.
I've had many people go on CNN and they call and said, I don't know what to do.
They want to pay me a lot, but I have to be negative on you.
I said, be negative.
That's okay.
There are guys on, like, CNN. They won't hire them.
Sean Duffy is a, you know, congressman and he retired.
He got a good job with CNN, but he was only positive about Trump.
So they kept him, but they would never put him on.
I mean, I respect what he did.
He could have gone, you know, negative.
I tell people, go negative.
You know, let my friends make the money.
Ha!
I tell people.
Look, I tell people.
It's nice.
I don't know if you wanted to stay positive, but I tell people, go on TV. Go negative on me.
Make your money.
I want my friends to make money.
It's a reminder of something that I've said from the beginning that even some of my friends in conservatism got wrong about Trump.
They say, Trump's so petty, he takes everything personally.
I said, excuse me?
Trump takes nothing personally.
And you heard it proven right there with Rogan.
Trump, he reacts, he punches back, he hits you two or three times as hard, but he doesn't take things personally.
He says, yeah, go on TV, say something negative, whatever, let my friends make money.
Here's how you know he doesn't take things personally.
He and Ted Cruz had a bruising primary campaign, and then at the end of the primary campaign, when Ted agrees to help Trump, what does Trump say?
He goes, oh yeah, he's not lying, Ted, anymore.
He's beautiful, Ted.
I love him.
Trump can work with just about anybody, even if they've had a brutal, vicious fight.
It reminds me of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.
When Michael wants to go and kill the cop who smacked him around a little bit because the cop was a dirty cop and he was complicit in the assassination of Don Corleone.
Sonny says, what?
You're going to take this all personally because you got smacked around a little bit?
And Michael Corleone says, no, no, it's not personal, Sonny.
It's strictly business.
For Trump, I think it's strictly business, which is a good attitude to have.
It's actually an attitude to...
Ironically, of humility.
Yeah, people, they attack him on CNN. That's okay.
Go let my friends make money.
We're going to need loyalty when it counts.
When the campaign really gets going, when the policy is really on the line, when the rubber meets the road, that's when we want loyalty.
All this other stuff, it's just noise.
Then, in the interview, Trump floats an idea that...
He also floated yesterday at Madison Square Garden.
I don't think this is just a one-off.
I think this is a serious proposal, the kind of proposal that we haven't heard in about 100 years in the United States, namely to get rid of the income tax and to bring in government revenue through tariffs.
To me, the most beautiful word, and I've said this for the last couple of weeks, in the dictionary today, is the word tariff.
It's more beautiful than love.
It's more beautiful than anything.
It's the most beautiful word.
This country can become rich.
With the use, the proper use of tariffs.
Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs?
Well, okay.
Were you serious about that?
Yeah, sure.
Why not?
Yeah, sure.
Why not?
There's two layers to this answer.
The one is just on the policy.
Trump has spoken highly of William McKinley, former president, the turn of the previous century.
He's spoken highly of tariffs before.
Some of the squishier modern conservative types, many of them just reflexively hate tariffs because they were taught in their seventh grade history class by some liberal teacher that tariffs don't work or whatever.
So they just reflexively hate it, even though Abraham Lincoln told us, give me a tariff, I'll give you the strongest nation on earth.
But Thank you.
Some people reflexively don't like tariffs.
Some, who are free traders, will acquiesce to the use of tariffs instrumentally as a way to increase free trade.
So they'll say, okay, we'll threaten tariffs when it's advantageous to trade agreements that free up trade a little bit more.
But Trump is going further here.
Trump is saying, no, no, tariffs are good in themselves.
More beautiful than love.
What a beautiful word these tariffs are.
And so he's making...
An actual political economic case for tariffs as a positive good.
And I know the modern economists are going to be pulling their hair out of their heads.
However, Trump does have in his corner McKinley, who he brings up.
He does have the Gilded Age.
But he's also got Abraham Lincoln, who's the first Republican president, when he was the founder of the Republican Party.
So there is...
Historical, political, and economic firepower before Trump here.
But what this reveals at the deeper level even, forget about tariffs and forget about the income tax, I think a lot of people would love to get rid of the income tax, is Trump is really good at bringing people together.
That answer that he just gave will appease libertarians and protectionists.
He'll get both of them to support him on that answer.
The libertarians because he says he wants to get rid of the income tax, the protectionists because he says he wants the tariffs.
There's a little bit for everyone here.
And he's not being a cynical calculator, I don't think.
I think he's just breaking the system.
And when you break the system, naturally there's a realignment.
So then Bobby Kennedy shows up to your rally, your Republican rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City a week before the election.
None of this makes any sense.
But it's happening.
And it's inevitably going to happen because Trump genuinely scrambled up the system.
You think about right now, at the rally yesterday, Rudy Giuliani devoted probably a quarter of his speech to how much he loves the state of Israel and the Jews, and how we have to defend the Jews.
And everybody was cheering and applauding.
There were a lot of people wearing yarmulkes in MSG. And at the same time, I saw at least one woman wearing a Muslim headscarf, wearing either an abaya or even the one where you just see the eyes.
And you have imams coming out endorsing Donald Trump.
Hold on.
You got the Jews and the Arabs?
You got the Jews and the Muslims coming together to support this guy?
And you got Kamala Harris' support among Jews and among Arabs and Muslims collapsing at the same time?
How is this possible?
Well, because Trump is saying to Jews, I will support the state of Israel.
And Trump is saying to Arabs and Muslims, I will pursue peace.
And I'll stop all this warfare in the Middle East.
There's something in there for both of them.
Kamala says, I'm going to turn my back on the state of Israel and I'm going to get more war in all the Muslim countries in the Middle East.
That's the worst of all scenarios.
Trump, and I think you've got to give him credit for it at this point, nine years in, Trump is really good at forming new coalitions, new alliances, a new form of American politics.
Then, speaking of Bobby Kennedy...
Trump brings up environmental consultants.
He had a really funny bit at the rally.
He goes, I love Bobby Kennedy.
We're going to let him run wild on Big Pharma.
And we're going to let him run wild on the FDA. And we're not going to let him run too wild on oil and gas.
We're going to rein him in a little bit on oil and gas.
We like what he says about food and medicine.
We don't like so much the EPA stuff or whatever.
Bobby Kennedy's right there in the room.
It was very, very funny.
Trump It speaks about this issue of environmentalism and environmentalism and politics.
Angel Rogan, in a way, probably, even if you're on the left or you're on the right, you've heard about this issue your whole life, probably you haven't heard about it this way before.
So when you're saying that there's people that are making money by making it difficult, are you talking about lawyers?
No, I'm talking about environmental consultants and lawyers.
Environmental consultants profit off of dragging out the process.
Absolutely.
And how do they profit?
And I'd probably do the same thing if I were them, to be honest with you.
I want to be honest with you.
How do they do that?
How do they make it?
I love that.
He goes, yeah, so what these guys do is the reason this environmental burden is so disastrous for businesses, the reason politicians like it, The reason that it keeps up.
It's not necessarily because of the science.
It's not necessarily because the world is going to end in 12 years, 15 years ago, like AOC said or whatever.
It's because there is a political system in place with sticks and carrots that encourages...
All of this environmental lobbying.
He says, yeah, these environmental lobbyists, these environmental lawyers, they make a lot of money and they have a lot of power and that's why they stymie builders.
And Trump knows this because Trump's a builder and he's worked personally with a lot of these guys for decades.
And then what does he say?
As he's revealing a little bit about the architecture of this system, a system that he knows a lot about.
More than he knows about Washington politics, he knows a lot about building and environmental regulations and business.
And Trump says, and you know, frankly, if I were in their position, I would do it too.
Because it takes a thief to catch a thief.
Trump is saying, look, I'm not going to be sanctimonious.
I'm not going to be holier than thou.
If I were in their position, I'd do it too.
The reason they're doing it is not necessarily because they're bad people.
The reason that these lobbyists and these lawyers are gumming up the works for everybody is because there's a system of sticks and carrots in place that create incentives for them to do that.
And that's why we need to reform the system so that the incentives are more conducive to the flourishing of Americans.
That's what we're going to do.
It's not that they're bad people.
It's not that they're evil.
It's just the system's a little bit broken and we're going to fix it.
And if I were in their shoes, I'd probably do it too.
It's a very humble way to talk about politics.
And it's much more insightful than probably any other politician I've ever heard talk about that issue.
Now, my favorite comment yesterday.
It's from xprodigyxgames3296.
It says, you can tell Kamala's lying because she can't look forward for more than two seconds.
This is ironic because I'm reading this on a prompter right now, so it looks like I'm changing my gaze too.
Wandering eyes is a sign of deceit.
I basically agree with that.
I saw in this interview, whenever it was, two, three days ago, Kamala, she'd have a question.
And it's not like she was just looking over, you know, right now I'm looking over watching a clip where I'm looking over here at a lighter side.
Kamala would hear the question and then just turn her head, stare off vacantly into space while she was concocting whatever lies she needed.
That's not a good sign.
When you have to do that, you're talking to somebody, looking right in the eye, and every time they ask you a straight question, you go, ah, hmm, let me, what do we have here?
That is, in fact, a sign of deceit.
So then, on environmental regulation, Trump is asked a question that you've heard for your whole life.
From environmentalists, from capitalists, from all...
Nuclear energy.
Why is it?
You'll hear this from a lot of poli-sci 101 kind of students.
Why is it that we don't have nuclear energy?
Nuclear energy is so much more efficient than any other kind of energy, not just wind and solar, which is not efficient at all, but also more efficient than oil and gas.
Why don't we have nuclear energy here?
It's because those dumb environmentalists won't let us.
And it's because the greedy capitalists in oil and gas want to suppress it.
But if we just had nuclear energy, we'd have flying cars.
Our society would be so great.
How come all these big dumb idiots in politics never listen to me?
You know, I got all the answers.
We just need nuclear.
It's going to be a magic wand to fix our problems.
Trump gives a sophisticated answer.
Let me ask you about nuclear.
One of the things that when I've talked to people that have a real understanding of nuclear power, what their position is, it's probably the cleanest, safest form of electricity that we could generate.
And that the fears of nuclear power are really about a few disasters.
The Fukushima, Three Mile Island.
These are old systems, and they're much more capable now, and they're capable of making even better systems.
But it's a difficult political issue, because you think nuclear power, you think Chernobyl.
That's what everybody does.
They have this connection, they have the potential disaster.
Or Fukushima, which is where you're not supposed to enter the land for 3,000 years or something.
I think it's worse than that.
I think that area is going to be radioactive for probably longer than you could imagine.
But...
The point is, they're better at it now.
Right.
And that they can do it now, and you can generate power in a way that you don't have to worry about these...
One of the most ridiculous things is electric cars being powered by coal-fired plants.
It's a ridiculous thing.
So what's happening?
Look, that's what's happening, okay?
And you can't enter the land for 3,000 years, and it's really, really crazy, and...
Why does Trump not go all in?
Why doesn't he take the bait from Joe Rogan and say, yeah, we absolutely need nuclear power?
Because he says, look, it's dangerous.
Okay, he's recognizing not just Fukushima, not just Three Mile Island, not just Chernobyl.
The big problem with nuclear power, if a country really relies on it, is it becomes a military target.
That's the problem.
Yes, there's the problem of human error.
But Joe says, well, it's a lot better now.
Maybe it is a lot better now.
But there's this political reality, which is, in times of war, foreign actors and adversaries could target your nuclear power plant.
A terrorist could try to blow up your nuclear power plant.
That's the risk.
And I think there's a lot to be said for nuclear power, and we should explore it, but there's a reason that we haven't just gone all in on nuclear power, and it's not just that we're all big dummies.
In a utopia, everything would be powered by nuclear, sure, but we don't live in utopia.
There is no utopia.
We live in a world of warfare.
We live in a world where adversaries are constantly trying to take advantage.
We live in political reality.
And more than just about any presidential candidate in my lifetime, in fact, certainly more than any presidential candidate in my lifetime, Trump deals in political reality.
It's not that there's no goal, there are no ideals, but he's not an idealist.
He's saying, nah, look, politics, it's kind of messy, it's kind of dirty.
And when politics becomes corrupt, you need a guy who can go in there and fix things.
And speaking of all this equipment, Trump then makes this same point on the Afghanistan withdrawal.
The knock on the Afghanistan withdrawal is that we left all this expensive equipment there.
Can you believe all these zillions of dollars we left there?
I'm speaking not of the day of the withdrawal where you have 13 American service members killed and that was a human disaster.
I'm saying even just the geopolitics of it.
You give all this equipment to the Taliban and it was so expensive.
Trump describes an argument he had with General Mark Milley, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was furious about white rage and, I don't know, is probably waving a rainbow flag somewhere right now.
Trump showed the myopia of his military leadership.
They should have taken all their equipment out.
Every plane, every screw should have been taken out, every tent.
And I said that, that's when I realized that Millie was a dummy.
I said, we're leaving, but I want to get everything out.
Sir, it's cheaper to leave it.
I said, what do you mean to leave it?
It's cheaper to leave it.
Yeah, he said it's cheaper to leave it.
Cheaper?
Cheaper.
He said it's cheaper.
Not more dangerous.
He just said cheaper.
I said, I want every plane.
I want every tank.
I want the goggles.
They have night goggles.
They have all this stuff that these guys now have.
He said, sir, it's cheaper to get out and leave it.
I said, this guy's nuts.
I'm telling you, he was so stupid.
He was so unwise.
He was like an unwise man.
I love that.
He was so stupid.
He was so unwise.
He was like an unwise man.
And he was in that interaction he's describing.
He was.
Because so many in our political establishment, they can tabulate dollars and cents.
Not that they care about tablature books because they're going to run up the debt to $35 trillion and counting.
But they can figure out all the little numbers.
They can make the numbers work.
But they've got more dollars than cents.
They don't recognize that there's more to life than money.
The technocrats today, they don't understand that.
Even the free trade ideologues don't understand that.
They say, look, if we ship all of our manufacturing overseas, you're going to be able to get t-shirts and electronics for a little bit cheaper.
So on average, a family's going to save $5,000.
And isn't that great?
It's like getting a raise, even though you lost your job.
And you lost your job, and now you're depressed, and now you're addicted to drugs, and your family's falling apart, and your community's falling apart.
But hey, on paper, look, dollars and cents in the Excel spreadsheet, you actually made a little bit more money.
Trump's saying there's more to life than money.
It's kind of funny that the billionaire from New York is telling you there's more to life than money.
There's more to politics than money.
Sure, it's cheaper to leave all the equipment in Afghanistan, but now you've armed our enemy of 20 years with state-of-the-art military equipment.
You don't think that's going to hurt us down the road?
You don't think that's a little penny-wise, pound-foolish?
Final point on the Trump-Rogan interview.
It was a really, really good interview.
I tried to suppress three hours plus into about 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
Trump...
Brings up McDonald's and the political calculation that went into becoming a fry cook.
I went into the place and I did the French fry thing.
And it just hit.
But that's like in life.
Sometimes you do.
I thought it was like a quick throwaway.
We're going to be there for 15 minutes.
Then I said, I've worked here for 15 minutes, which is 15 minutes more than she worked here.
She lied about McDonald's.
I absolutely love this.
I love the McDonald's bit, but I love what he says.
He goes, it just hit.
But that's like it in life.
Sometimes you do.
Sometimes you just hit.
I thought it was a throwaway, but it just hit.
I remember one time years ago, I don't know, I had had some academic achievement or something like this.
This was back when I was really young.
And a family member said, Michael, I think you're the most successful person I know.
I said, oh, that's very sweet.
That's very nice, because I had whatever the achievement was.
But I said, but I'm also certainly the biggest failure, you know.
And I said, what are you talking about?
I was like, oh, I've failed at so many things.
I've thrown spaghetti at the wall, and I have succeeded at a few things, but I've failed at a lot of things.
Which I think is the right way to do things.
I think you just kind of go for it.
You say yes to life, see how it works.
Trump is giving that same advice.
And the same thing could be said about Trump.
Trump is like the biggest success alive today.
He's also the biggest failure.
He's had bankruptcies.
He's had companies flop.
He's had embarrassments.
He's had scandals.
He's been impeached twice.
He's had, oh, what a failure.
What a total loser.
Except you just can't keep him down.
What a, oh, he's a flop.
He's a failure.
He's never going to recover from this.
He's been indicted four times and he goes out and he gives the press conference.
We're getting back up on the horse.
You just can't keep this guy down.
He's the biggest winner because he's willing to risk being the biggest loser.
That's why.
He's willing to just do it.
He's just going to go out there and do it.
And sometimes in life, look, I thought it was a throwaway, but actually, look, it really worked out.
Sometimes it really do be like that.
I have not had time.
Because look, I'm really jazzed, man.
I was at Madison Square Garden, an historic presidential rally yesterday.
A Republican in Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan, totally crazy.
And we had the Long Rogan interview to get through.
So I didn't get to Democrats running a pro-masturbation campaign ad for Harris.
I'm actually kind of happy that I didn't get to that.
We will get to that.
I guess we have to get to it tomorrow, but we'll have a little palate cleanser in the meantime.
No membrum segmentum today.
I've got to go get on an airplane, come back to D.C., take my studio back from Mr.
Walsh.
Go check out Air on the Daily Wire Plus platform today.
