New Republican Leadership & New Vision | Rep. Brandon Gill & Michael Knowles
In this episode, Michael Knowles sits down with the "Freshman Class President of Congress," Rep. Brandon Gill, to discuss the future of Republican leadership and the bold new vision for America.
Together, they explore how the GOP’s rising stars are shaping policies, uniting conservatives, and confronting the biggest challenges of our time. Rep. Gill shares his unique perspective as a freshman representative and what it means to lead during such a pivotal moment in our nation’s history.
Don’t miss this insightful conversation about the next generation of Republican leadership.
New year, new president, new Congress, new conservatism, new direction for the country.
I sit down with my friend, U.S. Congressman Brandon Gill.
Brandon, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
You are not only the representative from Texas' 26th congressional district, you are the president of the freshman class.
I have not been the president of a freshman class since 2004. And that was just in my high school.
You were the president of the whole freshman class of Congress.
The freshman Republicans.
I say we're pretty bifurcated here.
We're not quite to the bipartisanship yet.
You didn't get a lot of Democrat votes.
I'm not terribly surprised about that.
But you actually have been elected, even within the Congress, to a kind of a leadership role for your new class.
This was a bizarre election where you saw a major demographic shift.
Lots of people who used to vote for Democrats.
Or who didn't vote at all, now voting Republican.
So you're entering not just as a spokesman for a regular old congressional class.
This is a rather distinct congressional class.
What makes it different?
Well, that's exactly right.
And what makes it different is we're coming in with a very distinct mandate.
You know, if I look across my class, there's 31 Republicans in my class.
Every single one of us ran to varying degrees on the Trump agenda.
You know, some people focused on energy, some people focused on the border, some people focused on tax policy, some on social issues.
But all of us were different component parts of that Trump agenda.
Whenever we're coming in, we're 100% aligned with the president, I think, as a class.
And I think that's a very different situation than we had in 2016, for instance.
So I think the unique thing is that the class and the conference as a whole, I think, is aligned with the president.
We're ready to execute on his agenda.
And I think we're going to get started here very, very, very quickly.
Okay.
The first part of that seems obvious to me.
The class is fully on board with Trump in a way that you did not see in 2016, 2017. Is the rest of the GOP conference, some of the older members, some of the perhaps more establishment members, for any Republican Speaker of the House, I have such pity for Mike Johnson.
It's the hardest job in Washington.
It's always like herding cats.
Do you really think that there will be reasonable unity behind Trump's agenda in the Congress?
Well, I think there's going to have to be reasonable unity.
And you're right.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is Democrats are all pointing in the same ideological direction.
It's just a difference of degree.
It's kind of the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks.
Whereas the Republicans...
We're principled.
We've all got our own ideas.
We think independently.
And there are very distinct ideological strains within the Republican Party, as we've talked about before.
There's the paleoconservatives and the neoconservatives and the Reaganite fusionists.
And then there's everything, the libertarians.
And then there's everything in between.
So coalescing all of these disparate ideological groups into a single...
I do not envy Speaker Johnson at all, but I think that everybody realizes that, too.
I think that there's a broad recognition.
That we were elected with a mandate from the president, but that we've got one shot to execute here.
That if in two years we go back to our districts and we say, I ran on securing the border, I ran on extending the Trump tax cuts, I ran on fighting against this weird, woke trans agenda, and we didn't do any of it, we're not going to keep the majority.
And that's what all of us want to do.
I think that we realize that we have to come together.
It's more an issue of necessity than anything else.
Well, tell me a little bit about that, what you're seeing down the line in two years, because it seems to me that this mandate, this new coalition that you've got, brings with it new kinds of policies, new ways of looking at politics.
I wonder, if you go back to your district in two years and you say, hey...
I did exactly what every other Republican congressman has ever done.
I gave you some tax cuts.
I don't know, maybe I deregulated a little bit.
I had some good sound bites on the border, but probably didn't do that much about it.
But anyway, I cut your taxes.
Do you think that you will be reelected or do you think that the new class of Congress brought in by this new coalition is demanding something different than you saw during the Bush era or during the other Bush era or even during the Reagan era?
What does it mean to be a new kind of Republican?
Well, I can answer that this way.
So I'm the youngest Republican in the class right now, 30 years old.
And I think about the America that I grew up in.
Versus the America that Republicans 20 or 30 years ago grew up in.
And these are entirely different worlds.
The America I grew up in was after Ronald Reagan.
I was born in 1994. So didn't experience the Reagan revolution.
For my entire life, we've had a border crisis.
Even under Republican administrations, we like to think that this is a Biden problem.
It was exacerbated by Joe Biden.
But we've had a border crisis for 30 years now.
For my entire life, we've had an economy addicted to We've watched as our foreign policy goes off the rails, loses all sense of realism and restraint, in my opinion.
And I think whenever that's the America that you experience, and I think that other people in my class see this too, you don't have any illusions about how hard we're going to have to fight to get our country back.
And I think that that's the direction the party's going because everybody recognizes that.
They see where we're at.
They see that it's going to require a more muscular conservatism.
More fight on our side to actually get us back to the country that we know and love and want to live in.
So I think everybody recognizes that.
I think the party as a whole recognizes it.
Again, it's just time to execute now.
Now, do you think there is a divide in not just the electeds, but in the people around the electeds?
Meaning I'm seeing demands from GOP voters that are maybe at odds with demands from GOP donors or GOP institutions or GOP nonprofit organizations or whatever.
How are you going to work that conflict?
Yeah, and I think a really good example of that, right, is immigration.
And that's been one of the driving factors.
For a very long time, there's been this sort of Faustian bargain between Republicans and Democrats.
And Democrats wanted to open the borders because they wanted to flood the country with illegals who they believed would be voting for them in the future.
And historically, that's been a pretty good bet, actually.
And Republicans knew what was going on, I think, whether they wanted to say it or not.
But they went along with it because there was a massive cheap labor lobby.
And there was this libertarian notion that we need to...
That would embrace not only the free flow of capital across international boundaries, but the free flow of labor as well.
And that that would create, that would be pro-growth economic policy, and that was sort of the only end that we were looking towards.
Again, I think that there's a recognition that that has been a complete failure.
You know, one way to think about it, to use libertarian words, to use their own parlance, is they're...
Two roads to serfdom.
There's the traditional statist liberal route, which is let's expand government.
Let's get as many people on the dole as possible.
Let's weaponize the federal government.
But then there's also the libertarian route, which is the longer route to the same destination.
And that is let's undermine our culture, our society, all of the things that are bedrock American principles.
That our economy sits on top of.
So we enjoy this amazing free enterprise system that's created an enormous amount of prosperity for our country.
And it's been great for wealthy Americans, for working class Americans, for everybody in between.
But that sits upon a certain amount of cultural principles, a certain degree of cultural homogeneity.
We all worship the same God.
We all have the same, generally speaking, moral principles.
And obviously there's some diversity, but I mean...
The Founding Fathers wrote about this.
The Framers of the Constitution wrote about this.
Of course.
But by and large, we all have the same cultural principles.
And that creates social trust.
That creates an environment that's much more conducive to the type of robust American capitalism that we've gotten to enjoy.
Mass migration, I think more than anything, undermines that.
You see a federal government that seems explicitly almost to pursue the interests of foreigners over American citizens at our expense in so many different ways.
So I think, long story short, I think that we're recognizing that we've got to move in that direction.
We've got to realize that we have to represent our voters.
And I think that the donors and everybody else will realize that long term.
I agree.
I think it doesn't need to be a terrible all out bloody conflict between the voters and the donors because you know without the donors the voters are going to have a hard time getting their messages out in campaigns.
But without the voters the donors are just setting their money on fire you know.
I mean I don't think that donors who are maybe stuck in an outdated and now disproven ideological fantasy.
Open borders, so long as they're legal open borders or something, can lead to American prosperity and solidarity.
They can't redefine reality.
No amount of money is going to let them redefine reality.
I think there's a way that both groups need to recognize.
Their interests are aligned in significant ways.
You keep coming back to immigration.
The public opinion polls have been pretty clear that was a top issue for people in 2024. Why migration?
Is it just, you know, they're taking our jobs or is there something deeper?
And what were the other big issues?
Well, I think for migration first, if you think of what issue touches every single other issue, you know, whether it's housing prices, ultimately the size and scope of the welfare state, which impacts taxation, education.
Health care.
I mean, every single political issue is touched by mass migration.
Because that impacts the...
That is the makeup of the country.
So if you...
Right.
It's such a simple point you make.
But sometimes you'll hear ideologues, they'll say, America is just an idea.
Say, no, I think America is like people.
Isn't it?
Isn't a country made up of people?
People with a common history, a common heritage, who speak the same language.
Literally, the same language.
Exactly.
I mean, how am I supposed to communicate with the rest of the world whenever we speak, you know, speaking different languages?
I mean, how are we supposed to come together as a coherent political body whenever we can't even communicate?
But again, worshipping, you know, the same God, having a same moral framework.
And, you know, you see that.
Again, how migration touches everything else, but you see that whenever there are two conflicting visions of what the moral basis and the basis of truth are in this country, and migration affects that, that's where you get one side knows what a woman is, as you mention a lot, and one side doesn't.
So it touches everything else, but I think we do have to bring together the libertarian side as well, and I think that there's a clear economic argument for...
For the reduction in mass migration as well.
I mean, you look at how much, whether you like it or not, how much illegal immigration explodes the welfare state.
I mean, right now, the cost of illegal aliens right now is an estimated roughly $150 billion a year.
That's net of tax receipts.
That's more than we give to Ukraine.
That's a lot of money.
That's exactly right.
And that's $1,100 per taxpayer.
It's about $9,000 per year per illegal alien.
And this is economically unsustainable, and that's why American citizens can see it.
They can see that their children are going to school and they're having fewer teachers per classroom because we have to deal with...
Illegal alien children who don't speak our language, who need special attention.
That's why lines at the doctor's office are longer because we've got a mass influx of people straining our health care system.
I mean, it touches every single aspect of life.
And at the end of the day, Americans look at the country and they say, I feel like I went to bed one night and woke up the next morning and I don't recognize the nation that I'm living in anymore.
And that's a huge, huge problem.
Right.
And you can't...
You can't convince people out of that.
You know, you can't convince people, hey, don't believe your lying eyes.
Hey, your feelings are wrong.
You know, it's just, and I think a lot of, now actually, the majority of Americans have expressed that they agree with that view.
So I totally agree.
It's very simply put.
Migration is about who makes up the citizenry, you know, and what more basic political question is there than that?
What were the other big issues?
You were on the ground.
You've just won your first election to Congress.
What put the Republicans over the top?
You know, for a long time, Republicans wanted to stay away from social issues.
It was, let's focus on taxation.
Let's focus on regulation.
And those are all important issues we've got to deal with on the size of the welfare state, things like that.
Social issues had a major, major impact in this election.
I could see it in my race.
You could see it across Texas in the Cruz race as well.
You see it across the country.
Great point.
Ted Cruz had been running on migration mostly.
And then toward the end of the campaign, there was that great ad where Colin Allred, the football player tackles a little girl on the football field.
He was taking on men and women's sports.
And I think that really, really pushed Senator Cruz over the finish line.
It reminds me of the line in Orwell's 1984. The party told you not to believe the evidence of your eyes and ears.
That was their last and most final command.
And I think whenever the Democrat Party's entire messaging is contrary to what you know is common sense, it's contrary to basic reasoning, it's contrary to everything you can see in the world, that just doesn't work politically.
Nobody wants to live in a world where...
Boys are going in girls' bathrooms or their locker rooms or playing on their sports fields.
There's something so obviously disordered about that.
You don't have to have a philosophical foundation.
You can just see it.
It's a great point.
Some people can give you all the profound philosophical or theological reasons as to why this is wrong, but some people think it's just kind of gross and yucky.
And I think that's actually enough.
It's called the wisdom of repugnance, actually.
Right.
That's normal.
And I think that there's a level of common sense that we have to embrace.
And we have to embrace it because it's common sense.
So the Democrats ran on that.
We ran on basic common sense.
And we beat them.
What's amazing to me, though, is the degree to which they've doubled down.
We had a vote earlier this week on stopping federal funding.
For sports, girls' sports that allow boys to play in them, right?
Pretty...
Pretty commonsensical, I guess.
Basic, common sense.
158 Democrats voted against it on the floor.
158. I'm actually somewhat surprised to hear that, because at least in the liberal media...
You're beginning to see a little turn.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves how we lost so many demographics.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves if we haven't gone a little too far.
Even some of the old elder statesmen of the Democratic Party seem to be.
But you're telling me your Democrat colleagues in the House haven't learned a damn thing.
No, they haven't.
And I actually think I misspoke there.
It wasn't 158. It was over 200 of them voted against it.
So excuse me.
There's 158 who voted against the Lake and Riley Act.
Which would have told DHS to apprehend illegal aliens who are committing burglary and theft on American soil.
So illegal aliens who are pillaging American citizens on our territory would have told DHS to apprehend them.
Why are they doing that?
Is it because they just are true believers, ideologues, and they think we need to let illegals commit crimes and we need to let fellows into the girls' room?
Or is it some stick and carrot of funding?
What is it?
And I'll give you one more example, and then I'll answer your question.
We just walked off the House floor today, and we voted on one of Nancy Mace's bills, which would have declared rape and domestic violence a deportable offense.
That's not currently a deportable offense?
If you're an illegal alien on American territory right now, and you rape an American citizen, this bill would have said you need to be deported, and if you had committed that, in your home country, you shouldn't be allowed into our country.
That bill had a majority of Democrats vote against it.
And it raises the question, I think, for the Democrat Party, which is, do you represent the interests of American citizens who are here, who are law-abiding, or do you represent the interests of rapist illegal aliens?
And their voting record suggests the latter.
You're not even being needlessly provocative.
You're not even just throwing bombs.
That's their vote.
You can look at the congressional record.
That is how they just voted today.
But to your question, why are they doing this?
And I think that there are sort of two answers.
One of them is what we alluded to earlier, which is the electoral consequences of open borders and creating chaos.
Democrats know that you bring in massive amounts of people, which effectively disenfranchises American citizens, right, once you allow illegal aliens to vote.
And Democrats are pushing to allow illegal aliens to vote in municipal elections.
You see that in San Francisco and parts of New York.
That is the direction they're going.
Chuck Schumer has said that the goal is amnesty for illegal aliens, which, of course, gives them voting rights.
So that changes the...
Political composition of, obviously, where they're voting.
But there's also the question of the electoral count.
So mass migration increases the population in blue states, particularly like New York and California.
And whenever we appoint a portion, exactly, electoral votes, that benefits.
Blue states at the expense of red states.
You see the same thing with congressional appointment as well.
Because this is the problem.
It's why the Democrats are telling a half-truth.
When they say, well, look, we bring in the illegals, but they can't vote.
And actually, in some cases, they do vote.
But, okay, give it to them.
Generally, they don't vote.
Because we have birthright citizenship, their kids vote, their grandkids vote, and their kids and grandkids are overwhelmingly likely to vote for Democrats.
But even with none of them voting, congressional apportionment...
Right.
And think about that.
We're in a political environment right now where neither party is likely to have a major majority in the House, whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
Right now we've got a two- to four-seat majority depending on who's in and out, right?
So whenever you're talking about flooding 10 million-plus illegal aliens into the country, that has a major impact, potentially.
On the balance of power in the House of Representatives in Washington.
I mean, these aren't small changes.
These are major political changes.
To say nothing about the fact that the Electoral College also relates to that kind of apportionment, too.
I mean, every four years, whenever we think about who's going to win the electoral vote, we're talking about are they going to get 270?
Are they going to get 272, 280?
I mean, it's rare that you see these big landslides like President Trump.
Until they run Kamala.
Right.
Right.
So these are major, major political changes.
But I do think there's another angle here, which is illegal aliens, libertarians notwithstanding, they do commit crimes at higher rates than American citizens do.
They do undermine our cultural fabric.
They tear it in half.
They do create, they do reduce social trust.
I mean, there is a lot of serious cultural problems and social problems with the mass influx of illegal aliens.
You mix that on top of what you see the left doing in cities, where Soros-backed prosecutors are refusing.
Absolutely refusing to prosecute crimes.
I look at my own home state.
I spent a lot of time in New York City as a boy and as a young adult.
And I grew up in the era of Giuliani.
New York was safe.
You could walk around anywhere, basically.
You'd be fine.
Bloomberg was okay, too.
And over the years, right now, in midtown Manhattan...
People are being stabbed in the chest in broad daylight on commuter trains.
When you get out into the boroughs, women are being set on fire on subways.
I mean, you were talking about third-world stuff.
Third-world stuff, and you often find that it's the same people committing hundreds and hundreds of crimes and prosecutors refuse to, and local DAs refuse to throw them in jail.
So you ask yourself, why is the left creating an environment that is inherently destabilizing for American citizens?
And you can think about it as what is the type of citizen that is beneficial electorally to Republicans versus the type of citizen that is good for Democrats.
And what is the social environment that is good for either political party?
And I think that whenever you turn society upside down, you create an environment where the law is not enforced, either at the border or within the country.
That creates a level of chaos that is much more conducive to big government solutions.
You know, the Democrat mantra for a long time has been...
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
And I think the next step is if there's not a good crisis, create one and then use it to your political advantage.
Sometimes you hear the phrase anarcho-tyranny.
Right.
They seem to be opposites, but not really.
One actually creates the conditions for the other.
That's exactly right.
So I think that there's a...
It's really cynical, but I think that that is what the left is doing.
And we've watched them do it.
We've just got to have the courage to stand up against it.
So, okay, in the remaining moments that I have you here, what are the odds that the White House can fix these problems on its own?
The White House has substantial power on its own, especially through the agencies.
And what are the odds that Congress will be able to support the White House and even advance its own agenda?
You know, any president, certainly any Congress in a two-year period, has a very limited number of things that it can actually get over the finish line.
And that's before you even consider herding cats and whipping votes among Republicans.
So how many things can you really get done?
At least I didn't say two years.
And what are the odds you get them done?
Right.
I think that, well, I can tell you we're going to fight to get as much as we possibly can done.
Now, the biggest priorities, if you were to rank them, I think, for Congress, would be border security, energy, taxes.
Maybe not exactly in that order, but those would be sort of the top priorities.
There's a recognition that we have to get this done to save the country, that we don't have a choice.
President Trump's going to come in and he's going to institute the massive variety of executive orders.
These are going to be great.
Think of border security, for example.
Bring back Romaine in Mexico.
Maybe bring back Title 42 and other executive measures that secured the border, allowed us to deport illegal aliens.
It is Congress's job.
It is our responsibility.
To not watch that happen and sit back and relax, it is our responsibility to codify those executive orders into law.
And it's actually quite simple.
The president's writing laws for us in a way.
That's a great point.
Because the Democrats would say, we're going to govern by executive order.
And then I remember this during Obama.
Then the Republicans come in and they say, well, just as you can write your executive order, we can undo your executive orders.
But if the executive order is codified in law, it becomes a lot harder to undo.
That's exactly right.
So I've got a Remain in Mexico Act that I introduced.
First bill introduced, we've got over 90 Republican co-sponsors.
Good start.
I mean, that is 90 co-sponsors.
I mean, that's real unity right there.
And all it does is takes President Trump's 2019 migrant protection protocols, his executive order, and codifies it into law.
Very, very simple.
So I'm hoping we can move that.
I think that there's going to be a variety of border legislation.
But to your question, there is no other option.
Failure is not an option here.
We cannot survive another four years of a future Democrat president flooding our country with illegal aliens.
We can't survive not being energy independent.
We have to be able to produce our own oil.
We can't be buying it from Russia and China and Venezuela and hostile foreign regimes.
Failure's not an option here.
Good point.
We sometimes get a little complacent as Republicans.
I find myself doing it, too.
I'm here in D.C. I'm actually going to go back to Nashville, but I'm going to come back to D.C. for the inauguration.
And it's all really fun, and we're all seeing our friends and celebrating.
And you forget.
What was it, six months ago?
Trump almost had his head blown off on stage.
He was hit in the air.
An implausible 20-degree turn of the head is the reason that he's alive and president today.
He was nearly prosecuted.
Well, he was prosecuted four times.
They tried to send him to jail.
They tried to put him...
Off the ballot so people wouldn't even have the chance to vote for him.
The liberals were openly campaigning on destroying the Supreme Court to give themselves a permanent majority to do whatever they want with our law.
They were openly campaigning on getting rid of the filibuster so they could ram through whatever kind of legislation they wanted.
They were openly talking about giving millions, possibly tens of millions of people amnesty, fundamentally change the electorate of America, give themselves a permanent majority forever.
That's what Elon Musk was calling attention to.
We were like this close.
And because Trump so thoroughly destroyed Kamala Harris in the ballot box, and even this president, Joe Biden, who allegedly has dementia, so they have to get him out and put this woman in.
Because of all of these implausible events, we got a reprieve and an opportunity, maybe a slim opportunity, to fix the country before the Democrats deal the death blow.
That's a big charge that you and your colleagues have in the House.
It's a huge charge, and I think we recognize that it's almost like a second chance.
It's providential.
We've got to use it.
Whenever you think of all of the things that we have to do before us right now, it makes me think of how do we get there?
Courage is the first virtue, right?
Because without courage, none of the others matter.
We've got to have the courage to secure the border.
We're going to get attacked like crazy whenever we do it.
Whenever we start deporting illegal aliens and actually taking this country back, the leftist media is going to come after us.
The business lobby, the cheap labor lobby is going to attack us.
Whenever we start drilling on American land like we should be, the green energy activists are going to start coming after us.
Whenever we stop...
Boys from going in girls' bathrooms, the transgender activists are going to come after us.
My point is we're going to be attacked from every single conceivable angle, and we've got to have the backbone to withstand that and carry out the agenda that voters told us they want in this country.
People want their country back.
We want to be able to recognize the country that we grew up in.
We want to be able to live in a normal, common-sense nation where we can...
Get a good job.
Get married early.
Have lots of kids.
Provide for our families without the welfare state.
That's the America that everybody wants to live in.
We've got a mandate.
We've got to execute.
But we've got to have the backbone to do it.
And I think we do.
And your point on courage, it's not just one virtue.
It's the prerequisite for all the other virtues.
Because there have been plenty of members of Congress who have known all the right things.
Right.
And who could write probably a pretty good essay about all the right things.
But they just...
You know, it takes a spine and a few other anatomical features to actually do it.
You know, and they couldn't be bothered.
But you've got to do it.
Because if we look back two years, four years, and we've squandered this opportunity, it could feel...
We might wish that we hadn't even won.
We'll never live this down.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, I see why they elected you as president, Brandon.
