Matt Walsh Has An Honest Conversation With Vivek Ramaswamy
Matt Walsh sits down with Vivek Ramaswamy to discuss the 2024 election and the American identity.
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We're joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, of course, a former presidential candidate, also now the host of a new podcast called Truth, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Vivek, this is our first time speaking, I believe, and thanks so much for joining us.
It's good to finally talk to you, follow a lot of your commentary, especially over the last year.
I think it's the first time we're sitting down.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let me just start with a question you've gotten a million times, I'm sure, and are tired of.
It's always a good place to start.
Obviously, there's been a lot of speculation that you could be on the list for vice president in the Trump administration.
There was a report a couple months ago that you were being considered instead for a position in the cabinet.
Do you think you'll land somewhere in the Trump administration, potentially?
I mean, look, my top focus is making sure he wins the election.
And I think that Republicans win up and down the ballot so we can actually implement the agenda.
But if he is successfully elected, and I'm doing everything in my power at this point to make sure that he is, then I hope to have a big impact in some way or other.
And President Trump and I have built a pretty close relationship, especially over the last several months after I dropped out of the race.
But even we had known each other for years before that.
And I'm confident his second term can actually be even more successful than the first.
And I'm going to look at however I can have the biggest possible impact on this country.
And so we've had some great conversations, but I think the focus right now is not to put the cart before the horse, actually make sure that we're successful in winning the election.
I personally believe that we're actually at risk of some complacency right now.
You got a lot of people who are looking at the polls and celebrating and patting ourselves on the back.
I actually think the real race has not even yet begun.
In the sense that, you know, you look at the first presidential debate that's on June 27th, I think it is.
That's the earliest ever presidential debate ever held.
It's before even the Democratic National Convention.
That's not an accident.
I think that is the final audition before Biden actually becomes christened as the nominee, if he will be.
So I think there's gonna be a lot of twists and turns left this year.
And so I'm taking it, you know, one step at a time and seeing how I can maximize my own impact along the way.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the debate, but before we get there, let me just ask you this.
If you could do anything at all in any presidential administration, have any job you wanted, What would you take?
I mean, obviously you'd take President, but if you can't have that... Well, I was laughing because I ran for U.S.
President for the last year, and that was the job I intended to go for.
Except for that.
So, look, I think that one of the things about me is I come from outside the world of politics.
I am used to being an executive.
That's part of why I have not considered running for Congress or Senate.
And those are important roles, but being a legislator is definitely not for me.
But when you're thinking about my ability to use executive talent, how could I put that to use?
Two of the issues I focused on most during the campaign were, number one, shutting down large swaths of the administrative state.
That was probably the signature issue of my presidential campaign.
It's part of what pulled me in.
How do you shut down large numbers of federal bureaucrats?
How do you fire them, send them packing, downsize the government by 75% or more?
That's one category of issues that I think that largely you have to be a president or maybe a vice president or something like that that's above any one agency to be able to implement.
The other category that I was intensely focused on is once and for all actually fixing the issue holistically of immigration in this country in a principled manner.
How do we actually set up an immigration system that actually advances the interests of U.S.
citizens who are already here?
That means your first act of entering this country can't break the law.
That means that if you do have something of value to add to this country and you are actually embracing the values of this country, there should be an efficient process for the best Of those people to get in, but that if you have entered this country illegally and we're going to correct the mistakes of the past, we're going to have practical ways to do it.
So those are two of the categories that I was certainly focused on most intently over the course of my presidential campaign.
But, you know, I'm a big guy believing in how do you maximize impact and have fun while you're doing it?
I got a good piece of advice pretty early in my career, which is, and it's true advice, which is it takes about as much effort to do something small and do it well As it does to do something big and do it well.
And so if you're going to put the same amount of effort in, you might as well make it something big.
And so that's why I ran for president.
The beauty of this country is the people get to decide who leads.
And they went with the tried and true option, who I support, Donald Trump.
But the number one thing I'll be looking at is scope of impact.
And that's what guides me.
You know, I tend to think, I actually didn't want you to be vice president because I tend to think It's a waste to put anyone talented or interesting in the vice presidential spot.
It just, to me, there's no real function.
It ends up being sort of a wasted, if it is someone interesting, it's a waste of time to have them there.
Do you think I'm, is that too cynical of you of the vice presidency?
I don't think it's cynical.
I think that part of what you're doing is just looking at American history, right?
And so I don't think that your assessment is unfair when you look at most Vice presidents in American history, but it doesn't have to be that way either.
I do think it all comes down to how you want to run the show as an executive.
The top dog is the U.S.
president.
And I think the beauty of having a U.S.
president that isn't a professional politician, I put Donald Trump in that category, of course, is that he does like to do things differently.
And so it's up to him.
What does he want out of a vice president versus a cabinet secretary versus a special advisor versus, you know, any any number of other positions in the government?
I think the beauty is if you have a president who's actually going to run the government, you could think about that a little bit differently.
The thing that bothers the heck out of me is the people we elect to run the government, usually even including the U.S.
president, are not actually the people who run the government, right?
It's the permanent state that sits underneath the rotating cast of musical chairs on top that they view as cute little puppets that come and go every few years.
So in that context, the typecast that you would put for vice president, yeah, I don't think your comment is unfair, but I don't think it has to be that way.
If you have an actual commander in chief and chief executive who's the one running the show rather than just a pawn on the chessboard of the deep state that is usually there long before president arrived and long after they're gone.
My hope is it doesn't have to be that way.
And if there's a president who I'd bet on to do things a little differently, it would be somebody coming from the outside like Trump.
You mentioned the debate.
So there's obviously kind of two schools of thought on this.
One is that it's a mistake for Trump to do the debate, playing right into Biden's hands.
Biden is the one who needs it because he's desperate and he's flailing.
Then there's the other side that says, well, this is to get a shot at Biden.
On the stage, live on camera, you can't pass that up, especially because the guy is, as we know, half senile and can barely string together two coherent sentences.
I'm probably in the second school of thought.
I think that even though they're stacking the deck against Trump, cutting the mics off after a minute, you know, obviously we know the moderator's gonna be on Biden's side, it's still, it's just, you gotta take that chance if you get it.
Where do you stand on that?
Yeah, look, I think Trump should absolutely do the debate.
I mean, between the world we were in, which is Biden effectively refusing to debate, and showing up on the debate stage, the right answer is show up on the debate stage.
And it's one of the things I've liked about the approach that President Trump has taken, and he and I have had a lot of good conversations, and anything I would say certainly points more in this direction.
Show up in the places where you're not expected to show up.
He went to the Bronx.
I spoke at the Libertarian Convention last Friday.
Trump obviously spoke there Saturday night.
Not to an entirely, entirely friendly audience, which I think is a good thing.
If you're going to be the U.S.
President, you've got to be willing to face off with people who may not necessarily agree with you on everything.
And the irony is they would criticize Donald Trump for talking to sycophants only.
That's what the press criticized him for.
And yet he's actually the person who's showing up from the South Bronx to places like the Libertarian Convention, the nominating convention of a different political party.
So given that that's the approach that Donald Trump has taken, I do think it would be totally consistent.
I mean, it would be the only consistent thing to say that I'm actually going to debate the other guy who's been ducking those debates.
Now, Biden, not so much Biden, but probably his handlers around him, I think played it quite strategically.
Right.
So give credit to the puppet masters, whoever was the right puppet master to pull this string.
The idea that you make it an early debate.
And that wasn't even smart for Biden.
That's smart for the Democratic Party, because I think it is obvious.
I think it's three months earlier than they've ever held a televised presidential debate in U.S.
history.
It is the first time, to my knowledge, that it's occurring before the nominating convention of either major party.
This is obviously the final audition, the final hoop they're making the old man jump through before they nominate him.
And they've set itself up for a win-win, right?
So one win is the one you mentioned, is they make him look better than the expectations that have been set for him.
They like the expectations that have been set low.
I think they're actually leaning into that.
But they've set up the best possible showing.
CNN, home turf, no audience, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, one-minute responses.
And if he exceeds expectations, which they're trying to set him up for, then their hope is that resets the race.
Because the whole narrative was he was too senile to be president.
His expectations have been set low that he's set up for success.
But if he doesn't, which I actually think is likely to happen, Then it's a win-win for them because they still have ample time to be able to replace him as the nominee.
That under these most favorable of circumstances, if he can't even hold his own, and we're talking about June, there's no way he's then going to get to November.
So was the other side absolutely strategic and clever and even diabolical in the way they set this up?
Absolutely.
But does that mean it was the wrong decision for President Trump to do it?
No, it was absolutely the right decision.
It's exactly the ethos he's cultivated as the guy who's gonna man up, show up, be the commander-in-chief in a way that Joe Biden wasn't.
And so I don't think that skipping that debate was ever an option.
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Do you really think it's plausible that somehow Biden at this point is not actually the nominee?
And if it is a plausible scenario, then who?
I kind of figure they're stuck with him, because who else are they going to put in his place at this stage of the game?
Everyone always says Michelle Obama, as far as I know.
Not that I have any insight into it, but she has no interest.
So do you think it's a plausible scenario?
And then who else would it be if not Biden?
Yeah, so look, I tend to look at things in life when you're making predictions as, you know, none of us is God, none of us is going to divine some theory of what's going to happen.
But what you can do is look at the collective incentives that are on the board.
Right.
And what are the incentive they have?
This system has made clear that they will do anything.
And I increasingly believe it is anything to stop Donald Trump from getting back into the White House.
Right.
First, it was civil suits.
Then it's state level prosecutions, then federal prosecutions, then you've got extra judicial attempts to remove him from a ballot.
I mean, they stop at nothing.
So at this point, they have evidence that suggests that across all of the swing states across this country, Biden is performing very poorly and the trends are actually going in the further wrong direction for him.
So if that's their top objective, how are they going to achieve that objective?
Who would be the candidate that they would put up?
Who's going to maximize those odds?
Do I think it's plausible?
Yes, it is.
If you look into the Democratic National Convention nominating rules, it's plain as day that they have plenty of time, even between now and the convention, to be able to switch who the nominee is.
There's an election lawyer I spoke to to pressure test this, just out of my own curiosity to understand, is this actually, as a technical matter, legally feasible?
The answer is, hands down, the rules allow for it.
Turns out, even after the convention, if it's in cases of disability or voluntary Stepping aside of the candidate, there's also procedures for the way they could swap out who's on a ballot.
The only time it becomes really hard for them to do it is when the ballots are actually printed, right?
When the names are on the ballot, then I think we're entering a zone where it becomes impossible.
But until then, we've seen nominees change far later than this over the course of American history.
And one of the traps sometimes we fall into in the present, I think it's probably true of all people ever, but it's definitely true of us now too, is somehow believing that we're immune from the trends of history.
You read about crazy stories in history and then somehow believe that can't happen in the present.
Well, what do you think history was when that transpired, too?
So this would be far from the craziest thing in U.S.
history.
Wouldn't even rank in the top 10 of presidential races to be able to see Joe Biden ousted as the nominee in the month of June.
That would go down in the annals of U.S.
history as maybe a footnote at most.
It wouldn't be that big of a deal.
So is it possible?
Yes.
Who would they put up?
I do think when you look at the collective incentives, most people they put up, their bench is not very good.
I mean, I think they're going to have some pretty poor candidates to choose from.
You had Gretchen Whitmer.
I don't think that she's a particularly compelling leader.
You got other people who are hungering for it.
Gavin Newsom, he's unfortunately saddled with the albatross of his record as governor of California.
That and being a straight white man or whatever it is that the Democratic Party might have nominating in lieu of another straight white man, which actually I think the most compelling option, especially if you're talking about a late switch, would likely be Michelle Obama.
And I say this because it goes with the timing of the matter, which is you get all of the sheen, right?
You get the initial pop in popularity.
But you don't exit the honeymoon period.
The honeymoon period just continues from August straight through November.
The nominating convention is in August.
That's when the DNC is.
From August to November, you're just in the honeymoon phase.
You don't quite enter the scrutiny phase.
You don't quite end the falling out of love phase.
And so if you're them, that's how you kind of put together the timing and the momentum of it.
You bring up a not irrelevant objection, which is let's just presume what they say is true is that she doesn't want to do it.
The assumption baked into that is that she has any choice in the matter, right?
And as I told you before, most of the time, the people who we elect to run the government, they're not the ones actually running the government.
They are pawns on a chessboard.
I think that's true largely for most of the history of the Republican Party.
I think it's largely even more true in the modern Democratic Party.
And so, yes, I have no idea.
I don't know her, whether she wants to or not.
The fact that her preference might have anything to do with it is an assumption that I think is largely false.
The machine, once it decides that somebody's going to be put up to the job, they're going to be able to put the person up to the job who the machine demands.
What I think is the better counter case to it happening is part of that machine operates on the self-interest of the cogs in it, right?
The lobbyists, the people who have cultivated relationships with Joe and actually more relevantly, even Jill Biden, right?
I think that there's two things that would keep the status quo intact.
And it's not the fact that Michelle Obama doesn't want to do it because that's irrelevant.
I think the two things that would keep the status quo intact are number one is It does appear that Dr. Jill Biden is very attached to the position that she has, and she's certainly got more of her wits about her than the man who we call the President of the United States.
But I think the other thing working for him and for that first couple is there are a lot of people who have cultivated vested interests of being close to that who.
They've been circling that hoop for a long time.
Lobbyists and other special interests that are really tied in, that have invested.
Think about a business that you might run as an industrial business.
You think about capital expenditures or CapEx.
In the world of politics, it's the CapEx that those lobbyists and their firms have put in to really spend a lot of money, hard money and political capital along with it, to say that we're finally close to the inner sanctum.
They have a vested interest and they are already part of the machine.
So I think it's more deeply, Matt, a conflict between two different parts of the machine, the parts of the machine that have a vested interest in the status quo, even if it comes at the expense of trading off their overall probability of success.
On a probability adjusted basis, it's still worth it to them because the payoff of having their guy who they've cultivated the relationship with, Biden, still makes their expected value worth it to take the lower shot with Biden.
Versus people who are a little bit on the outside looking in, don't have as direct control over Biden, but still have enough control over the machine to say that, hey, the payoff of having somebody else I'm closer to plus the probability of even getting our guy rather than Trump, that's going to be the debate, not whether it's Joe Biden or Michelle Obama who does or doesn't want it.
That's just what the public gets to see, which I think is mostly a distraction.
I think an unpopular theory that I've thought about, at least unpopular on the right, is when it became clear to me that they were going to at least try to ride with Biden on this thing, which they're at least attempting to do on the Democrat side of it, I started thinking about there's sort of a third possibility here, which is No, like you said, it seems as though they're doing everything they can to stop Trump.
Obviously, with all the criminal trials, it's unprecedented what they're doing.
But at the same time, is there a feeling among the real power brokers in the Democrat Party, the machine, as you say, that, hey, maybe they're okay just letting, you know, just, okay, Biden loses, we give it, Trump wins.
And this is the real cynical view, where they say, well, it doesn't matter anyway, because the deep state and the bureaucracy is so fundamentally left-wing that it's completely arranged against whoever the president is anyway, if the president's a Republican.
So, fine, he's president for four years, then he's gone, and then the bureaucracy comes in, undoes everything he did in about 30 seconds, and just continues back right along like it never happened.
Is that too cynical of you?
No, no, you're talking to a guy who's never going to give you the answer that that's too cynical of a view, almost any question.
You could press, you could try me, and maybe we'll get there, but I think it's unlikely.
I think you could get, I mean, it's a question of how cynical you want to get, right?
You have a system that I said is hell-bent, has an anaphylactic reaction to Trump, but more than Trump, what he represents, actually.
Like, that's really the essence of what the system has the anaphylaxis to.
The anaphylaxis is an immune system response to an allergen.
The allergen is pretty darn close to the man, but even closer, if you're really right over the target, it's actually what he represents.
So how do you eliminate that risk?
The full menu of options is available, right?
One is you beat him through the front door.
They gave up on that option long ago.
The other is that you change the system to be able to beat him on an unfair version of that system.
The other is to take him out of the race one way or another.
You have that whole menu of options.
Many ways already so far, but whatever that menu of options is, take him out of the race.
And then you can get increasingly cynical.
What you just talked about is maybe a kick the can down the road, hold your nose for four years, but acknowledge it as a temporary passing cloud.
You could get even darker and more cynical than that, which is to say that, okay, well, we captured Biden.
Why don't we play a new game of capture?
I think that this is all, you know, not to say, I like when people like you are brave enough to challenge people in our own movement to think Outside of the linear boxes that sometimes any human being is trapped to think in.
So I think you should be doing more of that.
But if you look at the overall set of incentives and what the goal is, what are they against?
They're against what Donald Trump represents.
And they've decided by hell or high water, they're going to make sure that what he represents does not come to exercise power in this country again.
And so there's various ways they may go about undoing that, right?
Their menu of options is beat him through the front door, beat him through the back door, prevent him from being able to run.
You propose a weighted out theory.
There could be a different cynical theory that somebody offers, which would be a theory of if you can't beat them, you know, join them in a certain sense of the word.
And so I think any of those would be a loss for the American people.
I think for the American people, the right answer is how do you actually dismantle that machine, the machine that underlies that entire system?
And if that job were done, then we wouldn't be in the place where we are right now.
Now, one of the things I like about President Trump is he has the ambition to run for the second term.
If he had gotten everything he wanted to get done in the first term and done it all perfectly in a way that only God could, then he wouldn't need that second term.
But he's going back for that second term with the spirit of saying, look, we learned a lot from that first term of being in there, from having the first two years hobbled by a Mueller investigation that stopped him from governing as an outsider president who still was the first time in a political role.
Yes, we have a lot of learnings.
And this time around, we're going to use those learnings To go further than we ever did to break that machine.
That's what excites me about a second Trump term, is I think the possibility of actually changing the game.
And that's something that's bringing a lot of those Democrats and Libertarians and Independents along, too.
That's not a partisan point, Matt.
When you think about a lot of our own agenda or the fractures even within the Republican Party, opposing the ever-expanding surveillance state through the not expansion, not the reauthorization, but the expansion of FISA 702.
Forking over more money like it's candy to foreign countries.
With no end or accountability.
All of that is a product of a managerial machine in Washington, D.C.
That that's the machine that we actually need to break.
And so are there many ways they could do this?
One of which is to say that, OK, if you can't beat him, we'll join him.
Yes, I think all of that's on the menu, but I think that ultimate victory looks like not only putting Donald Trump in the White House, but doing it with such a mandate and with the right people who are part of that movement.
To break the machine itself.
And I think that Donald Trump will be the one man right now who's best positioned to do that for the next four years.
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So I want to switch gears here and ask you about, there was recently a controversy that you were involved in.
It's a couple weeks old now, but I find it really interesting, so I wanted to ask you about it.
I believe it was the first episode of your new podcast, you were interviewing Ann Coulter.
And at one point she said that she likes you a lot, but wouldn't vote for you because you're Indian.
And there was a lot of outrage over that comment from Anne, of course, but also a lot of outrage at you because I guess you failed to scream at her and call her racist and give her a DEI lecture.
So, first of all, what's your take on what Anne said, but also the reaction towards you from people on kind of the left and right for not calling her a racist?
He was fascinating.
I mean, I am driven by my curiosity.
And so we did this podcast during the presidential campaign where once a week, or at least as often as I could manage, we would have an interesting conversation that I intended, if I was elected president, to continue.
Because I think that that could be the modern fireside chat that I think we're missing from our leaders, who we don't get to authentically really interact with anymore.
So if I had been president, we would have continued that practice.
But anyway, after the campaign ended, took a couple of months, you know, recalibrated how I wanted to spend my time.
One of the many things I'm doing is I said, you know what, once a week we'll restart that podcast.
And so that was the first relaunch of the Truth Podcast.
And I wanted to get a guest who, particularly in the campaign, I had seen her surface, right?
It would pop up from time to time.
Different comments from Ann Coulter that were varying degrees of, I guess, passive-aggressive towards me.
She likes things I'm saying, but she clearly has some issue with me.
I've never met the woman.
You know, I said, let's have a conversation.
I'd be interested to see what's going on there.
I'm very interested in the theme of American nationalism.
I do consider myself a nationalist.
I think Ann Coulter, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but probably considers herself a nationalist in a certain sense of the word, too.
But yet we have this differing vision of what that means.
And so I thought it could be a useful and productive conversation.
Turns out it was.
She kind of came in with the very first comment that you mentioned, which is, I love a lot of what you have to say, but I couldn't vote for you because you're an Indian.
Those are her exact words.
And so that, I thought, was an interesting prompt to talk about American national identity.
And so we spent the next hour diving deep into what it actually means to be an American.
And to be clear, there are two competing views.
And I don't think Ann Coulter is the only one who holds her view, which is why I think it was important.
If it was just her, then it's just an idiosyncratic person who has an opinion like anybody else has an opinion.
But I think she has an opinion that represents the intuition of a lot of people, including people I encountered during the Republican primary who felt the same way she did, that they Couldn't quite vote for me because of one or two factors, either my religion or my lineage of not having been enough generations vested into this country.
And I was genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of that view.
My view of American identity is different.
I think citizenship is about loyalty.
That's what citizenship is fundamentally about.
I think there are many people who are sixth generation, seventh generation, eighth generation Americans who lack the fundamental loyalty or even the knowledge that's a prerequisite for loyalty to qualify for citizenship.
I personally think every high school senior should be able to pass the same civics test that we require of every immigrant before they become a naturalized citizen.
That's what I think.
And that's a super controversial view that was called a new Jim Crow during the presidential campaign at me.
So we've each taken our own criticisms, but they're very different views.
And so that was my conversation with Anne.
And by the end of the conversation, people actually missed this, probably about 40, 45 minutes in, we were in the depths of one of our back and forths, at which point she kind of came out and said, OK, maybe I would vote for you.
Right?
Which is interesting.
And she said, I'm not committing to it.
But then she said some things towards the last five minutes of the conversation that said, all right, well, I agree.
What I basically told her by the end, which I think is true, is I don't think Anne Coulter would have that view.
I don't think she would have been in a position to say that to me.
If we had actually had sensible immigration policies in this country in the first place, if we did not have 10 plus million people entering this country illegally, fundamentally changing the American character and way of life in a way that I believe that English should be the national language of the United States in a way that unites us.
I actually do believe that anybody who's in this country illegally should be returned to their country of origin and that we can and should have borders that we can secure and a national identity that we're missing, not just in the physical sense of it, But even in the sense of a civic revival of actual commitment in this country.
I think we should eliminate dual citizenship.
I think it is nuts that you have U.S.
citizens that are also citizens of another country when citizenship's about loyalty.
Dual citizenship is an incoherent concept.
And even worse, that you have people who may have dual citizenship that are elected leaders in this country.
So after we had gone through that, and I shared it with Anne, that if we had gotten each of those actual principled positions right, I don't think she would have the view that she did.
She basically agreed with me.
Which allowed me to tell her the truth, which is it is a shame when conservatives like her, and I think there are many like her, who effectively allow their own views to be defined by the left.
What do I mean by that?
If your own views, your own most closely held views, or what you think are your most closely held views, are really just emotional knee-jerk responses to the people who are actually ruining our country, Then the people who are ruining our country have defined what our own movement actually stands for, which is actually a success for them.
Versus the way I like to do it is say, okay, you got a lot of other people who are antithetical to the United States of America, but my own views aren't going to be determined as a backlash response or a reactionary response to them.
I'd prefer to have an alternative vision of who we are and what we actually stand for.
And that's what we're fighting for rather than just reactionarily responding to certain fringes of the left.
So that's what came out of that conversation.
Of course, were there a lot of people who said that, oh, well, you know what, there's this guy who is, you know, supplicating to white supremacy and he's the, they didn't, in this particular instance, have been called Uncle Tom before, but it was the equivalent of whatever epithet was used in response.
Sure.
Do I care about that?
No.
Did those people stop to actually listen to the exchange of our conversation or how we were actually even able to evolve Anne's own perspective where she ended rather than where she began?
Of course they didn't.
But that's a feature of, It's a feature of modernity where people collect their information through 60-second soundbites.
But I do think it actually was a productive conversation.
And I would encourage everybody to go listen to that hour, because it gets to the heart of two different competing visions on the right.
And not just like on the right in the sense of neocon right versus nationalist right, even within the nationalist right, competing visions of what it actually means to be an American.
And right now, Matt, those are some of the questions that are interesting me most, right?
Because you've got the Republican versus Democrat divide that mostly bores me just because there's not too much new to add to that conversation.
You know, I care about getting the right result for the country, but you've got the Democrat versus Republican divide.
Then within the Republican Party, you of course have the neocon wing of the Republican Party, generally more sympathetic to a surveillance state, foreign aid, and foreign intervention.
And then you've got the America First wing, which believes that the first and sole moral duty of U.S.
leaders is to U.S.
citizens.
But if we play the puck forward a little bit, right, skate to where the puck is going, even just fast forward this four years from now, I think there's an actual really interesting, fissure would be an overstatement, but a really interesting diversity of flavors within that America First direction itself that I think is largely underexplored because people are too busy with the other two layers of division that I just laid out.
And I think that there's two different visions of nationalism.
I think there's a strain of Nationalism tied to ethnic identity and lineage.
I think there's a strain of nationalism that is uncompromisingly tied to loyalty and civic commitments to this country.
And then I also think that there is a tension between a libertarian strand of this nationalism, which I happen to deeply share, that believe that our country is founded on a fundamentally constitutionally grounded vision where there's three branches of government.
The people we elect to run the government run the government.
They're responsive to us and the Bill of Rights means something.
And then there's an alternative version of saying that, you know what, the left-wing nanny state was a really bad idea, but we might need a right-leaning alternative to that in order to implement, via government, a vision of what is right and what is good, and that there is a vision of the good that we espouse not just in our religious or family lives, but ought to embrace through the levers of government as well.
And I think that's a really interesting and productive discussion that we are definitely going to have in this country.
I don't think 2024 is going to be the year where we mostly do it, but I am increasingly interested in, even for myself, just framing the terms of that debate.
And so that's why I enjoy having conversations with folks like Anne that don't relate to just railing against the, you know, radical Biden agenda or whatever it is that Republicans are normally supposed to talk about on television.
Yeah, I think you mentioned loyalty, which obviously is an extremely important factor.
I would add to that.
Which is related is gratitude as well.
And I think one of the problems that we have now is, first of all, we're importing a lot of people that have absolutely no gratitude whatsoever to the country that they're coming to.
You see these videos of immigrants showing up to whatever city and complaining about the accommodations.
There was a hearing in New York and you had immigrants from, I forget which country, but they were complaining that they were not being provided the right accommodations.
But then you also find that Among natural-born citizens who have this lack of gratitude ingrained in them, instilled in them very explicitly and very intentionally from birth, from the school system.
And that's why you get a lot of this... What really troubles me is this deep...
A feeling of both guilt among many Americans, especially white Americans, and also resentment towards their own ancestors.
We live on stolen land.
Sure.
Genocide was committed against the natives and so on and so forth.
Of course, that isn't true.
But all of that plays into this, doesn't it?
Totally.
Absolutely.
What do we do about that?
How do we address that?
How do we get people to actually have some real gratitude for the country they live in and everything that's been provided to them and all the people that made that possible for them?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that's the way we've got to be looking at this in terms of loyalty and gratitude.
I do think that we have a mass illegal migration problem and a mass immigration problem in this country we need to deal with.
But I think it's... I'm going to draw an abstract parallel here.
I sort of see this amongst folks on the right in the same way that I'll talk to like the Bitcoin crowd or the crypto or crypto audiences, where just because you're advocating for a good thing doesn't mean that all problems are going to be solved by that good thing.
OK.
And so like that's what I talk to many of my pro Bitcoin friends and largely views that we share in common.
I'll say, OK, but this is not going to necessarily automatically solve the problem of whether or not we get involved in foreign wars.
Right.
You're putting too much on the shoulders of this one issue.
I'll draw a parallel piece of advice that I give to a lot of my friends on the nationalist right, is that we absolutely need to uncompromisingly go outside the Overton window of the past to do what is required to fix this mass immigration problem in the United States of America, or we won't have a country left.
But that alone is not going to be sufficient to revive our own missing national identity, even amongst the people who are native born for generations in this country that also contribute to the complete dissolution of our national identity, too.
And so you can't get in the business of fetishizing one solution when, in fact, there's a deeper vacuum of identity and purpose in this country.
And the immigration problem is really a symptom Rather than just alone a sole cause of that actual problem.
So how do we do it?
There's not a policy I'm advocating for in any sense, but it's a thought experiment, right?
Obviously, you want to seal your border to anybody who's entering this country illegally.
Anybody who's coming to this country should know something about the country.
Bring the citizenship test up front, even for getting a green card, even getting into the country.
You think about actually people who are getting citizenship should have even more civic commitments that they're buying into, maybe financial commitments.
That's for the immigrants.
But for the people who are already here, a counterpart to that, as a thought experiment, I'm not advocating this as policy, but as opening our minds to the kind of way we should be thinking.
If somebody would accept a $75,000 check and leave and renounce their U.S.
citizenship and go to another country, and their only condition was they never get to come back, and they would actually take that, I'm not sure that they should be a citizen of this country in the first place, really.
I mean, the reality is I think there's many people in the United States of America who are completely agnostic to their citizenship, who view the United States as some type of economic zone that gives them something that they're supposed to be entitled to.
So if somebody were going to go just as happily to Canada or to England or Western Europe and live a particularly happy life with some startup life investment and to go do it, I don't think that that person is in any sense loyal in the sense that our founding fathers envisioned a citizen as being loyal to the United States of America.
Capital C citizenship is missing.
And so should we implement some large mass scale program like that in this country?
I don't think that that's practical or advisable, but we have to bring back what citizenship is about.
I think we have to revive some sense of civic duty.
I go back to, it's not one solution, but it was why one of the policy proposals I did advance in my campaign was that Literally every high school senior has to vest fully into their citizenship.
Obviously the government can't come knocking on your door or censor you from speaking no matter who you are.
But if you want the privileges of citizenship, if you want the privilege of selecting who actually leads this country, you should know something about the country.
If you're casting a vote at the ballot box, you should probably know, if you're casting a vote for president, what branch of government the U.S.
president actually leads.
I don't think that's too much to ask.
I think you should probably know who wrote the Federalist Papers.
And both of those, by the way, are questions on the naturalization exam, the 100-question pool that they draw from, which I think should actually draw from far more knowledge of the country than we demand even today.
So that's not a one-size-fits-all panacea, but it's an example of the kind of thing we need to think about to cultivate civic duty in this country.
Do I favor a mandatory draft?
No, I don't.
The libertarian in me would never allow for me to compel or have a government that compels you to serve, because in a certain sense, it's not even service then.
Is the spirit of people who serve their country and actually gain allegiance to their country through service something we need more of in this country?
Yeah, I think so, actually.
And I think we also need to restore a government that people feel inspired to swear that allegiance to.
Right now, as I said earlier, the people we elect to run the government, they're not running the government.
They're not engaged in public service.
They're engaged in self-service.
So when you see congressmen effectively lining their pockets or bureaucrats lining their pockets versus adopting simple policies that most Americans agree with, Like the idea that you should not be trading stocks as a congressman or a senator or a bureaucrat.
Why is that serving the interests of the American people?
Answer, it's not.
Implementing things like term limits, shutting down large swaths of the federal bureaucracy, returning that money like a dividend to the American taxpayer.
That loyalty is a two-way relationship, right?
The reason citizens don't have a loyalty to the country, one of the reasons is that the people who lead the country don't have their exclusive loyalty to our own citizens either.
I mean, I went to places like the South Side of Chicago during the campaign.
I went back to Chicago more recently.
I went to mostly minority neighborhoods.
We were in a mostly black bar that I happened to be hanging out at, meeting some folks.
They came up to me, said, hey, I'd have voted for you.
And I'm going to vote for Trump this year.
So how do you usually vote?
He said, mostly Democrat.
Number one issue on this guy's mind was actually Ukraine.
He could not understand why we're actually sending over hundreds of billions of dollars more to Ukraine.
I didn't get his views on the surveillance state, but I suspect he might have agreed with me on that one, too.
And so I think that part of what we're missing in this country is it's this downward spiral where because the elected leaders of this country have abandoned their loyalty to the citizens, the citizens of this country have in turn begun, have begun to abandon some of their loyalty to the country.
And so how do we reverse that downward spiral?
I guess you might as well start at the top to at least put people in charge who behave like And actually mean it, like they owe their sole duty to the citizens of this country, and it's amazing how trust and loyalty are a two-way relationship.
I think part of the distrust and the lack of loyalty comes from the fact that the government doesn't trust its own people.
The fact that we have a government that has systematically lied to its people about a lot of complicated and uncomfortable topics, both from the left and from the right, over the last 25 years, and for all we know, probably the last 100 years, doesn't help the matter either.
I think a government that got into office and did what I think, by the way, a major media company should do, But the same thing I would say about a government is to get in there and say, here, here's where we lied to you.
It's inexcusable.
Go back all the way from, you could pick your favorite, the basis for the 2008 bailouts, the basis for entering Iraq, the Steele dossier, the investigations around how the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed, whatever, the COVID origin, everything we knew about COVID-19 or the vaccines or the risks thereof before they were rolled out, whatever it is, pick the topic.
Be comprehensive and say, we lied to you, and it's unacceptable, and you should never trust us again.
But here's how we're at least going to give you a basis to rebuild that trust.
And the people we're going to put in charge are no longer going to be people who are unaccountable to you.
All those bureaucrats, most of them are gone anyway.
And the people you elect are the ones you actually have responsive to you.
And Thomas Jefferson, I think, said it well.
I'm going to get it approximately right when he said, what is it, the government you elect is the government you deserve.
Well, that's not really true right now because the government you elect has very little to do with the binding edicts that are issued.
Most binding edicts onto Americans today don't come from elected representatives.
They come from bureaucrats.
But if you restore a system in which the binding edicts that actually bind you come from the people you actually elect, you have a greater sense of loyalty, especially when those people you elect owe their loyalty back to you rather than to some Ukrainian kleptocrat or bureaucrat or Azerbaijani invader of 120,000 Armenians sitting in Nagorno-Karabakh outside of Armenia.
I mean, we could go straight down the list of where our elected leaders have demonstrated their actual loyalties lie, including their own pocketbook.
Changing that, I think, will set into motion, I think, a positive loop, right?
A virtuous cycle.
And then you build that type of civic knowledge and identity and the hard requirements attached to it, starting at a young age, for people who vest into citizenship in this country.
And I think those would be some serious steps in the right direction.
Well, I gotta let you go, but I wanna follow up on one last thing that you kind of alluded to there.
I get in trouble sometimes because I'm pretty skeptical about this idea of a kind of universal right to vote, and that what we need to do is make sure that as many warm bodies are in the ballot, you know, casting a ballot as possible.
You mentioned if you want to vote and, you know, take part in deciding who runs the government, you should have some basic knowledge on, you know, about what the government is and how it's run.
Would you support, and it would never ever happen in a million years, but just in theory, would you support some sort of policy that, okay, here's five, like, third grade level Civics questions that you have to answer correctly in order to vote.
Would you support something like that in a crazy world?
You realize, you realize I came out with this in the presidential campaign and it got me a lot of trouble actually, right?
So this is, I mean, this is exactly, I think, a direction that we ought to be talking about in this country at the very least.
And here's the thing, Matt, a lot of people who might, before those who hear that and get all up in arms about it, just to pause for a second and realize we already do that.
We actually already do it.
We do it for anybody who's a naturalized citizen in this country.
If you want to come to this country, you're paying taxes.
You might have people who are paying millions of dollars in taxes but cannot vote at the ballot box for good reason.
Because we demand two things of you before you vote in this country if you come here legally through the front door.
At least when the system's working as it's supposed to.
Number one is that you know something about the country.
You gotta pass the civics test with a passing score of 60% that most existing U.S.
adults right now would fail.
And number two is you have to swear an oath of allegiance exclusively to this country, which is why the concept of dual citizenship makes no sense, because that completely negates the oath of loyalty.
But those two things, we already ask you to do it if you're a certain class of person.
So if we already ask certain classes of people in this country to do it, why on earth don't we ask the rest of the people in this country to do the same thing?
It doesn't actually make any sense.
And, you know, our founding fathers, and not just the founding fathers, but the framers of each of our constitutional amendments, they knew exactly what they were doing.
I mean, the Bill of Rights is really expansive.
Not a little expansive.
It's really expansive in terms of the scope of protections that it gives you.
You have the right to express any opinion.
People forget that.
That's what the First Amendment protects.
Not to express some opinions.
Any opinion.
People talk about misinformation or would talk about threats or violence.
None of those are opinions.
Any opinion you have the right to express in the United States, any religion you have the right to practice it or not in the United States of America, or the right to arm yourself, something that's unheard of in most other nations that even guarantee you some of the same rights on paper as the United States, do not offer you that same set of protections.
You go straight down the list, First Amendment on down, get to the 14th Amendment.
You're talking about 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, the Reconstruction Amendments.
You're talking about no discrimination on the basis of race when it comes to the right to vote.
You move further down the list of amendments.
No discrimination on the basis of gender when it comes to the right to vote.
And yet, so our framers of the Constitution, the amendments knew they were doing.
There is not a single line in the U.S.
Constitution that offers some type of universal right to vote.
I mean, what would that even mean, right?
The people who are in the country, do you get to vote if you're not a citizen?
No, you have to be a citizen to vote.
Well, how do you become a citizen?
You have to pass the civics test.
You have to actually take an oath of loyalty to this country.
So the concept that you're talking about, The notion that it's controversial, I think you should, of course, in some superficial sense, it will be.
But I would dispense with that because that is literally the status quo as it exists right now.
The only question is, should we expand the scope of people to whom that already applies against the backdrop of a constitution that effectively contemplated some basis of civic duty to be a basis to vote?
Back at our founding, that was land ownership.
Many states required land ownership.
The idea that you had to have some skin in the game in order to vote.
I do not think that's a good idea.
I don't think that makes any sense in the modern United States of America to be a landowner, just because you own a plot of land.
You could have had somebody come to this country from another country, doesn't really swear an oath of loyalty, doesn't know the first thing about a government, but buys a plot of land.
Should they be able to vote?
No.
But is the intuition, a basic idea that you have to have some level of attachment and loyalty and exclusive allegiance to your nation as a precondition for deciding who governs?
Yes, actually.
And I think that that would actually dissolve a lot of the concerns that many of the left have about racism or ethnic conceptions of superiority or whatever.
You look at ancient Rome.
What they really cared about was whether or not you were a citizen.
Right?
I mean, they looked at people like you and me, and on the basis of our skin color, the difference between the color of each of our skin, our shades of melanin, our shades of tan, was no different than, say, the color of your eyes or the color of your hair.
In ancient Rome, it came down to whether or not you were a citizen.
And I think the United States is the one country in history, other than the ancient Roman Republic and Empire, that has the potential to, and has for most of our history at least, adopted a similar principle that what matters is, are you an American?
It's not what kind of American are you?
Are you an American?
And if you're an American, you're fully vested with the privileges and immunities of citizenship, but that has to mean something.
It can't just be an accident of history that Because a certain person was happy to be born here was certain person happened to be born there.
One of them was American vested with these privileges and immunities.
Another one wasn't.
It was a consequence of whether or not you exhibited that loyalty to this country and undying allegiance to this country that got you those privileges and immunities of citizenship as the necessary corollary of a citizen who pledges allegiance to that nation.
Now, again, It's unfair to demand that of citizens at a time where the elected leaders in Washington, D.C.
do not owe their sole allegiance back to those same citizens.
So it's broken on both levels.
But to fix it, we're going to have to fix it on both levels, too.
And so anyway, I've been having a lot of much more superficial and mundane conversations, but it was fun to kind of get a little bit more philosophical or first principle today.
But I do feel like we just scratched the surface of that, and it will surely be Misrepresented and lends itself to being misrepresented without going into further depth, but I don't really care.
I think that we gotta be having deeper conversations about our American identity to reunite and revive this country.
And that's my calling and what I feel called to do and feel compelled to do as somebody who does have, what you said, a lot of gratitude to this country.
When my parents came here 40 years ago with no money, I've lived the iconic American dream Written on paper, we want to pass that on to our kids.
I have a deep sense of gratitude to this country.
Everything from here on out, I'm 38 years old.
We've raised the beginnings, at least, of our two kids in their lives.
Four years old and another one soon to be two.
I've run for U.S.
president after building successful companies, married my wife, Apoorva.
Every day I have left in life is literally just, I look at it as bonus, right?
I've already lived a life that I am so grateful for that this country gave me.
But I am worried that country is about to cease to exist.
And so I'd like to play whatever role I can, however big or small, to reviving that sense of American identity that I think we're missing today.
And I think if we can, if we get leaders who are able to do that, I think that like there were many rises and many falls of Rome, which we were just talking about a moment ago, I think this could be one of the many valleys, as there will be many rises and many falls, of this American experiment we're in, too.
And I hope that this isn't our last volley, if I have anything to do with it.
Well, I think that's a great note to end it on.
Of course, as you said, this is particularly on this topic of rethinking just our approach to some of these basic concepts that people take for granted.
This is a conversation that could go on for hours, and maybe we could follow up sometime in the future about it.
But for now, I've got to let you go.
Vivek Ramaswamy, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
Good seeing you, man.
Nice to finally meet you.
You too.
Thank you.
(upbeat music)
John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
Wake up every morning with our show, Morning Wire, where we bring you all the news that you need to know in 15 minutes or less.
