Bill O'Reilly analyzes Donald Trump's strategic delay in announcing a 2024 run to evade campaign finance laws while criticizing President Biden as the second-worst U.S. leader after James Buchanan, citing the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal that freed 1,000 terrorists from Bagram. O'Reilly identifies Ron Klain and Susan Rice as key White House figures, argues the criminal justice system has fractured into fiefdoms, and predicts a Republican midterm victory driven by economic distress rather than cultural issues, framing the era as a social civil war where progressives prioritize equity over capitalism. [Automatically generated summary]
I have to tell you, as someone that just got my second book out, I am told, because I'm looking at the cover of your book right now, this is your 17th number one bestseller.
How many books have you written in the first place?
Twenty-five, a lot of them children's books off the O'Reilly Factor, but all of the killing books have hit number one, and The Killing Series, The Killing of Killers is the eleventh book in the series, the most successful non-fiction book series of all time.
And that's pretty stunning when you think about it, and humbling for me.
So let's, I want to talk about the book, obviously, but let's dive into just some of the stuff going on right now.
Obviously, as we're sitting here, abortion and the reversal of Roe v. Wade is the big one.
First off, are you shocked that putting aside the decision that we are not talking about the leak anymore, that that seems to have come and gone and is sort of irrelevant at this point?
Or at least in terms of what the mainstream media will discuss relative to it?
I'm not shocked because you got Merrick Garland, the Attorney General.
He has no interest in finding out who leaked that out from Alito's office.
Garland didn't have any interest in finding that out because it would hurt Biden.
And you have the head of the U.S.
Marshals Service supervising it.
No updates, no press conferences, nothing.
They're just hoping it goes away.
I mean, look, we live in a country now where there really isn't a criminal justice system or a civil justice system, for that matter, anymore.
It's evaporated.
Now you have little fiefdoms all over the place, and the prosecutor in New York City doesn't want to prosecute somebody who stabs another person, and he's not going to prosecute.
And the governors and the president and everybody else allows it to happen, so that's where we are.
Well, when you're right, they're going to say bad things about you, Dave.
That's just the way America works.
If you're right, you're going to get hammered.
I wrote a book called Culture Warrior way back.
If you read that book, everything I said in that book, and that was a mid 2000, you know, about 2004, I think.
Came true.
I could see the trend way before it happened.
Because what we have is cowardly politicians.
I mean, that's what it comes down to.
80%, maybe 70% of the elected people in this country are cowards.
They're not interested in helping the folks, they're interested in maintaining their power.
So when you have that, and you have an electorate that's largely uneducated, people don't know what the Constitution is, they don't know what it says, they don't care.
They want to know what the latest tweet is, or what's on Instagram, and they want to spend their lives here.
This is where most people live now, right here, in this little machine.
They want to take the time to understand what's happening and why it's happening.
And when you get a voting public like that, you get California, you get New York State, you get Illinois.
So does that, what you're explaining right there, really is the perfect example of what's going on with the reaction to Roe v. Wade, that nobody really understands this is about states' rights and what is and isn't in the Constitution?
And I guess to some extent, a certain set of the society just doesn't care what's in the Constitution.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives doesn't care what's in the Constitution.
Nor does the President of the United States or the Senate Majority Leader Schumer.
You think any three of those care what's in the Constitution?
Everybody knew.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg knew.
That the 1973 ruling, whereby abortion was legal all over the United States, wasn't based on the Constitution.
Because the right of privacy is never mentioned.
Now, in the criminal justice system, you have a right of sanctuary in your home.
The authorities cannot come into your home without a warrant, without probable cause.
And that happened because the British, the King, they were kicking doors all over the place.
So the colonists had no privacy at all.
Here come the troops, boom, they'll take your house.
But as far as abortion was concerned, it was never mentioned.
And because it was never mentioned, it then falls under the 10th Amendment, as you know, Dave.
And the 10th Amendment of the Constitution says if an issue is not clearly mentioned in the writings here, the amendments of the Constitution, the states then decide it.
What do we do right now if, obviously, everyone in my audience watching this and hearing you knows that's true, but what do we do if basically half the country, and as you just said, a huge portion of the political leadership, simply don't care about the documents anymore?
To me, this seems like a completely intractable impasse.
You know, you can't negotiate with people that don't think that the basic founding, the basic documents, are good or are worthy of I agree that you can't negotiate with someone like Nancy Pelosi.
So if 80 million people are going to vote for a guy like Joe Biden, and believe me, if you go back and you look at what O'Reilly said, In October, before the November vote of 2020, I predicted everything that was going to happen.
Because I knew this man was not capable of doing the job.
He cannot do it.
Alright?
And everybody has to understand that.
He cannot do it.
And so, you're putting in an incompetent.
Now you can say it is mental decline.
I don't even get into that.
I'm not a doctor.
But I saw he couldn't campaign.
He couldn't utter a cogent sentence in the debates, and I went, this is trouble.
But the populists hated Donald Trump so much that they put Biden in office.
And so now we're all paying a price for that terrible decision.
Ron Klain is the chief of staff and Susan Rice is the minister of propaganda in the sense that Rice is the ideologue, the progressive ideologue, and Klain is the administrator.
But the most powerful person in the White House is Jill Biden.
So you don't get to talk to Joe Biden unless you go through Jill Biden.
Very, very close to Nancy Reagan.
I wrote the book Killing Reagan, and Nancy, after Mr. Reagan was shot, she controlled access to the president.
But all the stuff that you see on screen comes from me, and I was tired.
And it was a big change in management, as everybody knows at Fox, and it was a different crew, and I said, you know, they were gunning for me, the far left cadres, and I didn't think I was going to get protection, and it just, it wasn't worth it anymore.
Didn't need the money.
And then when I got out of there, I said, look, The future of media isn't in the corporations.
They're all going to go down, and they are.
Every one of them is declining dramatically.
But the future is to develop a news agency that's independent from all of that and present it to the folks and see if they'll pay for it.
And they are.
I mean, I am making a lot of money on BillOReilly.com.
I'm not in it for the money.
I don't do it for that.
But there are Hundreds of thousands of people willing to pay for honesty.
And that's what I provide.
You may not agree with me, but I'm going to back up what I say.
So I thought it would work.
It is working.
We are the most successful news agency in the world now.
We're a worldwide operation.
And we combined television with radio, and we got more than 300 radio stations across the country.
So it's all going my way.
It's an enormous amount of work, that's for sure.
But I'm glad I don't answer to anybody.
There's no dopey meetings.
I don't have to play, I never played office politics.
I don't have to even be subjected to that anymore.
I mean, you're a Long Islander, like you grew up, I know where you grew up in Long Island, I'm a Long Islander, I grew up around a lot of people who were sort of moderate liberals and they seemingly just don't exist anymore.
No, I don't think so, because he lives in Hollywood.
His cocktail party invites are down by about 50%, I understand.
If he goes into traditional precincts, he'll never get invited anywhere.
And that's what these people live for.
That's what they live for.
The social aspect of it, that kind of thing, they accept it in the bubble.
Manhattan, D.C., L.A.
It's boring to me.
I never wanted to be in the bubble.
That never affected me at all.
I mean, I had, I produced, exec produced four movies.
And we were nominated for three Emmys.
And I was shocked!
The movies are really good, based on the killing books.
But I was stunned.
We didn't win because you're not going to give O'Reilly an entertainment Emmy.
I won three news Emmys, but that's a bubble out there in entertainment.
That's part of the reason we're in such a mess, because the entertainment industry and the media, news media, they're aligned with the progressive left.
And that makes the progressive left far more powerful than they would be because they don't have that great a number of people.
So since you are in New York and you are a true New Yorker, I often show clips on my show of Kathy Hochul, a woman who nobody voted for, who seems to be probably the second most authoritarian governor we have in the country, maybe to Gavin Newsom, but she might be number one.
So, to that end, what do you make of the splitting of America in that way?
That we're just going to have very, very different states?
As I think you know, I lived in California for the last eight years, finally moved to Florida six months ago, and as I keep telling everybody, I genuinely feel like I live in another country.
You're right, I do still live in the United States, I suppose, but I live in a free state here, and I did not live in a free state only 3,000 miles away.
Do you sense that maybe some of that's turning around, not only because of the Roe v. Wade thing, which kicks some of this back to the states, but some of the other decisions, the concealed carry decision, that some of this stuff is putting the power back in the hands of the people, and maybe that gets some more people to wake up?
So, Buttigieg can say to the airlines, if you don't have a legitimate excuse for delay or cancellation, you're fined $250,000 per flight.
You do it.
Got the power to do it.
Won't do it.
Now, You say, well, that might not be fair.
The airlines could appeal the fine.
And you set up a little apparatus for them to do it.
But I guarantee you, if Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, has the power to do it, did it, you would see, remarkably, the whole airline industry be responsible because they're irresponsible now.
The Biden administration came in, didn't hire on merit.
Who can we find out who really understands transportation so we don't have supply line problems and we can get the airlines regulated so they take off?
The only person on earth that Donald Trump ever listened to was his father, Fred Trump.
Okay?
And that was about business, not politics.
So anyway, Donald Trump, if you, and that's what the history tour that I went out with Trump on, if you look at the way he ran the country, he was very successful because he ran it on a deal-making opposition.
The reason they didn't have trouble with Putin is because Trump made a deal with Putin.
I don't know what that deal is, but they had a deal.
Now, Putin's hackers, they caused a little bit trouble, but Putin himself didn't.
As soon as Trump was gone, Taliban in Afghanistan, Putin in Russia, and myriad others said, okay, now we got a weak guy.
We don't have Trump because Trump's, he's going to hurt us.
And that's why I wrote Killing the Killers.
I show you in that book, how Trump handled ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Iranians.
And I tell you, it was pretty tough.
I don't think you could get tougher.
All right?
And nobody knows about this.
It's all classified information we have in Killing the Killers.
But anyway, Trump ran the country, in my opinion, but I'm not some guy who comes in and I just root for people.
I don't do that.
He ran the country well.
Donald Trump did.
But he doesn't even campaign on that.
It's all about the election.
The election's not going to be overturned.
And here's the real kicker on it.
If Trump is re-elected, he could then Appoint a special counsel to investigate the election.
He'd have the power to do that.
But to just run around and keep doing it and doing it, people are tired of it.
So he's not a lock.
DeSantis, as you mentioned, ran Florida pretty well, or is running Florida pretty well, conservative doctrinaire.
So let's shift a little bit to the book because you talk about some of the way that Trump ran policy to get some of these things done when we ran foreign policy somewhat effectively, unlike what we're doing today.
You've done obviously many of these books.
I mean, first off, where did the original idea for the Killing Series come from?
So, I contacted the National Security Advisors, beginning with David Petraeus and a Bush administration, all the way up to the end of the Trump administration, and I told them, they're all men, I said, I need to know what happened in certain areas.
I'm not going to quote you.
I'm not going to use your name.
It's just background.
Tell me the truth.
But I will verify it in other places.
And they all did.
So I got amazing stuff, stuff nobody's ever heard before.
And the way that America tracked and assassinated him, it's unbelievable.
Remember, Trump spent 1.4 trillion dollars on the military.
Nobody knows where that money went.
A lot of it went into space surveillance and weaponry.
Stuff China and Russia don't have.
What we have.
And all of that is in a book.
And when people read the book, and hundreds of thousands bought it, they're going, whoa!
Because a regular reporter will never get that stuff.
Ever.
In a million years.
And then when somebody would tell me something about Soleimani, or we opened with the Bin Laden raid, what really happened, and we ended with the debacle of Biden in Afghanistan.
So that's how the book is all throughout that time frame.
But when I got information, I verified it through people who were there.
Okay?
On the raids themselves.
And that's what You call reporting and killing the killers the best reporting I've ever done in my career.
How would you grade our mission, if you go from exactly what you said the book covers, from the assassination of Bin Laden, taking out Bin Laden, to the disastrous way we left Afghanistan?
I mean, can you put a grade on that, or I guess there's a curve?
All right, Bill, I know you're tight on time here.
So now, you know, when you often have ended your shows with the final word and your final thoughts, I always try to end my shows giving people a little positivity through this political madness that we are in right now, because it always feels like it's just getting worse and crazier and all of those things.
So despite Biden, despite the craziness of the woke, despite all the stuff that's happening right now and the economy and everything else, What gets you going in the morning to make you want to keep doing this when you don't have to do it?