Speaker | Time | Text |
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I would go into agencies and there would be closets of computers and printers and everything they would do. | ||
And so we start incentivizing agencies to give money back to the taxpayers. | ||
So, you know, when you go in there, what they do is, oh, we need more people for this. | ||
We need more people for that. | ||
You add a new program, that's not adding a person, that's adding 25 more people. | ||
That's the growth of government. | ||
And so at some point you go into every agency, you look at every program and say, what was the intent? | ||
Is it still needed? | ||
I did that in the United Nations. | ||
I went into every single one of the peacekeeping operations we had and I said, what was the original intent? | ||
Are we completing it? | ||
And what's our exit strategy? | ||
Because they had no exit strategies to any of them. | ||
We saved $3 billion the first year. | ||
It's just about putting some good approaches in place that make sure that they're actually meeting the intended goal to start with. | ||
And if there is no goal anymore, you scrap that program. | ||
You scrap the people that go with it, and that's how you clean an agency. | ||
And then you go and you put in something where anybody that's in a role, they can only serve in it four to five years, and then they roll to a different position or another position. | ||
unidentified
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You never let them sit for that long. | |
Over the coming months, I'm going to be interviewing all of the declared Republican presidential candidates. | ||
And if some Democrats get in, I guess we could do that too. | ||
And joining me to kick this off is the former governor of South Carolina, the former U.S. | ||
ambassador to the United Nations, and now Republican candidate for president of the United States, Nikki Haley. | ||
Nikki, nice to see you. | ||
Thanks for the chat. | ||
I appreciate it. | ||
All right, you're first out of all of the people. | ||
Well, technically you weren't first in, right? | ||
Donald Trump was first in. | ||
You were second in, but you're first with me, which I would imagine is probably more important. | ||
unidentified
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Yes. | |
You know, I mean, look, I'm a decisive person. | ||
I didn't need to wait. | ||
I didn't need to wait to see who else was going to get in. | ||
I didn't need to wait or worry about anything else. | ||
I think if you're going to do this, you have to do it because you know this is what you want and you know this is what you think you can do for the country. | ||
And so we were ready. | ||
And, you know, it's been a month and it's been a whirlwind, but we're working and all is good. | ||
What were the biggest things holding you back before announcing or the biggest worries? | ||
We'll get into the reasons why you're running, obviously, but like what was the stuff that you were going, maybe I shouldn't do it? | ||
It's always only family. | ||
I mean, family is the only reason that you, you know, you've got this, when you, when you know you can fix something. | ||
Like, it just itches at you. | ||
And really, after the midterms, I was like, that's it. | ||
That's it. | ||
You know, I mean, it's how much more do you sit back and watch? | ||
And I've always been a problem solver, and I know what we need to do. | ||
I've been a two-term governor that took double-digit unemployment state and turned it into an economic powerhouse. | ||
I was at the UN. | ||
I didn't deal with one country. | ||
I dealt with 193 and took the kick me sign off of our back. | ||
And I look at where our country is and I see us falling into this socialism and defeatism and, you know, there's not an avenue that we don't have serious issues with. | ||
And I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to do this. | ||
And, you know, it goes back to the fact that I look at my parents. | ||
They came here 50 years ago when America was strong and confident and full of opportunities. | ||
I want to prove to them that they made the right decision. | ||
I'm a military wife, and I've watched my husband and his brothers and sisters go out and fight for our freedoms. | ||
I want them to know their sacrifice mattered, that it means something. | ||
And I look at my kids, and my daughter's getting married, and I see how hard it is for her to buy a home. | ||
And my son is in college, and I see him writing papers he doesn't believe in to get an A. | ||
And none of us should be okay with that. | ||
And recently, 50% of Americans said that they don't think their children will live a better life than them. | ||
I refuse to let that happen to this great country. | ||
I just refuse it. | ||
So I'm going to get in there and do something about it. | ||
Are you shocked how quickly things have changed for the worse? | ||
I mean, if you take Trump's term before COVID, things were good. | ||
The economy was chugging along. | ||
We weren't in extemporaneous wars. | ||
Things seemed to be moving nicely. | ||
And then these last two years, and especially just this last week and a half with all of this banking stuff, it's like everything feels unsettled right now. | ||
Well, when you have a weak president, when you have the most socialist president that we've ever had, that's what's going to happen. | ||
You know, America's not strong on her own. | ||
We have to actually work at it. | ||
And that's the part I hope that Americans take away, is it's going to take every single one of us to fix this. | ||
And in order to do that, you've got to realize a lot of things have gone wrong. | ||
And Dave, it wasn't just the Democrats that did this to us. | ||
There are no saint Republicans right now because you look at Congress and all of this inflation, all the economic issues, that started with Republicans. | ||
That $2.2 trillion stimulus package that was passed, Republicans started it. | ||
Democrats have just run with it after that. | ||
But then what did Republicans do after that? | ||
So first they do this free-for-all. | ||
They expand welfare. | ||
So we now have 90 million people on Medicare, 42 million people on food stamps. | ||
So they expand welfare, and then, oh, it's bad, so what else do Republicans do? | ||
Open up earmarks after 10 years? | ||
Like, what's happening? | ||
What do you make of that? | ||
Because when every time, so Republicans usually say we're for small government, we're for low taxes, and every now and again someone does cut taxes. | ||
But when something like the omnibus comes, and they sign on to all of these crazy things, and you know nobody's read the bill, and they know what we're all gonna say about it. | ||
Yet they keep doing it. | ||
Is that to you just like the definition of what the swamp is? | ||
I mean, don't tell me that Republicans and Democrats don't agree on anything, because they love to waste taxpayer money. | ||
And they have no value for a dollar. | ||
It's why I think we have to have term limits. | ||
It's why I think we have to have mandatory mental competency tests over the age of 75. | ||
This is serious. | ||
And then you look at the fact that our debt is higher than our economy. | ||
We're having to borrow money to make our interest payments. | ||
I mean, none of this is OK. | ||
And so Republicans love to get on TV and talk about how awful Biden is. | ||
They started it. | ||
So don't don't do that. | ||
But we can put an end to it. | ||
And that's the key. | ||
And, you know, now they're looking at what's going to happen with the economy. | ||
And Biden, of course, wants to just keep raising taxes. | ||
But what should they be doing? | ||
Call back the 500 billion in COVID money that hasn't been spent. | ||
Don't put IRS agents on middle class Americans. | ||
Go and get that 100 billion in COVID fraud that happened. | ||
You know, if 15% of our budget is interest, stop borrowing money. | ||
We don't do that at home. | ||
As governor, I had to balance a budget. | ||
At what point is Congress going to realize they are not the only body that gets exempt from how they spend? | ||
Are you telling me if we increase the deficit and the ceiling, the debt ceiling, every year or two years or whatever, that that might cause a long-term problem? | ||
Am I following you properly? | ||
I mean, look at our households. | ||
We don't spend more than we make because we can't. | ||
It'd be pretty sweet if you could just always up that credit limit. | ||
It's amazing to me, truly. | ||
And I mean, Republicans can't say they're conservative. | ||
You're not conservative if you're spending like that. | ||
And look, I've dealt with that in South Carolina. | ||
We had a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and they didn't see anything that they didn't love to spend on. | ||
And we called them out on it. | ||
We called out port projects. | ||
We called out the fact that we had to pay down debt. | ||
We went and gave tax cuts. | ||
Like, you've got to be proactive and say, enough. | ||
And I think Republicans have to realize, look, yeah, we can bash the Democrats. | ||
They have been awful. | ||
They're socialists. | ||
It's terrible. | ||
But let's look in the mirror. | ||
Look in the mirror, and Republicans in Congress need to say, but what responsibility do we take? | ||
Do you fear ever that the cultural war has been so lost that even if you have all of the right ideas, right, so we can talk about individual rights and limited government and free speech, all of the right stuff, that the cultural part of this is so messed up and so many people don't understand what the real issues are and kind of just do want the government to do everything that it almost becomes an unwinnable situation for a Republican. | ||
Like if you look at the midterms, it's like the Republicans obviously should have won. | ||
And yet people were basically like, well, the Democrats are running everything. | ||
It's not that good, but I'm not going to vote for Republican. | ||
But I don't think that's what happened. | ||
I mean, I endorsed 70 candidates. | ||
We raised $10 million that went directly into campaign accounts. | ||
I was on the ground campaigning. | ||
I think you had three things that went wrong. | ||
I think, first of all, you saw Democrats outraised Republicans again. | ||
You saw the fact that Republicans have to get it out of their heads that you have to vote on election day. | ||
If you have legal voting time, we need as many of our people at the voting booth as we can. | ||
As long as it's legal, I want every person to vote because we need every single one. | ||
And then finally, when independents and conservative Democrats, who weren't happy with Biden, by the way, looked, what'd they see? | ||
They saw Republicans hitting on each other and hitting on Democrats. | ||
It looked like chaos. | ||
We have to go back to what our national purpose is. | ||
We've got to stop this national self-loathing. | ||
That's at the heart of the culture wars and what started it. | ||
Stop this idea that Kamala and Biden love to say that America's rotten and that we're racist and that we're terrible to the core. | ||
We have to go back to loving America again. | ||
Because right now, we look so distracted. | ||
And when America is distracted, the world is less safe. | ||
We're seeing that. | ||
But the national self-loathing, I want our kids to love America. | ||
I want our kids to start saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning at school. | ||
I want our kids to understand that this is the greatest country in the world. | ||
We have We have to do that. | ||
And so I think that's the first thing is let's stop all this craziness and let's go back to showing what loving America means. | ||
And that's not with faint hearts or watered down compromises. | ||
That's by truly proclaiming what we believe in and then our opponents will join us. | ||
And then the other side is if Republicans have lost the last seven out of eight popular votes for president. | ||
Shouldn't we say, maybe we're doing something wrong? | ||
Shouldn't we want to win the majority of America? | ||
Because our solutions are the right ones. | ||
We focus on lifting up everybody, not a select few, but how we communicate it matters. | ||
One of the three things that you just mentioned there, let's talk about the second one for a second, the voting situation, because the Democrats obviously do ballot harvesting, all of this stuff. | ||
You know, Trump is basically running on that they stole the election from him last time. | ||
Are you confident that there would be a situation where states that are still doing this stuff, so let, you know, I know you don't have to worry about, say, a Florida or, you know, another, or Texas. | ||
Or South Carolina. | ||
Or South Carolina, for example, right. | ||
But how worried are you that California, that Pennsylvania, the states that are doing all of this crazy stuff, no IDs, no signature match, all that, would even allow for an honest and fair election? | ||
Well, first of all, I passed voter ID in 2011 and was vilified for it, by the way. | ||
I mean, the press said I was disenfranchising voters. | ||
They thought it was terrible. | ||
And at the time, I put the marker down and I said, if you think anyone can't get to the DMV, we will go pick them up. | ||
You put money in for her, right? | ||
to the DMV, we will give them a free ID and we'll return them home. | ||
25 people out of 5 million asked for a ride. | ||
So one, I think voter ID needs to be the law of the land. | ||
That's not a Republican issue. | ||
All people want to know that their vote is who they say it is. | ||
But what do you do about that before 24? | ||
Because for Cali, for example, it's not going to do it. | ||
No, it's tough, right? | ||
And I think the worst part of it's the mail-out balloting. | ||
I mean, that's the part that I think is, that, the harvesting, I think Republicans are too nice. | ||
Republicans have always been too nice. | ||
We need to step up and play the game within the rules, but also call out anything that we see is wrong. | ||
It doesn't mean we say, oh, California's always going to do it. | ||
You call it out no matter what. | ||
We're going to force these states to have to do it right, because if you can get the people to say it, When 73% of Americans say that they think you should have to show your ID in order to vote, that includes Democrats. | ||
We need to start messaging that better and say, don't let them take your rights away. | ||
Don't you want to know that there's integrity to this process? | ||
It's not going to be easy. | ||
Yeah, it's incredible because most people do agree you have to have an ID to buy a bottle of wine and for some reason you don't have to vote. | ||
You also mentioned the cognitive test, so I have to ask you about the Don Lemon brouhaha. | ||
We can do it in two seconds, but basically he said you're not in your prime. | ||
And I said, hold my beer. | ||
I am definitely in my prime. | ||
You know, we made koozies out of it and it said, not in my prime, hold my beer. | ||
We sold $30,000 worth of koozies in 24 hours. | ||
So we literally made lemonade out of lemons. | ||
I mean, look, God bless him. | ||
But I have always made liberals' heads explode. | ||
From the very first time I ran, for the statehouse even. | ||
They can't stand the fact that a minority female would be a conservative. | ||
They can't take it. | ||
And, you know, even when I became governor, there was a senior African-American female Democrat. | ||
And when I became governor and they were celebrating that I was the first female minority governor in history, She went and she said, she's not a minority. | ||
She's just a conservative with a tan. | ||
Like this has always been an issue. | ||
And so for Don Lemon to sit there and do that, you know, Whoopi Goldberg had done it the day before. | ||
I know, I know. | ||
The Whoopi one was actually worse even. | ||
I mean, and then the guy on MSNBC, like, you know, to sit there and say that I was like, Trying to show white supremacy or whatever. | ||
They'll say whatever. | ||
But none of that fazes me. | ||
Because I know they're worried. | ||
They know that I pull from their base. | ||
They know that I pull in women. | ||
They know I pull in minorities. | ||
And they have always been scared by that. | ||
And so I know that that means I'm a threat and I'll take it. | ||
Do you feel that that's, like, the key part of your campaign, that you'll be able to get some of the crossover people? | ||
Because I was talking about my show, there's not that many people willing to move, right? | ||
Like, we sort of know how many people are going to vote for each side, and it's always about getting that fringe. | ||
I always say, to me, it's the disaffected liberals. | ||
It's the me of five years ago that are like, wait, the Democrats are completely insane, but could I actually vote for a Republican? | ||
You feel like that's sort of your sweet spot? | ||
So the interesting thing is the reason that I'm a hardcore conservative. | ||
So I'm not pulling them over because there's a moderate side to me. | ||
It's because of how I communicate with them. | ||
You know, Republicans need to see this as a story of addition. | ||
We need Asians. | ||
We need the Jewish community. | ||
We need the Hispanics. | ||
We need women. | ||
We need African Americans. | ||
But you don't go to them and say, you should be with us. | ||
You go to them and say, what do you care about? | ||
Guess what? | ||
Every one of them cares about their kids. | ||
Every one of them cares about opportunities for their kids that they didn't have. | ||
Every one of them wants a safe America that's strong abroad. | ||
My parents were Democrats until Reagan. | ||
Not because they were really Democrats, but because Republicans wouldn't talk to them. | ||
I just talked to them. | ||
I go and talk to them. | ||
I talk about conservative issues, but I do it through their lens. | ||
And when you know what their fears are, and you can talk about conservative solutions through their fears, they come over. | ||
That's what Republicans should want to have happen. | ||
We don't have to compromise, but you do have to communicate to people that don't look and sound like you. | ||
What's your policy going to be when it comes to the media? | ||
I mean, obviously you've got Trump loves fighting with the media. | ||
You have DeSantis who's basically saying, I'm going to ignore media that won't treat us fairly. | ||
It seems like you're willing to go in and play with them, but you know you're not going to get a fair shake, you know, if you're on MSNBC or whatever it might be. | ||
I mean, I'm going to go do any TV because if you're trying to win the hearts and minds of America, you've got to go everywhere. | ||
But if they say something's wrong, I'm going to kick back. | ||
You know, I mean, I think that you have to, you really have to do that. | ||
And I did that. | ||
I think one of my first interviews was with the Today Show and, you know, Craig Melvin, he was pushing back and I pushed back as hard as he gave it. | ||
Because I know that my answers were true and they just want to change the narrative. | ||
You know, a lot of the liberal media, the hate that they have on me is they either want me to love Trump 100% or hate Trump 100%. | ||
I'm not 100% with my husband all the time. | ||
President Trump would do something good? | ||
Of course I support it. | ||
Of course I praise him. | ||
Of course we did it. | ||
But if he does something wrong, I'm going to call him out too. | ||
I've always been like that. | ||
I've always been a truth teller in that way. | ||
And so, you know, I'll keep handling it that same way. | ||
So actually, let's talk about that for a moment. | ||
So it seems like there's a certain set of the Trump base that thinks that you either abandoned him or something like that. | ||
I think we talked about this once off camera, so I'll just tee it up for you to take it away from there. | ||
I mean, look, I had a great working relationship with him. | ||
He is a friend. | ||
I called him before I decided to run. | ||
I love what we were able to do together. | ||
I think he was the right president at the right time. | ||
And in the administration, when I was there, he would do something great. | ||
I'd support him. | ||
If he'd do something wrong, I'd say, you can't do this. | ||
And I'd give him options. | ||
Did he appreciate that? | ||
He did. | ||
There was a great respect between us. | ||
And he would always say, well, how do you see that playing out? | ||
We had a great working relationship. | ||
But when I see something wrong, I'm going to call it. | ||
I didn't think he handled January 6th well. | ||
I called it out. | ||
I stand by that. | ||
So, you know, those that don't like the fact that I called him out, that's exactly what I did when I was in the administration. | ||
That's exactly what I do to my friends. | ||
That's exactly what I'll do going forward. | ||
And he knows that about me. | ||
Is any of the stuff that has been played on Tucker and these tapes and any of that, is any of that changing your feelings on any of that? | ||
Or do you think there's any more of a gray area there? | ||
So I haven't seen much of it, but what I will say is all of that should be transparent. | ||
They should release all of it. | ||
I think it's important. | ||
I think the courts need to see it. | ||
I think the press needs to see it. | ||
I think the American people need to see it. | ||
And if someone broke the law, they should go to jail. | ||
And if someone didn't break the law, they should not go to jail. | ||
I mean, we need to just open it up for everybody to see. | ||
It's weird how so many people in the media are screaming that these tapes are being released. | ||
It's like, well, this is public knowledge, right? | ||
unidentified
|
They, more than anybody... In the old days, isn't that what they liked, right? | |
They, more than anybody, would always complain if things weren't released. | ||
The problem is they just wanted it released to a committee that was biased, that didn't want the American people to see everything. | ||
If you truly believe that, you know, January 6th was a terrible day, I think it was a horrible day. | ||
We never want to see that happen again. | ||
But if you truly believe that certain things happen, show us. | ||
Show everybody. | ||
Let us see it. | ||
It will help your case. | ||
But if you're not showing it, then you're making us wonder, why are you not showing it? | ||
So I think it's good for that to get out. | ||
So I actually don't want to focus on the former president too much, but one more on that, which is, so if you felt that he was the right guy then, obviously you don't feel that he's the right guy now, which is why you're running. | ||
So what's your thought process there? | ||
I told him when I called him, I think that the country needs to go in a new direction. | ||
I think it's time for new generational change, and I think we need to leave the drama of the past alone. | ||
And I think, for the sake of our kids, we've got to start looking forward. | ||
I mean, look at the foreign policy situation and tell me that we don't really need to be strong and at the top of our game and move forward. | ||
Look at our economy and tell me that we don't need to be completely focused on where we're going to go. | ||
We can't keep talking about the past. | ||
We've got to get past that. | ||
How much of it, I mean we've talked about the age thing before, but is an actual sort of generational mind shift, meaning that the boomers have been running this forever basically, you and I are Gen Xers, like it's supposed to be someone let's say roughly between 40 and 60. | ||
I mean, look at D.C. | ||
Look at D.C. | ||
That's why I'm so desperate for term limits. | ||
They say experience matters. | ||
Yes, but then experience turns into power. | ||
Term limits keep that from turning into power and turning into thin skin and hurt feelings and thinking that one-upping somebody. | ||
That's what's happening in D.C. | ||
unidentified
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now. | |
I mean, what has Congress done for you lately? | ||
Nothing. | ||
Not much. | ||
And so what I think is get fresh faces, get fresh voices, get normal people in there that can talk about what Americans are really going through. | ||
And I think this is a time of we have to look at forward-thinking solutions, the new things. | ||
You know, the old conversations of defense was land, air, See, right? | ||
Now you've got to add cyber to that. | ||
You've got to add artificial intelligence to that. | ||
We've got to have people prepared to do that. | ||
Literally TikTok. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
Yeah, so all right, so let's talk about foreign policy a little bit, because I feel like that's sort of your, is that your specialty? | ||
Can I say that's your- No, both are my- They're both your specialty? | ||
I was a two-term governor, so I ran a state. | ||
So I mean, I can talk about the economy, I can talk about debt, I can talk about pensions, but I can talk about foreign policy. | ||
So you pick it, I'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. | ||
Okay, fair enough. | ||
So you were the U.S. | ||
ambassador to the U.N. | ||
under, for a couple years, that things were pretty freaking good, and there were peace deals signed, and there weren't all these crazy wars, and all of this stuff. | ||
Your basic policy is peace through strength, right? | ||
Is that fair to say? | ||
Absolutely. | ||
And you know, you look now, what's going wrong? | ||
I mean, first of all, you look at the fact that everything goes back to Afghanistan. | ||
I mean, it's really, you know, as a military spouse, you know, military families sacrifice a lot. | ||
Michael deployed to Afghanistan. | ||
The idea that we left Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night without telling our allies, who stood shoulder to shoulder with us for decades, I mean, is unthinkable. | ||
Because that sent a message to our friends, it sent a bigger message to our enemies. | ||
What did you just say to our military families? | ||
I mean, Michael will tell you, if you wanted to get out of Afghanistan, fine. | ||
But it's not what you do, it's how you did it. | ||
There's a reason that we've got the highest suicide rate now of veterans. | ||
It was the biggest slap in the face, and we lost 13 more soldiers because of it. | ||
How worried are you about the military in general, that there's been such a demoralization, and just that the woke thing has so infected it, and they're talking about gender roles more than they're talking about battle preparedness and all that? | ||
There is nothing that scared Russia, China, and Iran more than America having a strong military. | ||
Strong militaries don't start wars. | ||
Strong militaries prevent wars. | ||
We need to be focused on how can we have the strongest military, not what they're doing right now, which is taking gender pronoun classes. | ||
That's the problem is we don't have our eye on the ball. | ||
And Russia and China see that. | ||
I mean, the idea that we are this weak, they saw what happened in Afghanistan. | ||
I mean, did you ever think Americans would look to the sky and see a Chinese spy balloon looking back at them? | ||
That was total arrogance. | ||
And don't think it flew over South Carolina. | ||
And know it for hours. | ||
Know it for hours and do nothing if not a week. | ||
You watched it go across. | ||
And China watched us watch it go across. | ||
And it didn't go over South Carolina because it loves our beaches. | ||
It went over South Carolina because we're a military state. | ||
They knew exactly what they were doing. | ||
If we did a spy balloon over China, do you think they would have let that happen? | ||
It was a national embarrassment. | ||
And so that, and then all of a sudden Russia goes and has, you know, takes down one of our drones? | ||
It is not what happens to you, it's how you respond to it. | ||
And America has been asleep at the wheel, we've handed China things on a silver platter, we're letting Russia run rogue, and we're not doing enough about it. | ||
All right, so let's talk about the Russia-Ukraine situation, because I think you and I have a slightly different approach on this. | ||
And we played a couple of the clips last week when Tucker had all of you, you know, | ||
the potentials submit, you know, basically your policy or at least your sort of overview | ||
on what you think should happen with Ukraine. | ||
From where I'm at at this point, even though I fully believe in peace through strength, | ||
it seems to me we're so screwed up at the moment and financially so out of whack, | ||
and we're watching the banks meltdown, and we'll talk about that in a little bit too, | ||
that this sort of endless pouring of money to Ukraine where we don't know where it's going seems really nuts to | ||
me. | ||
And that would be my first position on all of this before we get to anything about territory or anything else. | ||
What do you think about just that position first? | ||
Of like, we're completely out of whack, and it's like, how can we help anybody? | ||
We can barely help ourselves. | ||
We should never send money. | ||
To any country. | ||
Because I don't think you, unless you know exactly where it's going, we should never send money. | ||
We, I don't want to put troops on the ground. | ||
What we do need to do is make sure that we give Ukraine what they need to win. | ||
With the allies. | ||
And this is why it's important. | ||
It's not about Ukraine. | ||
This is about a war on freedom. | ||
And it's one we have to win. | ||
Because if we win this, This sends a message to China, it sends a message to Iran, it sends a message to Russia, it sends a message to North Korea. | ||
If we lose, the lesson is dictators tell you exactly what they're going to do. | ||
Russia has said Poland and the Baltics are next. | ||
We are trying to prevent a world war. | ||
This is in the national security interests of Americans. | ||
So if you go and you have a dictator go and take over a freedom-loving country, if we don't fight for that, Are we that arrogant to think that we're not next or that any of our other allies aren't next? | ||
The problem with people not wanting to spend time on Russia is that's the exact same kind of thinking that got us in the situation that we're in with China right now. | ||
If you don't show strength to them, They will continue to push and push and push. | ||
And I dealt with the Russians and the Chinese. | ||
They think the West are the great sinners. | ||
There is nothing they want more than to take us down. | ||
And you can't give Russia an inch. | ||
Because if you give them an inch, which is exactly what they've seen happen, they're going to go and take down our drones just like they did and violate international law. | ||
So what does a win actually look like? | ||
Because it seems to me that Putin knows if he loses, like, he's done. | ||
He's going to end up like Gaddafi. | ||
So he does have nukes. | ||
I mean, what does a win actually look like at the end of this thing? | ||
So speaking of losing, let's look at where he is right now. | ||
How low has he gotten that he's getting drones from Iran and missiles from North Korea? | ||
That's as bad as it gets. | ||
He knows that. | ||
That they've raised the draft age to 65. | ||
The idea that last week they didn't have enough ammunition, that they pulled people off the streets, put them on the front line with shovels. | ||
That's where Russia has gotten to. | ||
He knows that he's in a bad spot. | ||
But the one thing he's hoping is that China will help him. | ||
There's a reason he did China's dirty work by taking down that drone. | ||
He's trying to help China and China and Russia have said we are unlimited partners. | ||
And they have said Iran is their junior partner. | ||
That is your axis of evil. | ||
If we don't look at that with clear lenses and see it for what it is and be at the top of our game on that, that's what's going to go wrong. | ||
All Russia has to do for a win is leave. | ||
Is leave. | ||
If Ukraine stops, they lose their entire country. | ||
If Russia stops, the war is over. | ||
So you mean literally leave all the territory? | ||
Leave Crimea, like the whole thing? | ||
Or that is sort of a foregone conclusion? | ||
Well, first of all, Obama never should have opened that door. | ||
But Dave, if somebody came and took Texas, would you say, okay, we'll let them have Texas? | ||
Think about it from the Ukrainian standpoint. | ||
California, I would let them have it. | ||
I know. | ||
Everybody says that. | ||
But think about it from the Ukrainian standpoint. | ||
This is their country. | ||
I mean, the idea that these men went to the front lines to fight for their freedom, even though they were given five days. | ||
The idea that women said, I'm not going to stand by, and they made Molotov cocktails. | ||
These people have put everything on the line for their freedom and their country. | ||
That used to be us. | ||
We used to fight for our country like that. | ||
Why would we not be there? | ||
I'm the first one to say we should have the backs of our allies and we should hold our enemies to account. | ||
If you want to talk about what we shouldn't be doing. | ||
Last year we gave 46 billion dollars in foreign aid. | ||
Now, when I was at the U.N. | ||
and we moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I was so mad at that vote because we had the right to put our embassy wherever we wanted. | ||
I went to my staff and I said, I want you to do a book. | ||
I said, I want you to list all 193 countries. | ||
I want the second column to be the percentage of times they vote with the U.S. | ||
and against the U.S. | ||
And I want the last column to be how much foreign aid we give them. | ||
I took that book and I gave it to President Trump. | ||
He lost his mind, flipping pages, yelling out letters. | ||
And what I said is, I'm not saying you give foreign aid based on a percentage vote at the UN, but that should be one of the things we do. | ||
Of that $46 billion that Congress approved that was signed last year, We're giving money to Pakistan that was harboring terrorists trying to kill our soldiers, that's now an ally of China. | ||
We're giving money to Iraq that's right there with Iran terrorists that are saying death to America. | ||
We're giving money to Belarus that's holding Russia's hand that's never been friendly to America. | ||
You're giving money to Zimbabwe, the most anti-American African country out there. | ||
You're giving money to Cuba that we labeled as a state sponsor of terrorism. | ||
We're giving money to China Stop giving money to countries that hate America. | ||
That's not what you do. | ||
We believe in freedom. | ||
You can't buy off enemies. | ||
You can't buy off friends. | ||
The best way to show strength is to quit all the nonsense. | ||
Don't give China money. | ||
That's the weakest thing you could ever do. | ||
Were you shocked how quickly countries kind of came into line once you guys shut off some of the money? | ||
Because you did do that last time and then suddenly, or when you were ambassador, and then suddenly countries kind of were behind us again. | ||
I think if you look at what Trump did, which was, he was, everybody's got to do their part. | ||
They need to pay their part in NATO. | ||
They need to do, I think that was the right message because everybody needs to pull their weight. | ||
They can't just be America only. | ||
But the other thing is, we made sure that they knew what we were for. | ||
I personally went in and made sure that at the UN that those countries knew what America was for and what America was against. | ||
I didn't care if they didn't like me, but I wanted them to respect America. | ||
And one of those things that we were talking to President Trump about, we were giving $2 billion in military aid to Pakistan. | ||
We stopped giving that military aid. | ||
Congress has now put it back in. | ||
The thing is, you've got to look at that and say, let's be smart. | ||
Even if it's helping a small country, if it's a win-win, you do it. | ||
You treat it like a business. | ||
It's a win-win, you do it. | ||
If not, we could use that money here in America. | ||
We don't have to give it away. | ||
And so, you know, when you look at Ukraine, you know, I don't want you giving a check to Ukraine. | ||
And by the way, there was no better ally we had at the United Nations than Ukraine. | ||
They were with us on everything. | ||
I never had to ask. | ||
They were the one country that no matter what I did, they were standing by our side. | ||
Always. | ||
So when you've got a country like that, It just is trying to protect democracy and freedom. | ||
You go and you fight for all the freedom-loving countries because these dictators want to destroy any ounce of freedom that exists in this world. | ||
So as long as we're talking about dollars abroad, let's do dollars here. | ||
I mean, it's been a very bizarre week with banking. | ||
We are, just so the audience knows, we're taping this a couple days before we're going to air it. | ||
So God only knows what's going to happen, you know, in the next three days or whatever it is. | ||
But, you know, Silicon Valley Bank falls, now Signature Bank. | ||
We're doing this bailout. | ||
You know, my sense is that most Republicans are kind of like, ah, bailout again. | ||
Like, this didn't work in 2008. | ||
We're just making things bigger. | ||
On the other hand, you want payrolls to be met and you don't want to punish the average person. | ||
Where do you fall out on this whole thing? | ||
The accountant in me always goes back and says, how did we get to this point? | ||
You know, you first have to ask yourself that. | ||
And then you say, OK, where do we go? | ||
How we got to this point, if you flush that much money into the economy, inflation is going to happen. | ||
There was free money. | ||
This was a bubble waiting to happen. | ||
Talk to any of the Wall Street elite. | ||
They will tell you this was the easiest money they ever made. | ||
So then you go and you have all these people with free money doing all of these loans that they did, and then all of a sudden what happens? | ||
The inflation goes up so high because Congress spent all of this money. | ||
And then now you've got SVB where they bought short and they invested long, and in these bonds the interest rate's going up, and then now all of a sudden there's a loss. | ||
But the question in all of that, so first of all you have to blame, you know, Republicans that started it, you've got to blame Biden for continuing it and Congress to continue that. | ||
Then you look at the ball that started rolling. | ||
But look at where the rub is. | ||
SVB isn't like your typical bank. | ||
94% of the money that was in that bank was not insured. | ||
Where was the San Francisco Fed? | ||
All of this was transparent. | ||
They could see it. | ||
So when you see a bank is starting to buy short, but invest long, and interest rates are going up, where were they? | ||
Where were the regulators? | ||
So now you're going to see members of Congress come and say, oh, we have to put regulations on, or we have to do this. | ||
unidentified
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No. | |
Where was the oversight? | ||
And does anybody find it wrong that the CEO of SVB sat on the San Francisco Fed board? | ||
Or that Gavin Newsom, it's now coming out that his wineries, and it sounds like his personal accounts, too, were there, and he was lobbying Joe Biden for the bailout. | ||
I mean, well, nothing with Cali surprises me, I suppose. | ||
So if you want to talk about blame, I would say go there. | ||
So now where do we go from here? | ||
This is the socialism creep that I'm saying is happening in our country. | ||
The idea you're going to take from this group of people to pay off this group of people is wrong. | ||
And I know that they're saying, oh, but we fired management, and the bondholders lost everything, and these are the depositors. | ||
You know what? | ||
We don't reward bad management. | ||
We don't reward when things go wrong. | ||
If a small business went out, who's going to save them? | ||
Who's going to bail them out? | ||
I was opposed to the bank bailouts in 2008. | ||
I was, I have always been opposed to bailouts. | ||
It is a socialist creep that's dangerous. | ||
And all of these Wall Street elites that say, oh, but you know, all the other banks are going to fall. | ||
They've always said the sky's going to fall. | ||
No, it's not. | ||
You know what? | ||
All the other banks will take notice. | ||
And realize what you can't do. | ||
And instead, no one's talking about the Chinese money that was in that bank. | ||
Do you mean to tell me that our consumers, who are now having to pay higher bank fees and get less services because of it, are going to bail out the Chinese companies? | ||
Right, so to be clear, you would have just said, let them fail. | ||
Absolutely. | ||
I mean, this is not one, everybody will say the sky is falling. | ||
They said it in 2008. | ||
You cannot govern like that, because if you go and you give them a pass, the next bank thinks they can do it too. | ||
And no one's pointing the fingers at the real group that needs to be held responsible for doing this. | ||
Yes, it was management, but where was the oversight? | ||
Where was the Fed in all this? | ||
What was their role in all this? | ||
In a way, is that like the biggest reason to drain the swamp? | ||
That people think, oh we can just put enough regulators in these things and then everyone will behave properly and blah blah blah. | ||
But it's like no one's arguing we don't, well I guess somebody is, but like no one I think sort of roughly centrist would say there aren't enough regulators and that's what caused the problem. | ||
So that's why you have to drain the swamp. | ||
And the amazing thing is they're going to say, oh, but we need more regulation or this wouldn't have happened. | ||
No, you don't need more regulation. | ||
You actually need to just go say who was in charge of it and why didn't they do their job. | ||
And where was the outrage before this happened? | ||
Because they all could see it. | ||
So I happen to be more on this side of the argument, too, because otherwise I just see this as endless creep. | ||
We'll just bail out everybody. | ||
No one will ever be responsible. | ||
And then we'll end up with one bank, which will be the United States, that will insure everybody endlessly. | ||
But if you were president right now and that bank failed and you found out that I don't know how many companies, but let's say a hundred companies that were doing their banking there. | ||
Now you have all of these people who were just employees at the companies who are now all out of work because their checks are going to bounce. | ||
Does the government have any responsibility to those people anywhere? | ||
This is where it always pushes, that's that push and pull of small government. | ||
Don't fall for it. | ||
Government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. | ||
It was never meant to be all things to all people. | ||
That's it. | ||
So when you go and you decide to work for someone, you never know if they're going to go bankrupt. | ||
If you go and you decide to put your money somewhere, all of these clients at SVB, these were not your normal loans. | ||
They had really stretched it in a big way. | ||
They knew what they were doing. | ||
These were, you know, risky tech companies that knew exactly what they were getting loans they couldn't get from any other bank. | ||
And they knew exactly what they were getting into. | ||
No, you don't change the rules. | ||
You change the accountability that should have been there and you hold people accountable. | ||
That's how you fix things. | ||
Is the problem more of an optics thing? | ||
So it's like then Biden comes in and he says, OK, everyone's going to have their money. | ||
And it's like the average person is like, oh, Joe Biden saved the day. | ||
Everyone will have their money. | ||
But in reality, that's not really the way it is. | ||
A real leader communicates the facts on the ground. | ||
A real leader tells you the truth. | ||
That's the problem we're not seeing. | ||
We're not getting the truth. | ||
We're not getting the truth on spending. | ||
We're not getting the truth on the bailout. | ||
We're not getting the truth with this foreign policy. | ||
No one's telling the truth. | ||
And sometimes the truth hurts. | ||
But guess what? | ||
If you tell the truth, you're quicker to get to a solution. | ||
You want to know why this country is so divided? | ||
Nobody's telling the truth. | ||
And Americans want the truth. | ||
That's all they want. | ||
Life is hard enough. | ||
Just tell them the truth and they'll know how to make decisions from there. | ||
I use the Solzhenitsyn quote on the show every day. | ||
All we have to do is stop participating in the lie. | ||
That's it. | ||
But it seems like everyone is lying. | ||
All. | ||
I mean, that's basically all I do every morning. | ||
I'm like, all right, who lied today? | ||
Let's go through 20 people that just can't tell the truth. | ||
Will that, in a way, be the hardest part of running for president? | ||
That you know no matter what you say, and any of you guys on this side of the aisle, they're basically going to make it up. | ||
And you've got to just keep slogging through that. | ||
No, I mean, that's part of it. | ||
You know, politics is a blood sport. | ||
You don't get in if you can't, you know, take the heat. | ||
Yes, they're going to cut things up. | ||
Yes, they're going to tell lies. | ||
Yes, they're going to say things. | ||
That's already happened. | ||
That's happened, you know, throughout my political life. | ||
But my job is to just keep communicating what I believe, what my truth is. | ||
There's rumors out there about all kinds of things, like what I believe on this issue or that issue. | ||
I'll just, you know, I'll clearly tell you what it is and then people realize. | ||
Is there something that you think is like the biggest miscommunication about you or something? | ||
No, I think it's, I think most recently the funny thing is that, um, that CNN did this article and said, Oh, she wants to cut off, you know, social security and Medicare. | ||
And the truth is, yes, we do have to do, and that's what I said. | ||
I said, if you're going to be honest, You know, yes, we claw back the 500. | ||
Yes, we go after the 100 fraud. | ||
Yes, we stop borrowing. | ||
Yes, we cut the spending. | ||
Yes, we cut the earmarks. | ||
But you have to talk about entitlement reform. | ||
And the way you talk about it is, we don't take from anybody that was promised. | ||
Don't touch seniors. | ||
Don't touch anyone that has put money in that has been promised. | ||
My parents are in their 80s. | ||
I don't want anybody taking from them. | ||
But my kids are in their 20s and you go to them and you say the game has changed for you because they know they're not going to get it anyway. | ||
Let's start there. | ||
Start with everyone in their 20s coming into the system and let's do a few things. | ||
One, let's raise their retirement age so that we actually are looking more at life expectancy. | ||
Let's go and change cost of living. | ||
To relate more to inflation instead of just a cost of living. | ||
Let's go and let's make sure we expand Medicare Advantage plans so you have more competition and you run down costs. | ||
Those are the things that we could do that would really make a difference if we did that. | ||
Let's go and limit the benefits that go to the wealthy because, you know, you can talk to people like Bernie Marcus, they'll tell you, I don't want it. | ||
But let's go ahead and limit that. | ||
So, you know, these are truths that we have to acknowledge. | ||
Don't run from it because of what CNN says. | ||
Just go out there and educate on why you think what you think. | ||
So I want to get into some of the people you'll be running against on the Republican side, but quickly kind of do the Democrat thing. | ||
I mean, is it a bit of an odd thing that you kind of don't know who you're running against? | ||
Because your point, it's like Biden, is this really even like what is going on there? | ||
I mean, what do you really make of what's happening with him and who's in charge and all that? | ||
I mean, look, I think that, you know, it's easy to know that Susan Rice is still in that White House and that the old Obama crew is still there. | ||
But Biden has done an amazing job at becoming much more progressive. | ||
I mean, than anybody ever thought he would be. | ||
I think you're looking at Biden and Kamala. | ||
That's who we're looking at. | ||
That's what you have to assume. | ||
If Biden isn't still there, Kamala is going to be the one in there. | ||
And I'm not OK with any of that. | ||
Yeah, it'd be kind of fun to run against her. | ||
I feel like that would be at least a little more fun for you. | ||
Like the Biden thing, it's like, how do you make sense of what... I mean, that's fun too, because you look at, I mean, when you've got such a low bar, I mean, that's not a bad thing. | ||
So, all right, so let's talk about some of the people that you'll be running against on the Republican side, because everyone I think is trying to jockey for, you know, what separates us all on these things. | ||
So first off, I mean, you could be on a debate stage with your former boss, Do you relish in that? | ||
That seems to be where he shines. | ||
What do you make of having to do that? | ||
I shine on a debate stage too. | ||
It's just a fact. | ||
We're both running. | ||
We're both going to be on a debate stage. | ||
He's my friend. | ||
But at the end of the day, do we have different styles and different ways? | ||
Yeah, I think that's going to show. | ||
What about the guy here in Florida? | ||
I live in Florida now. | ||
My life is immeasurably better, as you know, because of that. | ||
Like, to me, he's done basically everything right. | ||
We don't know if he's running. | ||
It sounds like there'll be a little bit of a foreign policy difference with you guys, according to the Tucker thing, for sure. | ||
But a lot of the other stuff kind of seems similar. | ||
What do you make of that? | ||
Well, I saw your statement, actually. | ||
You just put out a statement that basically he's copying Trump on a lot of this stuff. | ||
I mean, he's been a good governor. | ||
And I think that, you know, I'm a fan of governors. | ||
I think governors know what it means to run something. | ||
They understand how to deal with a crisis. | ||
They understand how to deal with a budget. | ||
There's a lot to be said about a governor. | ||
You know, the only thing I'll say is that, you know, watching him Like, he did a total 180 and switched on where he was on entitlements and is now where Trump is. | ||
He did a total 180 on where he is with Ukraine and is now where Trump is. | ||
So, it just comes across like a Trump echo. | ||
Well, you know, then there's no difference between the two of them. | ||
Could some of that just be being in office and how things change? | ||
I'm not going to assume to know what he's thinking, why he's thinking it. | ||
I just think that it's odd that he is literally saying the exact same things as Trump. | ||
I mean, you see like the same things are coming out. | ||
And I think Americans, when they look at it, that were the case. | ||
They just vote for Trump. | ||
They're not looking for an echo. | ||
They're looking for like, For options, but you know, he's got to decide where he's going to be on everything. | ||
I think you have to be honest with the American people and say, yes, you've got to acknowledge entitlement reforms, but there's a way to do it. | ||
I think you've got to be honest on, you know, foreign policy that look, if you are going to be weak in the knees on Russia. | ||
You're going to end up with Russia being just like China. | ||
We watched that happen. | ||
We had Republicans and Democrats that got weak in the knees on China and said, oh, just leave them. | ||
If we're nice to them, they'll want to be like us. | ||
That is why we are in this situation where they are stealing intellectual property. | ||
They're now in our universities. | ||
They're buying up our farmland. | ||
They're sending spy balloons up in the air. | ||
It all started with people saying, you don't need to worry about China. | ||
Let's just worry about us. | ||
Well, you start doing that with Russia, and now you're going to have China and Russia there. | ||
So actually, instead of with our remaining time going through the laundry list of people that are running, I think those are the big two. | ||
So your feelings are clear on that. | ||
I would just want to ask you sort of philosophically, I think one of the things that I'm seeing bubble up now constantly is that people feel that the machine itself, that the way the United States was constructed cannot work at a federal level, that the states are so out of whack with each other, and that I fled California that I truly see no hope for. | ||
After the last time I was in San Francisco, I mean, It is. | ||
It barely looks like an American city. | ||
It looks like a third world country, basically. | ||
And then I see how things are flourishing here. | ||
That there really is a feeling amongst a certain set of people on the right, like, actually, the united part of this thing is not going to work anymore. | ||
And that we should only focus on the states. | ||
What do you think about that? | ||
I'm a states rights girl. | ||
You know, I mean, I think that You know, as a governor, I think that the majority of control should always be in the states. | ||
I mean, look, the federal government, it breaks more than it fixes. | ||
We see that every day. | ||
So, you know, as president, my goal is going to be to empower the states as much as possible. | ||
Whether it's health care, whether it's education, whether it's military, whether it's all of those things, it's best when it's closest to the people. | ||
That's when government runs the best. | ||
When you have these behemoth agencies, That gets so bloated and so big and then try and dictate to everybody what they should do. | ||
I think that's part of the problem. | ||
We've got to clean it out. | ||
What does that mean? | ||
Because I think there's going to be a competition for you guys to basically blow apart every agency. | ||
I can see it happening on stage. | ||
How many of you will blow apart the Department of Ed? | ||
How many of you? | ||
Like EPA, blah, blah, blah. | ||
I mean, is that what you'd go for? | ||
Like really just like disassembling these things? | ||
So what I did in South Carolina was I made sure that I put people in charge of those agencies and put people within those agencies. | ||
Their job was to clean it up. | ||
Get rid of the red tape. | ||
Get rid of the bureaucracy. | ||
Get rid of the people who had been there too long that had created these power fiefdoms. | ||
And some agencies, it required really cleaning house. | ||
And some, it required tweaks. | ||
But you don't know, you know, once you get in there, but you have to assume they all are bloated and they all have it. | ||
And it should be a number one priority that you do day one, that that's in there and that's the number one rule. | ||
Because if you don't have a government that works for the people, then you've just got a government that works for power. | ||
And that's what you don't want. | ||
The second part is we've got to get to a place where, as much as I love term limits, Within bureaucracy, you've got to roll people over. | ||
No one should stay in the same job for 20 or 30 years. | ||
Is that in essence what the deep state, when people say deep state, is that what they mean more than anything else? | ||
It's just the bureaucratic layer of these people that are sort of never moving in these agencies. | ||
So the president comes and goes, but these guys are 40 years in doing the same thing and making an awful lot of money doing it. | ||
Well, you know, it's like when I was at the United Nations and I was going, my first speech was actually hitting Russia on what they were doing with Ukraine at the time with the whole Crimea thing. | ||
And so when I went in, you know, I drafted my speech. | ||
I was ready to go. | ||
I sent it to the State Department, you know, just in National Security Council so they could look it over. | ||
They call back all upset, saying, you can't say this. | ||
And I said, well, what part, you know, what part's factually incorrect? | ||
And they said, well, none of it's factually incorrect, but you can't talk like this. | ||
And I said, okay, if you've got an issue or a fact that is wrong, I am the first one to want to fix it. | ||
You can't tell me how to say something. | ||
And I just ignored them and I went forward. | ||
But that's kind of, they want you to do it their way. | ||
They want you to do things. | ||
But, you know, the reason that I was able to do so much in the United Nations was I went in with fresh eyes. | ||
You know, I went in and really wanted to break what needed to be broken and see it through a different lens. | ||
And I've never held office in D.C., but I think that same thing needs to happen. | ||
You've got to go in and not have allegiances to anything. | ||
You've got to build the trust back up. | ||
I mean, Americans don't trust Any agency. | ||
And so the number one goal of a leader is Americans should at least trust what these agencies are telling them. | ||
And if they're so big and so bureaucratic and so powerful, something's wrong with the system. | ||
Would you say that's all a result of just sort of bipartisan bad policy or is that really just this, we did 50 some odd minutes, we haven't said the word woke once, like is it just that wokeness has now infected everything and all of the wrong people are being hired for all of the wrong thing, all of the wrong reasons, and nobody's qualified to do any of this? | ||
This was before any of the wokeness. | ||
This was the fact that, you know, I saw this in South Carolina. | ||
Agencies think that if they're going to get the same budget next year, they have to spend everything that they have. | ||
And we put in place... It's true, right? | ||
It's not just that they think it, it's actually true. | ||
That's true. | ||
So I would go into agencies and there would be closets of computers and printers and everything they would do. | ||
And so we start incentivizing agencies to give money back to the taxpayers. | ||
So, you know, when you go in there, what they do is, oh, we need more people for this, we need more people for that. | ||
You add a new program, that's not adding a person, that's adding 25 more people. | ||
That's the growth of government. | ||
And so at some point, you go into every agency, you look at every program and say, what was the intent? | ||
Is it still needed? | ||
I did that in the United Nations. | ||
I went into every single one of the peacekeeping operations we had, and I said, what was the original intent? | ||
Are we completing it? | ||
And what's our exit strategy? | ||
Because they had no exit strategies to any of them. | ||
We saved $3 billion the first year. | ||
It's just about putting some good approaches in place that make sure that they're actually meeting the intended goal to start with. | ||
And if there is no goal anymore, you scrap that program. | ||
You scrap the people that go with it, and that's how you clean an agency. | ||
And then you go and you put in something where anybody that's in a role, they can only serve in it four to five years, and then they roll to a different position or another position. | ||
You never let them sit for that long. | ||
So speaking of the UN, quickly, is it weird to you how irrelevant the UN is now? | ||
I mean, it almost is like in complete conjunction with you leaving. | ||
Like, the UN is, no one talks about the UN. | ||
They don't, it doesn't seem like they meet anymore. | ||
Does the Security Council do anything? | ||
Do they even know what's happening in Russia? | ||
Like, what is the UN at this point? | ||
Except that they rack up a lot of parking tickets. | ||
I mean, the UN is a farce. | ||
I've said that for a long time. | ||
But what's interesting, you say that, is I was meeting with Prime Minister Modi in India back when I was at the UN. | ||
And we were talking about, at the time, their alliances You know, their military cooperation with Russia at the time. | ||
And he said, do you know I never paid attention to the United Nations until you were there? | ||
But the reason that was the case was it wasn't about me specifically. | ||
It was about the fact that I forced them to talk about things that were uncomfortable to talk about. | ||
I forced them to deal with issues of the day and not old archaic things. | ||
And I called them out when they were doing something wrong. | ||
And, you know, just said, why aren't we talking about Russia? | ||
Why aren't we talking about the chemical weapons in Syria? | ||
Why aren't we talking about the Iran deal and how they're violating? | ||
I just forced them to talk about things that were uncomfortable. | ||
And I think that we need to have some uncomfortable conversations in this country, too. | ||
Speaking of forcing someone to talk about uncomfortable things, I mean, who are you going to choose as your VP? | ||
How about that? | ||
Come on! | ||
Oh, I'll let you know. | ||
We'll figure it out at the time. | ||
unidentified
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But it'll be somebody that makes the team stronger, that's for sure. | |
Do you have any other final thoughts? | ||
I think we've covered most of the stuff I wanted to hit here. | ||
I think the main thing is everybody needs to put all of this division in its place and understand we're fighting for our country. | ||
That's what this is about. | ||
Every American has to fight for the survival of our country. | ||
And in order to fight for the survival of anything, you have to love it. | ||
We have to go back to loving America. | ||
We have to go back to love the principles of America. | ||
Capitalism has lifted up more people than any place in the world. | ||
We don't need to go into this socialism. | ||
We need to quit beating down You know, America. | ||
I always tell this story because I think it's fascinating. | ||
When I was on the Simon Boulevard Bridge in South America, you saw thousands of people going from Venezuela to Colombia, holding their kids, walking for hours in the hot sun to get to one meal they might get that day. | ||
They were killing zoo animals for food. | ||
And when we got to the Catholic Church, they all started coming around me. | ||
And at first, I was like, why do they care about who I am? | ||
And then it hit me. | ||
They didn't care who I was. | ||
They cared where I was from. | ||
In me, they saw America. | ||
And in America, they saw hope. | ||
We need to appreciate our blessings. | ||
We need to remember what my parents always told my brothers and my sister and me was, even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America. | ||
Now we have to fight for it. | ||
Everybody wants to talk about this political side. | ||
Don't complain about what happens in a general if you don't play in this primary. | ||
Play in this primary. | ||
See America the way it should be. | ||
Want more for your family, and our kids, and our education, and our military, and our foreign policy. | ||
We deserve better. | ||
We deserve better. | ||
And if we all commit to it, we'll get better. | ||
But that's what it's going to take. | ||
Well, then I guess I can only end this with one last thing, which is I sense your future will be brighter than Don Lemon's, so it's going to all be okay. | ||
Go to NikkiHaley.com. | ||
If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, check out our politics playlist. | ||
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