March 29, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The margin presented a target of opportunity for us. | ||
| Look, like I said, this is my fourth term and I'm tired of the way this place works. | ||
| I think it's deeply corrupt. | ||
| I think the lobbyists run the show most of the times. | ||
| I think people are more interested in servicing their PAC fundraiser than they are the needs of their constituents. | ||
| And it's a grift game. | ||
| And what facilitates that grift game is an entire sophisticated structure | ||
| that ensures that no one's really responsible for the legislating. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, we're still in DC. | |
| I'm still Dave Rubin. | ||
| It's still The Rubin Report. | ||
| And joining me today is the congressman from Florida's 1st District and a first-time Rubin Report guest, which is really bizarre to me, Matt Gaetz. | ||
| Matt, how are you? | ||
| This is weird to me that we've never sat down before. | ||
| I feel like you've been fighting with everybody. | ||
| I feel like I know you because I watch the show, so. | ||
| How am I doing? | ||
| Great. | ||
| I mean, you're getting the message out. | ||
| Killing it in the hair game. | ||
| That's really what I want to focus on. | ||
| You know, when Dave Brat lost in Virginia, it was sad to see a colleague I respected go, but that was when I got the best hair in Congress. | ||
| And so, you know, there's some up-and-comers. | ||
| Kylie out of California, he's got great hair, great height. | ||
| I'm worried about him. | ||
| Is that mostly what's going on behind the scenes? | ||
| Everyone's like, who has the best hair? | ||
| Who has the worst hair plugs? | ||
| That's pretty much what's happening. | ||
| I wish there was a border bill up. | ||
| How about that for a lead? | ||
| I wish that we were talking about internal enforcement and asylum reform. | ||
| One thing that frustrates me a little is that we've passed two bills that deal with the borders of Indian tribes and not yet a bill to deal with the border of our country. | ||
| So I wouldn't give our Congress An A-plus yet, until we get the work of the people done. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| You're going right into the issues. | ||
| So let's do it right there. | ||
| Well, actually, give me one minute on just Matt Gaetz 101, for the people that just don't know your history at all, and then we'll get into all the specifics. | ||
| I'm a country lawyer from North Florida, served in our state legislature proudly for six years. | ||
| I chaired what was the equivalent of our Ways and Means Committee, fought for low taxes, good regulatory reform. | ||
| I was probably a more libertarian-leaning member of the State House than I am of the Congress. | ||
| When President Trump was running, the juices started to stir to do a little more for my country. | ||
| I got here, I'm in my fourth term now and eager to continue the work. | ||
| I think that we've got one-half of one-third of the government right now, and every day is really a test in how to exercise leverage effectively. | ||
| And you can overplay that and underplay that, but we're working to curate that balance in a way that makes life better for people. | ||
| So let's talk about that leverage for a minute, because just about two hours ago, I had Congressman Dan Crenshaw in here and you guys were obviously on opposite sides of everything that went down with McCarthy and the leadership. | ||
| But that was my whole purpose of coming to D.C. | ||
| I wanted to sit down with guys that were on every side of every issue. | ||
| So you basically led the fight against McCarthy. | ||
| Was that, were you planning on doing that? | ||
| Did it just kind of materialize out of nowhere and then did it become like a monster unto itself once it started? | ||
| Well, I think there were a lot of people who took leadership roles on different issue sets. | ||
| Not every person required the same concessions to allow McCarthy to ascend to the speakership. | ||
| Some people are more fiscal hawks. | ||
| Some people are more border hawks. | ||
| Some people are oversight hawks. | ||
| And so, within those different groups, there were a lot of voices that emerged, and so I wouldn't characterize myself the leader, but we realized the opportunity... Well, I guess maybe the media, at least, kind of framed you as, like, you were kind of the leader. | ||
| The media does like talking about me a lot. | ||
| They do like talking about you. | ||
| What's the handle on that? | ||
| Well, you hang out with the orange guy a lot. | ||
| There's a lot, you know, come on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, you know, he's a fun guy to hang out with. | |
| So, you know, the margin presented a target of opportunity for us. | ||
| Look, like I said, this is my fourth term, and I'm tired of the way this place works. | ||
| I think it's deeply corrupt. | ||
| I think the lobbyists run the show most of the times. | ||
| I think people are more interested in servicing their PAC fundraiser than they are the needs of their constituents. | ||
| And it's a grift game. And the way that what facilitates that grift game is an entire sophisticated | ||
| structure that ensures that no one's really responsible for the legislating, right? If | ||
| we had to take individual votes on individual departments and authorizations and bills and | ||
| spending, then we would probably be held to account to a greater degree by the people | ||
| in this country. But instead, what you get is every year or so some multi thousand page | ||
| bill that you get a day, day and a half to read. And the whole deal is thumbs up or thumbs | ||
| On the whole thing. | ||
| And then you're left with the decision of, you know, voting for a bunch of crap you don't agree with or leaving out the widows and the orphans and the veterans and the military and things that every American would care about. | ||
| And we had to force upon the system a better way to deal with legislating as an enterprise. | ||
| And that had features in policy, features in personnel and features in procedure. | ||
| And that's what we were working through. | ||
| So I heard you on Tim Poole's podcast talking about just that, these massive bills that you get and that nobody can read it as you just laid out, and it's a whole bunch of stuff, but if you don't vote for it, someone's gonna die and all that. | ||
| So I wanna talk about the specifics of that. | ||
| But did you feel like you actually at the end got the concessions? | ||
| And how do you know that you're actually gonna get them? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Do you have a piece of paper that's sitting in your office, you and McCarthy? | ||
| Yeah, the ultimate accountability tool isn't a piece of paper. | ||
| The accountability tool is that any one member can go and force a vote on the speaker at any time. | ||
|
unidentified
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So that was the main concession? | |
| Well, that was the enforcement tool for the other substantive concessions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, I'll gladly go into the substance of these things. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| And sure, we had documents that we exchanged back and forth with offers and suggestions and revisions. | ||
| And in any negotiation, you never get exactly what you want. | ||
| But, you know, I recall going into the Speaker's office with Scott Perry and Lauren Boebert Before the balloting began and we laid out what we thought was a pretty reasonable proposal to the speaker and he laughed at us and said, we just, you know, wanted the opportunity to have that power, but that resided in the speaker, not in our group. | ||
| Then ultimately we got to something that was far better than had been rejected and ultimately far better for the House of Representatives. | ||
| And I don't say that as a criticism of McCarthy. | ||
| I actually think it's to his great credit that he was willing to see past a reflexive opposition to things like the one member motion to vacate the chair. | ||
| He had originally said that was a red line. | ||
| He would never cross it. | ||
| He would never go there. | ||
| And had he been stubborn about that, He probably wouldn't be Speaker and it would have been worse for the country and for the House and for the party. | ||
| So his ability to, I think, move past his red lines started that process of building trust. | ||
| What do you make how it creates strange bedfellows out of people? | ||
| So for example, you know, Trump is backing McCarthy, but you're a Trump guy. | ||
| You're going against McCarthy. | ||
| The base doesn't seem to like McCarthy, but the base loves Trump. | ||
| Like there were so many just like odd pieces to the whole thing. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I mean, you know, we're complicated people. | ||
| No two people see everything the same. | ||
| I know people view me as a Trump acolyte and certainly I spend time with the former president. | ||
| I like him. | ||
| I support him. | ||
| But even President Trump and I see some issues differently. | ||
| And when you have a high intensity negotiation, different people can go to different corners and make different demands. | ||
| And I think ultimately we got to a good result. | ||
| But I don't believe that anyone deserves praise yet because all we have developed is a toolkit. | ||
| And it's a toolkit that's really unlike any I've ever had as a member of Congress. | ||
| But if all we do is admire the tools and talk about how great it was that we got the tools and what a negotiation delivered the tools to the toolkit, we don't use them. | ||
| Then we are part of the fraudulent system that screws people over. | ||
| So how do you wanna use the tools? | ||
| Today, you're in DC. | ||
| If you go over to the Capitol, start chatting with these guys. | ||
| How do you wanna actually exercise this stuff? | ||
| Well, one that's gotten me a little worked up as we're having this discussion is the border. | ||
| There is a commitment that Speaker McCarthy made that the border plan that had been previously endorsed by the Texas delegation would be coming to the floor. | ||
| And right now, We don't even have a border vote scheduled in committee, in the House Judiciary Committee. | ||
| We were supposed to, right now, be preparing for an upcoming hearing and the immigration bills were taken off the agenda. | ||
| So I'm a little frustrated about that. | ||
| I want to give grace and deference where it's due if there are some details still to work out. | ||
| But one substantive concession is to get a bill to the floor that says that we detain people if we have the space or we turn them away. | ||
| It's HR 29, and we need to get to the business of doing that. | ||
| The other is the budget. | ||
| We have to start moving individual appropriations bills to the floor so we can evaluate every agency, every layer of every agency. | ||
| That has to start getting scheduled in the Appropriations Committee. | ||
| We were promised to vote on term limits. | ||
| I think that a lot of these things, by the way, are gonna fail, that I'm asking for. | ||
| A term limits vote will fail. | ||
| The real changes to secure the border might fail if pro-amnesty Republicans don't hang with us. | ||
| Bottom line is I'm okay with that. | ||
| You see the leadership in both parties have this view that it's this great embarrassment and this great tumult if you put something on the floor that doesn't have the votes. | ||
| I actually think that can be revealing and sometimes you have to go through an iterative process to get to a good work product. | ||
| And whether it's Obamacare or I know who's written it. | ||
| that don't get that scrutiny, you end up with all these terrible unintended consequences | ||
| if you don't do it. | ||
| So when you talk about these freaking giant, they're not like this, | ||
| they're actually like almost to the ceiling high, some of these things. | ||
| So they hand this to you and you basically don't know who's written it, right? | ||
| Or it's lobbyists that have half written it. | ||
| I know who's written it. | ||
| It's the interest groups. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the way, yeah, I mean, the way, what this town runs on are the interest groups | ||
| that plow money into the political system. | ||
| And it's more sophisticated than that, but that is really the rock upon which they build their church. | ||
| But it's also, like in a lot of these offices, you get Underpaid staff working for the taxpayer. | ||
| And a lot of them, their dream is to go work as lobbyists or for these interest groups. | ||
| So they end up in some places becoming the valets of the special interests. | ||
| Now, fortunately, my staff is, we're a pirate ship. | ||
| So everybody comes on board and understands that we got it, we got a different kind of mission. | ||
| But in a lot of places, that is actually part of the swamp that, that concerns me. | ||
| But they're able to hide in that corrupt system. | ||
| If you have individual scrutiny of the bills, You get to flush out all the varmint and then you know what happens. | ||
| And, you know, getting personnel appointed is another critical thing for conservatives. | ||
| We have people like Thomas Massey, Chip Roy, Ralph Norman, who we trust do not fall victim to that system. | ||
| They have long histories of standing up for their constituents. | ||
| And so we put the three of them on the rules committee. | ||
| Now, guess what? | ||
| Before stuff gets to the floor, we're working out our issues in advance. | ||
| We're getting some of the pork and special favors for the lobby corps weeded out. | ||
| And then on the Appropriations Committee, we also demanded spots for additional conservatives. | ||
| We demanded that one of our existing members have over a subcommittee to be able to constrain | ||
| some of the social spending. | ||
| So I mean, these are real concessions that Speaker McCarthy has delivered on. | ||
| And then we've just got a lot of other stuff just stating in the pipeline. | ||
| And as you can tell, I'm anxious to get that done. | ||
| What do you think the Republicans can do to message this stuff better? | ||
| Because it's, I've been telling all my guests and I've sat down, I'm gonna sit down with Chip and Thomas tomorrow. | ||
| We've had Ron Johnson was here today. | ||
| I'm sitting down with as many people as I can. | ||
| And one of the things that seems odd to me is that Peter Thiel always says, we have the evil party and the stupid party. | ||
| And it's like, the Democrats are the evil party, obviously. | ||
| But then there's this other party that as frustrated as people may be with them, They just don't seem to want to cross that divide. | ||
| What do you think Republicans can do on that? | ||
| You know, we face exquisite headwinds. | ||
| The censorship industrial complex is real and actually we're using the power we have in the weaponization subcommittee, also a concession part that was a part of the speaker's race. | ||
| To expose that censorship industrial complex, to haul the people forward that really are the puppet masters that engage in the shadow banning and the programming of the mainstream media and the government threats to big tech that shape what people see and what they believe. | ||
| So it's hard to talk about the efficacy of one's message when you're not talking about the systems that proliferate that message. | ||
| So I think that is a threshold issue you have to address. | ||
| Look, you always want a movement with the best messages and the best messengers. | ||
| And fortunately for us, the left is somewhere between like a nursing home escape and a carnival freak show. | ||
| And so we've got a lot of running room. | ||
| And I actually think we have great messengers. | ||
| I mean, you mentioned Dan Crenshaw earlier. | ||
| There are a lot of issues that he and I see differently in the house, but that's a guy who knows how to carry a message. | ||
| He does so effectively. | ||
| I admire that about him. | ||
| He actually said the same thing about Yeah, and I think that right now the interesting exercise we're in with a four-seat majority is we have to think about things that we can unify behind that go from Matt Gaetz to, you know, a Mike Lawler or a Brian Fitzpatrick or a David Valadao, someone more in the political center. | ||
| And acknowledging that and working through that actually makes us stronger as a team going forward. | ||
| I don't say that as some some cheeky bullshit. You look at the debt limit that we have right now. | ||
| What are we going to demand as a part of the negotiation on the debt limit? | ||
| I've proposed demanding work requirements on a lot of these social safety net programs. | ||
| Not because that's the only thing I'd like to do. | ||
| I'd like to zero out the Federal Department of Education. | ||
| I'd like to zero out the ATF. | ||
| I'd like to zero out the Department of Labor. | ||
| I'd like to do all those things. | ||
| But I recognize that those demands are likely to fizzle in the broader construct we find ourselves in with Biden in the White House and with the Senate in Democrat hands. | ||
| And so what are the ways that we can juxtapose Joe Biden, not to me, but to Bill Clinton? | ||
| Who was willing to sit down and work out work requirements. | ||
| So that's how a four seat majority informs on like the real time decisions we're making this week about a consequential issue like the debt limit. | ||
| So I've asked this of everybody that's coming in here. | ||
| I mean, you mentioned how it's, what do you say? | ||
| It's an old age home and a clown circus, something like that, or a freak show. | ||
| It's like, is there anyone? | ||
| Is there anyone to talk to that you can work with on things? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| On the other side. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there are people in both parties to whom it is worthless to speak because they are vessels through which the special interests operate and the only thing that's going to guide them is some corrupt influence. | ||
| Sometimes it's campaign money. | ||
| Sometimes it's some family member of theirs that gets a no-show job that enhances their lifestyle. | ||
| Sometimes it's what their stock portfolio looks like. | ||
| You know, there are also very good people on both sides, I would say, that want to move the country forward. | ||
| Increasingly, I think there are too many Democrats who actually explicitly root against the country. | ||
| And they believe that is virtuous because they think that if America is weakened as a nation, that somehow we will treat each other better and be more just. | ||
| And they're actually just as dumb as the neocons who believe that you can go behind every Middle Eastern sand dune and build some Jeffersonian democracy after a regime change war. | ||
| I'm not for regime change there, and I'm not for changing the fundamentals of American life that have made us the envy of the world. | ||
| I think that the deconstruction is occurring on the left right now to the family, to the education setting, to law enforcement, and as conservatives, we have to unite to resist that. | ||
| Do you think there's anything that the Democrats can do to reverse that? | ||
| Or do you think that ship has sailed? | ||
| Meaning, you know, we played a clip this morning. | ||
| They don't invite me to their bunko parties. | ||
| You know, we played a clip this morning. | ||
| It's like AOC, you guys passed the parents' rights and education thing and she's calling it fascism. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries is saying they don't want to teach about the Holocaust. | ||
| Like, it's just like lies and craziness. | ||
| Like, is there anyone in there that can sort of stem that? | ||
| Or do you think that's just about it? | ||
| Broadly, I don't know the answer to that question, but I do think we have to be willing to create alliances around issue sets where we may have common ground. | ||
| Take, for example, the surveillance state that we have. | ||
| I get real squeamish about the powers that the Patriot Act and other laws have fused into the national security state to deprive Americans of their liberties, often in the absence | ||
| of constitutional protections. | ||
| And I can find Democrats like Zoe Lofgren on the Judiciary Committee or Ro Khanna in | ||
| the Progressive Delegation who will actually work with me to try to build enduring coalitions | ||
| against an establishment that also includes both Republicans and Democrats. | ||
| I don't know why we're in Syria. | ||
| I think that that is a foolish conquest for the United States. | ||
| I think that our service members are sitting ducks in many cases guarding oil rigs where for relatively low cost the Iranians can send lethal drone strikes. | ||
| So I force a vote on whether or not to withdraw from Syria. | ||
| I get 20 minutes of time, the Republicans get 20 minutes of time, the Democrats get 20 minutes of time. | ||
| All of the time controlled by each of the parties was given to people to debate in favor of America staying in Syria. | ||
| It shows you on some of these issues, from surveillance to foreign policy, how it's not really the red team against the blue team. | ||
| It's more about the establishment against the rest of us. | ||
| You must be kind of proud that it does seem, at least from what I can tell, that the anti-war sentiment does seem to be picking up that, you know, even if you watch the way when when Tucker took all the statements from the presidential candidates about Ukraine, you know, and DeSantis was a little more in the Trump camp than people wanted, then he slightly moved on it, but the fact that the whole machine came down on him. | ||
| He was right. | ||
| I mean, you're like a DeSantis apostle. | ||
| Why is it that Ron moved away from the America first position and had to start sounding more like Piers Morgan? | ||
| It's interesting and people People can watch my video from the next day. | ||
| I thought the statement on Tucker was perfect. | ||
| I actually thought it was basically perfect. | ||
| Like, it's a territorial dispute, we can't solve all the world's problems, and we got our own problems. | ||
| Like, that seemed good enough to me. | ||
| I should say, I'm not a surrogate for him or anything, so it is what it is. | ||
| He moved off it a little bit. | ||
| What did he say after? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I'm not even sure, but I know he did for the last couple of days. | |
| Oh, the Piers interview, he said war criminal, and I think that's what got everybody. | ||
| He said Putin's a war criminal. | ||
| And he started to parrot some McCain-Romney lines also. | ||
| Oh, the gas station line, that was the big one, yeah. | ||
| I don't know, I don't know, what do you think? | ||
| I think that DeSantis probably had the right energy in the Tucker interview more than in the Piers Morgan interview. | ||
| And, you know, he and I served together in the Congress and I enthusiastically supported his campaign for governor, served as his transition chair when he took the position, very proud of the work that he's done in Florida. | ||
| But we always would squabble a bit over foreign policy because I'd read his book and it leaned a little more into the Boltonista view of the world than my view of the world. | ||
| And so we would have friendly squabbles about foreign policy at times, and he's very bright, he understands the world very well, but I have a different view of what America's focus should be. | ||
| And when we try to become the world's policeman and the world's piggy bank, not only does that drain us of our treasure and the blood of our bravest patriots, it's often counterproductive. | ||
| Yeah, I'll be totally honest, I mean, and this is what I said to Crenshaw, who I happen to agree more with you on this than Crenshaw. | ||
| Like, to me, if nothing else, putting aside all of the policies, we are governed by a bunch of complete morons at the moment, basically. | ||
| So why would I trust they can't do anything right here? | ||
| Why would I trust that we can just endlessly give money across the world and that's gonna fix anything? | ||
| Even if you put aside the philosophic isolationist versus, you know, doing stuff policy, yeah. | ||
| I also get to have spirited, intelligent debates with Mr. Crenshaw on the subject and I enjoy those and I appreciate his perspective. | ||
| You know, but you look at our military now, during the Afghanistan withdrawal, the fact that they sequenced it incorrectly, the fact that they didn't downstream the authority to the American snipers to take out the suicide bomber resulted in the loss of 13 lives. | ||
| Then we didn't even get the redemption right. | ||
| When, when we were going to go have the vengeance killing against the ISIS guys who were planning the plot against Americans, we accidentally killed a family in a van. | ||
| So if Taiwan is invaded by China and we get in the fight, are we going to mizzen hit Japan? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I look at our military right now and I'm inspired every day by the folks who put the uniform on and love our nation. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| But they are not well served by the clowns who are making the calls at the senior levels of the Pentagon. | ||
| What did these guys get right? | ||
| They told us that the Ghani government was gonna stay and fight for at least six months, and they told us that the Ukrainians were gonna be gone in six weeks. | ||
| Do you trust these people to make accurate assessments about literally anything at this point? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| So the other thing I've been asking everybody is, do you think this is incompetence or willful destruction of everything that makes sense? | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I struggle with that decision because, honestly, I try to not judge people's motives. | ||
| But at some point, you know, the good book says you have to judge the tree by the fruit. | ||
| And I'm looking at the decision calculus and what it leads to, and it is just unworthy of my constituents who will go anywhere and fight anyone because they love this country. | ||
| And they don't ask the tough questions. | ||
| They do whatever they're told. | ||
| And so it is incumbent upon us to be willing to ask those questions. | ||
| And when Secretary of Defense and the Chairman come before the House Armed Services Committee, I think I'll be asking some tough questions. | ||
| So I think one thing that people see is, okay, so you bring out a bunch of people to talk about big tech, the Twitter executives, or this one or that one, and we expose some of the nonsense. | ||
| But nothing ever happens after, right? | ||
| That it's just like, okay, wow, you got the guy who traded the email with the FBI agent to censor somebody, but then the next day it's like, everyone still has their jobs. | ||
| Nobody really, you know, no one in government was hauled out. | ||
| So what about that? | ||
| Like, what about getting some of the people that were doing some of the surveillance stuff that was involved with Twitter and Facebook and everything else, and getting them to testify? | ||
| All right, those are the people that should be testifying, not just the kind of half-assed Twitter executive who was or wasn't doing the best he could. | ||
| Well, I think that's what we're building to. | ||
| My assessment is that that is precisely how this investigation crescendos. | ||
| The people in our government who believe that they should substitute their judgment about what is true or false, about what is disinformation or not, for the judgment of Americans who I think actually can compare sources and review information. | ||
| The pro-censorship crowd, they have such a low view of the rest of us. | ||
| They have to be there to protect us. | ||
| us. Well, actually, that's not how it works at all. And when you ask about consequences, | ||
| the United States Congress cannot go throw handcuffs on anyone. And that's probably for | ||
| pretty good reason. Right now, we have a Justice Department that is pretty recalcitrant to | ||
| any referral that we make, even if these people tell us to get bent when we send them subpoenas. | ||
| That'll be an interesting fight. | ||
| And so we have to go through this accommodation process to try to bleed out of the executive branch the people, the records, the admissions that I think make the case. | ||
| The real question is how to use the leverage, which I believe is the power of the subpoena and the power of the purse. | ||
| That is what Speaker McCarthy said in his acceptance speech, and it was beautiful, and it's true. | ||
| And so we cannot continue to fund this weaponized government against our people if those authorities stay in place, and if we do not bake into any budget deal a restriction on what they're able to do to us. | ||
| What about the fact that it seems like so few people that are asking the questions at these hearings have any freaking clue what they're talking about? | ||
| It's almost on everything, but I would say when it comes to- They should just yield me all the time. | ||
| That's what you're saying, right? | ||
| That's allowed. | ||
| They could just send me the time. | ||
| Let Gates do it. | ||
| Jordan, there's a bunch of good ones, Mike Johnson, Dan Bishop, you know, Harriet Hageman. | ||
| We got a lot of good ones, but yeah, no. | ||
| She's something else. | ||
| She's very effective. | ||
| Yeah, but really, like, especially with the tech stuff. | ||
| You get these people up there that clearly don't even know how to open up an app on their phone, | ||
| and they're like, it's just so stupid. | ||
| Well, I mean, we are not going to be able to defeat big tech if our leaders on the front line | ||
| are not digital natives. | ||
| That's why this next generation coming behind me is so important to win the battle against big tech and to | ||
| win the battles against. | ||
| Against transhumanism that are not even fully emerging yet, right? | ||
| And so, I view the geriatric millennials among us as really the bridge to try to start the fires that the zoomers behind us will have to really take up because it fundamentally shapes their life. | ||
|
unidentified
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But yeah, if you've been waiting around... A geriatric millennial, that's a Gen Zer, basically? | |
| No, no, a geriatric millennial is like the old millennial, like the first millennials, you know? | ||
| So where does that put Gen Z, then? | ||
| Well, Gen Z, they're the zoomers, they're behind us. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry, not Gen Z, I mean Gen X. I'm Gen X, what happened to us? | ||
| Yeah, no, Gen X, you guys listen to all the metal bands, and you're not really digital natives at all, right? | ||
| Gen X actually believes that you should come to work early and stay late, and that the way you moved up in the world was by working harder. | ||
| You guys were getting into the workforce in the Reagan 80s. | ||
| The Gen Xers have no idea how to talk to the Zoomers who show up and say, like, I'd like to discuss my work-life balance with you. | ||
| That's totally foreign to the Gen Xers. | ||
| But for us... | ||
| Here's the key policy question. | ||
| Do you carve up big tech in the courts, or do you reshape these companies legislatively? | ||
| And frankly, it's what divides people like me and Jim Jordan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| The Jim Jordan approach would be strip them of their immunities, like Section 230, and then allow the trial lawyers to go feast on them. | ||
| It's kind of like what we did to big tobacco in the 90s. | ||
| And I just don't know if that is enough firepower to shoot at the Death Star that is big tech. | ||
| I believe we have to go more the direction of the bell breakup in telecom where you literally force, but you use force of law to say that meta has to alienate Instagram. | ||
| You say that Google has to alienate YouTube and you have to reshape and break up these companies. | ||
| Without going through the litigation process for another seven, eight years. | ||
| Is this where you would say that old school republicanism just kind of doesn't work? | ||
| We played a clip on my show about two, three weeks ago where Mike Pence was on CNBC saying, well, DeSantis went too far by taking away some special rights from Disney. | ||
| And it was like, well, wait a minute. | ||
| He gave Disney those rights. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| And it just read to me as so out of touch with what people want, right? | ||
| There's also SeaWorld, they don't have special rights. | ||
| What is the constituency for Mike Pence? | ||
| I'm just wondering. | ||
| Other than Sunday Show bookers and CNN and the mainstream media, who are the people... I don't think he's running. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think he knows that. | ||
| I don't know anyone. | ||
| I don't know anyone. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I'm wondering where I've got to go to meet the Mike Pence voter. | ||
| Maybe Mike Pence house? | ||
| You must. | ||
| Wait, all right. | ||
| So you're a Florida congressman. | ||
| You're torn with a freaking red ass. | ||
| Where do you get the jacket like that? | ||
| That red jacket? | ||
| Oh, I lifted it off of Mater D on the way into the event. | ||
| I actually believe you. | ||
| I sort of do believe you, but okay. | ||
| Look, you're a Florida congressman. | ||
| You obviously like DeSantis, but you're doing your thing with Trump. | ||
| From where I sit, as someone that lived in Cali, moved to Florida, my life is immeasurably better. | ||
| I brought two companies here that are both flourishing. | ||
| Every one of my guys over here all moved. | ||
| Everyone is seeing the fruits of all of that stuff. | ||
| By that standard, you could vote for any Republican governor in America. | ||
| No, well, I could certainly go to any Republican state and be better than it was in Cali, sure, for sure. | ||
| I'm just seeing everything work in Florida. | ||
| So how do you balance that in that you live in a state that clearly the governor's doing the right thing, you got the super majorities you want and it's cooking, and then also obviously that you like Trump and he obviously has unfinished business and that whole thing. | ||
| I am a DeSantis admirer. | ||
| I worked very hard to get him elected, but Florida has been under unified Republican control since the mid-90s. | ||
| And so there has been a system in place in Florida to advance school choice, to have right-sized environmental regulations, to not overspend on the state budget, to care for our | ||
| seniors and the vulnerable. | ||
| And Ron DeSantis has done an exquisite job as governor leading that enterprise. I know because | ||
| I worked with him as his transition chairman and helped him hire some of the great Floridians | ||
| who've helped him enact bold policies. The time is right for Trump and Washington right now, | ||
| because that is a different fight. | ||
| Being able to successfully steer a successful state and to chart a bold course is something I'm glad Ron's doing. | ||
| I hope he continues to do it for his full eight years. | ||
| This place Needs somebody to come in with a sense of retribution and a sense of, I think, fight that is unique to President Trump. | ||
| And being in Waco this last weekend, seeing the tens of thousands of people show up, there's something unique about Trump and politics that I think we need to have even a chance against what we face electorally. | ||
| Say to you what I've been saying all along on my show, which is, again, I like them both. | ||
| If it ends up that Trump is the president and DeSantis remains my governor, I'll be freaking thrilled. | ||
| That might be the best situation, truly, and as a Floridian, I can fully make an argument that he shouldn't run. | ||
| I fully get all that. | ||
| But what I would like to see out of Trump right now, since you have his ear, is that you don't have to destroy the guy like he's trying to do it. | ||
| It seems to me that the nicknames are not working, that the pretending that Florida- You don't think Meatball Ron worked? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Look, you didn't? | ||
| John Oliver thought it worked. | ||
| This is a hot take, Dave. | ||
| Well, I don't agree with, I don't agree with John Oliver on a lot. | ||
| I don't agree with John Oliver on a lot, but, but, okay. | ||
| But now you're agreeing with John Oliver. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| Listen, I'm asking, I'm asking the question if you thought Meatball Ron just worked as a concept. | ||
| It might be the best of all of them, but like the sanctimonious, like, come on, it doesn't work. | ||
| He's not sanctimonious. | ||
| Like, I don't, I'm not sure Trump knows what the word means. | ||
| Well, look, sometimes you gotta go through a few iterations on the nickname, the game before you land at one. | ||
| Okay, but putting aside the nickname, the point of like trying to destroy the guy that is the standard bearer of a Republican as governor, I think is just misguided. | ||
| I think that that's misguided. | ||
| I get politics is nasty. | ||
| Yeah, nobody pitches underhand here. | ||
| It's the presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, I think that, you know, when someone puts himself in the context. | ||
| But I'm hearing a lot of that. | ||
| I'm telling you, I'm hearing a lot of that. | ||
| Oh sure, none of us like that. | ||
| None of us like when folks we admire are disagreeing and fighting with one another, but I certainly don't begrudge either for engaging in that enterprise because it's competitive. | ||
| Look, I mean, you know how you get the strongest lions? | ||
| Because if there's a strong male lion and he comes up on a less strong male lion that's got some female lions around, he kills the male lion and mates with the females, right? | ||
| That's how it goes in the animal kingdom, and I'm not entirely sure that politics is all that much different. | ||
| Every now and again, you end up with a bunch of dead lions and then you've got Democrats in power, which is a bigger problem, probably. | ||
| Yeah, they're the hyenas, I think, in my metaphor. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| What's next for you? | ||
| I mean, you're gonna fight as this thing's going. | ||
| It seems like Republicans are kind of moving a little bit. | ||
| You got some stuff out of McCarthy. | ||
| What else do you want to see in this town? | ||
| Yeah, I'm thinking very short term. | ||
| I'm thinking let's get a good deal on the debt limit that does not bankrupt this country. | ||
| I'm looking after that and an appropriations process that I hope will reset the table for a decade long past my time here as a congressman. | ||
| And I hope that The things that I fought for during the Speaker's Race will become the expectation and the baseline going forward and that the next generation can come in with even better ideas about how to empower the membership and how to really expose the extent to which | ||
| We don't get to make decisions on far too many matters that are of great consequence to our constituents, and we've got to do a better job fixing that, and I want to use the tools in the toolkit. | ||
| I'm tired of staring at them. | ||
| I often get chastised by my colleagues that I'm impatient, and I feel the anxiousness of that in this moment. | ||
| That probably should be the ending, but I feel like I gotta ask you one more, because now having sat with you for the, I mean, again, the first time that we ever met or anything, you know, if you listen to the mainstream media talk about you, you're some kind of far right, like, it's all nonsense, of course. | ||
| They say that about all of us. | ||
| Why do you think they hate me so much? | ||
| I've wondered this. | ||
| I don't fret over it. | ||
| Now it's probably just like enough you're around Trump enough that it's like it doesn't matter. | ||
| Just proximity. | ||
| Yeah, it just doesn't matter what you say. | ||
| But I mean, they think I'm far right too. | ||
| Oh yeah, you get it too. | ||
| I mean, New York Times literally, front page of the Sunday New York Times said I was one of the leaders of the alt-right, so I could be. | ||
| Better than being one of the followers, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, I guess, exactly. | ||
| At least then you have some ability to move them or something. | ||
| But what about that portion of it, that you're also fighting, it's not just that you're fighting sort of a deep state and a system that's screwy and Democrats that have kind of lost their minds, but also just like a media that is just so far from the truth that it makes just the messaging part of it incredibly difficult. | ||
| When when members get to this town and they go through the first barrage of unfair media criticism I try to advise them don't let the process be the punishment and Often that's what that's why the media does what they do. | ||
| They want to shape our legislative goals, they want to shape the things that we're | ||
| allowed to talk about in civil society, and I just don't give in to the construct. And I actually | ||
| have a far higher view of my fellow Americans than I think the media does, because I think | ||
| people see through the bullshit. I think people know who's fighting for them and who isn't. | ||
| And in a town where a lot of the politicians are just actors reading the scripts from lobbyists and staff who want to become lobbyists, I think people will forgive you a mistake and an occasional disagreement if they feel you are sincere and that you care about them and that you're actually fighting for them and that's how you spend your time. | ||
| So I try to convey that in the work I do. | ||
| I know the media conveys something else, but I continue to get overwhelmingly re-elected. | ||
| And I really am heartened by the prayers that I get, that I feel from all over this country, from folks who want to see that our work is done, not for my sake, but for theirs. | ||
| I know we may not see totally eye-to-eye on everything, but from one Floridian to another, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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