Oct. 20, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Here's a guy who is facing 91 criminal charges. | ||
| As you know, five criminal charges would have put pretty much any other, certainly any other Republican out of the field. | ||
| They'd be gone. | ||
| Not only does Trump endure, he does all kinds of rope-a-dope and he sort of outwits all these guys. | ||
| So he's going to the election and seemingly all of this hasn't really hurt him. | ||
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unidentified
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It's a crazy world, crazy world. | |
| Somebody's gotta have the same views. | ||
| It's a crazy world. | ||
| It's a crazy world. | ||
| Somebody's gotta have the same views. | ||
| Joining me today is a best-selling author, the host of the Dinesh D'Souza podcast, and filmmaker of many films, but his new one's coming out next week, Vindicating Trump, Dinesh D'Souza, good to see you. | ||
| Good to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| We've done this many times now in many, many different studios on many coasts of America, and I have to say the first time that I sat down with you was around 2017 or so, and we were Pretty far apart politically, and I think we were trying to make some sense of each other at the time. | ||
| I think the world has changed quite significantly since then, and we've gotten a lot closer. | ||
| That's sort of indicative of what's going on here in the country, don't you think? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| In fact, I think we, in some ways, went on a similar journey. | ||
| I just maybe went there a little quicker than you did. | ||
| And what I mean is that, you know, when I first encountered Trump on the scene, I was like, where is this guy coming from? | ||
| We don't know anything about him. | ||
| His sort of ideological contours appear to be extremely unclear, to put it mildly. | ||
| And so we would hunker down for Ted Cruz in the 2016 primary. | ||
| Then Trump won, and then it forced a kind of a re-examination. | ||
| Let's take a look. | ||
| What is it about him that's striking a chord? | ||
| And then, of course, the vilification of Trump started, which immediately puts you on your guard. | ||
| So I think by the time that election came along, I thought, yes, this guy represents something new, and it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. | ||
| What do you think he represents at this point? | ||
| Because to me, it's well beyond politics. | ||
| It certainly is not conservatism. | ||
| I don't know what it is other than maybe America can continue in a way that we've known it to be. | ||
| It's something like that. | ||
| I think that the implications of Obama's Let's remake America didn't sink in at the beginning. | ||
| People thought that was boilerplate rhetoric. | ||
| Everyone says, we're the change. | ||
| So this seemed to be staple rhetoric. | ||
| But in fact, in the two terms of Obama, a real remaking was underway on pretty much every front. | ||
| And Trump represents, I think, the antithesis of that. | ||
| So the way I look at it is, we have this in the film, one of the iconic scenes, Trump coming down the escalator, Trump Tower. | ||
| So here's how I understand the symbolism of that scene. | ||
| You have all the elites kind of perched at the top and of course you have Ellen DeGeneres is up there and Oprah is up there and Trump is one of them. | ||
| He's cool. | ||
| He's a cool cat and he's a cultural celebrity. | ||
| And loved by all of them, by the way. | ||
| Not just one of them. | ||
| They all loved him. | ||
| Oprah begged him to run for president in 1986 or something. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Then he makes a spateful decision, and it's an interesting question to what degree he knew the full implications of it. | ||
| He descends down that escalator, right? | ||
| It's almost like you got these ignored group of American people down at the bottom. | ||
| Not the entire population, but the people that no one has paid attention to. | ||
| They're down there. | ||
| He decides to go join them. | ||
| And this, I think, helps to explain their attachment to him. | ||
| Because the way they look at it is, he didn't have to do it. | ||
| This guy had it going. | ||
| And look at the slings and arrows he's taking. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Because he's joined our team. | ||
| Meanwhile, from the point of view of the cultural elites, where are you going, Trump? | ||
| This guy is a betrayer, a traitor to his class, a sellout. | ||
| He's now joining the pitchfork people against us. | ||
| So I think in that little scene is a drama that at least gives us a hint of what Trump represents and why the people who once loved him now loathe him. | ||
| Do you think he even realized where this thing might go? | ||
| Like, as off the rails as it's gone in terms of some of the things you talk about in the film as it relates to getting them off ballots and the trials and, say, two assassination attempts, etc. | ||
| I think that he underestimated the depth of corruption of the government. | ||
| He didn't realize how broadly it had metastasized. | ||
| This is why, for example, when COVID came along, I think Trump thought, "Well, yeah, the media is biased against me and academia and Hollywood, but I can trust the guys in the white coats. | ||
| If Fauci, who's been around since Reagan, comes and tells me you need to shut down the economy, well, I should do it." Now, remember, that was not an easy thing for Trump to do because he was hurting his own economy. | ||
| And for people who say, no, it's all about himself. | ||
| He doesn't really care. | ||
| I think looking back, that represented a pretty fateful decision by him to jeopardize his own re-election. | ||
| But he did it because he trusted the CDC. I think he trusted the NIH. Of course, now I think A lot of us, including Trump, have realized, no, even there, the rot has gotten consolidated. | ||
| Does that show how deep the rot is in that a guy who ran on draining the swamp, that was the motto, basically, make America great again and drain the swamp, he got drained himself by the swamp or overtaken by the swamp as it pertained to COVID, even though he obviously didn't I'm saying that he had to learn a tough lesson, | ||
| which is that even institutions that we previously thought were, quote, conservative, the FBI— The military. | ||
| Even there, there had been not only a kind of corruption at the very top, but a restructuring of incentives so that the ordinary FBI agent, who's probably not all that political, family guy, gets the idea, hey, if I want a bonus, I've got to go arrest those January 6th people. | ||
| I've got to find some more cases. | ||
| This is bureaucratic manipulation, which has, I think, occurred since Obama. | ||
| Of course, it's continued under Biden. | ||
| I think this is why I think a Trump second term will be different. | ||
| The weakness of his first term was personnel, and I think an excessive distrust of institutions that were stabbing him in the back, even though they were part of his executive branch. | ||
| So one of the things I've been talking about for years is this sort of widening of what's happening on the right. | ||
| And suddenly now we have a guy like Elon Musk and we have people like RFK and Tulsi Gabbard. | ||
| There seems to be something happening. | ||
| So you're confident that if Trump becomes president a second time that he would bring in the right people to deal with this effectively? | ||
| Is that the ultimate vindication? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He sort of implied it would be the ultimate revenge, I think is what he said. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's... | ||
| Success, that is. | ||
| The ultimate success, I think, for Trump is going to be to recognize two things. | ||
| One is that you need to widen the tent. | ||
| And so the RFK thing is very significant, I think, for that regard. | ||
| Because it's one thing for RFK to go, you know, I'm really ticked off at these Democrats. | ||
| I'm going to spitefully endorse Trump. | ||
| But that's about it. | ||
| No, RFK. He's out there. | ||
| He's on the campaign trail. | ||
| He's doing his thing. | ||
| And then the Alan Dershowitz, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand, so many others. | ||
| Elon Musk, I think quite significant. | ||
| So I think Trump needs to make sure, and I think he's aware of this, include those people. | ||
| Number two... | ||
| I think he needs to bring in people into government who take relish and are expert in detoxifying these institutions. | ||
| And here I mean people of the ilk of Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, people who actually enjoy the particulars of government and bureaucracy and would understand, if you put me into the intelligence agencies, I will fumigate that place. | ||
| Do you think it really can be done? | ||
| Do you really believe that this thing that we now all see, that years ago everyone thought was sort of this grand conspiracy, but now it's kind of burst forth for everybody, do you think it really can be drained or does the house always win in a weird sense? | ||
| Well, the House is very powerful. | ||
| I think this we've got to realize. | ||
| The House was able to oust Trump in 2020. | ||
| And Trump had a good economy. | ||
| He was coasting to re-election. | ||
| They were able to, through a series of deft and in some ways underhanded moves, they pulled it off. | ||
| They restructured the election rules. | ||
| Their level of coordination, and by coordination, I don't mean active conspiracy. | ||
| I mean birds of a feather flying in the same direction in a coordinated pattern. | ||
| So if you take something as seemingly innocent as the six feet social distancing rule, Fauci recently comes out and goes, well, we made that up. | ||
| There was no science. | ||
| There were no studies. | ||
| But then I say to myself, well, why'd you make it up? | ||
| Why did you think it was such a great idea? | ||
| And there's only one answer that occurs to me and that is Voting. | ||
| In other words, you can't have a normal election if people have to stand more than six feet apart from me. | ||
| You can't stand in line. | ||
| And so you've got to redo the whole structure of the 2020 election. | ||
| Millions of ballots go out, mail-in drop boxes. | ||
| So I see these things as always having some rationale. | ||
| And it's quite clear that the other side has very powerful institutions in its grasp. | ||
| So it's not clear that we can win. | ||
| And it is clear that even a Trump victory is not the end of the story. | ||
| It's really the beginning of the restoration, not the end of it. | ||
| I don't know if you saw it, but a couple of weeks ago, Brett Weinstein was on Joe Rogan's podcast, and he basically said that there's a cheap margin that they can work with. | ||
| And clearly, I saw 2000 news, I saw the premiere at Mar-a-Lago with you, that there's some cheap margin that they can fiddle around. | ||
| But his argument would be it would have to be so overwhelming that the system couldn't do anything. | ||
| Does that basically sound right to you? | ||
| It is true. | ||
| The fact of it is cheating does occur on the margin, and certainly with the mules. | ||
| And it's going to be harder for them this year because people will be looking for that. | ||
| So that particular form of cheating, I think, is going to be... | ||
| So I think what's going to happen is they have to keep coming up with new ways to cheat. | ||
| In the new film, we unfurl one of those ways. | ||
| But our purpose of doing that is to blow the cover on it beforehand because it's kind of like saying, if I give you the roadmap for how to rob Fort Knox and everyone knows about it, it's going to be really hard for you to do it that way because I've now told you there's a back door and here's a combination and here's what you'd have to do and everybody's going to be looking for it. | ||
| So the cheating, I think, is something that the entire GOP is now alert for. | ||
| The RNC is on it. | ||
| Trump is on it. | ||
| It's going to be a little tricky for them to do it on a large scale. | ||
| But are they doing anything? | ||
| Because I remember watching 2000 Mules, which was obviously quite compelling, and the entire time I was watching it, I was thinking, well, what will happen next time around? | ||
| What are the mechanisms in place? | ||
| Is there evidence that the Trump campaign will have more poll watchers that is doing more to stop illegal ballots or the harvesting or any of those things? | ||
| Because I think that's what most people are wondering right now. | ||
| Okay, let's say we believe they do certain things. | ||
| Well, what's actually being done about it? | ||
| Well, I know that the RNC is pushing aggressively to make sure every ballot drop box is under 24-7 surveillance. | ||
| That's already in the election rules. | ||
| It doesn't require any new laws. | ||
| It's just a matter of enforcing it, making sure it's done. | ||
| When you do that, you've got it all on camera. | ||
| So that's step one. | ||
| I know they're also recruiting a large number of poll watchers, poll judges, and they're planning to have a lot of lawyers on the scene. | ||
| That certainly does help. | ||
| I think the awareness of our film. | ||
| So in the new film, Vindicating Drum, we talk about ballot making. | ||
| This is kind of crazy. | ||
| And in fact, I didn't even know about it. | ||
| I thought after Mules, I was relatively well versed. | ||
| But it turns out that you can buy ballot paper, legitimate sort of ballot stock. | ||
| And think about it. | ||
| If you have ballot stock, let's say you have 10,000 sheets of ballot stock, you can go on your local website and Look at an absentee ballot, download it, take that copy, put it on the ballot stock, and you have a ballot. | ||
| You have an actual working... | ||
| Ballot stock, meaning literally the same papers. | ||
| The reason for this is that government is lazy. | ||
| Government doesn't print its own ballot paper. | ||
| There are hundreds of ballot shops around the country that make ballot paper to specifications supplied by the states. | ||
| And so these companies... | ||
| You can go on Amazon right now and order ballot stock. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| And you can make ballots. | ||
| And in fact, not only can you make ballots, but that making of the ballot is not by itself illegal. | ||
| Now, if you sign some fictitious name on it and drop it in the Dropbox, it becomes illegal at that point. | ||
| But the point is... | ||
| This is a very vulnerable system, and I think my job as a filmmaker is, you know, I can't solve the problem of sort of election vulnerability, but what I can do is I can do my part to say, here and here and here is where you need to look, because probably the criminals are looking exactly there. | ||
| So with that in mind, if the election is, let's say, fair, roughly fair, within the margins of whatever fair might be, I assume you think that Trump will win. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, my wife and I have a $100 bet on this. | ||
| And the reason we do is because, you know, I mean, Debbie's very confident. | ||
| First of all, she's from Venezuela. | ||
| So she has, I won't even say mild, she has severe PTSD from what happened there, which is the hijacking of the 2004 election. | ||
| And basically, it's over after that. | ||
| I mean, their election just two months ago was an absolute farce. | ||
| We understand how that happened in, you know, Stalin's Russia, or even in Goebbels's Germany, because the Ministry of Propaganda said, this is our line, and if you say otherwise, you're going to jail. | ||
| We don't have that kind of coercion, and yet, so I think Debbie's fear is that the propaganda is so intense that it's just going to fool enough people in the middle that the election could go Kamala's way for that responsibility. | ||
| And that's partly what I mean about the house always winning, that no matter how many of us wake up, I'm not even talking on the cheat side, let's remove cheating for just a second, that the machine is so powerful, the house is so all-encompassing and can just set the table, basically, that no matter how many of us wake up, no matter how many RFKs wake up tomorrow or anything else, that somehow they still pull off the trick. | ||
| And then we end up in a situation like Venezuela where 80% of the people are going, what the high hell just happened here? | ||
| Yeah, well, I think, look, I think the American people are intuitively smart. | ||
| And here's what I mean, and I'll say this sort of as a movie guy. | ||
| You take an ordinary guy who's not even political, not even a genius of any kind, just an ordinary Joe, put him in a theater, turn out the lights, and you put a whodunit of some sort that's somewhat complex, and it's kind of not obvious what's going on. | ||
| It's not obvious who did it, and there are obviously the usual suspects who didn't do it. | ||
| But the ordinary guy is very... | ||
| We're really shrewd in being able to pick up cues and say, no, it can't be that guy. | ||
| No, it's probably over here. | ||
| So there's a certain amount of kind of functional intelligence that is deployed when it's needed. | ||
| And so this is the question. | ||
| Are people who are actually not all that happy about their lives, who if you ask them the simple question, is the country going in the right direction, are going to say emphatically no. | ||
| Are those people Can they be easily hoodwinked by a massive propaganda apparatus that is basically saying, don't believe your pocketbook, don't believe your eyes, don't believe this hysterical, cackling Kamala. | ||
| You see, there's another Kamala Harris that we want to show you who's amazing. | ||
| And I think, honestly, this election is going to give us the answer to that question. | ||
| God, I hope you're right about that. | ||
| We'll get to Kamala in a sec. | ||
| I know that's not what the movie's about, but I want to talk about Trump on the personal side because you talk about him sort of politically, personally, physically, like the whole thing. | ||
| On the personal side, after seeing everything he's been through these couple of years, the fact that he got out there, say, the day after the last assassination attempt, which is just a crazy statement in and of itself, to say the last assassination attempt, the fact that he gets out there the next day and seemingly is exactly the same, the fact that he gets out there the next day and seemingly is exactly the same, Where do you think that came from within him? | ||
| That is a reflection of a man of supreme courage. | ||
| I mean, there's no other way to look at it. | ||
| And I'm not just talking about... | ||
| I mean, look, there were a lot of indications that he was like that. | ||
| Number one, here's a guy who is facing 91 criminal charges. | ||
| As you know, five criminal charges would have put pretty much any other, certainly any other Republican out of the field. | ||
| They'd be gone. | ||
| Not only does Trump He does all kinds of rope-a-dope, and he sort of outwits all these guys, so he's going to the election, and seemingly all of this hasn't really hurt him. | ||
| He also gives press conferences while he's on trial, which the lawyers must think is insane, and yet it seemingly works to his advantage every time. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He taunts the gag orders. | ||
| He gets fined. | ||
| But the fines don't stop him either. | ||
| So he's clearly running the show. | ||
| His lawyers are doing what he says and not the other way around, which is very often the case. | ||
| Then you have the two assassination attempts, and his reaction to both is downright classic. | ||
| Let's start with the second one. | ||
| First of all, his reaction is immediate irritation at being interrupted in his golf game. | ||
| He's like, I'm about to make a particularly amazing shot. | ||
| And then he posts zero for two on social media. | ||
| I mean, who does that? | ||
| He's keeping score on the assassinations. | ||
| The first assassination we all know about, him pulling himself up. | ||
| So the thing about Trump is that The question I think we have to ask, and this is sort of my answer to some of the, I won't say never Trumpers because they may be too far gone, but the sort of reluctant Trumpers who say things like, well, you know, I don't like his character, his personality, but I like his policies. | ||
| And my point is, listen, this guy has qualities that are supremely needed in our current crisis. | ||
| Okay, maybe he was a playboy when he was younger. | ||
| Nobody claims he's a playboy now. | ||
| He's obviously a reformed playboy. | ||
| Maybe he's egotistical, and he is. | ||
| He loves public praise. | ||
| He's actually not that egotistical and private. | ||
| And I think his ego protects him in some ways. | ||
| It's his own personal wall. | ||
| But courage is extremely rare, and no one has it like Trump does. | ||
| And Aristotle says, number one, that courage is the supreme virtue, but he also says it's the virtue that's needed to carry out all the other virtues because it gives you the strength to actually go follow through. | ||
| And while a lot of people think of courage as like he has no fear, Aristotle says that's not true. | ||
| The reckless man has no fear. | ||
| So the guy who has no fear is the kind of guy who goes up to a precipice and there's water down and he doesn't know if there are rocks and he jumps. | ||
| That's an idiot. | ||
| He's reckless. | ||
| Aristotle says you have recklessness over here. | ||
| You have cowardice or timidity over here. | ||
| The courageous man is in the middle. | ||
| He has fear. | ||
| He weighs the risk, but he goes ahead anyway. | ||
| And so, to me, Trump is perhaps not the best man for any time, any given time, but he is the best man for our time. | ||
| Do you think the vindication of Trump is possible if he doesn't win? | ||
| I would say, first of all, interestingly, by his own score, I would say no. | ||
| Because Trump is a man who goes by the scorecard. | ||
| If he watches 2,000 Mules and he's sitting there and I'm sitting next to him and he's giving me a running commentary, but a lot of it is like, it's going to be your biggest one yet. | ||
| Wait till the numbers come in on this one. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He's all about the size of the crowd. | ||
| He's all about being ahead in the polls. | ||
| He was right about that. | ||
| I think it was your most... | ||
| Profitable movie ever. | ||
| It really was, yeah. | ||
| No, no, he was right about that. | ||
| So, but he's, he, let's put it this way, he's an unmodern man in this sense, that the modern man will say things like, I don't care that only seven people show up for my rally. | ||
| I know in my heart that I'm the best candidate. | ||
| So there's this sort of interior validation that is the most important thing. | ||
| Not for Trump. | ||
| For Trump, what people say about you, what the score is, what's up in lights, that is your measure. | ||
| And so I think Trump will probably take it hard if he loses. | ||
| Now, I don't think he's going to, but I think if he did, he would. | ||
| I do think also that the... | ||
| In order to go down in history as a truly consequential figure, you generally need two terms. | ||
| And there are some exceptions to that rule. | ||
| Lincoln, of course, was interrupted in the second term. | ||
| Even Polk, who doubled the size of the country, had one term. | ||
| Those are the only two exceptions I can think of. | ||
| By and large, if you want to really change the course of the country, you need eight years to do it. | ||
| How worried would you be that they will just unleash all hell again, whether it's COVID-9 or the zombie apocalypse or the alien invasion or just basically to handicap him, even if he learns all of the lessons. | ||
| So let's say he brings in all of the right people that you just mentioned, but still the trickery and shenanigans will exist or the riots on the streets, etc. | ||
| And it will. | ||
| I mean, no one can be under any illusion that it won't. | ||
| I think the question is, Is there a way, having the executive branch now, for Trump to recognize that he has weaponry at his disposal that he never used the first time? | ||
| In fact, I think rightly he abstained from using it. | ||
| Remember all the people who were like, lock Hillary up! | ||
| And Trump might have egged them on a little bit, but he didn't do it. | ||
| He didn't even take the first step to doing it. | ||
| There are now, in the accordion book of federal statutes, innumerable statutes that can be deplored against the Democrats. | ||
| To take one simple one right off the top of my head, in the RICO laws it clearly says that conspiring or participating in any way in the orchestration or rigging of an election is a serious felony. | ||
| Now, Republican AGs look at that and they pay no attention to it. | ||
| They go, it's never been used in that way. | ||
| Well, there's always a first time. | ||
| And so, the left having opened up the Pandora's box of doing this, I think Trump's got to realize, you can pull out the stops. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| I'm going to also. | ||
| And it'll be a dangerous time for the country, but I don't see an alternative. | ||
| Are you worried that if he goes down that road... | ||
| Far more legitimately than the Democrats going after him, if he goes down that road, that we kind of never get out of that. | ||
| That once a country starts going down and persecuting and prosecuting, and again, the Democrats are doing it already to the best of their ability, but once that really gets kicked into full motion, you can't turn back from that. | ||
| And then it's like, who in their right mind would ever run for president or be involved in any of the circus? | ||
| The reason I don't agree with that—well, let me give you an analogy, first of all, that I think illuminates our situation. | ||
| Before I came to America, my main exposure to America was movies, and my favorite were the Westerns, right? | ||
| Now, let's look at the Western as an analogy for what's happening in America. | ||
| The Western begins with a peaceful shinbone, a pleasant veil. | ||
| Things are going really well. | ||
| And there's an old sheriff with a toothbrush mustache in charge. | ||
| I'm going to call that guy the GOP establishment. | ||
| But then some bandits come in, and they immediately have displays of homicidal violence. | ||
| They kill people. | ||
| They subdue the sheriff. | ||
| They take over the saloon, the provision store. | ||
| And the point is... | ||
| You realize that shinbone is not the same. | ||
| That old shinbone is already gone. | ||
| And that's my point about America. | ||
| Our old America will never come back until there is a reckoning with these guys. | ||
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It's tempting for the citizens and the sheriffs By the way, I'm not arguing against it. | |
| Yeah, no, no, I know. | ||
| I'm just laying it out. | ||
| It's tempting for the sheriff and the citizens. | ||
| And there are Republicans who think this. | ||
| Well, we can't go down that road. | ||
| So think about what happens in the Western because it plays out exactly what's happening now. | ||
| A stranger comes in from the outside. | ||
| So that's Trump. | ||
| Not a lot is known about the guy. | ||
| What is known is that the gangsters have immediately identified this guy as the threat. | ||
| They know it. | ||
| They're going to go all out to remove this guy because he is what is going to destabilize their whole operation. | ||
| And the people of the town are uncertain, right? | ||
| Because this guy is an unknown. | ||
| He may be against the gangsters, but he's not for us. | ||
| And moreover, what if he wants to be the head gangster? | ||
| What if he wants to defeat them and take over? | ||
| And so this is, I think, the significance of the closing of every Western, which is having felled the gangsters, having done the great draw or the great shootout, the hero has to leave. | ||
| He has to get on his horse and he has to leave because by leaving, he's saying, I've made Shinbone great again and now I'm out of here and I'm giving you back your country. | ||
| I'm giving you back your town. | ||
| I think without this reckoning, the situation in America, the squeeze is already in. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| The best way, look at Elon Musk, right? | ||
| How does Elon Musk The moment that Elon Musk champions free speech, think of it, for one day at the beginning, he banned a bunch of leftists on Twitter, and suddenly there was a unanimous shriek on the left. | ||
| Haven't you heard of John Stuart Mill? | ||
| What about our First Amendment rights? | ||
| Free speech is the oxygen of a democracy. | ||
| So they quickly discover the virtues of... | ||
| Free speech and civil liberties more generally when theirs are threatened. | ||
| We have never on our side done anything to do that. | ||
| I don't want to do it. | ||
| I prefer the kinder, gentler America of the Reagan era. | ||
| But how do we get back to that? | ||
| I think that's the operational question. | ||
| And I think this may be the only road back to where we want to be. | ||
| Yeah, I largely agree with that. | ||
| It's why I've, for the last three years, been still screaming about COVID, because if nobody gets fired, if nobody pays the price, if not one person gets put in jail, the freaking janitor at the NIH, there's always a scapegoat, then of course we will do it again. | ||
| And that basically is your argument, right? | ||
| And add to that, take another example, the 51 intelligence officials who very knowingly put out falsehoods that are then amplified by the press. | ||
| Again, no accountability. | ||
| Not even one of them has lost their security clearance. | ||
| A lot of them are making, are raking in the money. | ||
| Some of them work at CNN now, literally. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there has to be accountability of some sort. | ||
| Fortunately, the laws that demand it are already on the books. | ||
| The attorney, Mike Davis, has pointed out to several of those. | ||
| And I think it's going to take a tough AG to pick up that mantle, but the Democrats have set the precedent for it. | ||
| Let's pause on Trump for a second and talk about Kamala and the Democrats for a moment, because to me, for your next movie, although it will be much harder to get access to any of these people, we had a coup in the United States. | ||
| I have no problem saying it. | ||
| I mean, they basically have admitted it. | ||
| I mean, Pelosi and Schumer basically had an Obama, from what I understand, got together with Kamala. | ||
| And it sounds like they forced him with the 25th Amendment. | ||
| We're going to do this. | ||
| They would have needed her to say it to him. | ||
| And they did it. | ||
| Are you if you basically agree with that premise, but feel free not to if you but if you basically agree with it, are you amazed that they can do that right in front of our eyes? | ||
| Or again, is this just the power of the system? | ||
| Well, I think that what happens with these guys is that they they try something crazy and they see if it works. | ||
| And so, for example, a good example of that was COVID. They were like, guess what? | ||
| You know, Jane Fonda, I think, put it when she said, COVID is God's gift to the left. | ||
| And the left was like, okay, you know what? | ||
| Let's put it to use. | ||
| And they realized, hey, we're getting away with it. | ||
| This will take out Trump. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This will allow us to change the rules of the election and this will allow us to get Trump. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So they pulled it off. | ||
| I think what's going on here is that the left with Biden, they notice that Biden is deteriorating fast and probably was deteriorating from the moment he said in the Oval Office, right? | ||
| So the left goes, guess what? | ||
| We're going to try something new. | ||
| And that is we're going to try the regime runs the country and the president is the front man. | ||
| And we're going to see if the American people go nuts, if there's any kind of disturbance or revolt or pushback. | ||
| And then they realize, actually, this is working. | ||
| You know, we just send Biden out. | ||
| He makes a few statements. | ||
| Every now and then he utters an utterly incomprehensible stutter or makes up a gigantic new word that has never existed. | ||
| But somehow the press is on our side. | ||
| We're pulling it off. | ||
| And then they go, well, let's do it again. | ||
| Because if it turns out that Biden is now inconvenient, by the same logic that we picked him in the first... | ||
| Remember, there was no real primary for Biden either in 2020. | ||
| We did it then, so clearly there's now a recognition that we, meaning the junta running the country, make the rules. | ||
| We pick our president, or we pick our person, and Kamala will know just as well as anyone else that we can do it to her. | ||
| Think of it. | ||
| We never thought this of when John Kerry ran or when Carter. | ||
| We always thought they're running the country. | ||
| The people who are around them are picked by them and are acting at their behest. | ||
| It seems quite clear that that did not happen under Biden and is not happening under Kamala. | ||
| I mean, to me, that's why I describe her as the ultimate—she's the perfect avatar for what the Democrats want at this point. | ||
| It's like you're going from someone with dementia who clearly wasn't in charge to now someone who has no set of beliefs, no cohesive set of beliefs. | ||
| That was installed, in essence, and it's like we'll owe an awful lot to the system for that installation. | ||
| Did you see that little social media clip where Schumer is having a press conference and Kamala Harris starts like she's behind him and she's a senator. | ||
| She's talking out of turn and he just raises his finger sort of like the teacher like I don't want anything out of you. | ||
| And she rolls her eyes like, oops. | ||
| She goes like, oops, I've been busted. | ||
| Teacher caught me. | ||
| So in that little clip, it encapsulates that she is completely willing to be subservient to the triangle or the octagon of eight people or however many it is who are actually running the country. | ||
| When you're making these movies, do you finish and are you hopeful or are you more black-pilled as to what our future is? | ||
| The way I look at it is I try to take a film and start with where the debate is now. | ||
| So, for example, the debate might be the reluctant, the person who says that Trump lacks character but has good policies. | ||
| And then I say, well, look, I think there needs to be a character defense of Trump. | ||
| So Trump won't himself do it. | ||
| Trump, in fact, interestingly, hides some of his best qualities. | ||
| Very strange to say, but when I was pardoned by Trump in 2018, my family got to sit down with him in the Oval Office in November of 19. | ||
| My wife asked him the following question. | ||
| She said, You get slashed and burned on every platform, every second of every day. | ||
| How do you take it? | ||
| How does a normal person endure that? | ||
| And we kind of expected Trump to go, well, these people are idiots. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| The whole thing's fun. | ||
| But no, he sat back and he was like, well, guys, you know, he goes... | ||
| I have to admit, at the end of the day, it gets to me. | ||
| He goes, because, you know, I don't really need this. | ||
| I'm doing it for the country. | ||
| I just got al-Baghdadi. | ||
| And so, he's like... | ||
| And look at the reaction of that. | ||
| So, when Debbie and I left, we looked at each other and we said, you know... | ||
| Trump needs to show that aspect of a little vulnerability, a little introspection, but he won't do it. | ||
| He doesn't want to do it. | ||
| When he was on with Dr. | ||
| Phil, Dr. | ||
| Phil kept on with the, how did it make you feel? | ||
| And Trump just refused to go there. | ||
| So I was determined in this film to sit, you know, even closer than we're sitting, face to face, and try to bring out that aspect of Trump that I had seen. | ||
| I knew it's part of the private Trump. | ||
| Other people have told me about it, but he doesn't put it on the public stage. | ||
| And do you feel like you were able to accomplish that to whatever degree you were going for it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And my strategy was to ask him the unexpected question. | ||
| So, for example, this is a typical one. | ||
| I go, a lot of people say you called for an insurrection. | ||
| And I said, as far as I can see, you didn't actually do that. | ||
| You didn't call for anyone to go inside the Capitol, stop the count. | ||
| You didn't do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I said, but, guess what? | |
| If you had called for an insurrection on January 6th, there would have been one. | ||
| And there would probably be one if you called for one now. | ||
| What do you want to do with that kind of power? | ||
| You may be the only guy in the country. | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| No one else can call for an insurrection. | ||
| Even if Kamala Harris called for an insurrection, it would be a joke. | ||
| And the same is true of any other Republican. | ||
| They can just subtly get people to burn down cities. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's true. | ||
| It's a subtle signal, yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so you can see with Trump, the tumblers are going in his mind, and he reacts to it in a very interesting way. | ||
| So getting Trump to pause and think, you always get something surprising and thoughtful out of him that you might not otherwise, because he does have the Trumpian shtick, and that is always his go-to. | ||
| And what did you get out of him on that? | ||
| So what I got out of him out of that was this, and I'll put it in a slightly different context. | ||
| Lincoln, as a young man, gave his, it's now called the Lyceum speech. | ||
| In the Lyceum speech, Lincoln goes, America, our constitutional republic is very strong. | ||
| It's very hard to subvert it. | ||
| It's not going to be subverted from the outside. | ||
| If it's ever subverted, it's going to come from the inside. | ||
| And then Lincoln says the way that will happen is that a kind of lawlessness will start breaking out around the country, but that's not even the real danger. | ||
| The real danger is that a Caesar, a Napoleon, an Alexander the Great will tap into that and use that lawlessness to subvert the Constitutional Republic. | ||
| And of course the left, and there's been several articles and commentary to this effect, they go, oh yeah, well Lincoln was prophetic. | ||
| It's Trump. | ||
| He's the Caesar. | ||
| He's the dictator. | ||
| So I specifically invoked Lincoln, asked Trump to reflect on power in this context. | ||
| And here's the point I was getting at, is that, you know, the reason the left calls you a Caesar, the reason they call you a dictator, is you do have a larger-than-life dimension. | ||
| And so they think that you could do it. | ||
| And they said that, by the way, of Lincoln. | ||
| Remember, Lincoln was accused of being a tyrant. | ||
| Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and go, this guy's a tyrant. | ||
| When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, he shouted, the Latin version, but he shouted, this is what happens to tyrants. | ||
| So I wanted Trump to react to my point that he is not a would-be Caesar, but he is a could-be Caesar. | ||
| And he goes, basically, look. | ||
| He goes, we need a lot of power in order to dismantle what they are doing to the country. | ||
| He goes, but that's all I want. | ||
| I just want the power to do that. | ||
| I don't want any more than that. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| And I even then went into the whole thing about, you know, this whole business about, will you ever leave? | ||
| I go, you yourself are posting memes. | ||
| Trump 28, Trump 32, you're trolling the left. | ||
| They say you'll never leave. | ||
| And his reaction is just priceless because he's like, do you know what I'm in for if I get re-elected? | ||
| No normal person would stay beyond the necessity of the time. | ||
| So I think the film does bring out that added dimension of Trump. | ||
| That's the centerpiece of the movie. | ||
| We also have very entertaining recreations. | ||
| I like to make my films very cinematic so that they're not a typical documentary, put it that way. | ||
| They're more like a movie. | ||
| Some people call them a docudrama. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But this is a film that someone who even didn't like Trump would enjoy and they'd go, hmm, as they left the theater. | ||
| It would get them thinking. | ||
| Did you get anything on the sort of really personal side of him? | ||
| Because one of the things that changed me on Trump was, my audience has heard this, I'll give you the very brief version, was I had had dinner with Junior at Mar-a-Lago and he said, do you want to meet my dad? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Two tables over. | ||
| It's the week of the first presidency, right before Christmas, whatever year, the first impeachment, whatever that was, 2018. | ||
| I don't even remember what year it was, 21 maybe? | ||
| No, no, no, of course not 21. | ||
| No, 18. | ||
| So it was right before Christmas in 18. | ||
| And we go over, we get introduced, and then I said something to him, and he turns... | ||
| Melania's across the table, and he puts his hand on her hand, and he says, "Honey, honey, I want you to hear this." And he had me retell what I had just told him. | ||
| It doesn't even matter what it was. | ||
| But I thought the way he put his hand on his wife's hand and said, "Honey, I want you to hear this." And I thought, "Wait a minute. | ||
| If you listen to the media, they hate each other. | ||
| She hates him." But it was so natural what happened. | ||
| So unless he was just acting completely, and her reaction was completely authentic too, Did you get anything like that, to just get more of the family side or the personal side? | ||
| I begin with some of that, because I think the... | ||
| Here's what I say. | ||
| I say, look... | ||
| Trump is a very strange character if you think about it, because you can't name too many people for whom there's a substantial number of people who would take a bullet for the guy. | ||
| And there's a substantial number of people who would cheer if somebody put a bullet into the guy. | ||
| You have to go back to Lincoln to find a character of comparable divisiveness. | ||
| And yet, with Lincoln, the divisiveness wasn't over him. | ||
| There were comments that Lincoln is a barbarian, Lincoln is a gorilla, but the controversy was really over slavery and the extension of slavery. | ||
| But with Trump, as you know, it's mainly about the man. | ||
| And so we begin the movie with... | ||
| And we show quite touching scenes of Trump with family, particularly with the grandkids, because he is very much the affectionate, tickle you in the belly and watch you laugh and giggle, and that side of Trump is completely suppressed by the media. | ||
| Trump has certain pet peeves, and his pet peeves are extremely normal. | ||
| So every time Debbie and I see him, he will always remind us. | ||
| He goes, Dinesh, I'm really glad I pardoned you. | ||
| And he says, but I'm not so glad. | ||
| This is the point of the story. | ||
| I pardoned Scooter Libby. | ||
| And we always dutifully say, why? | ||
| Even though we've actually heard. | ||
| And he goes on to say, because he goes, right after I pardoned Scooter Libby, he went to a fundraiser for Liz Cheney. | ||
| And he goes, who does that, right? | ||
| So he goes, I didn't want to call him. | ||
| So he goes, I had some of my people kind of raise it with him. | ||
| And he goes, and Scooter Libby was like, what, what? | ||
| As if, like, he didn't get it. | ||
| He didn't understand why Trump might even be perturbed about this. | ||
| But for Trump, loyalty is a big deal, you know? | ||
| And so for Trump, he is almost... | ||
| Kind of, I mean, it reminded me, he's a little bit like the opening scene of The Godfather. | ||
| I don't mean the analogy and obviously the full sense of the term, but for Trump it is like, I'll do something for you, but I expect you to be willing to return the favor if you can. | ||
| Do you think America, well, I think you slightly answered this already, so I'll word it a little differently. | ||
| Do you think America can get back to a place where we have a roughly fair media and an approximately fair system that people believe in? | ||
| Putting Trump aside for a second, putting Kamala aside. | ||
| I think a lot of us of a certain age, we think back to a time when it all kind of felt normal. | ||
| Maybe it was not. | ||
| Do you think there's any way for some sense of normalcy to come back in or are we just in some version of craziness on one side or the other leading us forever now? | ||
| I would say that we do have a medium to long-term project and it is this. | ||
| It is the creation of a viable Alternative, academic, and media culture. | ||
| Now, the good news is that we don't have to take back 300 universities. | ||
| We need to create one world-class online university and that will be sufficient. | ||
| That will do it. | ||
| In the same way that having X alone as a single platform almost compensates for not having all the others because it's a powerful platform and it does by itself, it just subverts the censorship engine at every turn. | ||
| And pretty soon people realize if you want censored speech, go to YouTube. | ||
| If you want uncensored speech, the only place you're going to find it is on X. I think the same thing with the media. | ||
| I can throw Rumble and Locals in there. | ||
| Rumble and Locals have been played critical, and truth as well. | ||
| No question that the alternative platforms are critical. | ||
| But the point I want to make is that with regard to the media, the homogeneity of the media, the fact that they can act They can act in a way that is sort of like a conspiracy, even though they don't get on an 8 a.m. | ||
| Zoom call. | ||
| That is eerie. | ||
| And I do think we have to break that monopoly. | ||
| And what that would probably require is having a major media platform, whether it's... | ||
| I mean, look, the Washington Post came up for sale a few years ago, asking price $250 million. | ||
| There are two dozen people right of center who could have written that check without blinking. | ||
| Why didn't they do it? | ||
| Probably because they thought, well, what's the return on my investment? | ||
| Can I do eight new oil wells for that? | ||
| Whereas Jeff Bezos didn't think like that. | ||
| He thought, it's the Washington Post! | ||
| So we need more people on our team to think like this. | ||
| And there are quite few of them. | ||
| Because they're used to giving to candidates. | ||
| They're not accustomed to thinking in terms of, like, the renovation of the culture. | ||
| And yet the two are connected. | ||
| It's not that I say that politics is downstream from culture because politics affects culture, just as culture affects politics. | ||
| There's a very symbiotic relationship between those two. | ||
| So I got one more for you, which is probably the ultimate question as it relates to making these films. | ||
| You did 2,000 Mules with, I assume, the hope of making, well, we sort of pointed out already, with the hope of That this election will be a bit cleaner and some of the shenanigans will not be able to be pulled off. | ||
| This film is now coming out just a couple weeks before the election. | ||
| Do you really think you'll be able to get some of those people who are not the full TDS people? | ||
| Do you think you will be able to get someone that maybe is on the fence to watch this or hear about it and actually move in the right direction? | ||
| Or how would you gauge success? | ||
| Outside of monetary success, how would you gauge success? | ||
| Our model is very simple. | ||
| And not a single one of our investors is trying to make money on films. | ||
| Their goal is to have an impact. | ||
| And even when I sell them on these movies, I use the phrase recycled philanthropy, which is, give me a dollar. | ||
| I will work really hard in the market to get it back to you so you can give it to me again to do the next movie. | ||
| And the good news about this is we can do multiple movies with the same dollar. | ||
| You're not going to have me asking you for new dollars because we're going to recycle the dollars in this way. | ||
| Our real goal is impact. | ||
| And so, with a film like this, as with 2,000 Mules, the primary goal is to get the message out widely enough. | ||
| And I do think 2,000 Mules, Laura Trump told me, she's interviewed in the new film, she's like, I can't go anywhere where I'm not swamped with inquiries, petitions, demands, what is happening to clean up our elections. | ||
| And Laura Trump goes, well, It's partly Trump, but it's partly 2,000 mules that created this sort of momentum for change. | ||
| And so this film, my goal is to get it out very widely before the election, make sure it's seen by many millions of people. | ||
| Admittedly, in the theaters, initially, it's always seen by Trumpsters, by people who like my movies, who've seen the earlier ones, who like The Message, who like to see it with their friends, and that's all very good. | ||
| The preaching to the converted should not be underrated. | ||
| It also motivates people to get out there, not to sit out the election, even if it's raining. | ||
| But on the other hand, I agree that I think it's critical. | ||
| And this is where we could also use some help because there are other people, let's take the RNC, who have a direct interest in getting this messaging, which they can't make, by the way, to undecided voters. | ||
| And so part of what I'm saying to them is, listen, I've created the messaging. | ||
| You should jump in at this point because you have a better ability than I do. | ||
| Because think of it this way, I'm making hiking boots. | ||
| The people who are going to come to the store are the people who want hiking boots, people who like to hike. | ||
| But let's say that the whole fate of the country depended on a bunch of people who sort of know about hiking but aren't all that interested in hiking. | ||
| The hiking store may not be the best way to market the hiking boot. | ||
| You need somebody who has an interest in reaching those people to say, "I'll do it." So ultimately, I think I create the product. | ||
| I put it out there. | ||
| I do my best to get the message out. | ||
| But if I were on the left, I would be getting massive reinforcements from all the institutions of the left. | ||
| And on our side, that doesn't always happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Then the bonus question is, will we know the winner on election night? | ||
| And who will the winner be? | ||
| It's a two-parter that nobody wants to be asked. | ||
| I've been asking a lot of guests the same question. | ||
| Okay, let me put it slightly differently. | ||
| I think that if the fraud can be kept under control, we will have a reasonably early decision on election night. | ||
| If the fraud is rampant and they figured out things and the RNC is not on it and the Trump campaign is not on it, then I think we may be in at the least for a long night, if not worse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And who do you think will win? | ||
| Well, I have the bet. | ||
| I'm expecting to be collecting my $100 for my wife. | ||
| And she's going to have to pay up too with cash. | ||
| It's a pleasure my friend. |
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