| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Encouraging Insurrectionists
00:14:53
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| Lindsey Graham keeps pointing out this county clerk, I think, was in Tennessee, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. | ||
| The left put her in jail and celebrated it. | ||
| So, I mean, again, that was an official charge with applying the law equally. | ||
| She didn't do it and she went to jail. | ||
| So, Lindsay's making the same case. | ||
| I can't dispute him that we ought to do the same thing with the elected officials who refused to follow their oath of office to faithfully execute the laws and enforce the laws, refusing to do it. | ||
| That is the insurrection. | ||
| Those are the insurrectionists. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me once again on the program is Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson. | ||
| Senator, how are you today? | ||
| Doing well, Dave. | ||
| How about yourself? | ||
| I'm doing all right. | ||
| I suspect you know what we'll mostly be talking about for this interview. | ||
| It's all the craziness around ICE and immigration and voting rights and all of those things. | ||
| Is there a particular place you want to start with that, or do you want me to take it away? | ||
| Well, it's, you know, we're going to be holding a hearing with, I think, DHS officials in about a couple of weeks. | ||
| And so I'm starting to gather information on it. | ||
| I asked my staff to bring me a list that was produced by DHS back in 2024 in the Biden administration showing the number of convicted or criminals with pending charges that were on the docket list, non-detained. | ||
| And there were more than 600,000 criminals, 407,000 convicted, a couple hundred thousand non-convicted. | ||
| And including that is about 15,000 murderers, 20,000 rapists. | ||
| That's what the Biden administration led into this country. | ||
| And, you know, listen, nobody wants to see law enforcement excesses. | ||
| And sometimes that happens. | ||
| But I just have a great deal of sympathy for anybody, whether it's the department secretaries or the law enforcement officials on the ground who are trying to clean up this enormous mess. | ||
| And I just wish the Democrats would have focused every bit as much on the Lake and Rileys, the Rachel Morins. | ||
| I mean, the many, other victims of vehicular homicides, brutal murders and rapes. | ||
| But we don't have videos of those. | ||
| We've got videos from the paid activists, the trained activists that are harassing and obstructing ICE. | ||
| So again, it's just tragic what the left is doing to this country. | ||
| So let's focus on some of the numbers you just mentioned there. | ||
| So you just said 15,000 murderers, 20,000 rapists. | ||
| So let's remove that there's probably another 20 plus million illegals from the Biden years, and we don't even know how many before that. | ||
| But let's just go with those numbers. | ||
| That's 35,000 extremely violent criminals. | ||
| When you talk to your colleagues on the other eye of the other side of the aisle, I don't know how many are still willing to talk to you these days. | ||
| How do they offer a defense of not going after those people? | ||
| Well, they don't. | ||
| They can't. | ||
| Again, they open up the borders. | ||
| They flooded this country with millions of people, among them criminals. | ||
| They want them to vote for them. | ||
| So they want to make them dependent on big government. | ||
| They're the party of big government. | ||
| And they shouldn't want to deport them. | ||
| They want to make it easy to cheat. | ||
| They want to make it so that non-U.S. citizens can vote in not just local elections as some of these radical left governments have done for local elections, but they want them to be able to vote in federal elections too. | ||
| And the cops should anyway, motor voter don't require ID, don't require proof of citizenship, you know, mail-in balloting, automatic registration. | ||
| I mean, all these things that they want to relax our controls over elections, that they're going to reject any type of security that we want to pass for elections. | ||
| For example, like the Save America Act, which is just asking if you want to register, you have to show your citizenship. | ||
| If you want to vote, you have to show an ID. | ||
| 75, 80, 85% of Americans agree with that, whether they're Democrat or Republican or Independent. | ||
| It's wildly popular. | ||
| Nobody wants their legitimate vote canceled by fraudulent one. | ||
| Yeah, Democrats will dig in their heel and they will not. | ||
| They will not support us in trying to pass that law, that basic control. | ||
| So, do you, I guess this is the million-dollar question right now. | ||
| I mean, do you, as a sitting senator, want Trump to pull the nuclear option here? | ||
| I mean, in essence, it would have to be you guys doing it. | ||
| I mean, do you want him to do this with a simple majority? | ||
| I think that was the first Republican senator that came out publicly when President Trump called us into the White House and asked that we do that. | ||
| I said, I agree with him. | ||
| Reluctantly, it's unfortunate Democrats have shown us their hand. | ||
| They've purged the two members of their party that stopped them from ending this filibuster the last time they had power. | ||
| They regained control. | ||
| They will end the filibuster. | ||
| They'll turn D.C. and Puerto Rico into states. | ||
| There's four more Democrat senators. | ||
| They'll pack the Supreme Court. | ||
| They will take and enforce things like mail-in balloting, automatic registration. | ||
| Again, they are looking for a one-party nation. | ||
| They're going to be the party. | ||
| They're going to be the ones in control. | ||
| If we end the filibuster, it'll be for the benefit of the American people. | ||
| We want to do it, you know, prosperity. | ||
| We'll want to secure America, secure our elections, secure our borders, secure taxpayer funds, end or try and prevent as much fraud as possible. | ||
| So much of this fraud is occurring in Democratic jurisdictions because, again, they want to make Americans dependent on government. | ||
| They're the party big government. | ||
| How much of what's going on with the general chaos in the streets in Minnesota do you think is a shell game that the Democrats have set up so that we don't focus on the fraud that clearly has Ilhan Omar, Tim Walz, and many other big-time Attorney General, Keith Ellison, I mean, many others implicated in it. | ||
| Because the week before everything broke with ICE, that's what we were focused on, the fraud there. | ||
| So it doesn't seem to me to be a coincidence that it's the same city that this is happening in. | ||
| Well, certainly a very effective distraction from that, isn't it? | ||
| I'm not going to let it deter me. | ||
| I just sent a letter to Governor Walls and the head of their Department of Health Services, DHS. | ||
| You know, come clean. | ||
| I want to see the records. | ||
| I want to see what you knew, when you knew it in terms of all this fraud that really agencies knew about that back in 2019, 2021. | ||
| They just did nothing about it. | ||
| They just turned the other way. | ||
| So, again, it could be a distraction, but at the same time, you have nationalized groups who are funding these and training these activists to harass, impede, obstruct ICE's activity. | ||
| And again, I asked reporters that, you know, he said, should ICE be required to take the masks off? | ||
| Would you like to be an ICE officer? | ||
| Would you like to be any law enforcement where you've got the radical left elect officials managing a signal chat that is tracking your enforcement movements and deploying trained activists? | ||
| You don't know these people are armed, what they're going to do. | ||
| ICE has been shot at. | ||
| They've had their vehicles ran. | ||
| They've had bricks and rocks thrown at their vehicles. | ||
| Obviously, we know one of the trained activists came to the protests in Minnesota armed to the teeth. | ||
| Now, that person ended up losing his life. | ||
| Again, these organizers, they are encouraging people that they're training. | ||
| They're encouraging them to put themselves into harm's way. | ||
| Had to know something was going to go wrong. | ||
| Somebody's going to be harmed. | ||
| Now they've got their martyrs. | ||
| So, how convinced are you that the DOJ or the FBI is going to do something like that? | ||
| Because I've been screaming about this on my show for weeks. | ||
| It's obviously well-funded. | ||
| We know about this Singam guy that's CCP aligned for sure that's been funding some of the Hamas protests in New York and some of this other stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, is there going to be a giant RICO case? | ||
| I keep telling people, this is how you take down the mafia. | ||
| You don't just take them out with the little crime, but there's a series of webs of crimes here. | ||
| Well, I hope so. | ||
| Again, but I've been expressing my concern about the fact that Kash Patel and Dan Bondi have a really difficult time backfilling the leftists they had to terminate from government, the leftists who left on their own volition. | ||
| The law fare against, for example, President Trump's lawyer in Wisconsin, bankrupting Judge Trupas. | ||
| That has an impact in terms of other lawyers joining the Justice Department and the FBI under the Trump administration. | ||
| So that's a real problem. | ||
| Throw in the fact that the FBI has some like, or the Department of Justice has 600 lawyers or 300, I can't remember, a huge number of people to go through 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files. | ||
| Like that, listen, I'm as curious as anybody else. | ||
| I'm as suspicious as anybody else, but there are more important things to do. | ||
| But that's what Congress made the Justice Department do. | ||
| So they had to go through 3.5 million pages and some of these other investigations, I'm sure, are taking a back seat. | ||
| So it seems to me that where we're at right now is that the Democrats want as much chaos as possible. | ||
| I sense you basically agree with that. | ||
| It seems to me that it's obviously well-funded. | ||
| I sense you agree with that. | ||
| And it seems to me, I don't know if you'll fully agree with this, it seems to me that they actually do want some of the deaths because they want more martyrs on their side. | ||
| If you basically agree with that premise, what else can Donald Trump do right now? | ||
| Because to me, he has to just completely overwhelm them with force. | ||
| If he walks from Minnesota without a win, a real win, like they say there's 90,000 illegals in Minnesota, a city of about 460,000 people. | ||
| If he walks from that, to me, the entire administration is done. | ||
| Well, I don't think he would. | ||
| And I say that as a huge supporter. | ||
| I think we have a lot of confidence in Tom Holman. | ||
| Tom Holman is going to definitely target the enforcement actions. | ||
| He's going to, you know, throughout the nation, but also in Minnesota, he's going to try and recruit sheriffs, by and large, want to cooperate with ICE. | ||
| Some of them simply can't because of ordinances passed in their jurisdictions. | ||
| But try and find the sheriffs that will cooperate with you. | ||
| Focus on working with those people first as opposed to some of the other things that attracted so many protests that resulted in these tragic deaths. | ||
| And by the way, I have to agree to you, these organizers, are they crying big crocodile tears over the fact they finally got their martyrs? | ||
| I mean, they had to know that was a distinct possibility. | ||
| It's largely their responsibility that these people are dead. | ||
| What do you make of the state of the Constitution as all this is happening? | ||
| Because I've read the supremacy clause several times on my show over the last couple of weeks. | ||
| I mean, most people understand that immigration and deportation is left to the federal government. | ||
| It seems to me the very nature of a sanctuary city is inherently illegal. | ||
| The fact that now the states are basically at war with the feds over something that's part of the federal government's purview, I mean, does the Constitution even matter anymore? | ||
| Lindsey Graham keeps pointing out this county clerk, I think, was in Tennessee, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. | ||
| The left put her in jail and celebrated it. | ||
| So, I mean, again, that was an official charge with applying the law equally. | ||
| She didn't do it and she went to jail. | ||
| So Lindsay's making the same case. | ||
| I can't dispute him that we ought to do the same thing with the elected officials who refuse to follow their oath of office to faithfully execute the laws and enforce the laws, refusing to do it. | ||
| That is the insurrection. | ||
| Those are the insurrectionists. | ||
| That's just a basic fact. | ||
| So listen, I'm always concerned about federal overreach federal power. | ||
| So again, I'm concerned about that. | ||
| But fact of the matter is, immigration law, the Biden administration blew the order of the borders open. | ||
| Millions of people flooded in. | ||
| I gave some of the basic stats of people just on the DACA. | ||
| These are the people we know about that we, you know, a few of them we detain. | ||
| Most of them remain at large, hundreds of thousands of criminals. | ||
| This is a clear and present danger to this nation. | ||
| So I've got a great deal of sympathy for the folks trying to clean up that enormous Democrat-created mess. | ||
| Do you think the irony of all of this is that if there was ever a president who would make a deal here, it is Donald Trump, and yet the Democrats seem to be unwilling to make any concession whatsoever, which probably does further your theory on why this is about elections more than anything else. | ||
| Well, you know, the battle cry always used to be the DACA kids, who I think we all had a great deal of sympathy for. | ||
| I know in President Trump's first term, I was working with Jared Kushner and Mike Lee on a, you know, I thought would have been an excellent legal immigration system. | ||
| We were talking about in passing that, let's take care of the DAC kids once and for all. | ||
| I think that's President Trump absolutely wanted to do that. | ||
| Unfortunately, Joe Biden won the election, blew the border wide open and set back a functioning legal immigration system. | ||
| I don't know how many years. | ||
| And now here we are. | ||
| Democrats don't even talk about the DACA kids anymore. | ||
| Now they're focusing on how can we keep the, I don't know, 10 million, whatever the number is, nobody really knows. | ||
| Those people here make them dependent on government, making them committed to vote for us for the rest of their lives so that we can, again, turn this nation, this, you know, our nation into one party nation. | ||
| That's their goal. | ||
| That's their aim. | ||
| It's so obvious now. | ||
| But when I used to talk like this, or people like me used to talk this way, they'd go, oh, you're pushing replacement theory. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's what they did. | ||
| That's what they wanted. | ||
| That's what they're actually talking about. | ||
| Right, which they, in some sense, they don't use the phrase, but they're basically admitting it at this point. | ||
| It sort of reminds me, you know, you were way ahead of most people in the Senate on COVID, and they would call you a crazy person for that. | ||
| And it sort of seems like the same thing here. | ||
| It's like the truth is basically slow motion at this point. | ||
| Well, again, they have their allies in the legacy media, and so they've got a great deal of power there. | ||
| They can count on the corporate media to back up their points, to bolster their arguments. | ||
| And that's difficult to compete against. | ||
|
Senate's Political Influence
00:10:39
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| Where are you at? | ||
| The discussion the last couple of days has been suddenly, should we have body cams for these guys? | ||
| Where are you on something like that? | ||
| I'm generally supportive, but most law enforcement want body cams because it generally proves that they're innocent. | ||
| When you take down a criminal, that can sometimes look pretty violent because the criminal is violent. | ||
| What the public needs to see is the five or 10 minutes that lead up to that point in time, which proves that person had to be apprehended and arrested. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So if you're for body cams, you believe that Trump will not reverse on this and he's going to go forward. | ||
| Are there any Democrats that you've been able to work with or even talk to when you're walking the halls of the Senate building that are going to play ball at all? | ||
| Or is there just, I mean, I suppose it's Federman and that's it, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think they're pretty few and far between. | ||
| They're pretty dug in. | ||
| I think we foolishly made these agreements and scheduled these appropriation bills and left DHS out. | ||
| I've been talking to Leisha about that literally for months. | ||
| How are we going to fund DHS? | ||
| I mean, we've got to make sure we tie that to something Democrats actually want. | ||
| Now that's out there as an orphan. | ||
| I could see DHS going completely unfunded, not even with the continuing resolution. | ||
| The only thing that'll probably prevent that is DHS also funds TSA. | ||
| They fund FEMA. | ||
| I mean, personally, I could see going out going without TSA. | ||
| I could get on board in that. | ||
| Don't threaten me with a good time. | ||
| I appreciate the job TSA agents are trying to do here, but let's face it, it's basically security theater. | ||
| And if push came to shove, I sure wouldn't shut down airline travel if we don't have TSA agents in the airports. | ||
| I just say, okay, we're going back to the way it used to be before 9-11. | ||
| We're going to take the risk. | ||
| I mean, that's quite a state. | ||
| I'm sort of with you in spirit. | ||
| It's quite a statement politically. | ||
| What else is on your mind at the moment? | ||
| I mean, I feel like the ICE thing has so just enveloped everything. | ||
| Obviously, now there's this Epstein document dump. | ||
| I mean, what else are you focused on right now? | ||
| Well, we're going to get CBO's 10-year projection here in the next couple of weeks. | ||
| And I'll be chairing at least one hearing in the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility. | ||
| We have not come to grips with the enormous debt, the enormous deficits that just continue to be accumulating. | ||
| The most recent from last year, combining the One Big Beautiful bill, the projection over the next 10 years, $26 trillion of additional deficits. | ||
| That's averaging $2.6 trillion. | ||
| Now, we're not at that stage yet, but they start ramping up. | ||
| We've got Social Security going bankrupt. | ||
| The trust fund will deplete itself in about 2033. | ||
| How are you going to honor those benefits if you can't plus them up out of the general fund because you're running $2 trillion to $3 trillion deficits? | ||
| So we have to start focusing on returning to a reasonable pre-pandemic level of spending. | ||
| I laid out a number of options. | ||
| They were largely ignored in the debate of the One Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| We did reduce spending a little bit, but just simply did not meet the moment with the, now I guess we're calling it the Working Families Tax Cut Act. | ||
| But that's why I ran in 2010. | ||
| We were mortgaged against future. | ||
| It's way worse now. | ||
| We were $14 trillion in debt then. | ||
| Now we're approaching $39 trillion in debt with no end in sight. | ||
| Can you give me an example or two of something that you propose that didn't make it into the cuts on the Big Beautiful bill? | ||
| Because it seems to me that we're obviously it's spent more. | ||
| That's kind of why Elon at least temporarily turned on Trump. | ||
| He's back in action. | ||
| But it seems like the tax cuts and some of the things that will loosen up the economy, we're just going to start seeing the results of. | ||
| But what were the types of things that you would have cut that didn't get in there? | ||
| Well, I took a very businessman's like approach. | ||
| I went back to Clinton in 98, Obama in 2014, Trump in 2019. | ||
| I took their actual outlays. | ||
| I excluded Social Security, Medicare, and interest. | ||
| But all the other outlays, the actual outlays, I just increased by population inflation. | ||
| Had we done that, we could have saved somewhere between a half a trillion and a trillion and a half dollars, depending on which year you pick. | ||
| So again, that's just a businessman's approach in terms of establishing a baseline for spending. | ||
| But if you want to get specific, we allow legalized fraud, for example, within Medicaid, provider fees, provider taxes. | ||
| That isn't health care. | ||
| We are artificially driving up the cost of health care so that states get reimbursed more by the federal government than what they spend. | ||
| I mean, it's sick. | ||
| The nine-to-one match. | ||
| You know, for every dollar the state spends on a disabled child, the federal government kicks in about $1.33. | ||
| For every dollar the state spends on a single able-bodied, childless adult, we kick in nine bucks. | ||
| Again, it's legalized fraud. | ||
| Unfortunately, there are plenty of Republican states that have based their budgets on this legalized fraud. | ||
| And so we didn't have enough votes to change it. | ||
| I think it's a real travesty that we didn't do so. | ||
| Is that the crazy part for you right now that obviously we could spend all day long talking about how the Democrats have gone off the rails, but that the Republicans, with this president, after all of this, facing the opposition he faces, doesn't have a more unified party to work with on these things? | ||
| I mean, even just in the last couple of days, obviously you're in the Senate, but in the House, you know, Thomas Massey did not pass the spending bill, which would have had the voting rights bill attached to it because he didn't want spending to go up. | ||
| I'm sympathetic to that. | ||
| But to me, the voting rights stuff has to come right now for the reasons that you laid out earlier. | ||
| So again, that's not going to be taking up the Senate. | ||
| It doesn't sound like anytime soon, unfortunately. | ||
| But listen, when I got in 2011, the big debate between Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoff, senators from the same state, was earmarks. | ||
| And Inhoff made some good points. | ||
| You can't let the president make all the spending decisions, but I side with Tom Coburn. | ||
| Earmarks are the gateway drug. | ||
| So we passed a resolution in the Senate Republican Conference. | ||
| We would not earmark. | ||
| We wouldn't allow it. | ||
| And during Trump's first term, that resolution held and we did not do appropriations with earmarks. | ||
| All of a sudden, we've got a Republican chairman of appropriations, and this spending bill included $14.3 billion of earmarks. | ||
| I mean, that's $14.3 billion we don't have, even though it violates the resolution we have in the Senate conference. | ||
| So that's why I voted no on spending bill. | ||
| Are we doing any better post-Doge and with this administration to at least track the spending, even if you're not happy with the amount that is flying around all the time and the bills that are being passed? | ||
| Is there any sense that what we're doing is actually being tracked better? | ||
| Because it's all right, sure, we could talk about fraud in Minnesota and that's just fine. | ||
| But what about what we're doing right now? | ||
| So in order to get me to vote for the one big beautiful bill, I got $100 million allocated to OMB basically to do line by line, program by program auditing of the entire federal budget. | ||
| The first thing we're using that money for is an AI program to track this. | ||
| Working with Russ Vote, I mean, we're looking at this as a long-term project. | ||
| You know, the next three years, we're going to focus on this. | ||
| We already hired somebody to kind of help spearhead this thing. | ||
| But no, there's a real dedicated effort. | ||
| I'll be working very closely with Russ Vote and OMB to, you know, I asked Russ, do we have any idea how much the federal government spends that's filtered through NGOs? | ||
| He doesn't know because we don't track it. | ||
| The St. Louis Fed, I think it is, is the one that tracks the assets of NGOs worldwide. | ||
| You know what it is? | ||
| You know how many assets non-governmental organizations have? | ||
| $14.1 trillion. | ||
| I mean, that is economic power. | ||
| And they don't necessarily use that $14 trillion to fund the welfare they want to promote. | ||
| What they use, they use that for political influence to have the U.S. government fund it and send it through NGOs. | ||
| And so what we're investigating is I want to track that. | ||
| I want to see where do they develop that wealth? | ||
| I mean, how much was private donations? | ||
| How much of it literally is government funding that went through these NGOs that never made it to the recipients to just increase their asset? | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing in our remaining time here. | ||
| I actually don't know that much about your philosophy on foreign policy. | ||
| And it seems to me that we are slow rolling towards a war with Iran. | ||
| I have a lot of sympathy for the, you know, there's 40,000 dead people probably, and, you know, however many more injured. | ||
| And I have great sympathy for the Persian people trying to rise up. | ||
| If America doesn't do anything, it seems to me nobody else will. | ||
| I don't know that it means that we're supposed to do anything. | ||
| I mean, what's your general take on what's happening right now? | ||
| I think President Trump is the least likely president in my lifetime to get us into a war. | ||
| Now, does that mean we're not going to engage in military action? | ||
| No. | ||
| You see what he did in Venezuela. | ||
| You'll see what he did with Syria when they used chemical weapons. | ||
| He's willing to use force when he has to, but he looks for a peaceful solution to anything. | ||
| He gives people second, third, fourth chances. | ||
| But in the end, he'll pull the trigger and people recognize that. | ||
| And he is dealing with some of these countries that are just simply menaces. | ||
| I mean, Venezuela was a menace. | ||
| Iran is probably the greatest menace. | ||
| And he's going to take care of them. | ||
| And I'd actually be supportive of that. | ||
| Now, again, it would be a mess. | ||
| There's a reason I'm sure he hasn't pulled the trigger yet is you've got you still have nuclear materials there. | ||
| You have an active nuclear reactor there. | ||
| You've got you'll have remnants of the Revolutionary Guard. | ||
| This won't be easy. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| Again, this is why I would never want to be president. | ||
| These are tough, tough decisions. | ||
| But I really do have confidence in President Trump. | ||
| This is not a man who wants to go to war or engage America in long-term military actions. | ||
| He wants peace, but sometimes the only way you achieve peace is through strength and through destroying the people who are menacing and threatening peace. | ||
|
Tough Decisions Ahead
00:00:14
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||
| Senator, you are on my short list of sane people in government, which is why I always enjoy talking to you. | ||
| I thank you for your time. | ||
| Have a great day. | ||
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. | ||