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June 7, 2024 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:57:40
MUST WATCH: “This Is The REAL Donald Trump” - RNC Spokesperson Reveals TRUTH About President Trump
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In this video, you're going to see the future.
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Hello there you Awakening Wonders.
Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
The first 15 minutes we will be streaming broadly across the world, but after that we will be exclusively in that sweet home of freedom that we call Rumble, where we can speak freely.
And we're going to want to speak freely today because we're talking to Elizabeth Pipko, spokesperson for the RNC, with an extraordinary take on Donald Trump and the necessity to vote for Donald Trump to prevent Apocalypse, further social decay in HP.
It's a brilliant conversation.
You'll love it.
And I suppose it's interesting to have an insight from someone who's worked on Trump campaigns for a number of years and to hear what it's like to support Donald Trump publicly in a space where such a thing can be regarded as an anathema or even as, I don't know, some kind of some sort of social disease.
It's a brilliant conversation.
I think you'll love it.
Elizabeth's background's in a variety of things.
Including modelling and writing.
She wrote a book called Finding My Place, Making My Parents' American Dream Come True.
But what you get from talking to Elizabeth and listening to her, in your case, is the sense that Donald Trump can't be everything his detractors claim he is and still have this incredibly potent appeal among a wide base of people, an increasingly wide base of people.
I think you're going to Enjoy this conversation.
If you're not on Awake and Wonder yet, but come one now, then you can join us live for conversations like this one, as well as getting the opportunity to meditate every week and join us for book clubs.
I'm going to begin the conversation now.
As I say, it'll only be available for about 10 minutes or so on YouTube.
Then we'll be exclusively on Rumble.
So here's my conversation now with Elizabeth Pipko.
Thanks for joining us.
Elizabeth Pipko, thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand today.
Thanks for having me.
Whilst you have an extraordinarily varied past and resume, you're here in your capacity as RNC spokesperson.
Can you tell me, firstly, how you've arrived in this position?
And also what is the capacity and function of a spokesperson and what duties that comes with, what obligations and what potential pitfalls?
Because I'm guessing that you're here to advocate for the Republican Party and the Republican Party movement, but perhaps even more specifically for their presumed presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
I am.
Yeah, I mean, the pitfalls are getting attacked left and right.
I think you know almost better than I do.
You've been a public figure a lot longer than I have, so you know what that's like.
The benefits are getting to sit here with you.
So I think the benefits highly outweigh the pitfalls, but it's a lot of getting yelled at on TV.
It's a lot of getting yelled at on social media.
It's a lot of people wondering why you made this choice, threatening your future, which is a little scary.
But it's also a lot for me in a good way because my parents are immigrants to this country.
They came here with nothing.
I think $90 in their pockets.
My mom was a very little girl, but my dad was 20.
So he remembers it very clearly.
His story is really sad, actually, but also very inspiring based on the fact that one generation later, I'm here with you and I represent one of two major political parties in this country.
So it's very special for me.
And all that outweighs any of the horrible stuff that comes with it.
Yeah it's pretty astonishing and I suppose it's one of the things that people that are not from the United States still glory in is their capacity for people to build incredible lives here.
Now we're having this conversation of course In the week where Joe Biden has announced that he himself will be emulating a border policy that when comparable executive orders were made by Trump in office, he was much derided and attacked.
As a first-generation immigrant yourself, how do you feel about the subject of immigration?
How do you feel about the level of attack levelled at Trump in particular in 2018, in particular when he used comparable procedures to prevent immigration, initially just from Muslim countries specifically, but then additionally deployed that order?
And what does it say about the current state of the Biden administration when they simultaneously plagiarise from Donald Trump while criminalising him?
I am.
I think that's the question here.
It's not about the policy.
It's about the lies or the hypocrisy, right?
It's about the fact that people knew for a fact Donald Trump was not a racist.
People knew for a fact what he meant when he talked about any of his immigration policies.
They also know that his wife is an immigrant.
I believe his first wife was as well.
Everyone knows where Donald Trump stands and yet they painted him in a negative light, not just to disparage him, but all of his supporters as well, which was I think one of the first times in American history that's happened.
It's always been brutal in politics when it came to the actual candidates, but I want to say it was the first time, definitely in my lifetime, but I've heard from others as well, the first time that a person's actual supporters were called racists for supporting him in what I think were some very normal border policies.
You just said it.
They were actually copied.
Some of Donald Trump's policies were also copied from Barack Obama's administration.
And yet he got penalized for them.
He got attacked for them.
He was called a racist constantly.
And no one really knew that, you know, for example, the kids in cages narrative that I heard for God knows how long.
I mean, most of it was not true, but whatever was established was established under Barack Obama, not under Donald Trump.
So the problem is not the policies.
I'm happy to have a policy debate any day of the week.
I think so is Donald Trump.
So are countless Republicans and countless Democrats.
The problem is the lies and hypocrisy of the fact that Joe Biden He's pulling out any kind of border policy because the election is five months away and he knows that polling is a top issue for people.
It's the economy and it's immigration.
He needs to do something.
The problem is not the policy itself, which we can debate for years.
And if he is blatantly copying Donald Trump, but the policy works, then good for him.
We can actually debate the policy because he's not actually copying him.
He's just pretending to copy him and claiming to be putting a stop to illegal immigration, but he's actually legalizing it and making a pathway for a lot of people.
At the same time, he's framing it differently, making sure people think that the issue at the border is being taken care of because we have an election in five months.
Clearly trying to jail Donald Trump might not work and he needs to win this thing.
What do you think about the aspect of the policy that is obviously anti-asylum seekers or illegals or migrants or whatever term that you might deploy.
Do you feel that as a first generation, former Soviet Union, Russian is your heritage and background, am I right in thinking?
Do you feel that there is any hypocrisy there or do you think that there is a distinction, I'm assuming, between legal immigration and having controlled and secure borders?
Yeah, no, there's obviously a huge distinction.
For me, personally, I understand the argument.
The argument that people out there need help, people that have to come here because they're fleeing their countries, I completely understand that.
I also understand the argument that Americans have to come first.
So the obvious answer is a legal pathway, legal immigration.
It's also hard for me.
I mentioned my dad's story.
It is really sad.
It's a very difficult story.
We just marked the anniversary of my grandfather's passing.
My dad said goodbye to his grandfather, his father, my grandfather, when he left Estonia at the time, but former Soviet Union, thinking he'd never see him again.
That ended up being the case.
He sat with tears in his eyes telling me about the last time he saw his father standing behind a fence armed by, you know, guards while my dad boarded the last train out of the Soviet Union.
And he had tears in his eyes.
He's telling me that he knew for a fact that he'd probably never get to see him again.
He tried his best.
We can get into that story as well.
He never saw his father again.
He came here with nothing to his name.
He had to decide on multiple occasions whether to take the subway home from school or to eat dinner that night.
He had truly nothing.
He built a life for himself and it's hard for me to know my own family's struggle and then to know that a lot of people want to skip that line.
Skip the line of many like my parents who did it.
the right way and try to fight for them at the same time as fighting those that have been in line for I don't even know how many years.
So it's very tough.
It's very nuanced.
No one is saying that we don't understand where people are coming from by wanting to welcome people in and give them some kind of asylum from the horrors that they're running away from.
We're all also a country ourselves and we have to look out for Americans first.
Secondly, those that want to be Americans and want to do it the right way.
One of the questions that has arisen in my own analysis of the subject of immigration has been whether I, excuse me, whether I trust the integrity of the argument that it is compassion that undergirds the position of those that are laissez-faire on the subject of border security and border control.
That's always the argument that is offered.
That we owe a debt of gratitude, not of gratitude, of duty and of kindness and compassion and I've always been very sympathetic to that argument and it sounds like you are also, that there is a kind of shared human duty for us to take care of one another, particularly I suppose when we come from, speaking for myself, a country that has a colonial and imperial past, that's wreaked havoc Across the world through plunder and acquisition that perhaps there is a duty of contrition and restitution that is born.
We talk a lot on our show about how potentially if you believe in secure borders, and plainly people do, plainly that's what people want, Plainly that's why Biden is emulating that policy.
Then perhaps an accompaniment to that would be a curtailing of the kind of corporatism and globalism and geopolitical misadventure and exacerbation of war and profiting from war that appears to be kind of prevalent and central to the Democrat Party's purview elsewhere.
Do you see that Having secure borders and protecting a nation, as well as of course acting upon the view and mandate of the electorate, which is what democracy is supposed to bloody mean anyway, do you see that it's helpful to regard that as an accompaniment to non-interventionism more broadly?
Yeah, I mean, you started off by saying that you maybe don't believe the argument people make.
Yeah, I don't.
I don't believe that they're compassionate.
It's a good point because I think people don't separate those at the top and those everyday Americans that actually believe in certain policies or think that they should believe in certain policies.
I have met everyday Americans and I believe them when they say this is what I think is the right thing to do.
I don't believe that those at the top think it's the right thing to do because of the goodness of their heart.
I think they know that they can sell that, specifically to young people, to college students, to so many that buy what they're selling.
Unfortunately, I think that they have the same heart as those at the top.
They know they can profit off of this, profit off of war, like you said, and who don't do anything, I think, honestly, for the right reasons.
I think the border is just the beginning of that, but the destruction of everything we know To be our fundamental values, just the country that we had is a country of, I mean, a country with borders, a country that protects its citizens.
And we've seemed to kind of throw all of that away because people knew that they could convince others in the country to believe that for some reason that was the right thing to do.
If the motivations aren't what they claim, do you ever wonder what the motivation might be?
Do you think it's like an annihilation of the American way of life?
What do you think is behind it?
If it isn't compassion and kindness and the human duty as it's claimed... It is 100% annihilation of every single thing that we know and love about this country.
And by we, I mean people actually like my parents and people who are still around the world dreaming of being in a place like America because For them and their country, up until maybe this Trump trial, they don't see a comparison.
They see America as a beacon of hope.
And there are too many people in the world that want to take that down.
And unfortunately, a lot of those people are in this very country because they know that there's money there and there's power there.
And that means a lot more to them than what America means to all of us.
You said a minute ago that you've, since publicly supporting Trump and Republicanism, faced a lot of attacks.
I guess because you've worked as an author and you work in media, you've It sounds like you came pretty close to being an Olympic athlete at some point.
It felt like, generally speaking, these areas of American cultural life are assumed to be the domain of liberalism.
Yes.
And so was there a point where you felt like, oh I don't feel like I'm in alignment with him views, I want to start speaking out about it.
Were you always inclined towards republicanism and you know even, I guess you're 28 years old, so like pre the advent of Trump and the MAGA movement, What was it that you were into then?
The Tea Party, Republicanism more generally?
Did you like George W. Bush?
Was there a moment of transition or is this something they've always been in alignment with?
It's a good question because there was a very long period of time that I didn't care about politics at all.
But as a little girl, I was weirdly obsessed.
I ran for every political, you could say, position we had in our school.
Like, I was secretary of the school in fourth grade and vice president in seventh grade.
I think my first trip to Washington, D.C., I stood with my mom outside the White House for like seven hours just waiting to meet anyone that worked in there.
I think later on, I realized I wasn't really obsessed with politics.
I was obsessed with America.
For me, and I say it a lot, but I almost don't say it enough, my parents' story is basically all I know.
Every single part of my life, everything I do, everything I try to succeed in, everything I suffer from, everything that gives me anxiety or sadness or hope or joy, comes from their story and their sacrifice.
And people, honestly, they think that I maybe oversell it, but that's truly what it is.
I feel it in my bones.
I know what my parents and my grandparents gave up.
For me, never meeting my grandfather.
For example, hearing the stories of my dad was practically homeless when he was here.
Knowing what my grandfather went through.
The other grandfather on my mom's side.
I was raised by grandparents, basically.
My parents were very busy when I was growing up.
I was very lucky.
And my grandfather did not waste a split second when I was with him.
He was, um...
I'm a very well-known artist, actually.
So he was working up until he got Alzheimer's when he was older, but he worked through, you know, 80, 85 years old.
But whenever he had a free moment, I sat on his lap and he told me what it was like to be in Russia and he told me what I had here in America.
We sang the national anthem together.
He was also a very, very proud Jew.
So for him, it was about knowing that he escaped so that his granddaughter one day would be allowed to be openly, proudly, publicly Jewish.
Something that he was not allowed.
Obviously his children were not allowed.
It's something that he dreamed of back in the Soviet Union.
Everything I know comes from their struggle.
So for me, it was never about speaking out because I'm Republican.
I never even associated with the term.
It was just, I'm a proud American and I want the best for this country.
You asked me just now, if I think that people that have certain policy views are doing it because they believe that's best or because they want to destroy America.
And I fear that there are people in my own country that want to destroy America and I stand against them.
That's all that we can give you on YouTube.
We're going to be leaving now.
To see the rest of it, click the link in the description.
Join us over on Rumble.
I care less about the parties and more about the country.
And right now I think the Republican Party and Donald Trump, our candidate, is the most patriotic candidate we could ask for right now and the one that wants the best for us.
So for me, it was never, hey, I like politics.
Hey, I'm Republican.
You know, like, let's wear red and let's get involved and let's do this.
It was never that.
It was just, holy crap, people my age don't know what we have here as Americans.
Like, let me do something and say something because otherwise no one else will.
How then have you found yourself in the position of being a R&C spokesperson?
It's quite the journey.
In 2016, I was living in New York City.
I had a, I don't want to say flourishing, but a pretty good modeling career.
I was with Wilhelmina Models, a really big agency.
I was having the time of my life as a young adult.
I had just I lost my figure skating career, which is another story, but I basically tore my ankle.
I was told I'd probably never run, jog, workout ever again.
I spent seven years in rehab and on medication and everything else just trying to have a normal life.
I was signed with this big agency and was trying to get my life back in order.
Donald Trump announced he was running for office.
His Trump Tower office had a volunteer center downstairs.
I happened to live, again, very lucky.
A few blocks from Trump Tower in Manhattan.
And my brother, who you just met, asked me, do you want to go?
Gabe!
He's a good lad, Gabe.
He does the data analysis.
He does.
He's a little genius.
And he said, do you want to go volunteer for Donald Trump?
At that point, I knew who Donald Trump was because he was in charge of Wallman Rink, the ice skating rink in Central Park.
That's your connection.
That's all I knew.
I like him, the ice rink guy.
Yes.
I have pictures of me as like a 10, 11 year old little girl figure skating and it says Trump behind me like on the wall and that's all I knew.
He does put his name on stuff.
He likes to put his name on stuff, yes.
And I knew who he was because of that.
I think I had seen him at one event at the rink.
It was like a figure skating competition for little kids and he showed up but that was all I knew.
My brother watched I think every video that existed on this man and said Donald Trump's going to be the next president of the United States.
I think Gabe was 15 or 16 at the time, and I said, you are out of your mind, but let me look into it.
You're the smartest person I know.
I looked into Donald Trump.
I thought the most amazing part of everything to do with Donald Trump at that time was that the world was laughing, right?
So just like I laughed when Gabe said he's going to be president, the world laughed every single day when Donald Trump said, I'm going to be president.
I think he was polling at 2%.
When I had looked into him, when Gabe told me, this is your next president, and I thought, I lost so much confidence.
I lost so much of my life.
I was very depressed after this injury.
I went through a really tough time.
I thought the one thing I need is to learn something from this man who gets up every single morning, knows that the whole world, including many people that were his friends, are laughing at him.
And he's saying, I'm going to be president of the United States.
So I went to volunteer with my brother.
We made phone calls.
It was like the phone banking operation that every campaign has.
We made phone calls from Trump Tower.
Um, I have never done anything half-assed.
I don't know if we can curse on here.
Never done anything... Even half-assed was a little much.
It's free speech, you can say whatever you want to.
Okay, careful what you wish for.
Um, but I have never done anything like that and I just wanted to... I always like to do the most that I can and I thought, I don't want to volunteer, I want to be on this campaign.
So I wrote a letter to the data director of the campaign saying, this is what's wrong with the volunteer operation.
I found an intern to bring it up to the offices.
What was wrong with it?
A lot was wrong with it, let me tell you, but I fixed it.
So I asked this intern to bring it up to the office.
The data director called me, I think, 48 hours later, offered me a job, and I said, you can't take me without my brother because he actually loves Donald Trump even more than I do.
God, you're a right hustler, you, aren't you?
First of all, yeah, Weaseled your way in through the intern.
Then when you're given the good grace of a job offer, you're like, Gabe's coming.
I said, trust me, you're not going to win without my little brother.
Gabe now, he's in charge of data, is that right?
Yeah, so he did data analytics back then too.
Yes.
And at the beginning, Trump was polling at 2%?
2%.
I was volunteering.
I think we volunteered maybe five times.
You and Gabe, I think, are the architects of the rise of this man.
Exactly.
So we joined the campaign.
I think Gabe was the youngest staffer on the campaign.
I was probably third or fourth youngest.
A lot of us were actually pretty young, but we joined the campaign.
We won the election.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, a few people saw that in the news.
What?
They're still not okay with it, so I still have to remind people.
So we won.
Um, I went back and forth for a few years.
That was because of, um, Russian.
Yeah, well, right, so we are Russians, so we joke that we are the Russian collusion.
So we're starting our piece together now.
It's good.
It's like the end of Usual Suspects.
I like this.
Yeah, it's just the 21-year-old and the 18-year-old with no college degree who just maneuvered this.
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Can I ask what, when you're doing that, um, ringing up, doing the, you know, cause I've, I've never been involved with anything like that.
And I don't like that.
I don't like a cold call.
I don't blame you.
It's weird.
Are you going to be voting this election?
Yeah, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't trust anybody.
I'm not voting for anyone.
What do you, how does that go?
And also I do want to know what you snitched.
To the data manager about what was being done incorrectly about the campaign.
I'd like to know that as well.
Yeah, so you kind of emulated the call pretty nicely.
That's how it goes.
We have more like state-specific ones.
So, I mean, it depends, but, you know, we're calling into usually swing states, but it's about getting people out to vote when we're close to election day.
And then also just asking people who they're voting for, getting that data and sending it back to the campaign.
So it's that simple.
Um, when I took the job, I complained about, I think, the volunteers that just wanted to do more.
I knew that a lot of the system wasn't working very nicely, the phone banking system.
It was easy enough for me as a young person to understand it, but a lot of Donald Trump's volunteers were older.
Hello!
Will you vote for Donald Trump?
You've got these geriatrics on the phone.
Right, and they don't even know how to log the call into the computer after they've done it.
That was the problem.
Like the answer phone's coming on in the back.
I'm sorry, I gotta turn this off.
Basically, but some of the people I met, I think it made me fall more in love with the campaign.
There were people in there.
There's one woman, I won't say her last name, but her name's Eileen.
She, I think, was a nurse who changed her shift to work nights so she could volunteer all day.
I think she made the most phone calls of anyone in the country.
I mean, there were people driving in seven hours just to be in Trump Tower to make these calls.
The amount of purple hearts and awards and letters and things that people sent in.
There were days that were really, really hard in there, obviously, political campaign.
I would just go to this back office we had where we kept all the gifts and letters people sent in to us and sit on the floor reading them.
The amount of people that had some kind of faith restored because of this man, the things that they sent him, the things they said to him.
I had never seen that kind of stuff in my life, and I think the volunteers were a good amount of the reason that I believed that he was going to win when no one else did.
While all this was happening, and Donald Trump's being continually vilified in the media and condemned, and let's face it, some public blunders were made, in particular the leaked audio of what we would all have to say was a rather inappropriate remark.
How are you reconciling that with your sense that this is a person that is heroic?
Is it a genuine question?
Because, you know, like I recognize people say dumb stuff.
I've said a bunch of dumb stuff in my own life.
How were you dealing with the public perception of Donald Trump, this hugely vilified man, condemned as like, you know, people saying literally this is worse than Hitler?
Or at least on part of it, I don't know if anyone's said it worse.
How are you, how are you, as someone who's very proud of your heritage... I've actually heard them say it worse than Hitler.
Don't worry, I've heard it.
Yeah, I'm just trying to think of some of the MSNBC, CNN stuff I've seen.
Someone has said it, yeah.
How are you reconciling that with the experience you're having, with the various people who seem of good faith, and your own experiences of that movement?
I think the answers are the volunteers.
I was very lucky.
Doing that job is not easy.
And I got, more than anyone else, to actually interact with the outside world.
I got to see the amount of people that were gonna turn out for him, why people loved him, how many people loved him.
There was one woman.
She was actually homeless.
And I remember delivering this note upstairs myself.
She gave me an envelope.
With a card in it, we had to open it to make sure anything that got to the candidate was safe, so we gave it to Secret Service or whoever.
But it was a note and it just said, this is all that I have, but please take it and make America great again.
It was a $20 bill from a homeless woman.
And I remember thinking to myself, I have no right to complain about how hard this campaign is.
Look at what he's doing for people.
When I say people sent in I mean, it was truly purple hearts, gold stars, like people's military awards.
They sent in notes for him to sign, notes just for him to know how much they supported him.
People, I also ran, there was like a few phone lines I had to set up so volunteers could send in like their, you know, questions or concerns or things because we were trying to deal with the amount of volunteers we had and that we were very short-staffed compared to a real presidential campaign or Hillary Clinton's, for example.
So I was getting all these voicemails and the amount of love people had for this man, that's why I kept going.
And my job was very easy compared to most.
People at the top worked much harder, but even for me it was very stressful.
But I got to interact with some of the most incredible, down-to-earth, just middle America, incredible human beings that want the best for this nation.
Nothing more, just the best for America and thought Donald Trump was it.
Do you think that there is a legitimacy to the support that he has galvanised?
Because again, many of the detractors of Donald Trump, and let's face it, even though there's a sense now that many of them are centralised in, for example, urban areas, or the professional media class, say, or professional class, or people within particular states or cities, there's still a sense, I think Elizabeth, That people say that whilst Trump has harnessed the power of the people that you've described, the people that make any nation great, not just your country, but mine too, people that work in civil and civic professions, people that are willing to sacrifice for their nation, whether that's through military service or through working in areas like health, what people, the detractors of Donald Trump say, is that he doesn't genuinely represent those interests, that he's a misanthrope and a
misogynist and you know we all know the things that Trump is condemned for.
How do you, do you not think there's some legitimacy to that charge or that claim rather
than charge?
That's one of the few areas where he's not facing charges actually.
We found another lawfare front to attack on.
How do you feel that he...
What makes you feel that he does genuinely represent those interests, mate?
And specifically, how did you feel about the stuff that came out at the time?
Because every time one of those things happened in 2016, in the lead up to that election, people were like, now we've got him!
He said something crazy.
We've got him.
And of course, we know that, obviously, he won that election.
We've established that he did win the 2016 election.
With Russian interference, or at least Soviet, because your background is Estonian.
I bet you're a proud American, no doubt.
Do you see any dichotomy, challenge, or compromise there?
Or do you see that stuff as just part of, I don't know, everyone's said dumb stuff in the past?
Yeah, I mean, I have some faith in myself that if I were to have heard something that truly rattled me, I would have walked away.
I have yet to experience that moment.
I've also only experienced the opposite with him and his family, by the way.
Oh, so you're around Trump and the family and everything?
Yeah, I mean, I've been around him.
Enough times over the years.
His family, quite a bit of time.
I just started telling the story because it just happened, but I think it was 10 days ago or so, my mom, who's the biggest animal lover in the world, found a Facebook post about some dog that was going to be put down.
And my mom was like, I can't stand for this, obviously.
And she called everyone she knew to get this dog in Texas out of the shelter.
She was paying the shelter money to not put this dog down.
And she, you know, last minute she was like, I don't have anyone.
I have to fly to Texas and save the dog myself.
What do I do?
So I texted Laura Trump, his daughter-in-law, the co-chair of the RNC now, who I work with regularly, who is known for, you know, her love of animals.
And I said, help me save this dog.
Six hours later, the dog was out of the shelter.
The dog's taken care of now.
That was the same day that we at the RNC, by the way, got a disgusting package of blood sent to us.
When I texted her, it was maybe 20 minutes before a huge box hit that she was doing, and I just said, hey, help me save this dog.
That's the Trump family that I know, and I understand people see something else because that's the way he's portrayed in the media, so I almost don't judge those that think of him a certain way.
I judge those that portray him that way, knowing it's not the truth.
That's who I judge.
For me, I've had nothing but good experiences, and if I had a bad one, I would walk away.
I know that I would.
And I wish to God sometimes, not anymore, but a few years ago, I wish that I could say, you guys were right.
He is what you say he is.
I'm walking away.
I've never experienced that.
Not from him, not from his family.
They've been nothing but good to me, to my family, to this dog, to countless others that I know.
For me, knowing that Laura Trump doing all this went and saved a dog in less than six hours, like that's the family I know.
I wish to God I'd experienced what everyone else talked about and could have walked away and stood and said, you guys are right.
He sucks.
He just doesn't, and his family doesn't, and there's a reason people around the country see what they see.
I understand this weird elitism thinking that you know better than everyone in America because you have this degree or that degree or you're on television, but if millions of Americans see something in him, instead of demonizing them, why not take it upon yourself to try to see what they see?
If you care at all about this country, maybe just do that for five minutes.
That's what I haven't seen yet.
That's what I have a problem with.
I agree.
I find that very surprising myself, Elizabeth.
The constant condemnation and criticism of people to support Trump and no attempt at all to address the issues that are creating, generating and increasing this support.
And as a person who's faced some pretty serious condemnatory language and attacks myself, I'm aware how powerfully a media machine can generate hysteria and hatred when it decides to do that.
The common trope around Trump, and this election in particular, is that it was irresponsible to vote for Trump, that you have to vote for Joe Biden.
We saw Robert De Niro on the courtroom steps removing his mask, even though it seemed to me that he's relatively safe COVID-wise.
You never know.
Watch out!
It could happen!
At any moment saying that you know that we're in real peril, real peril from Trump and what's slowly dawning on me as a former member of the Hollywood establishment is that actually a greater threat to democracy Are these authoritarian, centralising, controlling, censoring, surveilling, warmongering politicians that masquerade under the auspices of compassion while condemning 50% of the population as racists and maniacs, even though Trump's support appears to be on the rise?
Since being in this country, I'm sensing a different temperature.
I'm sensing that if someone is clearly that much of a threat to the establishment, this is a person that we have to look at Very, very seriously.
Even people that would never have dreamed of voting Trump before.
We have to recognise that we are at a critical moment.
Not just because of what's happening nationally in this great nation of yours, but because of the threat of escalation of war.
In particular, the ongoing and potentially seriously irresponsible support of a war between Ukraine and Russia, where diplomacy is surely the solution.
Where America might be deployed in order to bring about peace, rather than escalate war.
I don't know if you remember, he was doing a CNN town hall, and she was asked about the Russia-Ukraine war.
And she asked, who do you support in the war?
And he said, I want everyone to stop dying.
And he was demonized for that.
That's where we've gotten to as a society, where you have to pick a team, apparently, instead of saying, I want people to stop dying, which should have been America's answer from the start in every single war.
That's not what we see right now in Gaza.
That's not what we see in Russia, Ukraine.
I think that's the problem.
You mentioned the people, right?
The people that are demonized every single day.
Look at what just happened with the trial in New York.
Obviously, they're laughing at Donald Trump.
I mean, everywhere, because they don't care that America just convicted for the first time a former president.
They just don't like Donald Trump.
But they're also laughing at his supporters, many of which, like my parents, come from countries where they see this happening regularly and who are not able now To distinguish between the legal system here and the legal system where they came from.
And those people are being laughed at.
That's the problem.
Instead of being transparent and saying, we hear your concerns, but this is why we did this, they're laughing at people here as if they're crazy Trump supporters, when in reality that's not the case.
I think you mentioned just now, people are coming over to the Trump side, especially after this case, by the way.
We looked at the numbers when it comes to donations that came in.
We raised over 30 million in six hours after the verdict, over 50 million in 24 hours.
It went up and up and up.
But more importantly, 30% of donations that came in were from people who never donated to Donald Trump ever before.
Whoa.
People's eyes are open, not because they love Donald Trump, like a lot of people do, but because they're seeing a system that they once ran away from, and they're seeing it happen here, and they're seeing a government that doesn't want to answer their concerns about the system.
That's the problem.
They're laughing at Americans who say, are we sure this is correct?
Instead of saying, this is why we did this.
We understand your concern.
We know that in America, this is not a good thing, but hear us out.
That's not what they're saying.
They're saying you're crazy for thinking anything is weaponized, you're crazy for thinking anyone is against Donald Trump, and you suck for supporting him too.
And that is the opposite of what we should be doing in this country.
I agree with you.
To see the judiciary, which has to be as best as possible, an objective institution used to adjudicate fairly in complex legal matters, metastasized into a weapon as it is being That's happening increasingly, not just across your country, but elsewhere, that people are using the institutions of democracy to control, curtail and shut down their opponents.
And that's something that we always understood as a hallmark of tyranny.
Once there is no such thing as justice, we're in trouble.
In fact, I've been saying for a while, Elizabeth, I don't know what you feel about this, mate, When we look at like the writing of George Orwell and his vision of a dystopia which is sort of brutal and I guess Stalinist in its aesthetic, the boot stamping on a human face forever.
When we look at Kafka, Franz Kafka, the Czech writer's depiction of bureaucratic dystopias where you don't know what you've done wrong and what's happening to you and where the evidence has come from.
When you look at the writing of Aldous Huxley and his depiction of a dystopia as a place where you might be happy to be because of the soma and that you're free to vote for anybody as long as it's Joe Biden, I feel that what technocracy, tyranny and technological dictatorship has become is a kind of new feudalism that we can learn a lot about from looking at the literature of Orwell, Huxley, Kafka and that this is a far greater threat than the kind of idea that we're being sold, that Trump is a kind of revival of the charismatic and military and militaristic dictators of the last century.
As the brilliant American commentator and writer Martin Goury, a former CIA analyst, continually points out, you don't have fascist dictatorships led by men in their 70s that don't have control over a militia.
These things don't happen.
The hysteria, around Donald Trump it seems to me is the only weapon left in a corrupt and broken system that is more in danger and in fact has already become more dictatorial than the thing that they're telling us we have to fear.
Literally.
I'm so glad you brought up Orwell.
I had to use his book as an example the other day when I was trying to explain to people why it is that so many like my own parents are concerned about what's going on.
I don't know if you remember In Animal Farm.
It's my favorite book of all time.
I've read it 10,000 times.
We've done it at school.
I have as well, but then I kept reading and reading and reading it.
It's not the book that people talk about.
It's the last page.
It's the most important part.
The last maybe three sentences of the book when the pigs are in a room with the humans that formerly were in control and the other animals are looking in, right?
The last, I think, three sentences of the book is the creatures looked from pig to man, from man to pig, and from pig to man again.
Already it was impossible to tell which was which.
That's what's happened here.
The people that took power are unable to let it go, and we've become almost indistinguishable from the very countries that we criticize ourselves every single day.
When Joe Biden stands up and criticizes Russia, criticizes all these countries, as he should, by the way, he's not realizing that when Americans now look at his own legal system, we've become the exact same thing.
Our legal system is indistinguishable, if you're looking at what happened to Donald Trump just now, from so many countries that Americans fled from.
George Orwell tried to warn us.
How many people tried to warn us?
But people aren't seeing it, and those that are are being demonized everywhere that they look.
That's the problem.
And people here have very valid concerns.
How often is a president, five months from an election, a former president, possibly future president, leading in all polls, by the way, is, you know, threatened with jail time?
Where does that happen except in these fascist countries that everyone fled from to come here?
And then, like I said, when Americans are asking why this is happening and if this is okay and if this is correct, they're demonized left and right.
This doesn't happen in the United States of America.
This isn't normal.
It's not okay.
And clearly a lot of people did not get to read Animal Farm in school like we did.
Yeah, they should have been forced.
Elizabeth, another thing that's pretty significant, I think, is Donald Trump's defining position on media.
He coined the phrase fake news.
This incredible ability that he has for coming up with catchphrases, condemnatory nicknames, and kind of memeable linguistics is one of these inherent skills he has that his detractors are unable to nullify.
We now are streaming on Rumble.
Rumble is a committed free speech platform.
Rumble, first of all, couldn't operate out of France because they refused to take down Russia Today's content, believing, in my view correctly, that people should be able to decide for themselves whether or not something's a bit of propaganda.
I look at a bit of Russian propaganda and, you know, I'm not saying I'm beyond being duped, of course not, I've been fooled a thousand times, but I'd like to decide for myself whether or not this is a piece of Russian propaganda or a piece of American propaganda, English or French propaganda.
Not only, though, are Rumble not able to operate out of France, they can't operate out of Brazil, can't operate out of Russia.
Now, the media that's continually condemned Rumble for being a sort of a Russian psy-op, when Russia kick Rumble out of their territory, the legacy media don't report on that.
They don't say, oh, well, there's something must be going on because Rumble aren't able to operate out of Russia anymore.
And yet YouTube are, as Chris Pavlovsky, our CEO here at Rumble, pointed out.
What are YouTube facilitating in Russia that Rumble wouldn't, that means that they can still operate out of there?
This shows us, I suppose, that free speech is very, very important.
And people have recognized the significance of free speech.
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And this is while you have an administration that's emulating his policies, plagiarising from Donald Trump while simultaneously criminalising him through the weaponisation of the legal system.
In a straight choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, if you care about democracy if you care about freedom.
I don't know how you can do anything other than vote for Donald Trump for precisely the reasons that they claim that you can't vote for Donald Trump.
They act as if a vote for Donald Trump is almost like you're directly voting for Armageddon.
Like you see hysterical performances outside of courtrooms, endless MSNBC bombast But I'm starting to think that, no, a greater threat to democracy is this kind of technological feudalism that tells you that it cares about you and it's protecting vulnerable people, all the while increasing censorship, increasing the funding of wars, increasing the division between ordinary Americans.
What do you think?
I think that the Armageddon that everyone's warning everyone of actually started when Joe Biden took office.
What we're seeing in this country and around the world, World War III, I mean, people talk about this every single day because of what's happening in Ukraine, because of what's happening in Gaza.
Look at the inflation rates here.
Look at our border.
Look at all the issues Americans are facing.
This all started when Joe Biden took office.
The disjunct between reality and the discourse is what frightens me most of all.
The idea of this kind of Kafkaesque, Huxleyesque, Orwellian nightmare continuing all the while while they're telling you that they're helping you, it's a far greater threat than their constant portrayal of Trump as a mad strongman figure, a kind of 21st century reiteration of the despotism of the last century.
For me, what we are facing now is a bigger threat than that.
I agree.
It's almost like when Joe Biden, I think last week or two weeks ago, said when he came into office, we had a 9% inflation rate.
When in reality, it was 1.4.
But people believe that they will believe whatever he says, whatever the mainstream media tells them, and not do the research for themselves.
They truly believe the American people will listen to their portrayal of Donald Trump instead of remembering what life was like when he was in the White House.
And I think that they're wrong.
I think it's going to come back to bite them in the butts on November 5th, 2024.
Yeah, I think I'd be frightened if there was a further four years of Joe Biden.
I mean, this with all due respect doesn't look like a person who's potentially going to endure for that long.
I think the trajectory of the country economically, militarily, And in terms of stuff that I care about, like free speech and censorship and the criminalization of free speech and the free exchange of ideas, frightens me, Elizabeth.
And I never thought that I'd be a person that would say that if you care about democracy, if you care about America, if you care about world peace, you will be safer in the hands of Donald Trump than in the trembling and tremulous fist of Joe Biden.
But that's where we are.
In one way, one of the ways that his rise, other than you and your brother, was extraordinary and astonishing to most people, is that if you look only at legacy media, there's no way this guy's going to win.
Polling at 2% is a joke.
I was one of the people that said, Donald Trump can't be president.
That's too mental.
It's too crazy.
Obviously, I was proven wrong.
Not only was I proven wrong in that regard, I was proven wrong in terms of what represents a real threat to democracy.
Is it a figure like Donald Trump or is it an administration that currently supports limitless war, that currently funds limitless war, that currently surveils and censors and uses the media as a propagandist amplifier rather than an independent adjudicator?
And is not beyond using any institution, as you have rather well articulated, including the judiciary, to attack its opponent, as well as the fact that it's condemned entire populations.
Free speech is massive and is significant.
The movement around organisations and platforms like Rumble, I think, is an evolution of what Trump was able to achieve on X, then Twitter.
He was able to bypass these corrupt institutions and reach a base.
And the gatekeepers were unable To mediate and control the rise in popularity.
Do you see the increase in censorship as well as the ongoing crushing and attacks that people that have dissenting views, whether that's a dissenting view like you hold, because it is dissenting to be a young person in the area of entertainment that's Republican and an advocate for Donald Trump.
And also I have experienced extraordinary attacks also.
Do you see that part of the attack on free speech is the desire to establish control over any means that could be used to confront and potentially override the establishment power that is clearly starting to disintegrate?
Yeah, no, 100%.
I think it's weird.
Watch the Washington Post headline always, democracy dies in darkness.
It's weird all the people that are screaming that are allowing it to die because they want everything to be dark all the time.
There's no transparency left and those that ask for it are demonized.
And that happens in everything, whether you're asking about a war, when you're asking about election, you're asking about anything, you were demonized because you're not allowed to ask questions anymore.
That's how this whole thing started.
You said Donald Trump kind of bypassed The censorship because he's so popular.
But as he always says, they're not after him.
They're really after all of us.
So even though they couldn't censor him, they censored all of his supporters.
They censored those that supported him, even in small ways here and there with certain things that he said that weren't, you know, crazy MAGA base members.
That's the problem.
They didn't go after him until now when they realized that he might actually win this next election.
They went after all of his base and all of his supporters, those of us that it's easy to go after.
We're not former presidents.
If they want to shut any one of us down, they can do that.
And I think people are only starting to see now how serious that is because of what happened to him in this trial.
It's easy to say, well, this person said what they said.
They shouldn't be allowed on Twitter anymore and think that you're in the right because what they said was wrong or mean or racist or anything else.
And I'm against all that language.
But like you said, I want more of it out there so I can make the decision for myself.
I've dealt with this a lot because I have fought on the front lines against antisemitism for years.
And I have had to debate this with people who are on the same side as me who want to shut down antisemitic language.
And I say, no, it has to be there so you know that it exists.
If you shut it all down, A, you're giving people a reason to go start hunting it down and looking for it.
B, who's going to believe me?
Who's going to believe me about what Hitler said?
Who's going to believe me about what people around the world or on college campuses here now are saying and thinking if we're not allowing it to be out there?
You have to put everything out there so people can decide for themselves what's good and what's bad, what's right and what's wrong.
Otherwise, no one's going to know what's out there, what's okay to say, and we're going to have one administration deciding that this is okay and that's not.
The next one, whoever it's going to be, is going to fight back and do their own thing And America becomes a ping-pong game between people that like certain things and those that don't like it, and Americans being toyed with every single time.
Because no one is allowed free speech anymore, or free thought, which is even more important.
Free speech is easy to get confused with because of hate speech.
Free thought is the real problem.
That's what's under threat.
There's no college campus anymore where you can come out and say that you stand with Israel right now, that you stand with Donald Trump.
They don't exist anymore here.
That's the real problem.
Freedom of thought was shut down after the 2016 election.
I think you're right that free speech has no value at all unless it's the free speech of people you disagree with and even of sometimes, you know, there are already laws about speech that's inciting hatred and violence and those are very, very sensible and necessary regulatory measures.
But without free speech, many other values start to fall away because you can't, where do we achieve consensus?
Where do we find the areas that we can agree amidst the many areas where as human beings we are necessarily and inevitably going to disagree?
How can we come to consensus?
How can we find areas of agreement?
I think there is something sometimes, I think Elizabeth, anti-human at the core of this establishment.
It is sort of anti-aspects of our nature that are beautiful and complex.
It's anti-comedy.
It's anti...
aspects of nature that appear to be evident to many, many people and have
historically never been queried or inquired about. There's a sort of a bad
faith project being undertaken to prevent people forming alliances that
might otherwise not be possible but are absolutely necessary if we're to change
the world. And one of the things I think is interesting because I'm English so
I'm not so ensnared within the particularities of the American
political landscape but obviously it's understood and often commented on the
the ascent of Donald Trump coincided with the Brexit movement in our country
and both of these political events, epochal in their own ways, are
are indicators of I feel something that is significant and that you have alluded to several times that there is a kind of misanthropic disdain for ordinary people in our kind of democracies.
The basket of deplorables remark being one of the great indicators that the establishment regards some people as being beyond the ability to participate in electoral democracy, that they just want them condemned, silenced, shut down, and they'll call them racist, they'll call them homophobe, they'll use whatever smears are necessary to prevent voices that are about bringing together popular movements so that representative democracy can flourish, so that people can control their own lives as sovereign, can control their own communities, can control their own states based on the electoral principles that this country was built upon, and any sensible country
Or be pursuing.
What do you think about that kind of contempt that is visible in political discourse?
And do you feel that Donald Trump is a person that is capable of bypassing that contempt?
Because certainly he plays rhetorical games when it comes to his opponents that I think flirt with, shall we say, contempt.
And there's no question that the people that hate and attack Donald Trump use contempt for him and everybody.
But what do you think about the other direction?
It's weird because I have to sit here and tell you that a billionaire from New York City understands and appreciates the common man more than others do, but that is actually the case.
That's what I've witnessed.
Anyone I know that spends five minutes with Donald Trump tells you that it looked like he actually cared about what they were saying.
I've never seen him in a room with anyone, not say hello to them, not ask them for their opinion.
He's very big on asking people their opinion.
He was very good at connecting with people.
Since 2016 everyone always laughed at everything he said either because they called him racist or everything else or because they just thought it was silly not realizing that for some reason that was going to propel him further in the polls.
He's very good at understanding what the American people are thinking and whether you like him or don't like him I think many people agree with that.
For someone that was never in politics, he's very good at politics.
He knows what people want.
He almost tells them what they want and then they realize in the moment that he's right.
He's very good at connecting with the common man.
I think it's because he actually talks to people.
I've never seen him walk by a janitor without asking him how his day was.
So for me, I think people in power Like you said, the disdain is probably the best word, but it's almost as if they think that those people don't exist.
I remember my dad coming back right before Brexit, and he was telling me that all his friends told him it was never going to happen and laughed, much like they did in 2016.
And he said every taxi driver told him how they were voting.
And he came home and he said, I know what's going to win.
Like, trust me, Brexit.
And I said, how do you know?
Everyone's laughing.
He goes, trust me.
Every taxi driver I spoke to said, this is how I'm voting.
This is what's going to happen.
They don't know what they're talking about.
And that's what happened.
Same thing in 2016.
And again, I go back to the people who instead of saying, why did they vote this way?
Why did people choose this?
They just harness the power that they have, take more and more from people, demonize people at the same time, and try to divide us further because they know the more divided the people are, the more powerful the government is.
That's the only way for them to win is for people to hate each other.
I have no problem being friends with Republicans and Democrats and liberals and everything else in between.
I love everyone.
I don't care.
I've always been that person.
I actually have more friends on the left than on the right.
I just don't care.
I'm not that human being.
And for some reason, for Americans to tell me, people that were raised here to tell me that I'm a bad person for how I'm voting so they can't be in my life, that baffles me.
It doesn't make any sense to me, especially everything my family escaped from, to get to vote and be publicly proud of their vote.
That's not who I am.
It's never going to be who I am.
But then you watch it and you realize this has been ingrained in so many people because they want us divided.
The best way to have power in any society is to divide the people.
There are more people than there are powerful people at the top.
But if they're all divided, then the powerful people can continue to win.
Continue to take from us, continue to divide, continue to get away with the policies that you were mentioning.
Funding wars, murdering people left and right in wars that we don't have to answer for because the people are too distracted hating their neighbor instead of asking why people are dying in Russia and Ukraine.
And we continue to send money and to fund that very war and fund those deaths without any kind of solution or explanation.
And then we have to hate those who disagree with our policy towards Ukraine instead of asking them why they feel a certain way and trying to stop what's going on over there.
It's very strange to me.
Donald Trump says things like, I want people to stop dying.
He's attacked.
It's not because of the policy, it's because he's different.
Because every president before him...
Probably the certain status quo, Republicans or Democrats.
And he came in and he was different.
I'm not saying he was better even, that's for people to decide, but he was different.
And the status quo hates different.
That doesn't work for Washington, right?
In 2016, I think in his inauguration speech, he said, people in Washington keep winning, but their victories are not your victories.
Like he put the, like he hit the nail on the coffin.
The American people are not a part of the government here.
They're separated for some reason.
And they know that the victories that happen Let's say even overseas, with the victories that happen that our government celebrates, the American people don't celebrate.
Because we've been separated from everyone that's having any kind of decision-making power.
At the same time, they've also separated us from our family and our friends and everyone that we're supposed to be next to, regardless of how they voted in the 2016 election.
And that's the real problem.
No one talks to each other anymore.
No one wants to know anymore who says what they want to know how you voted in 2016 and how you're going to vote now.
And that's what this administration has been very successful at doing is demonizing every single person in this country, especially, of course, Trump supporters, because that's how they win.
Yeah, you're talking about like quite essential human values that I suppose usually derived, Elizabeth, from a spiritual perspective of respect, compassion, willingness to listen and open-mindedness.
I think these are really, really important values and actually transcend what we have
to accept is a temporal debate that on some level we are operating in eternity.
You know, this is an important moment in America because 2024 is coming up and we're in it,
but the 2024 election.
We're in it.
It's five months from today.
It's five months from today.
Yeah.
So, this is important, but there are, you know, we're operating to somehow within eternity
and this denial that we deal in eternal principles like grace and compassion and good faith,
open heartedness to people that you disagree with.
The precluding, preventing, curtailing those values, it makes me feel despair.
It makes me feel despair to see institutions, whether those are media institutions, state judicial institutions, turned into weapons.
And they're sort of kind of stripping away and loss of human values.
I think that It's kind of hopeless to live like that.
It's hopeless to live like that.
And my prayer is that whatever happens in this election, the kind of values that you've articulated incredibly well and communicated brilliantly, come to the forefront of politics.
And that people, even and especially people that dislike Donald Trump, are willing to say, well, you know, I want people to stop dying.
ain't a dumb thing to say and the significant support of a massive part of America is something
that should be taken seriously and open heartedly and open-mindedly not just condemned because
that revealed something to me.
You know I was changing over that period.
I started to realize that when you're part of an establishment even if it's an institution
like media that you kind of are utilized.
You're like, I reckon what I represented for a while was like hedonism and like yeah do
what you want and sexual liberty and freedom and like I was a recovering drug addict and
everything but you know I feel like you get used to represent something.
That doesn't mean you're not personally responsible for your own actions.
Of course you are.
You're responsible for actions undertaken, not for actions you don't undertake.
I think that we're operating within a system that has no values, Elizabeth, has no principles.
It's gotten pretty ugly.
And I think that the only way to confront that is through a kind of a return to and adherence to the sort of values you were mentioning there.
I agree, it's... I was talking to my dad actually before I took the RNC job.
Ah, is it a proper job?
It's a job.
This is a job?
It's a job, yes.
I mean, you've got a salary, right?
Come on, go do some spokespersoning.
Yes, yes.
Spokespersoning.
Before I took the job, I asked my dad if I should do it because I thought to myself, in today's world, there's almost no winning.
Like, you're demonized no matter what.
You want to take the high road so badly, but you never know when or how.
You never know how people are going to react, no matter what you say or do.
And he said to me, I think in today's day and age, it's almost like there's no high road left, right?
People are just looking for something to be angry about.
And I think that started with the demonization of Donald Trump and his supporters in 2016.
Both sides are so angry at the other.
And it's almost like no matter what any candidate says, they don't hear it anyway.
They just hear what the media's ingrained in their brains for eight years.
I did BBC last week and they asked me, What does Donald Trump plan to do when he wins?
Is he going to target his political opponents?
Is he going to do this and that?
Shouldn't he try to calm down the nation as if he's just riling people up?
And I said, he wants to unite people.
He has no interest in any of this.
Stop painting him this way.
It's not fun for us because now I have to argue with my neighbor and explain to them that I don't support this man who wants to tear down the institutions that we have here.
That's not what this is.
And they've told people so many horrible things about him that it's almost impossible to calm people down and explain to them the truth.
Donald Trump says, I mean, he said it countless times these last few months, all he wants is success for this country.
He believes that you will unite Americans once again for the first time in eight years through success.
It's the only way to do that.
And he says it all the time.
And then they paint him in this different light.
He has no interest.
I don't think I definitely haven't seen it.
in anything but success for this country and unity for the country because I mean he was a staple in this country for how many years in New York City especially like he knows what it means when Americans are together he always says he was there on 9-11 he remembers the days after that he knows what it means and I'm sure in some way it hurts his heart to see the things that you and I are talking about now it is horrible what's happened and all he wants people to be unified again to stop hating each other for how they happened to vote in one election or two or three.
And I think the problem is that not enough people realize that what is said in the media just isn't true.
It's said to rile people up in one way or the other.
It happens on both sides, by the way.
And it's not the case.
It's so easy to get riled up, to hear what is being shouted at us constantly and to get angry.
But in reality, it's better to look at what the candidate says himself.
And I assure you, Donald Trump has said and will continue saying it.
He just wants success for this country and us to be unified again.
And it's, I know it's easy to listen to MSNBC and CNN and believe something else because we've been wired to believe them now for so long, but that's not what he wants.
And that's not what the majority of his supporters wants, not what his staff wants, not what anyone wants.
We just want America back to normal.
And I truly, after this trial and everything else, just hope that that's somehow possible again.
Do you practice your Jewish faith?
Yes, very much so.
I've become Christian recently and I really would like to publicly declare a prayer for peace, for peace in all of the regions of the world, for all of the disputes that are costing people their lives right now.
It's interesting meeting you, mate.
I think they made a good choice with you as a spokesperson.
You articulate things very brilliantly.
You're a really, really, really good communicator.
You're doing a really excellent job.
So you gave me this hat.
Now, do you carry these around as a kind of physical cryptocurrency?
Have you got a bunch of them in your trunk that you and Gabe drive around America issuing MAGA hats to people, converting them and stuff?
And making the country great again.
You're getting out there, you're making it with the familiar zigzag.
The signature there.
You know, I met Donald Trump before.
I met him like, it must have been, I think it must be 2009 because I hosted the VMAs that year and it was the year when Kanye came on stage when Taylor Swift was, do you remember that?
Of course.
Right, so like it was that year.
I was hosting the VMAs, but I was off somewhere.
You don't, sometimes you don't do every single link.
Then the next day after that, Like I went to Trump Tower and like met Donald Trump.
We had to wait.
It was a really mad weird day.
Like the sound, the guy that was doing our sound, his kid died.
He got a phone call all of a sudden and all of a sudden it was like my kid's died in hospital.
And it was like a really weird sort of day.
Then I went into Trump's office, which I guess you've been in, in Trump Tower.
There's all of this sort of memorabilia and stuff on the wall.
He goes, I was like, oh my God.
I had like sort of Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves or something like that.
I feel like I remember.
And he goes, take anything you want.
You can take anything.
I didn't take anything.
So I was like, what is going on?
He was actually, Really nice.
Kind of kind to me.
But like, you know, like, at that point, actually, he wasn't running for office or anything.
So it wasn't like a politically charged thing at that point.
Donald Trump hadn't been vilified then in the way that he had been.
I was pretty rude about him, actually, because I was doing stand up comedy and I made some jokes, pretty cheap jokes, you know.
And then I wrote him a letter of apology.
I had to write a letter of apology to him and the filmmaker, Oliver Stone, because Oliver Stone was using Trump's buildings to film Wall Street 2, I think, something like that.
So it was a really weird day for me to have to write a letter of apology to Donald Trump, a letter of apology to Oliver Stone.
And I'll tell you, man, it's like, what an extraordinary time.
Since then, Donald Trump has become this sort of like both beacon and wrecking ball in American institutional and cultural life, depending, of course, on the inflection.
And it's extraordinary now to sort of hear a perspective from someone with your very
particular past and your very particular affinities and affiliations speak so passionately but
also plainly and simply about why you believe in Donald Trump.
You've really given me a lot to think about and you've been as a spokesperson for the,
you know, would you say spokesperson for the MAGA movement or a public?
How do you describe it?
I'd say the RNC right now is very much the MAGA movement.
So you could say, he is our candidate.
Yeah, of course.
I think you've done a really brilliant job.
Thank you.
Listen, the majority of people that watch our channel, they love Donald Trump.
The vast majority.
The vast, vast majority.
So thank you so much, Elizabeth.
It's been a brilliant opportunity to listen to you and spend time with you.
And I really wish you all the best because the principles that you're conveying are transcendent of the temporary machinations and fluctuations of politics.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks, mate.
Thank you so much for joining us for that conversation.
Let me know what you thought.
Let me know if it's changed your perspective at all, or if you're pretty dyed in the wool and know the direction that your vote's heading already.
And please join us next week for another extraordinary week of conversations live from Rumble.
Russell in residence at Rumble continues for another week.
We've got some fantastic guests, some amazing conversations, potentially even The most significant conversation of all.
Remember, subscribe to our channel, give us a like, and become an Awake and Wonder if it's something that suits you.
See you again next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
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