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July 17, 2024 - Sean Hannity Show
35:35
Senator JD Vance - July 16th, Hour 3
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All right, news roundup, information overload hour, as we continue from Milwaukee at the RNC in beautiful Wisconsin.
Last night, J.D. Vance, his first interview on Hannity, and it is worth playing again, especially for those of you that didn't know a lot about him.
This interview will enlighten you.
Joining us now, Maureen, Senator, author of the massive big hit, both in a book form and movie, Hillbilly Elogy is the Republican vice presidential nominee, JD Vance.
Sir, how are you?
Good, man.
How are you?
Good to see you.
I'm sure you've had a very slow day today.
Yeah, that's right.
Nothing happened.
Pretty boring.
Nothing happened.
Pretty pretty important day.
Let's talk about the process.
Sure.
Uh a lot of questions for you, obviously.
Uh what was it like?
Because the last couple of days, well, it's down to two, you and Senator Rubio.
What was that like for you?
You know, I just tried to enjoy the ride.
What an honor to be considered.
If it had been Senator Ruby, obviously Marcus a good guy, he's a good friend.
So I try to just have a good attitude about it.
You know, my family's very excited, obviously asking a lot of questions.
I I will say, Sean, I hope I'm not uh betraying too many confidences here, but when the president called me today to actually formally offer me to become, you know, the vice president's nominee, which is sounds crazy.
Um, my son, my seven-year-old son was sort of making noise in the background, and you know, I'm getting so embarrassed.
It's like, oh my god, Donald Trump's asking me to be his vice president.
So the phone rings, he calls you, and you're like, okay, this is the call, or maybe not the call.
Or maybe it's a bad call, right?
It's the call.
Who knows whether it's good or bad?
But then he actually has me put my seven-year-old son on the phone.
You think about this.
Everything that's happened, the guy just got shot at a couple of days ago, and he takes the time to talk to my seven-year-old.
It's a moment I'll never forget.
All right.
Uh, and what did he actually say?
You know, he he just said, Look, uh, I think I'm gonna go save this country.
Uh, I think you're the guy who can help me in the in the best way.
You can help me govern, you can help me win, you can help me in some of these Midwestern states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and so forth.
And he said rightfully that we have been very, very close for a long time, but especially since I endorsed you in 2022.
And I would not have won that race without Donald Trump's endorsement.
And the president's trust then and his partnership since then has been something I value a great deal.
Let me let me ask you, you know this happens all the time.
You get announced, and in incoming begins.
Let's go over some of it.
Please.
And uh not questions you haven't heard before, knew would be asked.
All of them are fairly predictable, but I think Americans want the answers.
Sure.
Let me go back to, for example, after you know, he announced this, the media I'm starting to read every article, right?
Yeah.
And criticizing you that, you know, here's a guy, this was came out of Ohio.
His support for a national abortion ban and his twisted belief that women should stay in violent marriages for the benefit of their children exemplifies his dangerous extreme extremism.
He's not just wrong for Ohio, he's wrong for the country.
I never I actually saw those articles this weekend.
And I said, why would I wait?
I I wanted to know the answer.
I called you.
Yeah.
How do you address that?
Well, look, Sean, first of all, Democrats have completely twisted my words here.
And as you know, both me and my mom actually were victims of domestic violence.
When they say that, you know, Vance has supported women staying in violent marriages.
I think it's shameful for them to take a guy with My history and my background and say that that's what I believe.
It's not what I believe, it's not what I said.
And I think Sean, it's evidence of the Democrats' complete inability to talk about the future.
What are Republicans running on delivering the peace and prosperity that Donald Trump already delivered in his four years?
What are Democrats running on?
Lies and complete distortions of people's records.
That is something I think the American people are going to reject.
They're too smart for it.
You know, I said on January 2nd when the year started, I said, let me tell you what this year is going to be like, and I try to give a perspective to my audience.
It's not my first rodeo.
It's right, JD.
And I said, Democrats are going to try to make this election about quote democracy and peril.
How often have we heard that?
Uh meanwhile, they might want to disenfranchise every primary voter that they had.
Uh, and they wanted to get Donald Trump off the ticket in some states, another example.
It'd be about January 6th.
It would be about abortion.
Uh ever and and I we hate Donald Trump.
Exactly right.
Can they run on the issue?
Is the country better off than it was four years ago?
Of course they can't, Sean.
They can't run on that at all.
And they can't run on the issue of is the world more peaceful than it was four years ago.
Remember when Donald Trump left office, you had real growing peace movements all over the world.
The Abraham Accords that showed a real promise of uniting the Israelis with some of the Sunni Arab states.
There was no war in Europe.
Uh Asia looked like it was under pretty good control.
And three years later, it seems like we have a conflict in every corner of the world, and Americans are poorer, Sean.
Uh, you know a little about my background.
I grew up in a poor family.
I I remember when my grandmother uh who raised me, she used to negotiate with the Meals on Wheels people to give her additional food so that she could feed me.
How does a family like that deal with Joe Biden's grocery price inflation?
How does a family like that deal with gasoline and energy price inflation?
It's gotten more expensive just to live a good life in this country.
Donald Trump and I want to make that better, and we have policies to make it better.
Democrats have lies and distortions, and again, I don't think the American people are going to reward that.
You know, I had an opportunity to talk to Donald Trump, and I knew this question would come up actually for almost every person that was under consideration.
And that was past comments that you had made about him.
And when I I'll tell you after what his response was, but you you weren't didn't have the nicest things to say about him back in 2016, uh, which seems like a long time ago now.
You know, Pat, you literally said you texted a friend that Trump is a cynical a-hoe like Nixon who uh wouldn't be that bad and might even prove useful, and that he's America's Hitler.
And you compared him to a cultural heroine in the Atlantic Monthly.
And I'll tell you Trump's response, but you said that then.
What do you say to people that say, well, wait a minute.
What did he mean?
Well, Sean, I don't hide from that.
I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president, and he changed my mind.
I think he changed the minds of a lot of Americans because again, he delivered that peace and prosperity.
If you go back to what I thought in 2016, another thing that was going on, Sean, is I bought into the media's lies and distortions.
I bought into this idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy.
It was a joke.
Joe Biden is the one who's trying to undermine American law and order.
President Trump did a really good job.
And I actually think it's a good thing when you see somebody, you were wrong about them.
You ought to admit the mistake and admit that you were wrong.
Um when I brought it up to him, he said.
I can't wait for this.
Okay, when I brought it up to him, he said, yeah, he goes, but he doesn't think that way now, does he?
So he actually had a very good sense of humor about it.
I also says a lot about him, and he understands were you as political back then?
Not really, Sean.
I mean, you know, my book came out in 2016, Hillbilly Elogy.
It's really the sort of the story of growing up in poverty, achieving the American dream, starting out in business, and uh I I really didn't care that much about politics.
I certainly had views.
I was a Republican, but I was not as nearly as involved, obviously, as I am today.
And again, there's something that really changed for me, and I think for a lot of Americans is we saw the results of the Trump presidency compared to the obsessive, deranged media reaction in 2019 and 2020.
Like, what's going on?
What's so bad about this guy that he's delivered rising wages for American workers and peace in the world?
Why is the media so obsessed with him?
I think A lot of Americans actually have had a similar awakening over the last few years because you compare the results with the reaction, and clearly the people with the reaction to the problem, that's not President Trump's problem.
No, a lot of people forget too.
Back in the first debate, I believe it was, and Kamala Harris was on the stage with Joe Biden at the time, and she said, I was that girl.
If you remember that moment, it was a very hard-hitting moment.
What she was referring to is the fact that Joe Biden had partnered with a former Klansman and tried to stop the integration of public schools.
Joe Biden's words, he didn't want those schools to become racial jungles.
Sean, Kamala Harris basically said Joe Biden wouldn't want a little black girl like me to live in her neighborhood.
He also powed around with Klansmen.
She said this months before she joined his ticket, Sean.
I said some bad things about Donald Trump 10 years ago, but I think it's actually important to be able, again, to admit that you're wrong.
I think I can make a good case to the American people, people who may have been skeptical of the president back in 2016.
Who can be skeptical now that we've seen the results?
All right, let's talk about a little bit.
Um, and I think these are important times and consequential times.
Sure.
And we see what's happening with the border, for example.
I think it's now become the number one national security threat.
Oh, absolutely.
And we have nearly 11 million unvetted Joe Biden illegal immigrants in this country.
What should we do with them?
Well, Sean, we have to deport people.
We have to deport people who broke our laws, who came in here, and I think we start with the violent criminals.
And you know, President Trump has been very, very effective at communicating on this, so to the point where now a majority of Americans believe that we need to deport a large number of people who have come here legally.
That's that's a major political victory for him, and I think it's going to lead to a policy victory for the American people.
But Sean, we have to talk about the fentanyl problem because this is something that I know extremely personally.
And uh, we have close to a hundred thousand Americans dying of drug overdoses every single year.
Most of us brought is brought in by Mexican drug cartels, manufactured in China, and brought in by these cartels.
Uh, to get a little personal, you know, my mom struggled with addiction for a big chunk of my early life.
That's why my grandmother, who I call Mamma, raised me.
But the coolest thing, maybe the greatest blessing uh of my life is that my mom is about to celebrate 10 years sober.
And she is able to celebrate 10 years sober, frankly, because the poison that's coming across the border now wasn't coming across in such large numbers 15 years ago.
We are depriving Americans of a second chance with their loved ones.
You cannot keep on doing this.
You're orphaning an entire generation of kids.
Go to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Sean.
You have thousands of grandparents raising grandchildren that they weren't expecting to raise because of the poison Joe Biden let it come across the border.
President Trump is the guy to stop this, and if we don't stop it, we're gonna lose a generation of young kids.
You know, when I saw you in Atlanta, I said I felt a little embarrassed because I was one of the few Americans because most people knew Hillbilly LG.
It was a massive best seller that became a movie.
And I didn't I I literally read at least a book a day researching.
I know you do radio and television.
And so I decided I watched the movie.
And when I saw you, I I did ask you if is this really what your life was?
Appalachia.
And this is the history of your life.
Appalachia, you become a marine.
And by the way, your mom was a drug addict and an alcoholic, your father, not exactly the greatest father in the world.
And you grew up poor, and you had an amazing grandmother that came out of your life too.
But then you joined the Marines, you served in Iraq, you came out of school, you went to Ohio State, you went to Yale, you prospered at Yale.
Uh then you went on to be successful in business, which by the way, Democrats are criticizing you for they wish you failed, like uh when they when they wrote that, considering where you came from, it's the American dream.
And then you know, you got into politics and you did so successfully.
Uh a pretty amazing story.
Give us some texture and context to that life.
That I mean, that's a tough life you had.
Yeah, Sean, it was tough in a lot of ways, but blessed in a lot of ways.
And I think you've got to sort of accept the good with the bad.
I wouldn't see the world the same way that I see it without that experience, and I really do see it as a blessing.
I mean, but the the grandmother who raised me was such an amazing person.
I mean, she was a woman of deep Christian faith.
She cursed like a sailor.
I mean, she had a mouth that would really make a Marine Corps drill instructor blush.
But she was so loving and so disciplined.
And I I really think that all the opportunities that I've had uh come Directly from her.
She also believed in this country and recognized that most people in Washington do not care about people like her.
And when I talk about generations of grandparents raising generations of grandchildren, that's exactly who I think about because I remember my mamma, she couldn't afford her Medicaid payments.
She couldn't afford the prescription drugs that she needed.
She sometimes couldn't even afford food for both me and her.
Those are the people who suffer when we have the policies that we've had over the last three and a half years.
And those are the people who stand to benefit the most from President Trump round two.
Let me go back to the scene, and you referred to it earlier, meals on wheels.
Yeah.
And she would negotiate an extra something because you had nothing else.
Nothing.
Well, we sometimes we struggled, but sometimes, Sean, we didn't have anything.
And she would negotiate to get a little bit of extra so that she could share with me and also have enough for herself.
Look, sometimes tough work, sometimes times were hard, right?
And uh, you know, but I I look back on that, and I think to myself, when I go and talk to people, when I serve people as a United States Senator from the state of Ohio, I go and visit a food bank.
I actually understand a little bit what people are going through.
And so, yeah, it was tough when I was dealing with it, but now I really do think it's a blessing because it's giving me a perspective a lot of politicians don't have.
Let's talk about what you believe the role of a vice president should be.
Sure.
Well, look, Sean, I think it's very simple.
Number one, you need to support the president in enacting the agenda.
Whether it's going and meeting with foreign leaders, whether it's working with the Senate and the House to get legislation passed.
The president can't be everywhere.
Even Donald Trump can't be everywhere.
So you've got to be a person he can trust, he can rely on to actually advance the agenda.
That's the most important job.
Of course, if something God forbid happens, you gotta be ready to step into that office.
That's one of the most important roles of the vice president.
But I think Donald Trump, very healthy, gonna serve four very good years, but we've gotta have Republicans who are helping with him with the agenda.
You remember this as well as anybody, Sean.
As successful as he was politically, even after he was elected, certain Republicans didn't want to actually enact the America First agenda.
You've got to have leaders in Washington who are supporting him, not fighting against him.
All right, quick break.
We'll come back more on the other side.
More of my interview with JD Vance, now partnered with Donald Trump to be the next vice president of our country.
As we continue, we are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the RNC convention.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass.
You're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict to a Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started normally a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
We talk about the issues that actually matter to the country without panic, without yelling, and with a healthy dose of humor.
We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict to a Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down a verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
Point per me.
25 till the top of the hour.
800 941 is on number back to my interview with uh now, vice presidential candidate JD Vance at a second.
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Let's get back.
Last night, JD Vance, now vice presidential candidate with Donald Trump on the Republican ticket and my interview with him.
Let's talk about an occasion where you might disagree with him.
Sure.
How do you view your role in terms of handling that moment?
That's very simple, Sean.
I think that you owe it to the president to be honest with him if you don't think that he's doing the right thing if you disagree with him.
But you do it in private.
You offer your counsel in private because a lot of the vultures in the press, they will blow up every public discussion.
So you've met my colleagues while you're here.
I call them state run media.
Uh no, they absolutely are state-run media.
Um in fact, they're so state-run that even after President Trump was shot, and he showed a remarkable amount of unity and defiance and calmness, they blamed him for the rhetoric, even though he was the victim of a of a near assassination.
It's it's crazy.
But I I think it's really important that you don't have Republicans who blow up disagreements so that they can win points with the media who are never going to treat Republicans fairly.
The job is to help the enact the agenda.
And why does that matter?
Because that's what's going to make people's lives better.
Let's let's talk about I'm sure in the course of this process, it had to go through your head.
God forbid what is.
We saw this on Saturday.
President Trump.
A millimeter.
If he didn't turn his head, we we would be having very different conversations.
And um, and I certainly believe in God and faith, and it's an important part of your life.
And but it was that close.
And we always hear about one heartbeat away from the presidency.
I'm sure Americans are watching you tonight.
Are you ready at a moment's notice to step into that role?
And what do you believe most qualifies you for that?
Well, Sean, the answer is yes.
And I have to say you have to have some humility about this.
It's the biggest job in the world.
But I serve my country successfully, United States Marine Corps.
I had a successful business career, and I have the vision and the agenda aligned with President Trump to make the American worker better off, to bring peace to the world, and to actually advance an agenda that's good for American citizens.
I think the experience that maybe most Americans would care about, it's not that I spent two years in the Senate, and I think I've had a very successful two years in the Senate.
It's like came from nothing, became United States Marine, and succeeded in business.
That's the experience that I think gives you a fresh perspective.
You combine that with the ability to get things done, and that's what you need to do.
But Sean, I gotta say, Donald Trump is as healthy as anybody I've ever met.
I tell him all the time he's got ridiculous genes.
I plan to be a very good vice president for Donald Trump for four years.
Let's talk about when the shooting occurred uh this weekend.
What was going through your head?
And now we have some perspective.
I thought the people around him on the stage, Secret Service.
I've gotten to know Secret Service guys over the years, sure, doing this job, and I have found them to be amazing people.
They're willing to sacrifice their lives for you or for the president or for any elected official they may be assigned to.
They were phenomenal.
And then we found out how is it possible?
Just a mere hundred and thirty yards away.
You know, they talk about a perimeter, it was outside the perimeter.
No, the perimeter would be shooting range for any assassin.
And a guy was able to get on a roof, unnoticed apparently, except by people in the crowd trying to warn law enforcement.
To me, a massive failure.
What is your reaction to it?
Well, look, Sean, it's scary.
Uh I was actually playing mini golf with my kids when people started to text me, and I realized the president been shot.
Of course, I didn't know what his condition was.
My first reaction was just to pray for him.
I was terrified if if if President Trump had been killed, of course, terrible, terrible, terrible, but the reverberations in the country, it would have been a world historic tragedy.
Thank God he was okay.
I you know, I don't know enough about the security protocols, but I was a United States Marine, and 150 yards is not nearly enough of a layup.
It's a for anybody that has any skill at all.
But any skill at shooting, it's it's amazing, Sean, frankly, that he wasn't hurt much, much worse.
So I think there needs to be a full-scale investigation.
We need to understand what happened, because clearly your mistakes were made.
I mean, look, the Secret Service ran up there, they put their bodies over them, they reacted quickly.
That's not what worries me.
What worries me is why was there a shooter 150 yards from the president of the United States?
It doesn't make an ounce of sense.
But we need to understand why.
Because look, Sean, you know this.
A lot of Americans are extremely worried about President Trump, rightfully so, and they're very skeptical of the official narrative on anything.
The way to solve that is to get to the bottom of this, understand what happened, and fix it so it doesn't happen again.
All right, let me go back.
Let's go through some issues and where you stand on positions and where the administration would stand, assuming that you in 115 days.
By the way, early voting starts about 64 days in Pennsylvania State, you know very well.
Exactly right.
Uh let's start with immigration.
What do we do with the nearly 11 million unvetted illegal immigrants?
And I might add, many coming from countries with terror ties like Syria and Iran and Afghanistan and people from Venezuela and Egypt and tens of thousands from China and Russia.
What what should what should happen?
Is there an orderly way to say if you didn't come in legally, we will escort you home?
Yes, there is, Sean.
First of all, we've got to stop the flow to begin with.
Joe Biden has thrown open the southern border.
President Trump had it under control.
We've got to stop the flow to begin with.
Now, what do you do with the 11 million people?
I actually think it's probably more than 11 million people who are here right now.
Number one, you start with the most violent people, the people of criminal records, and you've got to be willing to deport them.
Number two, how do we find them?
Well, I think a lot of them we actually know where they are, Sean.
That's what the crazy thing about the Biden administration is they let people in, they give them asylum, and we actually know that these people are sort of out there in our country.
Uh some will be hard to find, sure, but a lot of them you actually can find just because if you actually try to look, which is what the Biden administration hasn't done.
The second thing, Sean, is we've got to make it hard for a legal aliens to work in our country.
It undercuts the wages of American workers, it invites more people to come in illegally.
And if you make it hard for people to work, it's a lot of them are gonna go back anyway.
And you do those two things, I think you can go a long way to solving the problem, but you gotta stop the flow.
That's the most important thing.
Let's talk about foreign policy and and I won't call it the Vance doctrine, because it'll be the Trump doctrine.
It'll be the Trump doctrine.
Okay, but look, let's go over some of the hot spots in the world.
I, for the life of me, don't understand Joe Biden's policy towards Iran.
I don't understand why he allows China to have spy balloons and hostile maneuverings against our Air Force and international airways and our Navy and international waterways.
Uh why why Russia got a waiver for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, for example.
But we've got a lot of hot spots in the world that have been very outspoken on the issue of Ukraine.
Yep, hundreds of billions of dollars in Joe Biden.
And then I would argue that Joe Biden surrendered in the war on terrorism with Hamas by not supporting Israel further and their offensive moves after the worst terror attack in their history.
Let's get your overall view.
Let's look at these hot spots.
Ukraine, Iran, uh, the war in the Middle East.
Yeah.
So, first of all, Sean, I served in the United States Marine Corps for four years.
One of the things I'm proudest of.
The most important part, I think, of the Trump doctrine and foreign policy is you don't commit America's troops unless you really have to.
But when you do, you punch and you punch hard.
I think that's the way that you respect America's brave men and women who are serving.
Now, let me say something about when you say that, does that like for example, how President Trump beat the caliphate?
It's overwhelming force, and it was done pretty fast.
How President Trump beat the caliphate, beat ISIS, which people said literally couldn't be done, and he did it in a matter of months.
But also Iran, Sean.
A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran, but not these weak little bombing runs.
If you're gonna punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that's what he did when he took out Salomani.
By the way, that action, people said that it would lead to broader war.
It actually brought peace.
It actually checked the Iranians and slowed them down a little bit.
But let me just say something about this this Iran issue, because maybe the most important diplomatic breakthrough of the Trump administration was the Abraham Accords.
If you want to check Iran, the way to do it is to one, withdraw their oil money, which of course Joe Biden's been bad about, but you've also got to enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states to work together and actually provide a counterbalance to Iran.
Joe Biden has done nothing.
You have the infrastructure there, sitting there to weaken Iran to strengthen our ally Israel.
Joe Biden's done nothing with it.
Donald Trump would reinvigorate it.
Let me go back to the issue of abortion.
And there was this article that said, oh, JD Vann said it's inconvenient.
I want you to address that, and I want you to explain in great as much detail as you are what your position is on the issue of abortion, especially in light of the Supreme Court ruling, which I would argue codified first trimester abortion abortion, which is mostly double the pill availability would be nationwide.
But what's your position in detail?
Yeah, very simply, Sean.
First of all, the Democrats have completely twisted my words.
What I did say is that we sometimes in this society see babies as inconveniences, and I absolutely want us to change that.
I do want us to be a more pro-life.
That's the word they focused on.
But but we do see babies in as inconveniences, and that's a mistake, Sean, and I want to change that because I do care about uh protecting people.
Now here's the thing Roe versus Wade is no more.
And what Donald Trump has said very, very smartly is California's going to want to have a different policy from Ohio.
Ohio's gonna want to have a different policy from Alabama, and it is reasonable to let voters in states make those decisions.
Doesn't mean we have to agree with it, but you have to have some respect for the political process.
This is really important, Sean, that respect for the political process.
Donald Trump is running against a Joe Biden president who wants taxpayer-funded abortions up until the moment of birth.
President Trump is trying to identify some reasonable compromises so we can tone this thing down, find some reasonable pro-life policy, like for example, make it easier to have babies, bringing down the price of homes so that you can raise a family in a house if you choose to have babies.
These things are, I think, where the Republican Party is going and focused on.
The Democrats want the most radical abortion policy funded by taxpayers.
So the idea that they can run on this and attack us when President Trump is the one trying to identify some reasonable compromise, and they're the ones who want pro-life Christians to pay for abortions at 39 weeks, it's insane.
I don't think any American buys it.
You know, it's interesting.
Bill Clinton famously said rare and legal.
And I think where Republicans seem to be today is rare, legal and early, meaning maybe dobs 15 weeks.
And I see this as the number one issue that they want to demagogue for sure, which we can see in the statements that Democrats have made about you.
This is a big difference, actually, between Democrats of now and 30 years ago.
My mamma, the woman who raised me, was a she was pro-choice.
She used to say safe, legal, and rare.
And I remember um, you know, that that was her understanding of what the Democratic Party view was.
The Republicans were pro-life, the Democrats were safe, legal, and rare.
Now the Democrats are saying taxpayer funded up until the moment of birth, unlimited.
That's ridiculous.
And for them to try to say that we're radicals on this, Sean, I don't think the American people buy it.
So you uh completely agree or in full complete agreement with President Trump, and is the answer, for example, that he gave during the debate.
My view is that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and his views on abortion are going to be the views that dominate this party and drive this party forward.
And his views are very simple, Sean.
It's look, you gotta follow your heart.
You have to believe in reasonable exceptions because that's where the American people are, and you've got to let individual states make this decision.
Alabama's gonna make a different decision from California.
That is a reasonable thing, and that's how I think we we build some bridges and have some respect for one another.
Let me ask last question.
I'll combine two issues in one.
Uh it always comes up the issue of LGBTQ rights, now the issue of of trans status and what's age appropriate in schools for kids and the second amendment.
But look, I mean, I think that we shouldn't be teaching kids sexually explicit anything, whether it's LGBTQ or anything else.
I want my kids to go and learn reading, writing, and arithmetic.
And one of the important things that we can do as a country, Sean, is cut out the federal funding for radical curricula.
A lot of the craziest stuff that you see in our schools, the cradies, the craziest books and so forth, it comes from federal funding.
And I think 90% of Democrats and Republicans, they just want their kids to get an education.
They don't want them to be indoctrinated.
They don't want fourth graders to read sexually explicit stuff.
That's not a left-right issue.
That's a common sense parents' rights issue.
So if you look over your shoulder, there's a big stage down there.
And you have a big speech coming up.
Um has the world changed a little bit since Wednesday, uh, since Saturday, and you're speaking Wednesday.
It's changed a little bit, Sean.
Of course it has.
I mean, Donald Trump has given me an incredible honor.
And we get to go and make the case to the American people that President Trump's next four years can be as great as the first four years, maybe even better.
And that's an incredible thing to do.
But Sean, I'm so grounded, man.
My my faith, I I got to spend a few hours with my wife and kids today.
We've got a seven-year-old, a four-year-old, and a two-year-old.
Uh, things are crazy and things are way different, but I'm still a husband and a dad first, and uh that's gonna make me a very happy guy over the next four months.
Well, we're gonna look forward to seeing you.
We'll be out with you on the campaign trail.
Uh, first of all, congratulations.
Congratulations.
Congratulations to the great people of Ohio, have a lot of friends there.
We wish the best of luck in all of this.
Uh JD Vance, uh, for my colleagues in the mob and state-run media, uh, they're not gonna be your friend ever.
Um, anyway, God bless you, Sean.
Thank you.
Appreciate you being with us.
Uh, I will tell you if somebody that had not read Hit Hillbilly Elogy and only recently saw the movie a number of weeks ago.
Very impressive.
Appalachia, Marines, Iraq, Ohio State, Yale, top of his class, business, huge success.
Senator, now vice presidential candidate.
And I thought he had great answers.
All right, that's gonna wrap things up for today.
Hannity tonight, nine Eastern on the Fox News channel.
We are loaded up.
Don Jr. tonight, Glenn Youncan tonight, Christy Gnome, uh, also Jessica Tarloff and Pete Haggseth, Newt Gingrich.
Say you D VR, Monday through Friday, Hannity on Fox, best election coverage.
We'll see you tonight, back here from Milwaukee tomorrow.
Thank you for making the show possible.
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