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Feb. 20, 2025 - Sean Hannity Show
32:45
Saving Americans - February 19th, Hour 1

Sean reacts to his interview with Elon Musk and talks about the various ways in which he truly is saving Americans.  He's saving astronauts abandoned by the Biden administration; he talks about billions in cost reductions.  We are returning to the values and visions of our founding fathers. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I can't even really respond to the overwhelming generosity of comments.
Trust me, when interviews, if people don't like them, they're pretty loud about it.
And in fairness, sometimes the criticism is right.
And this was an interview that just kind of took on a life of its own.
Although we got so much.
When I walked into this interview with President Trump and Elon Musk, I had no idea how long I was going to have with them.
No idea.
And, you know, I was hoping to get a full hour.
We actually ended up having more, which we will run tonight.
Like tonight, there's some really incredibly insightful things that we just didn't have time for last night.
You know, why he wants to do this.
And, you know, what happens to the world of America fails and how America cannot fail and his motivation for doing it.
It is pretty spectacular.
How to make things better.
And, you know, I got into a lot of this.
And I don't think if I wanted to accomplish one thing in this interview, as we listen to the state-run legacy media mob, they have no interest in going through where the waste, fraud, abuse, corruption is none at all.
I mean, we had a moment on fake news CNN, and I thought it was pretty revealing.
And it was Stephen Miller just, are you against the cuts?
You know, tell me why you're against these cuts.
You know, asking some anchor over fake news CNN.
And I'm, you know, because as we played on the program yesterday, these are comments eliminating waste, fraud, abuse in government.
These are comments that have been made repeatedly.
You know, Ronald Reagan had the Grace Commission, but these were comments made by Democratic presidents and vice presidents.
You know, Bill Clinton made these comments repeatedly.
And, you know, Al Gore made these comments repeatedly.
And Barack Obama made these comments repeatedly.
And, you know, Republicans have been saying it for years.
And I love Miller was being attacked on fake news CNN.
The U.S. government is $36 trillion in debt.
And the average American makes $66,000 a year.
And here you have a guy that's putting his life on hold, working for free.
He's not getting paid.
And a guy that has done some of the most innovative, amazing things in his life with the brain of a genius he thinks on levels that all of us could only dream of.
I mean, if you think of everything from PayPal, all right, may sound simple in this day and age.
It wasn't so simple when you thought of it and making it work, or SpaceX, where it becomes the first public company.
He was the chief engineer, invested his own $100 million at the time, money that I think he got from PayPal, and is the chief engineer and becomes the first public company to send astronauts into orbit.
Pretty amazing accomplishment.
He sees the incredible possibility of Tesla early on, electric cars.
I think liberals would love that.
Even joked, yeah, liberals used to love me.
They don't love me anymore.
And, you know, and look at the innovation.
And by the way, he's not mandating.
And at one point, it even came out because, yes, I asked the conflict of interest question.
And what's going to happen to Social Security and Medicare?
And who's in charge between you two?
All right.
I knew the media would care the most about that stuff.
But for me, it was just very different.
For me, I wanted to understand it.
I wanted to understand him.
And then I look at all the other accomplishments.
I mean, he's on the precipice of going into space.
They have successfully docked with Space Station before, and now they're going to do it to rescue astronauts.
I don't know why there wasn't urgency during the Biden-Kamala Harris years.
It makes absolutely, positively no sense.
And, you know, one of the questions I ask him that will air tonight, I don't know how much time we have left, maybe 12, 15 minutes available to use tonight.
And I ask him, why is he doing all these things?
And President Trump weighs in that this is the most important thing he's ever going to do.
This might be the only chance we ever get.
I mean, when you have the average American seeing, and that's why I keep scrolling because imagine being the interviewer and they say, excuse me, while I read this long list of waste, fraud, and abuse that you found that we've been able to confirm.
And I read that.
I would take the whole time that they wouldn't want to talk to me.
And you wouldn't blame them.
And I'd be talking too much.
So I decided, you know what?
I'm just going to scroll this like I've been scrolling it.
But, you know, and Elon goes into great specificity about, God help the world.
If America fails, we cannot fail.
And it might be our only opportunity.
And he goes into detail about how this may be our one shot.
It's like what Newt's been saying.
We've got to the dance, but they haven't fixed it all yet.
And in the end, it's going to be hundreds of billions, if not over a trillion dollars in savings.
And that's going to be great for our kids and grandkids.
And we're going to run government more efficiently.
And I say, in my words, return to constitutional order and the values, the vision of our framers and founders, which is liberated government and greater freedom.
The interest payments on the debt now exceed our national defense budget.
We're at a point where we're going to have the biggest debt to GDP ratio since World War II.
The American people still suffering.
We still live under the Biden-Harris economy, and people are putting bare necessities on credit cards.
56%, I've been saying this now for days, of the American people cannot afford a $1,000 emergency expense.
If, God forbid, their air conditioner goes down or their car breaks down, they're in trouble.
And that's why credit card debt is as high as it is right now.
And the American people are tired.
And when they see this, if you had a natural reaction, you would be outraged.
And it was funny.
So Stephen Miller is on, you may assert that there's no waste in the treasury, but I'm not asserting.
I don't think anyone would assert that, Stephen.
And he says, then why are you not celebrating these cuts?
If you agree there's waste and abuse, if you agree there's corruption, why are you not, and why is the media not celebrating these reforms?
Why people are going to die because of the Doge?
No, they're not.
You're not going to.
And that got clarified last night by the president as it relates to Social Security and Medicare.
It doesn't mean you can't reform them, just like you can block grant money to the states or have school vouchers and eliminate the Department of Education.
But, you know, we've got to understand why this is important.
And that was more my motivation because I don't think a lot of people know this.
Then you add to that, you know, the robotic arm of Tesla.
I mean, robots created that could do menial tasks for people in their homes.
It's probably going to be more common much more quickly than people think.
It's kind of like when big screen TVs came out, only a few people had them.
Then the price went way, way down.
If you bought one of the early ones, you paid a fortune.
If you waited, you got it for next to nothing.
At some point, robots will become more common and the price is going to be driven down dramatically and they'll mass produce it.
And we may all have robots, you know, cleaning our house, cleaning the dishes.
I don't know what they can do, you know, or something as unbelievably magical if they can pull this off, working with artificial intelligence and his new version of Grok, which according to every expert is surpassing even what the Chinese DeepSeek that they put out and every other AI that has been created, but it's taken it to a new level.
And he wants to study, you know, the vastness of the universe and creation.
And it's just the media and the left don't want to see the big picture.
And when he talks about Neuralink maybe curing blindness and people that have spinal cord injuries one day being able to walk, you've got my attention.
And then you're going to devote your time, energy, resources into finding waste fraud and abuse.
And they're finding it, you know, in ways that should make every American so, so angry.
And the only people that keep pushing back and are screaming and singing and chanting, we will win, blah, blah, blah, and all this madness and calling him the F-word and, you know, male body parts, the street vernacular, and a constitutional crisis.
It's not a constitutional crisis.
The only crisis is the corruption that's been exposed.
They don't like him because he's friends with Trump and he exposed them for their waste fraud, abuse, and corruption.
And they don't like being exposed.
And that's where their power came from, spending and abusing your money.
And it's your money.
It's not my money.
It's partly my money, but just wasting it and robbing from our kids and grandkids at a level that is unprecedented.
And they want to be angry at Elon Musk.
It was so interesting getting to know him because in many ways, he's just innocent and he's just excited by every aspect of life.
He thinks about getting plants to Mars and people to Mars.
I don't wake up in the morning thinking about doing something that incredibly brave, bold, and innovative.
My brain is not as bright as his.
And yet we have good people that want to devote their lives to government.
Now, you know, at different times, people ask me if I ever want to run for office.
I'm like, wow, you must really hate me because look at what they do to people that want to run for office.
And nobody's gotten the brunt of this and the abuse of it more than Donald Trump ever.
And, you know, Jon Stewart was pretty interesting.
And I don't know if, you know, Jon Stewart doesn't like me, and I don't think I don't particularly love him.
But you know what?
I got to give him props.
I mean, he's willing to call out the left.
And Bill Maher, same thing.
I don't have a relationship with either one of them, and I don't really like to do interviews anyway.
I have no desire.
But when they're spot on, they're at least far more honest than other people in the media.
And he actually said that I tell, you know, when you keep saying fascist, fascist, fascist.
And I think if you quote cry fascism at every administration overreach, even the ones that are constitutionally okay, you're going to find yourself out of fascism bullets when the time really comes.
And I think what the media has done over the past 10 years is cry wolf to the point that they have numbed everybody.
And it's gotten to the point where, you know, what was the thing they litigated throughout this campaign?
He's a fascist.
He's a horrible person.
Democracy on the ballot.
Guess what?
He goes, guess what lost at the ballot?
If you told us democracy was on the ballot, democracy got its ass kicked by a majority vote.
Now, it's smart and it's clever and it's true.
And he says, so I'm very cautious about when, yeah, you know, hopefully I won't do it, you know, himself, but it's like when you put your dog down, it's one of those things like you're not quite sure.
But I do understand how annoying that is.
And he's kind of warning the left.
Bill Maher has been saying the same thing.
You know, even before the election, if Trump wins, I know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to do exactly what I'm doing now.
And if Kamala would have won, yeah, it would be rough.
I think the country was headed into a very steep decline of radicalism that won that would spiral so far out of control.
I don't know if we would be able to come back and save it even.
I just don't know.
You know, people say, who's the next Trump?
There is no next Trump.
There never was a next Reagan.
There just wasn't.
There are true originals in life.
And there's nobody else like him.
I mean, to be the force of nature that he is and to take all that he's taken and come back standing, they threw everything they had at him to destroy him.
So this is where we are.
And this is an opportunity now to be transformational, an opportunity to get back on the right path and return to constitutional order, to return to the principles of limited government.
And this goes for Republicans too, because they're still fighting amongst themselves about, you know, how much to cut, where to cut.
None of them are going to get everything that they want, but there is a roadmap, and that would be the Trump agenda, which I think should unite all of them because without Donald Trump in this election, a lot of them wouldn't be there.
And he carried a number of them across the finish line.
And that's just a fact.
So I hope we still have more.
We'll run tonight and talk more about it, analyze it.
Christy Noam also on tonight.
We got a great show, Nine Eastern on Fox.
But I am pretty amazed.
And I think we're pretty blessed that good people want to serve us, and they give up a lot in the process.
And then they get demonized by people that just don't like their politics for no reason at all.
Hey there, I'm Mary Catherine Ham, and I'm Carol Markowitz.
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All right, 25 now till the top of the hour, 800-941, Shauna's on number.
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Because it's happening more and more.
I mean, there's crime in small towns, big cities.
Look, my first option is always to get out of the situation and not have any confrontation.
That should be everybody's first option.
If you have the ability, your last option is lethal force.
And I've always had a license to carry.
I still do.
In Florida, I even had one in New York City, believe it or not.
And although I returned that.
But, you know, what is the option?
The next option for me is thanks to the technology that is Burner, the less lethal launcher, it's so effective.
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Never leave home without a burner.
Now, the beauty of Burner is it has kinetic rounds and tear gas and pepper spray.
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All right, we do have a lot to get to.
The last thing I'm going to say about Musk is he has, and we discussed this a little bit, XAI, which is the newest version of its flagship, Elon Musk's flagship, Grok ChatVot, which outperforms its artificial intelligence.
He believes rivals Sam Altman and OpenAI and the latest, all the buzz about China's DeepSeek and the discovery.
Most people didn't think that the Chinese were as close and as sophisticated in AI until that came out.
But Grok 3 scored higher on tests in math, science, and coding than any other artificial intelligence out there.
And that includes OpenAI's GPT-4.0 and Google's Gemini and DeepSeek and every other model out there.
And XAI's claims about Grok 3's performance are pretty amazing.
And all of artificial intelligence is to me.
It will change all of our lives.
And we just don't know how it's going to change all of our lives.
We don't know.
Starting with Doge today, the top 10 federal agencies in Doge cost savings.
I mean, these are billions of dollars that we're talking about here.
We're not talking about millions, billions.
And there is a difference.
$8,164,000,000 Department of Homeland Security.
$6,541,000 for the agency, you know, AID or Agency for International Development, separate.
The Department of Education, over a billion dollars.
I mean, it just goes on and on on top of all of the specific cuts.
It was pretty interesting, too.
I mean, to get the questions answered that I know the media would want most answered.
You know, is it President Musk?
Because they don't want these guys to get along.
You got the world's smartest, richest man, offering his time and energy, taking it away from some of the most creative thinking in the world.
Who's in charge?
President Musk.
They just do it to try to divide Trump and Musk, and they know it.
They see it.
So we got that question straightened out.
Then the fear-mongering, it won't be Social Security for grandma and grandpa.
We dealt with that last night.
Department of Education, which the president said he wants shut down immediately.
Yeah, he clarified that too.
More efficient ways than having a federal bureaucracy running education in every state.
And even acknowledged some states will do a poor job at it.
And then there'll be, you know, if you give it to different areas of states independently, like he broke up New York.
If you look at the map of New York, the voting map, a lot of the state is red.
As a matter of fact, the majority by far of the state, upstate New York, Nassau County, Suffolk County, have all gone red.
Bruce Plakeman's done a great job in Nassau County as the county executive.
They've done phenomenal work.
And as a result, they are being rewarded by voters at the polls.
I mean, now the only thing Governor Hochl seems concerned about is whether to step in and remove the mayor of the city of New York for the first time.
It's insane.
They just can't get their act together.
Donald Trump.
Now, some people say, well, why would Donald Trump do this?
Why?
Because it needs to be done.
We have seen the weaponization of our Department of Justice.
We have seen the politicizing and weaponizing of our FBI and our intelligence community.
And the president directed the Justice Department to fire all U.S. attorneys left over from the Biden administration, all of them.
And he said, therefore, I have instructed the termination of all remaining Biden-era U.S. attorneys.
We must clean house immediately, restore confidence.
They were there the whole time.
Did any of them ever stand up at the Department of Justice and say that, wait a minute, this is not equal justice under the law?
And when I talk about rank and file, I understand at the FBI, really, there's so many of these people that look forward to the FBI being restored towards its former greatness and being restored as the world's premier law enforcement agency.
And on top of that, you have senior DOJ prosecutors quitting after being told to investigate Biden's climate spending.
Well, I mean, look at what we're spending on climate radicalism worldwide.
We're not even spending Spending it here.
This transcends, you know, everything that the UN is doing and that we give $7 billion a year to.
And, you know, the Paris climate accords in which we're paying hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I mean, this is insanity.
And the American people have a right to know, and this is what the president signed in his executive order yesterday, where every penny is going.
So, clean house, you know, and the left is doing what they always do.
We now have a whopping 74 lawsuits filed in federal courts against the administration because what they can't get done at the ballot box, what they can't get done electorally, what they can't get done legislatively, you know, then they run to the liberal courts in the hopes that they can get it done there and go against the will of the American people.
And frankly, what's right for the American people?
This is basic, simple common sense.
If you're a Democrat and you see all of this waste, fraud, and abuse, and you realize it's your money and your children's money and your grandchildren's money, are you not angry at this?
Because I think you have every right to be angry.
Anyway, the House Senate, I mean, we kind of expected this, a little bit of intramural fighting.
It's probably going to take Donald Trump to act to get these guys to get working in unison.
And that is, they had a budget test vote clearing in the Senate as the House GOP has not gotten time to act on their bill.
There were very, very stringent, stringent requirements for a reconciliation bill in the U.S. Senate.
And it is time to act on the mandate of the American people.
And that's rebuilding our defense, securing our border, preparing for the next generation of weaponry, unleashing American energy, deporting all these people in the country illegally.
Let's see.
Doge found the GAO now admits up to 7% of federal spending may be fraudulent.
Wow.
That's a nonpartisan government agency.
This isn't even Doge.
The director telling NPR that fraud represents 3% to 7% of our annual federal budget.
Well, if the GAO nonpartisan says that, maybe what they're doing with Doge is a pretty good thing.
But, you know, the left keeps crying, constitutional crisis, constitutional crisis.
That's the first thing they always do.
He's in violation of the Constitution.
You know, it's, as Musk said last night, he actually answered, he said, when these attacks occur, the thing they're accusing the administration of is what they are guilty of.
They're saying that things are being done that are unconstitutional, but what they're doing is unconstitutional.
Frankly, outright theft.
It was pretty funny.
A couple of things that they didn't know.
One, I started out joking around.
I just said, well, he's your friend and he's working for free, but you just settled a $10 million suit that you had filed against Twitter before Elon Musk knew it.
Elon Musk, I just give it to the lawyers.
I didn't pay attention to it.
And Trump didn't know that Musk endorsed him the day of the assassination attempt in Butler.
That was pretty interesting that came out of the interview.
And I started, I said, you made him pay $10 million.
I'm like, give him the money back.
Lynn, did you think that was a little funny?
I did.
I thought it was a little awkward.
I don't know.
I don't know that I would have led with that, but I have a question for you.
What?
So you're sitting in a room with these two dudes, right?
Three dudes sitting in a room.
Okay.
Is this a joke?
No, no, no, yeah.
Three guys walk into a bar.
But all kidding aside, I know how you prep and how much you prepped.
How much of what you wanted to ask did you ask?
You never get in everything you want to ask.
There's certain things I knew that I had to get in.
You know, who's in charge?
How do you get along?
What's the nature of the relationship?
What if there's a conflict?
What about the fear-mongering about Social Security, Medicare?
Those you just had to get in.
But those are basic questions.
Now, the next question.
If I didn't ask him, I would have gotten killed, but that was wanted people to know.
The liberal air needed to be cleared and squashed, and I thought that was smart.
And I enjoyed it.
Now, how long did it take before the three of you actually sat down to do the actual interview?
I know you guys must have been, maybe you had some jiu-jitsu moments.
Maybe you flipped the president, showed, you know.
No, I didn't flip.
No, I've never shown the president any of my interviews.
But all kidding aside, how was it?
Like, did you guys walk around the White House?
Like, did you guys talk for a little bit?
What's the behind the scenes?
Behind the scenes, as I get there, the president, when you go in the Oval Office and I went through the Oval Office, there's a bathroom on the right.
There's a room that the president has turned kind of into like a souvenir room that he gives gifts to people when they visit the White House.
And then there's a dining room area.
It's not that big.
It's pretty small, but we were all just hanging out of the dining room, just, you know, hanging out probably for an hour, just talking.
Wow.
So you had like an hour of hang time before you did the actual sit-down.
Yeah, nervous that I wasn't going to have any time.
I had no idea how much time they'd give me.
I was hoping I'd get a whole show out of it and I got a little more.
But, you know, it's, yeah, I mean.
Was there anything that you love that didn't make air?
You mean the stuff behind the scenes?
Yeah, like, was there anything you learned?
I mean, obviously, you know the president.
I'll tell you what I learned.
I learned that I really liked him.
Who?
I learned, well, obviously I'm a fan of President Trump.
I'm very outspoken about it.
But I really liked Elon Musk.
And I found him, you know, his genius comes across, and he's got the innocence of a kid in many ways.
He's like, he gets excited over the stuff that he's doing, which probably explains why he sleeps at work all the time.
I mean, he has a reputation for just sleeping on the floor in one of his offices.
Well, I guess that's a perfect fit for President Trump who doesn't sleep at all.
So, you know, he barely sleeps too.
You know what you should have done?
You said, you should have said, guys.
I got my rapid radios.
Let's all get, let's get three of them.
We'll share them.
And then we can just share ideas all night long because you're the three people in the world that don't sleep.
Okay.
We're dealing with multi, multi-billionaires here.
All right, fine.
We'll plate them in gold.
It's fine.
And we got to admit, it was a little funny when I said, he's the richest guy in the world.
It probably bothers you a little bit.
I was just messing with President Trump.
Well, I mean, really, who is more wealthy, right?
I mean, but he is the most powerful.
So there is that.
I did think it was.
It felt real to me, their friendship, which was nice.
That is, I can confirm that a thousand percent.
And it was just the interview took on a life of its own.
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say I controlled that interview because I did not.
I just let them talk.
I would disagree with that.
I think you controlled that interview.
You were very much a part of that interview.
I didn't feel like that was like a train gone astray.
No, it wasn't because I thought the conversation was real.
And it's what I mean by it took on a life of its own.
They gave very genuine, real answers.
And a lot of a lot we, you know, kind of came up a little bit behind the scenes, but it was more getting to know him.
And if I could, I'd like to spend a day with Elon Musk and just get in his brain and listen to him.
I said to him, I would love to pick your brain about AI.
The thing that fascinates me the most, I mean, well, two things that really fascinate me the most about him is Nora Link, his passion for it, and SpaceX and the rescuing of the astronauts.
Well, I think my favorite line, I don't want to give it away because we're playing a lot of it at five o'clock, but I think one of the funnier moments, in my opinion, and Katie and Ethan can speak to this as well, was when he said, I watched that rocket come back like you grab a beautiful baby.
You know, a big, beautiful baby.
I was like, what is happening right now?
Why is he so weird?
I was like, I don't know if that's how we grab babies, but all right, cool, sure, whatever.
And Trump, kind of like me, you know, when he first met Elon, had no idea how deep he was into all of this.
And now he understands it all.
And that's, that's, and he's such a quick.
Well, he is like you, a serial entrepreneur.
So I'm sure there is between the three of you a lot of conversation to have about building businesses, how you fail, how you succeed, why you need to fail to learn from it, and so on and so forth.
There's so much that we can learn from smart people.
And I just wish, you know, for a moment that common sense would prevail and there would be recognition.
I mean, again, if this is the political hill Democrats want to die on, it is the dumbest choice ever.
Reckless Green New Deal, DEI, transgenderism, wokeism, LGBTQ monies, you know, tens, what will be hundreds of billions abroad, while America has record debt and our taxpayers are buried under the Biden-Harris economy, which we all still live under.
So it was, we'll get to that.
We're going to play the interview from last night.
And we have more tonight, by the way.
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