Rod Blagojevich exposes how Obama’s 2008 Senate seat deal—vetted but later weaponized by the FBI—landed him in prison, where he survived gang-infested conditions through faith while witnessing the Democratic Party’s shift to "wokeness" and Chicago’s socialist collapse under Mayor Brandon Johnson. He accuses prosecutors of Soviet-style tactics, credits Trump for his release, and warns 2024’s outcome could decide America’s democratic future, citing electronic voting fraud in 2020 and comparing Harris’s potential victory without proof to Nazi-era plebiscites. Blagojevich also ties Democratic hypocrisy—from bombing Serbia in 1999 to ignoring Christian victims in U.S. wars—to a coming realignment, where working-class voters may abandon the party for Trump’s populism, framing it as a last stand against elite corruption. [Automatically generated summary]
I'll tell you, this is a long way from being inmate number 40892424. Well, I must say, your prison story, I've heard a lot of prison stories, one of the most incredible I've ever heard.
It's a story that starts with one president, Obama.
He started the whole thing because he sent someone to me to make a political deal for the senator.
Ends with Trump.
Okay.
And most of it's about a governor in prison with Crips and Bloods, gangster disciples, Sinaloa cartel drug dealers who look up to El Chapo like my daughters look up to Taylor Swift.
Murderers weren't there for my first three years.
I lived in a six-foot by eight-foot prison cell, a far cry from the 50,000-square-foot governor's mansion.
But even if you hadn't gotten screwed, I would still be in awe of your toughness, emotional, spiritual toughness to come out positive, focused, not bitter.
Three years in that six foot by eight foot prison cell, you know, in the higher prison where they were squeezing me, you know, with the gangbangers, murderers, bank robbers.
Pedophiles, transgender people who were half woman, half man, funded by you, the taxpayer.
And you get those moments when you find yourself in deep despair and you feel like there's no chance.
The system is so rigged.
You can't get justice.
You can't even get mercy because you fought back.
No one even said I took a penny.
It was all politics.
Request for campaign contributions, no quid pro quo.
We knew where the lines were.
Tried me twice.
And then you put your faith in the appellate court, and then they can't uphold the so-called sale of the Senate seat because if they allow that standard, government shuts down because that's all horse trading, and that's what they called it, and they were right.
So they eventually reversed that, but I'm known for this.
The other ones were three fundraising requests made by...
Third parties, not even by me.
And they knew not to make any promises or threats.
And they criminalized it by using a standard that the Supreme Court said wasn't the law.
And it was whitewashed by the appellate court to protect them.
And you get those moments.
But then you say to yourself, it ain't about you anymore.
It's about your daughters.
They were little girls when I left home.
And your wife.
You've got to be strong for them.
And as long as you have purpose.
In life, you can survive anything.
And Viktor Frankl wrote that book, Man's Search for Meaning, Holocaust Survivor.
I mean, a million times worse than anything we went through.
But his point was, the last of the human freedoms is our freedom to choose our own attitude in any given set of circumstances.
And I reached for that Bible in a way I never did before.
I wasn't going to bother with Genesis or Leviticus or Deuteronomy, get caught up in who's beginning who, because that would always slow me down when I try to read it in the real world.
I'm not running for anything, so I'm not giving any BS to your listeners.
It was just real.
And in some respects, I'm not saying it was good, but I'd have moments over the years where I would actually feel some sort of real unique connection to God.
And it was somewhat like what Solzhenitsyn had written when he was in Siberia.
And he had talked about, he had said something like, thank you prison for what you did for me, but for...
What you did, I would not feel as close to God as I do now.
Yeah, I think, yes, and I think a greater appreciation for the things that really matter most in life, you know, like the people in your life that you love, and the appreciation for the simple things that maybe you were...
You know, a little bit less aware of because you were so busy in the race of life to get ahead, right?
They're unwilling to have any kind of open-minded discussion about the fact that the schools have been failing for generations, and most of the kids that are suffering are the black kids.
They talked a big game about being on the side of the black people.
But they won't even give a black mother a choice or a chance to maybe try another school because the public schools are so locked in to what the teachers' unions want.
And I'm not here to say that I wasn't exactly, you know, part of that Democrat party and the unions and the teachers' unions.
Because she's a practical politician, and so she's gravitated towards that energy in the Democrat Party today, which is that far-left socialist Democrat Party that wants to...
We change America.
And you say this, and I'll repeat what you say, and that is to force us and make us to try to believe things we know.
Because there's an element in America, and it's found a home of the Democrat Party that's all about science and absolutely nothing about religion.
I think part of the coalition is the Democrat Party, and I've been supportive of LGBTQ issues, but I think they feel threatened by Judeo-Christian values, and so they've become...
In many respects, antagonistic to those traditional values.
And these are some of the practical considerations that are part of why a lot of these Democrats have left the traditional Democrat, you know, working person's view of God and have become more apt to embrace science.
And, you know, I'm not saying there's any advantages to being in prison for a long time.
But I think that he's practical, and these Democrats have programs and stuff that they want to pay for, and bloated budgets are not a priority.
And even the old-school Democrats, that's not a priority.
It's jobs and opportunities for people who've helped and that kind of thing.
But the point I wanted to make about Daley was, when I worked in that state's assurances office, You know, I learned a lot about how, you know, prosecutors operated, and they were all right.
Mostly good.
But I imagine that the federal U.S. attorneys who went to the better schools, you know, I could never have a chance to be one of them, right?
Grades, I was a Gentleman C scholar in law school, that these people had to be really smart, really bright, and they had to be super honest compared to the local Democratic prosecutors, many of whom, you know, had some political backing to get their jobs.
In my case, anyway, and I don't want to speak generally about everybody, but they're so corrupt.
The Supreme Court took the case, and Weissman's standard that used to destroy Arthur Anderson and cost all those people jobs, nine to nothing, the Supreme Court ruled.
The city that used to be, you know, diverse racially, you know, very strong, still, you know, black population, still in the poor, bad, rough neighborhoods, a big Latino population, but it was a city.
And they've been replaced by these young, you know, Young, new generation, not very politically aware, you know, probably driven by the social issues more than anything else.
You know, a woman's right to choose those kinds of issues.
It's rich white women and illegal aliens working in tandem to destroy civilization.
It is in cities across the country.
That is the model.
The unhappiest people and the most, you know, the people with the least power who just can be used as cannon fodder for the program of the unhappiest people.
So, but do you know what the Dailies think of this?
And Mayor Daley, who's in his early 80s now, he hosts a Christmas party every year, and I get invited, I get to see him, and he's had a couple of strokes, and then he hosts the St. Patrick's Day parties, you can imagine.
Yeah, and Bill Daley maybe not, because he's sort of, you know, he was more like, Bill Daley didn't win elected office, he was more of an appointed guy, you know?
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So what role did Obama play?
I mean...
I think most people thought Obama was a sign that America was getting healthier healing from past trauma and all that.
He was a sign of hope.
And then it just got super evil.
But when did you realize that Obama was not what he seemed to be?
And what role did he play in the disaster in your life?
My story, the book that I'm writing, is a story that started with him on election night in 2008. It was magical.
First black person, half black.
Mom from Kansas, dad from Kenya.
Elected president.
I've known him since 1995. We both came up together in politics, had good relationships.
I was introduced to him by a guy by the name of Tony Bresco.
I think that name is familiar to you.
Who's not nearly the guy who's been portrayed.
I mean, businessman, very practical.
Extremely generous to Obama and good to Obama.
Helpful to both of us raising money and things like that.
And when I was elected governor, he would come to me with requests from Obama.
And, you know, a lot of it were appointments to high positions in state government.
I was two years ahead of Obama in terms of going to the next level.
Because I was the first Democrat governor elected in Illinois in 2002. And with this long and hard to pronounce last name, which was kind of cutting edge at the time, because for the most part, Illinois was electing guys with Anglo names or Irish names.
You know, we had Thompson, we had Edgar, and we had Ryan before me.
But I think in some respects, I should apologize to the American people because I might have had something to do with Obama's success because I think he saw that if I won and I could win downstate in the rural areas and deep southern Illinois, which is the American South, a guy like me from Chicago.
He could do it.
And with a name you can't say his name, he could do it.
And two years later, he did.
And he got the opportunity to give that speech in Boston, which was his William Jennings Bryant moment, right?
Yeah, so was I. I turned to Bobby Rush, the congressman, former Black Panther.
I said, Bobby, just think about that.
As soon as you got done with that speech, you're the only guy who's ever beaten that guy in an election.
Because Obama challenged him in 1998. But no, I thought Obama was all right, you know.
Kind of cold and impersonal, but okay.
And I was happy to be helpful.
But he's one of the more selfish people in politics on a one-on-one level.
And he's not pure like the driven snow in the sense of his ethics or morality.
And, you know, Tony Resko is the guy who bought this lot next to Obama's home.
And one of the things I write about in my book is that when I was governor first, and then Barack won in 2004, I was asked to make a phone call on behalf of Michelle Obama.
Because as soon as he won the Senate race, She wanted a job either at Northwestern University or the University of Chicago hospitals for $200,000 to $300,000 a year, the wife of the new senator.
So what happened was the Obamas bought this mansion.
Now he's the new senator.
The first thing they do is buy a mansion.
I guess he felt like I was getting a mansion because I was the governor.
It wasn't mine, but I got the use of a 50,000 square foot governor's mansion.
I guess they wanted their own.
So they could only afford $750,000.
So they purchased the lot with the house on it, the mansion on it, but they couldn't afford the adjoining lot.
So they asked Resco to buy it for him.
And he did.
And my understanding of the federal investigations With me, we're also connected to Obama, that these guys were apparently looking into that and some other things.
Along the way, the dynamic changed, and Obama started moving up in the presidential race.
And here again, it's something I'd like to take back, but I was the first governor in America to endorse him for president.
We had personal relationships from Illinois, and he was running against Hillary, so it wasn't hard.
What ultimately happened was, you know, when he started rising, Axelrod, David, who used to work for me, and then went on to Obama, I knew what they were doing.
They were, for political reasons, they were, you know, influencing the media to pretty much lay Tony me up more than Obama.
I was more Tony'd up.
And Tony was a supporter and a friend, and I liked Tony, in spite of everything that's happened to him.
But Obama knew him and loved him longer.
And Tony had done more for Obama over the years than he did for me.
And ultimately, politically and in the media, the media just conveniently ignored Gresko's relationship to Obama.
No, I like David a lot, but he's a very practical guy and he's very ambitious politically and, you know, it's a rough and tumble business and, you know, when his interests collide with yours, you know...
I didn't realize it, but let me say something to your listeners.
When you're in Chicago politics, And the ethics in that place and the way they do business and the way the feds not wrongly necessarily try to set people up to see whether or not they'll take a temptation.
They send people in, they offer you cash and stuff like that.
You'd be an idiot if you don't think they may be listening.
I had been under federal investigation for five years.
I knew it because of the Resco stuff and some other stuff.
People who were supporters of mine and Obama.
I mean, I thought it's all very possible.
And everything I'm talking about doing is legal.
And I was super careful because I was under such intense federal investigation at that time to make sure that anything I talked about doing, I checked with my governor's lawyer and lawyers.
And my lawyer was on average on all these FBI tapes.
They taped my calls.
To this day, 98% of those tapes are covered up under a court seal.
The judge would not allow us to talk about how my lawyer was on those calls three times a day because at that point, now you know they're coming.
You want to be absolutely careful that whatever you do on this Senate seat is legal.
And so you're throwing out all kinds of ideas because you do have this effing golden opportunity.
We talked about Oprah for a couple of days, all these crazy ideas.
And everybody wanted it.
Everybody wanted me to appoint them, as you can imagine.
And through third parties, they're suggesting deals that were political.
They weren't illegal.
Some had suggested money and campaign funds, which would have been illegal.
But I would talk to my lawyer three times a day.
And he was advising me.
In fact, one call, I say something like, you know, we're discussing a creative way to create a non-profit political action committee to help support the advancement of access to health care, which was a big issue for me when I was governor.
And Obama was talking about doing Obamacare and all this at the federal level.
And some of the people that had put our health care plans together in Illinois went on to work for Obama.
The question was whether or not there was something that we could do to be helpful, to push it further in Illinois and do something.
And can we put together a 501c3 or 501c4?
Obama gets some of these big, rich Democrats who give money to him to put it in our thing.
And can we, you know, perhaps make the deal on the Senate seat for something like this?
And so I say to the lawyer and to one of my aides, I say, I mean, how do you do a deal like that?
I mean, it's got to be legal.
Obviously, I'm on the tape saying that.
A couple of years go by, I'm at my second trial because they failed to convict me on their corrupt charges the first trial.
And they're going to play that tape against me.
And I'm actually charged.
One of the crimes was that phone call.
How do you do a deal like that?
I mean, it's got to be legal, obviously.
I'm asking.
I don't even know if you could do it.
I'm just thinking out loud.
And they criminalized it.
But surely I'm going to get acquitted on this.
But the jury instruction was...
Custom-tailored to fit these conversations to tell the jury that those things were criminal.
And they can convict anybody if they do that.
If they decide, for example, that this conversation you and I are having and they charge us and then they've got to prove it before a jury and they've got to judge us when they do anything they want them to do, all they've got to do is just write up a jury instruction, 12 laymen, average, everyday, ordinary people who aren't lawyers, aren't in politics, just tell them this is against the law.
They'll make the right decision.
They'll convict you of this conversation because they're told by the judge and the prosecutors it's against the law.
And I had state police security all the time as the governor.
And I thought it was a friend of mine.
I say this a lot because he's like that way, and I really did.
I said, come on, State Senator Jimmy DeLeo.
And I said, come on, Jimmy, stop effing around, 6 o'clock in the morning.
But it wasn't him.
It was really the FBI with a warrant.
I think they got me, handcuffed me, drove me to their facility.
Four hours later, about 10 o'clock, they were a good cop.
And they had me in, and you're not a bad guy.
We listen to all your tapes.
You're just a product of Chicago politics.
They wanted me to cooperate.
I believed, my interpretation was, they wanted me to talk about Obama.
I don't think they were ever going to go after Obama at that point, for his black president.
But I think they wanted to see whether or not I would, here's a prison term, snitch on the president-elect, and then go back to him and say that.
They probably told him that anyway, because they lie.
In any event, I said, I was never involved in any wrongdoing with him.
I don't know whether he's involved in anything of that sort.
I can tell you I'm not.
And I got nothing to talk about.
Whatever I discussed was politics.
And then they got it.
They changed their attitude.
They shipped me to another facility, the court building, and put me in a small little cell.
And they had me next to this really angry guy all caught up on PCP, you know, screaming and MF, and he had no clue that he was right next to the governor.
You know, I'm doing push-ups in there because I'm thinking, this is really a bad day, and this is going to be really bad.
But maybe at some point I want to be able to say that while I was in the heat of the moment, I still was strong enough to do some push-ups in my cell.
Anyway, so I think, and then they went to Obama the next day, and they interviewed him.
They call them 302s, FBI 302s.
Every criminal defendant is entitled under the Constitution.
To have evidence that could exonerate him or her.
And Obama's 302s are directly relevant to my case.
To this day, they won't give it to us, what Obama said.
And he publicly contradicted what the labor boss, Balinov, had said that he had come to me the night before because it all started that way.
And Balinov had testified under oath twice in two trials that he said that Obama had called him and sent him over to me.
And, you know, it was about talking about a political deal.
And Obama publicly said no.
What he said on those FBI 302s might contradict that.
I don't know.
If you lie to the FBI, you know, it's a crime.
So I think what happened was, because it's unusual, and you know this, the new president doesn't keep the U.S. attorney from the previous president, especially if it's the other party.
And it wasn't until they got me at the second trial years later that they all went into private practice and became partners at big firms making millions of dollars.
One lady, one of them became a judge, but Fitzgerald's a partner in a big law firm.
The lead prosecutor, partner in a big law firm.
And the moment that they got their convictions against me in the second trial, that's where they went.
And I think the reason Obama did nothing to be helpful while I'm in there and after being in prison for Well, five and a half, six and a half years, I was unusually, unlike the 151,000 federal inmates, I was probably the only guy who was able to get, this is the vernacular of prison, my paperwork in front of two presidents.
Axelrod was getting my request for a commutation from Obama on Obama's desk.
He gave him letters from, you know, my two daughters, my young daughters to the president.
Obama's daughters are...
The same age as mine.
And I'd done already six and a half years asking for clemency.
And we recognized the politics of him and, you know, his image and walking out of the White House on January 20th, 2017. So we're not even going to have it be where someone might have a, you know, the screenshot of him leaving the White House and me leaving the Big House at the same time because we're connected to the case.
But why don't you just cut my sentence in half from 14 years?
I never took a penny.
It was a request for campaign contributions and a political deal you wanted to make, right?
Just cut my sentence from 14 years to seven, which would be higher than anybody governor's ever gotten from Illinois who's been in prison.
Probably maybe the longest actual time served of any governor.
And I'll limp out of prison in October of 2017. And it sure looked promising in the days leading up to that.
Because a few days before that, he had released from prison a member of the FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group, that was blowing up federal buildings.
And I'm thinking, ooh, that's a good sign for me, right?
And then, a guy got 35 years in prison for treason against the United States.
His name was Bradley Manning.
He went into prison as Bradley Manning came out of prison, Chelsea Manning, through the largesse of the taxpayers.
Obama cut him, cut her loose after six years or seven years.
I'm thinking, I'm easy compared to these two.
And I had members of Congress, Democrats, who I'd served with, ask Rod, asking him to do it.
And he didn't do it.
And I think it's because he made a deal with them.
They basically said, we'll leave you alone.
You don't interrupt, get involved in any of this.
And you don't help him.
That's what I think.
But here's what's interesting.
And it shows a lot about the kind of person Trump is.
And all through this process, these long, hard years and the years of, you know, dashed hopes and expectations, because there was no way we could lose our appeal.
These things are legal.
Then you figure, then they reverse the Senate seat after I'm in prison for three and a half years and vacate my sentence.
Now I have no sentence.
So I went from 14 years to no years for a year, which was an easier time to do because when you're looking, you know, you walk into prison in March of 2012, March 15th, and your exit day is May 2024, right?
That's a long, hard road.
So you try to break up, psychologically, you try to break up that time, right?
So you say, okay, let's get from here to the appeal.
We're going to have hope that we can win that, though deep down you just know.
You've seen enough of the system to know you're dead, right?
But you cling to that hope.
They can't uphold the Senate seat.
They reverse it.
Now I have no sentence.
I discuss with my attorney, when do we go back to re-sentencing?
They've got to give you a sentence.
You go back to the same judge.
Let's just wait a year.
I'll just stay here.
I'll keep working out, reading, and just trying to grow.
And then we'll go back to this judge when I will have served almost five years, more than just about anybody.
I mean, nobody in American history other than me has served a single day in prison for a fundraising violation.
And this wasn't even a violation, but let's assume the worst that it was.
No one had did a single day.
And my lawyer presented this to the judge.
There's not a single case.
And letters.
My little girls had grown up.
They gave beautiful presentations in court.
I'm video from Colorado in prison for the resentencing.
August 9th, 2016. Okay?
So I go from no sentence.
The centerpiece of the case was a big lie to begin with.
It was never a crime.
No sale of the Senate seat.
No sentence.
Back before the judge.
I've been a well-behaved inmate.
We submit.
Well over a hundred letters from my colleagues, guys that I helped.
Good guys.
I'm criminals, but I learned a lot of these guys aren't bad guys.
Some are really bad.
Some are pretty good guys.
They're just, you know, have gone the wrong way and got bad habits.
We submit the letters.
And there's real expectation that I'll go home.
He puts me back at 14 years.
And I hear my older daughter sobbing in the courtroom after they gave these beautiful presentations.
I'm watching my little girls who've grown.
And I'm so proud of them.
And look how sweet and nice and smart they are.
And boy, Patty did a great job raising them.
All these things I'm thinking at this resentencing.
But here's where God comes in.
And this whole miracle of how I eventually got home.
And that Donald Trump would be the instrument.
See, this is part of what I read about in my book.
I got to know him a little bit on Celebrity Apprentice.
A show I never watched.
But after the...
Took everything away from me, and I had no income, and I was an honest governor, didn't get rich in the business.
I was getting these opportunities to do these, you know, one place that you can actually make a living when you got this leprosy is an entertainment.
And there's no doubt in my mind that what they did to me at the AAA level to a Democrat governor, they said, ooh, we can get away with this.
Let's do it to Trump, a Republican president at the major league level.
And that's exactly what this whole Russian collusion bullshit was all about.
And I'm watching this from prison and I know all of it.
I recognize it.
I know the tactics.
I know what the stuff they say to the media, how they leak stuff and how they lie.
They're political operatives.
Our country is on the crossroads, on the threshold.
I mean, so important to elect Trump for a thousand reasons.
This might be the most important one of them.
Because if we lose this, the ability in America to elect our leaders without the intervention of prosecutors, criminalizing things that aren't crimes for politics, The voters don't have any choices.
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So, I mean, we have a media-protected, you know, first-line item in the Bill of Rights, as you know, in order to push back against the abuse of power by the government.
And they don't seem to be playing that role.
They're a signed role.
You know, the role that duty would compel them to play.
First of all, you gotta be a horse's ass to think that you can get away with something like that.
I'm gonna steal, I'm gonna sell Obama, any presidents, but Obama at that time was a demigod elevated by the media.
Okay, all superficial bullshit about how great he is.
But I'm gonna be that stupid where I'm gonna actually try to sell his Senate seat?
And I'm already under intense federal investigation for Resco and some of these other guys.
And, you know, activists in politics and stuff, and they're trying to find crimes, they can't find them for five years, so now this, I'm thinking, the media, they're not so great, but the media is certainly going to laugh them out of court before they get into court.
Who'd be so stupid to do something like that?
And the reality was, they were all over it, because it was just too super sensational to pass up.
It sold newspapers.
It was good for ratings.
So they're more interested in the storyline than the truth, abrogating their responsibility to all of us as citizens to keep an eye on the power.
The government has no power.
These federal prosecutors have all the power, unchecked power, not foreseen by our founding fathers when they divided our government.
They didn't know that there'd be a branch out of the executive part of the government, an agency out of the executive branch that would grow like a cancer there.
Originally going after the Al Capones of the world and now taking that power to all kinds of levels to turn it into a political life.
This is why the work that you do, Tucker, and I mean, you're so nice to me, but I'm grateful to you for what you do and others like you who are fighting for freedom and Elon Musk and these guys.
In a fair election, he wins every one of those battleground states with some cushion.
It's another thing I want to say to your listeners.
They should listen to me on this sort of stuff.
You know, in a fair election, one thing I've been good at in life is winning elections.
I've run 14 of them.
Seven or eight were really hard.
Primaries really hard against other Democrats.
You know, running against Republicans for governor in Illinois, being the first Democrat to win after 26 years.
Those are really competitive races.
So I'm giving me high marks.
I'm an expert witness when it comes to politics, understanding the mood of the voters, sensing them, not just what the polling says.
Actually, it's more instinctive, what you saw at Madison Square Garden when you gave that great speech.
I saw the crowds there.
They're not Nazis.
You know what they are?
They're white people and they're black people.
They're Hispanics and they're Asian.
They're old and they're young.
They're good, decent, hardworking.
Forgotten Americans.
And there's more of them that aren't and they've learned to know what's being done to them and how our country is setting the priorities that go against their interests now so blatantly for those who don't legally come to the United States.
They're not stupid.
And I believe if this election is run fairly, it's going to be a 2024 version of 1980. When the country made its choice between Reagan and Carter by the first or second week of October and started shifting and going towards Reagan, ended up winning maybe 49 states or something.
That won't happen now because the demographic in America is different.
The ballgames, those battleground states.
But if I'm right about this, Trump will sweep all of them and might be competitive in states like Virginia, maybe, or Minnesota even.
Well, it does seem, I mean, I'd bet my house on the proposition that Trump is more popular than Kamala Harris and more people in those seven states will vote for Trump than Kamala Harris.
But that doesn't mean that he's going to be president.
I think there's such a movement for Trump right now.
I think there's such a movement against what's happening.
And I think the testicular virility, that great courage Trump showed at that moment when he got shot.
Yes.
Elevated him to a very different place.
He's no longer your typical politician.
I think he represents something that's really powerful.
And you can just see all the things that are unfolding.
And here's another reason why I feel very good about this election.
The public polls, whatever they are.
I never relied on those.
We had our polling.
And it guided how we ran the race and what the strategy was to run and win.
You know that the other side has their polling too, and in all likelihood it's probably as good as yours.
So they know what you know.
They're seeing what you're seeing.
And so if you really want to know how the campaigns are going, just watch the candidates, where they go, what they say, what they do, and what they're running on.
And Trump's running on a message on things that he wants to do for the American people.
You might disagree with those things, but this is what he's saying he's going to do.
It's about you, the people.
What's he saying?
He's a Nazi?
Now they're in the late stages and...
Making these outrageous accusations and calling people names.
Whenever that would happen to me, they weren't calling me a Nazi, but I was, you know, you get nasty stuff thrown at you when you're ahead.
So if they come to us the day after the election, and by day I mean morning Joe.
And the rest of the sycophants in the media and tell us that Kamala Harris turns out to be just incredibly popular, incredibly popular.
And her compelling vision got her across the finish line with a massive margin and she got, you know, 84 million votes and she's the winner and if you disagree, you know, you're a criminal.
Will people accept that?
I will not accept that, but will others accept that?
He had lost some weight, but he had been a big guy.
And when he told me about having met him once down in the Metro East area of Illinois, down Southwestern Illinois, in East St. Louis, I kind of remembered him.
And I frankly believe he was telling me the truth.
But that's the answer to your question about those machines.
You know, what gives me hope too about this election is among the ways Democratic precinct workers And Obama and I know this.
We were high up, but you kind of know these activists are doing whatever they're doing in the polling places that are controlled by Democrats, largely in the inner city, in the poor neighborhoods.
It's through the absentee ballots.
And they gather them up and harvest them.
And what happened in 2020 was that on steroids with the COVID situation and the mail-in ballots.
And that's among the reasons why I have a, you know, I believe on honest skepticism about the result of that.
Don't know that Trump even had a fair chance to get in the court on any of that stuff.
And again, I know from my experience how the courts can, you know, be dishonest.
There's got to be so many reforms that have to happen.
God willing, Trump wins to clean up that justice system.
And I think there has to be, nobody should be unchecked.
I think that's the lesson from my heart experience.
Human nature, even good people can get tempted to do the bad things and wrong things.
Another reason why, thank you scientists for your great intelligence and the great contributions you make.
But unless we guide you through conscience, which comes from God, you're going to destroy the world.
So, to answer your question, I think the...
The voting system is the way it is today because of political priorities that are above and beyond what's fundamentally right for our country.
And what really makes me angry at my party is nothing sacred to these people anymore, that they would weaponize the law and the justice system to destroy Trump.
Because they know that if they destroy Trump...
Nothing's going to stop them from destroying our freedoms.
And little by little, this I know too, having lost mine, I see the steady erosion of freedom in America.
And it's so much like countries that, like my father came from after World War II Serbia.
He didn't want to live in a communist country.
And, you know, they saw, they know, how those rights and freedoms are taken away.
And here's this, what Lincoln called the last best hope on earth.
If we lose freedom here.
Forget about it all over the world.
I think we're going to start seeing the beginning of a new dark age where tyrants and totalitarian governments are the rule and democracy is dead.
Yeah, and I compare that and I think about Trump who's made all that money and built it up in business and then decided to leave that good life.
To go and put himself through this, in this rotten, nasty business, and he gets treated like that, where they're trying to literally destroy him and his family and all that wealth that he created.
And the juxtaposition between that, where he wants to serve and Obama, how they've catapulted to that level after the presidency by just playing the inside game and being part of the establishment.
Do you see, when you keep hearing these whispers, a lot of them are just nonsense on the internet, but then you do hear from Democrats, I don't know if it's true, but that Obama would like to see his wife run after Kamala Harris loses.
Boy, he was pretty cold with Joe Biden, who was always kind of running around, pathetically bragging about how close he was to Obama, and they were buddies.
Abominus knifed him twice, one in 2016, supporting Hillary for the nomination, and again this summer with, you know, leading the coup against him.
It's a rough business, and you know you're in a rough business like that.
Harry Truman said, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog, right?
There's a lot of truth to that.
But within the spectrum of these practical people in a business of bullshitters and duplicitous phonies who almost embrace their hypocrisy as if it's like some sort of skill or talent that they have.
In other words, Michael Jordan, you know, his game got better as he got greater, right?
He became a much better shooter.
I'm from Chicago.
Six championships.
We love Jordan, right?
But Jordan wasn't as good a shooter when he first came out of college as he became.
His game got better.
And so you embrace that.
He can move, go to the left a little bit better than he did when he first started.
You embrace the improvement of his skills in sports.
These politicians, what they do is, like the Chuck Schumers of the world, they laugh at their duplicity and their hypocrisy.
It isn't that they're being phony or fake.
They feel good because they're getting away with it.
And the people are buying it, right?
And at some level, including me, there's a level of that that's part of that business.
But there is a difference between a lot of the people in politics that aren't like that.
And in spite of what everybody, well, the establishment's been saying about Trump, he is probably the least political of the people I've known in politics.
And I've known a lot.
I mean, I knew Biden when he was a senator and I was in Congress.
I knew Bill Clinton.
He was actually a very nice guy.
That's my Bill Clinton impersonation.
I really liked him.
Right?
Defended him, and that was a hard thing to defend.
It was 1999. Balkans and Serbia and the United States and NATO decided to bomb Serbia over Kosovo, which is part of Serbia.
And basically it was whether or not the Serbs would accept an agreement that was made in France, Rambouillet, that basically said, this part of your country has to be submitted to a referendum where the Muslims outnumber the Christian community about like 10 to 1. And if you don't submit this to a vote, which obviously was going to go for separation, secession, we're going to bomb you.
But, you know, I learned this about politics at the high level, which was surprising to me, that a lot of our foreign policy, and this is frightening, is driven by campaign contributions.
And so they bombed this country my father came from, and it was, on a personal level, it was really hard.
You know, I think about my late father, and he would tell me stories about World War II. My father spent four years in a Nazi prisoner of war camp.
And then three years in a refugee camp after the war, waiting for the U.S. to pass a law called the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed my father and millions of others like him with these long and hard to pronounce last names a chance to come to America.
Freedom.
My dad loved America.
And there was no place like it.
If you're worthy and work hard, you can make it.
And if you don't, your kids can do good.
Actually, it happened with my brother and me.
But freedom was the thing.
And I saw that.
David Ashford was working for me then.
And I would go to his office and I'd vent these MFers, this MF and Clinton.
Where did they come up?
Serbia was an ally with the United States in World War II. Serbia was an ally with the United States in World War I. And now they're violating international law and bombing a sovereign country to support.
Those on the other side of the war, as opposed to trying to work something out through the United Nations, you know what, it was just maddening.
It's disgusting.
And I gotta support this, I gotta support my party.
So anyway, and I'd vent, and so we're figuring out ways where I could be constructive.
Now I'm an American, and God forbid, and now we're at war with the country my father came from, my loyalties are to the United States.
I was one of 15 congressmen, Democrats, Kucinic, another one.
Who said, don't do this.
You bomb this country.
You're going to unleash the Furies.
Milosevic is a crazy guy.
He's going to kick out innocent Kosovoers out of that country.
It's coming.
They wanted it.
It was a provocative act by NATO. No one Milosevic would do that.
And most people would suffer like they did.
But then they put it on the Serbs, right?
And demonized them worldwide.
But the Black Caucus...
In many ways, the black community really understands abuse of power more than any other community because they've been on the wrong end of that historically.
They're not buying it.
So the bombing starts on a Thursday as we all leave from Congress.
They timed it.
We had a two-week recess for spring break.
And I'm Saturday.
I'm watching this on CNN. Anyway, long, long story short, I'm venting the axe rod.
This is making me sick.
I've got to do something.
By then, they had taken three U.S. soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Serbs during that war.
They had stumbled into Serbia, and they were taken prisoners.
Nobody knew where they were.
The Red Cross wasn't allowed in.
Milosevic had been demonized, the president of Serbia, in many ways, justifiably, but worldwide.
And they were making them look, and they were calling it ethnic cleansing, genocide, which is also another lie.
It's not good.
But ethnic cleansing, you know, it's the nature of how things have happened in Europe all over the place.
12 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the east to the west after World War II. A lot of them murdered.
Because I'm the only Serb, these guys from the Serbian government are reaching out to me.
I don't know if they're real or not.
And I see one of them on television with Milosevic.
A guy by the name of Kottage, Bogolub Kottage, very interesting man.
Long and short of it is, I'm meeting with him.
I want to play a role.
I got to do something.
And he says, why don't you try to get those soldiers out?
But you can't do it by yourself because I speak the language.
That's my first language, my father.
My mother was American born.
So how do you get there?
They won't let me.
I'm a junior congressman.
I mean, they'll crush me.
They won't let me go.
State Department was against it.
And then I saw that Reverend Jesse Jackson, Ramsey Clark, you know, right?
Reverend Jesse Jackson wanted to do what Ramsey Clark had done.
He wanted to go visit the bombing sites, but that he had made a condition that he won't do it unless he can see the three soldiers.
So, I don't know Jesse Jackson at the time.
Since then, he's become kind of a friend.
So, I see the sun, you know, we're young congressmen.
And I see Jesse Jr., and we vote on a Tuesday.
We get done with our votes, like 11 o'clock Washington time.
We're sitting in the chamber.
It's empty.
It's just me and him.
And I said, you know, hey, Jesse, I saw that your dad wants to go to Serbia and see those soldiers.
He goes, yeah.
And I said, I don't know if this is bullshit or not, but these guys from the government approached me because my father came from that country, and I speak the language.
If I could arrange for your father to go to Serbia to see those soldiers, you think he might do it?
Yeah, and then I said, and then he says, and you pulled this off, I'm taking you with me.
I didn't say it, but I'm thinking to myself, of course I'm going with.
Okay?
I'm putting this all together.
Anyway, we got to go.
He did it.
The government whined at Jackson.
And Jackson...
Put together this interfaith coalition of religious leaders, left-wing religious leaders from very diverse Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, Methodist ministers, this lady named Dr. Joan Brown Campbell from the National Council of Churches.
They were all part of this delegation, Jesse Jackson and me.
And so we go.
I speak the language, and they're very understandably mistrustful of America because we're bombing them.
Bombs were falling while we were there.
They wouldn't stop the bombing.
The Clinton administration kept trying to squeeze us.
Jackson, I guess he's able to procure things.
He got like a plane.
He got like a commercial plane.
World Airways.
You'll appreciate this story.
World Airways.
And we're supposed to leave on Saturday.
And then Friday evening I get a phone call from his aide and he said, we've got to postpone our trip because...
So the U.S. But it does seem like a lot of our interventions wind up killing Christians from the bomb on Nagasaki, which was not a military significant place, but it was the center of Christianity in Japan, to the war in Iraq that basically ended the Christian population of Iraq, to Syria, to Gaza.
To Serbia, it seems like one thread that connects all of those is the killing of Christians by the U.S. government.
If you're asking me to speculate on why that might be the case, I don't think it's so much of a desire to hurt Christians as it is if we got to hurt anybody, we'll hurt the Christians and not the other groups.
Because it's politically incorrect if we hurt the other groups.
And it was really maddening because, you know, these otherwise liberal Democrats who were...
It turned out, I think, right on Vietnam that was wrong, the wrong war, and how to get out of this was the issue, and I think Nixon, frankly, did the best he could under the circumstances of war started by Johnson.
But now suddenly they were all war hawks.
All these liberal Democrats were war hawks against Serbia in 1999. It was sickening, and I had to work with these people, you know?
So I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post at the time suggesting that they should partition Kosovo then and stop the bombing, stop the killing, the bombing of a sovereign country, partition that country, protect the Orthodox monasteries, the Christian Orthodox monasteries that are so vital to the Serbian experience because Kosovo in the Serbian history is historic.
It is to Serbs what Israel is to Jews.
And they had lost this battle in the 1400s against the Turks, the Ottoman Turks, 500 years of enslavement after that, you know, the Ottoman control.
And the Battle of Kosovo is central to the Serbian history and culture.
I'm American-born, and I didn't really understand it, but I got a much better appreciation of it during that war.
And so I suggested this.
As the bombing was going on, and the American people really never understood why we were doing it, Clinton was losing support.
and particularly with the Black Caucus being against it and leaders like Jackson speaking out against it.
That's why he was so vital going there and making the deal to get the soldiers back which we successfully got those soldiers back, Jackson and I.
What happened was that they had to justify this war so they went extremely hard in trying to demonize the Serbs without any kind of honest analysis of the complexities of those issues over there.
And It's really galling.
And Wesley Clark, the general, was the one running.
And those traditional Democrat working class voters, everyday ordinary people, I talked about them before, the silent majority, including a much larger number of black people than even the polls are reflecting, and Latinos.
I predict Trump across the country will actually win a majority of the Latino vote in this election.
And the beauty about the Latino vote, they remind me so much of the immigrant back, my background.
God-fearing, hardworking, family-oriented.
Most families are like that, who come here legally, and those illegally go back and come back legally.
And that's what we should all follow our rules, especially when you first come here, right?
Don't break into our country, and the Democrats have opened the doors, and Kamala Harris, all by design.
But when I think about how the parties have changed, those corporate country club...
I have a lot more in common with the left wing, Kamala Harris wing of the Democrat Party than traditional working class daily type Democrats, John F. Kennedy Democrats, Robert Kennedy Democrats have with them.
And they're now part of this new coalition, Trump's building in this new Republican Party.
It's very exciting.
I see all these history books that you have here.
And my reading of history, and I had eight years to read a lot of it, right, is – We're going through a historic political realignment.
These parties are very different.
This new Republican Party is the party, the little guy.
Truly believe that.
My voters.
I saw that at Madison Square Garden.
Those were my voters that I saw there.
They looked just like my voters.
You know?
Good people, working people, honest people, not the elites.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing our show.
I know.
Shocking that in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear.
But it turns out it's happening.
So what can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it.
That's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that's true.