Vivek Ramaswamy credits Donald Trump’s 2024 landslide to a rejection of leftist orthodoxy and his "badass" leadership, framing it as a generational shift toward self-governance. He outlines Trump’s plan to dismantle the federal bureaucracy—using Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright—and relocate agencies, warning that delay risks irreversible entrenchment. The pair links U.S. interventions in Syria and Libya to Europe’s immigration crisis, proposing election reforms (paper ballots, ID requirements) to counter 2020’s suspicious vote surge. Ramaswamy dismisses "Never Trump" as fringe, calling Elon Musk’s endorsement a game-changer, while both predict Republican dominance and a cultural reckoning—though Carlson doubts Democrats will reform. The victory signals a once-in-a-century chance to shrink government, but external crises could derail it. [Automatically generated summary]
So what, it is now a little over 24 hours after Donald Trump won the majority of the popular vote, about half the Latino vote, overwhelming majority of the electoral college, just all three branches of government.
I think it happened because it was a rejection of what the modern left has put on offer, which in some ways was a great favor to the rise of this country.
You need something to actually provoke a rebellion like the one that we had.
And I think that's one of the things I've appreciated is that I wrote this like the morning after the lecture, the afternoon after, and it just felt right to me.
He's not actually, the thing that I've learned as I've gotten to know him over the last year much better is he's not an ideologue or a policy wonk and he doesn't pretend to be one.
The nation needs a badass as its commander in chief right now.
And democracy kind of works actually in the end.
Like, the people really knew what they needed, and they showed up in droves to put the right person in office.
And so I just think it is kind of one of these rare inspiring moments in history where the people knew what they wanted, they would not be shaken from their will, he would not be shaken from his will.
And I loved being in Mar-a-Lago that night where it was just kind of interesting where everybody else is, you know, myself too included, is just like really joyous about what's happening.
And I'm sitting next to Donald Trump and he's sitting there and he's just, yep, this is exactly how it was supposed to be.
Wait till it comes in.
All right.
Now we're going to the convention center.
And this is where I was destined to be and what I was put here to do.
And I think the people of this country right now want somebody who has that level of self-confidence and conviction to bring that back for the country.
And so anyway, I just think it was kind of a beautiful moment of democracy working.
It's just that we know that we're born to be the greatest nation that sets an example for everybody else of what's possible for human capacity.
This is the country that does it.
And we had no reason to believe that other than the fact that we do.
And I think that that's the kind of leader we need right now to bring that back.
And that's Donald Trump as a person.
So in some ways, Trump's story is America's story.
Trump's comeback is now hopefully America's comeback.
And I actually just think it's going to play out that way in the next couple of years.
The national spirit's going to be back.
You'll see it in the composition of the electorate, by the way.
A lot of young people, that was probably the biggest demographic shift, just came in a tidal wave of force, which I was particularly passionate about seeing this time around.
And, you know, I think it's just this moment where we're going through a great kind of spiritual, I don't mean spiritual in the religious sense here, I mean the civic sense, but a spiritual revival of American identity.
And, like, that was the pinnacle of what we saw on Tuesday night.
There was a moment, I think, right around the time he was shot, and Elon endorsed him within moments, which I think was, looking back, a pivot point, the whole thing.
But where I think, or I myself felt this way, like, why are we on the defensive, people who vote for Donald Trump?
Why are we embarrassed?
There was this very successful effort to make people feel ashamed for supporting Trump, and it worked for, I mean, eight years anyway.
And then in one moment, it just evaporated, and you saw, like, 22-year-old sorority girls.
I mean, it started a little bit with, you saw it in the business elite community.
I mean, Elon's endorsement was obviously huge.
But I think this has been percolating for a little while.
I was really, probably the thing I was most...
Gratified by, after the elections, the next morning, the number of either calls or messages I got from real serious business leaders, billionaires in different domains or whatever.
They didn't have to do this, but a few of them shared with me, look, I think you were an important part of giving me the permission to support Donald Trump.
100%!
Or give me the permission to at least stand up against whatever left-wing orthodoxy in a way that they couldn't have.
And I think a lot of other people played important roles in that as well.
I mean, Elon probably played the biggest role in giving people that permission.
Can I just push a little bit on that point though?
I mean, you and I talked a lot before you ran for president, and I remember thinking, you know, most people imagine that if you make a lot of money, you made a lot of money young, that that gives you the freedom to say whatever you want.
The richer you get, the more vested you are in the current system, the more you have to lose.
And so I did think you were very unusual in that you made all this money young and you're like, yeah, I'm kind of happy to, first of all, stop making money for a while.
You all misused your credentials against the system that bestowed them.
So I have to ask you to pause.
So you're on the Yale Law School, which for those who don't follow, is the most prestigious law school in the United States, I think it's fair to say, but also probably the most insane in some ways.
And then there was this long thread of what charity people were going to give to in Springfield, a town they otherwise would never visit, never have heard of, never have given second care to, to say, okay, here's what we're actually going to do to help this community.
And they started to have everyone piling in.
Well, I'm going to make my donation, and I'm going to make my donation here.
It was so nauseating, but it was actually a very keen effort to get the New York Times to report on it.
So the New York Times did report on that.
Of course, the New York Times has their own agenda in wanting to report on this because it's designed to actually make— They wanted to give money now— To particular causes in Springfield.
Virtue signal the fact that we're not on the J.D. Vance, Donald Trump side of this.
And as fellow Yale Law School alums who came from that same class, we're going to actually make a concerted donation to send a different signal that we're on the side.
I actually spent a lot of my youth in Springfield.
I actually know a lot about this.
I'm tempted to pull up the email that I sent.
So I sent an email to the group.
I haven't commented on this list.
I haven't posted a single thing, but I kind of entertain myself watching this stuff from time to time.
So I actually also went to Springfield myself.
So this is a, well, let's rewind back.
So when all this was playing out, I said, I kind of want to go to Springfield and check this out.
I have a lot of family that's lived there in the past.
I have some family there who lives there now.
I spent a lot of my youth there.
There's this place, there's a sub place that I used to go to, like, you know, when I used to play tennis at Wittenberg every summer, which is the university in Springfield.
So I've spent a lot of time there growing up.
So I said, I live like 50 minutes from there right now in Columbus.
I grew up in Cincinnati.
I live in Columbus.
Springfield's literally on the way right in between.
Like, let me just go check it out.
So I just was having dinner with my wife and a couple of friends in Columbus, and I just put out a tweet.
I said, I'm going to Springfield.
I want to see what's happening.
See it for myself.
And no plan for an event or anything like that.
But some guy then replies and says, I have an event space that can hold 375 people.
We show up in Springfield.
This is what?
Like a month or two ago when all of this played out.
And there's 375 people.
It could hold 2,000 people show up.
But they couldn't hold 2,000.
So the rest were lined up outside.
And people just wanted to be heard.
Did I see evidence of cats and dogs being eaten?
I didn't see evidence of that.
What I did see evidence of was a woman being chased out of a store with a machete, her daughter by an illegal immigrant who was in this country, which didn't get reported on by the news at all, but was a function of a woman who actually came and told that story of her daughter, who was literally being chased with a machete out of a grocery store, called the police, and the police didn't show up for hours, and they didn't follow up with an investigation either. and the police didn't show up for hours, and they So I thought people deserved to hear.
That's what she said, and I have every reason to believe her.
Anyway, against that backdrop, I also wanted to do something positive for the community.
Having shown up in Springfield, there's obviously a strain on local resources, so I wanted to make a donation.
And as you said, I've lived the American dream.
I wanted to make a $100,000 donation, right?
And so, for my family, that's an easy thing we were able to do to help a local community.
Where's the strain?
So we found where the local strain points are, access to local primary care.
And we tried to make a donation in conjunction with my trip, but the organization did not want to accept the donation that our family was about to give.
So they've talked about Springfield.
We need help.
We need all the people who can to help support the community.
And yet here is somebody who is...
Living in Ohio has lived the American dream.
I want to actually use a small portion of what this country has given us to help a community that's important to me in the area of healthcare, where there were a lot of strained resources, in part because of the large numbers of people who've been moved to that community.
And I didn't even have the ability to help the community that way.
I would say I heavily doubt that if I were Sherrod Brown or something like that, that they would have turned down a similar donation in a time of need.
So anyway, I talked about all this when I visited Springfield, but afterwards, I told people that I was going to help.
Support Springfield.
So I decided to, I wanted to follow through on that.
So we found a couple of other charitable causes to donate to, you know, in totaling $100,000 to help Springfield.
And one of them was a crisis pregnancy center.
I'm pro-life and we wanted to at least help people get to, you know, strains on the system.
It's a different area of healthcare where we thought there were strains on the system.
I actually surveyed a lot of people in Ohio and in Springfield privately who I knew, where could I have an impact?
And they gave us.
They gave us this as a resource.
So anyway, to bring this back to the original story, we have this law school listserv where they've made a donation to – I think it was like – it was a left-leaning group that had a lot of woke stuff on their front page.
I can't tell you which exactly one it was.
DEI plastered all over wherever it needs to be.
And they made the donation.
They got – That's crazy.
That's beside the point.
And so I'm on this list having to sort of see my, you know, inbox repeatedly flooded with every other time somebody made a donation.
So I just sent a note.
Because maybe there's people who have a different point of view from supporting exactly the cause they put up.
So I included a link saying, you know, for those who want to support Springfield, here are some other alternative causes that you might wish to support.
My family and I were pleased to support the community.
They felt personally insulted that I was going to exploit their good feeling about Springfield and the attention they wanted to draw by supporting it by offering a very different kind of cost.
But a beautiful thing happened because this goes to the same trend you and I are talking about.
There were actually a lot of my classmates who I know lean left of center who then came out and were just like, well, have you ever considered the fact that we might also have classmates who have a different point of view on these questions?
And you may not just want to be donating to one particular side of this cause.
And there was just a debate amongst them.
So I didn't really get further involved in this.
I rarely post on that list.
That was just a two-liner that I had to share to offer.
I mean, you're obviously, you've got a strong personality, you know what you think, you're not dependent on other people's approval, obviously, you don't seem to care that much.
But, you know, most people, young people really do care what the herd thinks.
And for those kids, like, a lot of them get destroyed and become completely irrational and into the, you know, the witchcraft of transgenderism or whatever.
I mean, they become, like, not really functioning people.
And you just wonder, like, how long does the prestige attach to those institutions, particularly in, say, China, which keeps them afloat?
Maybe not Yale, but, like, below Yale, a lot of these schools are dependent on rich Chinese.
So the thing is, there's a difference between even these places now versus 20 years ago.
It's just like not the same place in the same institution.
Harvard, Yale, always lean left, always have had a very, you know, certainly self-important view of themselves.
That's always been the case.
But they were institutions, certainly when I was there.
I can tell you from experience where...
Alternative ideas were tolerated.
There was good debate.
I actually learned a lot from being pushed by classmates who had different points of view than mine.
I evolved in some of my views.
It's a beautiful thing.
That's what's supposed to happen through a supposedly liberal arts education.
That is not the institution of Harvard or Yale or countless others like them that exist today.
Something dramatic has changed as they have lost their North Stars no longer, at least dated as of, let's just say, six months to a year ago.
Maybe a lot's going to change.
We're no longer committed to the pursuit of knowledge and we're committed to the pursuit of affirmative social goals.
Like Harvard's top goal, it seems, is to drive social change in the world rather than to actually educate their students.
Yale has completely abandoned the idea of free speech, that the expression of certain ideas is itself constitutes an act of violence in a way that they no longer...
I think all of that's going to have to change because otherwise you're going to actually produce a bunch of, let's just say, effete graduates that aren't going to go on to actually accomplish very much, which gives the next generation very little incentive to want to go through those institutions in the first place.
And so, you know, what's going to happen?
You know, either they're going to become increasingly irrelevant and go through this process of elegant decay that they're in right now.
I think it's a renewal of national self-confidence, actually.
I think that we're going to be more sure of ourselves as Americans.
I think we already are.
I think that the idea that people are – a lot of people who would have either felt uncomfortable saying they supported Donald Trump or didn't even think they did but now realize that they actually value what he represents have a greater sense of conviction in themselves, have a greater sense of conviction.
And the rest of the stock market went exactly in the opposite direction.
And so, you know, markets reflect confidence.
And I think the revival of our self-confidence is the most important thing, actually.
Because everything else, we could talk about the issues that, you know, fixing the border, restoring law and order, enforcing the law, ending rampant crime in the country, growing the economy.
All of those things require a certain level of It requires a certain sense of spine in who we are to be able to say, okay, an economy grows when people are willing to take risks.
You're not willing to take risks to create a new business or to grow or to invest in a new venture unless you have actual confidence in yourself and your ability to do that.
Same thing with respect to the rule of law.
You have to believe in the validity of American rule of law to actually stand by it even when it's actually hard or unpopular to do so.
Same thing to say that our own border actually means something.
You have to have confidence in a nation to believe that that nation is worth protecting.
If you actually don't believe in what's inside, then there's no real reason that you have to protect it physically either.
So I think the revival of our national self-confidence is the most important thing Donald Trump has delivered and I think is going to deliver for the country.
And if we get that back, the rest of it's actually pretty easy.
It sort of falls into place more or less automatically, I would say.
I think it will because, first of all, we're all human beings, Donald Trump included, has learned a lot from that first term.
I think that if you have somebody who had never run for office before, and I'm particularly sympathetic to this, I ran for president without knowing.
What the heck I was getting into.
And it was very much a fire first, aim later strategy for me over the last year when I ran.
And so I can deeply empathize with Donald Trump's first run for president, but not only did he run for the first time, he actually won the first time as well.
And to be able to get in there, as you said, I wasn't there, but it sounds like without even that much of an expectation of winning, I think the system was able to strike back before he and his team were able to get their arms around the system and even still accomplished a lot.
I mean, I think that first term was, you know, I said this when we spoke the other day, but it was like the most successful president of the 21st century, which is setting a very low bar because the other presidents in the 21st century have been awful.
George Bush, Joe Biden, Barack Obama are the others, and Donald Trump was unambiguously the best of that batch.
But I think the idea that there's only certain things you can only learn by doing it.
I mean, even running for president, there's only certain things I could have learned about that process by doing it.
Now, let alone leading the country.
I think there's only certain things Donald Trump could have learned by actually being in that position.
And so this time around, I think he is laser-focused on making sure that the people he puts into those positions...
Actually share broadly his vision for the country, broadly share an allegiance.
People make like this some kind of bad thing, but an allegiance to him personally.
I'm sorry, if you're running a company, you can't run that company as a CEO if the people who work for you actively dislike you or wish to undermine you personally.
Even if they believe in the company's product, it doesn't work if they actually like actively hate the CEO. So I don't know why the liberal press actually likes to make a big deal out of the fact that Donald Trump wants people who will also share a personal allegiance to him and are mission aligned.
I think both of those things are required for a functioning organization.
Of course, he was a COVID dissident and he was raided by the FBI today.
Now, I just texted him.
I don't know what.
The charges are, the pretext is, for raiding his house, but I'm willing to stake my credibility on, since I know him so well, you know, don't think Alfie Oaks is doing anything that warranted an FBI raid, and I doubt he would have been raided if he had not been an outspoken Trump voter.
And so I think he's ready to go in with real determination this time around to move quickly, move fast.
I think we need the winds behind our back early on.
You know, one of the things that I think we learned from last time around is a lot of this is just early momentum, right?
Let's say we have all three branches.
Let's say we've got judicial branch.
We have a great judicial branch right now at the top of the Supreme Court, the best we've had, certainly in our lifetime.
But you combine that with a strong electoral mandate for the presidency, a strong, decisive majority in the Senate, hopefully get a good Senate majority leader picked.
And then I think Rick Scott would be great for that.
And if Donald Trump wins the popular vote in John Cornyn, of Texas, who is way more liberal than a lot of Democrats I know, winds up Senate Majority Leader?
Assume a few more of those correct pieces fall into place, and then even a majority, at least an impeachment-proof House.
I think that we gotta go big, we gotta go fast.
Two major issues right out the gate.
One is already the one that Donald Trump's been talking about the entire time.
You know he's pumped up about it and he is not going to mess around with this, is to fix the illegal immigration crisis and actually seal our national borders.
And he is laser-focused on that.
He has made no secrets about that.
That's his top campaign message.
He's going to keep that promise and I think he's going to keep it fast starting on day one.
That's number one and there's a lot to say on that, but it's hard to say.
What hasn't already been said about what needs to be done.
It's just about getting in there and doing it.
So that's mass deportation.
Number one is millions of illegals out of this country and sealing the border along with it.
But I'm actually far more intrigued and interested for the long run in what I think of as the second mass deportation that we require, which is the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the DC bureaucracy.
And I do think that is what's going to save this country.
So the one difference is, first of all, we have a president who I think has the spine to actually step up and do it.
But the second thing is we actually have a, not to get too in the weeds here, but we actually have a legal landscape with the current Supreme Court that allows us to do what couldn't have been done in the last half century.
That's what the Constitution says, but that's not exactly how it works today.
And the Supreme Court, thankfully, has had a major problem with that.
So there was this case West Virginia versus EPA two years ago.
There was this Loper-Bright case that came down this year that overturned this horrific doctrine called Chevron deference, which said that the courts have to defer to the agency's judgments on what the law actually says.
The Supreme Court's torn all of that to shreds.
And basically what they've said is, if it's a major question, if it's something that affects people's lives economically or relates to a major political issue, It cannot be written into existence by somebody who was not elected to office or who can't be voted out of office.
It has to be done by the people who were elected to write the laws.
So who could be voted out if they write bad laws?
That's a beautiful thing.
And I think that those were seismic in their impact.
So we've had those cases come down under this Biden-Harris tenure.
Takes over in the presidency now, as we're going to go on January 20th, who takes a posture of executive humility.
And this is the key part, right?
Because people will say, oh, Donald Trump's going to go, if he's going to go shut down these agencies, that's executive fiat.
No, no, no, you got it mixed up.
The executive fiat's what's been happening for the last century, really, in this country.
But over the last four years included, unelected bureaucrats by fiat legislating what otherwise should have gone through we the people and our elected representatives.
So the Supreme Court's already said, told the executive branch, no, no, no, you can't do that.
Actually, a lot of that was illegal and unconstitutional.
All we need right now is an executive branch that says, hey, the Supreme Court, you've told us a lot of what we're doing is illegal.
It violates the Constitution.
So we're not going to do that anymore.
And that requires us to take...
Any regulation, any federal regulation that fails these standards that the Supreme Court has given us in West Virginia versus EPA, in Loper-Bride, in there's another case called Jarkisi versus SEC. That one relates to slightly different issues.
But the Supreme Court standards, all of these regulations that fail that test, we're just going to rescind them.
They're null and void.
And we don't have to rescind them because we already know they're actually null and void and illegitimate anyway, but we will put the public on notice to say these tens of thousands of regulations that have been written by federal bureaucrats, they're null and void because they were never written by the people who we elected.
Now, if you have 50% fewer regulations, that creates kind of an industrial logic to say that, okay, well, then we don't need 50% of the people around anymore either.
And the way these...
Rules have worked in the past.
You know this well, right?
The civil service rules, the civil protection rules that say you can't fire these federal bureaucrats.
That's been the historical accepted dogma.
Actually, if you read the law carefully, it doesn't work quite that way.
That applies to individual firings, right?
To say if I fire you, you have a special protection to say that I either… If you fire a bunch of people with discretionary firings, if there's a disparate racial impact or a gender impact or whatever, you could be sued on a million grounds.
But if it is part of a mass firing, what you call a reduction in force, if it's just like a mass firing, those actually fall outside the civil service rules as they exist.
So if you go in that order to say that, okay, the Supreme Court's already told us that all of these regulations, not all of them, but...
An overwhelming majority of them are invalid.
You go straight down that list and say we have 50%, 70%, 80% fewer regulations.
Then you look at the 4 million people, civil servants or whatever, and say that, okay, if we have 80% fewer regulations, then we need 80% fewer people to enforce them.
That simply makes sense.
Then you have the industrial logic for right there under current law, mass downsizing just the scale of the federal government.
And part of the problem is these things are deeply related.
When you have a bunch of people who show up to work who should have never had that job in the first place, they start finding things to do, actually.
And that's what gave us that regulatory morass in the first place.
Like the Federal Reserve.
I mean, if you just fired about 22,000 employees in the Federal Reserve.
If you fired...
90% of them, there would still be 2,000 left, which is arguably on the high side if you have a Federal Reserve whose sole focus is restoring the stability of the U.S. dollar, which I do think should be the sole mandate and sole purpose of the U.S. Fed.
Same thing with respect to, you go straight down the list, EPA, SEC, FTC. What do 22,000 employees do with the Fed?
Oh, they do a lot of calculations.
They do a lot of conjecture.
And it feeds their hubris a little bit.
So, markets, and I was, you know, I worked at a hedge fund, that was the first job I had for seven years out of college, and, you know, understand a way in which people will huddle around, divining what the exact meaning is of a comma at the end of Federal Reserve minutes.
Does that mean that they think the economy's overheating so much that they have to raise interest rates?
That feeds the kind of hubris of the bureaucrat to make them think that they're some kind of genius and some kind of actual savant that merits this attention.
But the reason the market actors pay attention to what these Federal Reserve people say is not because they have some sort of expert knowledge that's actually meaningful.
They're actually looking to see effectively how they're going to screw it up in the process, right?
And so academics took over the Federal Reserve in the late 1990s.
That's true, but they've used that in ways that have been, I think, badly destructive to the country.
Here's an example of how.
When the academics took over the Fed in the late 1990s, one of the things that happened, and this was a kind of managerial class in this agency, and that's a three-letter agency in some form, the FED, right?
What they said was, okay, if wages are going up, this is a long story if you want to get into this, but we can give you a short version.
If wages are going up, That is a leading indicator of inflation.
So wage growth was a bad thing.
So the way you fight wage growth is by tightening monetary policy into wages going up.
Here's the problem with that.
Anybody who's run a business knows this.
Wages are generally the last thing to go up in the business cycle.
If things are going really well in the business cycle, the last thing most employers want to say, I'm not saying it's the right decision or the wrong decision, but most employers, the last thing they want to have go up is the wages.
So wages tend to be actually not a leading indicator of the business cycle.
Wage growth tends to be a trailing indicator of the business cycle.
But you have the academic mindset of the Federal Reserve that said, that's one thing we can measure, that we can observe and feel smart about.
So wage growth, we're going to treat that as a leading indicator of inflation, even when it's a trailing indicator.
Well, what does that mean?
They tighten monetary policy precisely into a natural downturn of the business cycle, which gives you the boom bust.
And then what comes after a bust is...
It's, of course, the bailout.
So you get these boom-bust bailout cycles.
That's exactly what happened, you could say, in 2000. You could see it in 2008. You could see some version of it, you know, even in 2023, although that was a little bit more subtle.
And so anyway, that's a whole rabbit hole about the Fed.
But it's an example of when you have 23,000 people show up to work who should have never had the job in the first place.
They start finding things to do.
And when you find things to do, that ends up being destructive rather than helpful, which means the root cause is you got to get rid of the presence of the people who populate that bureaucracy.
But in order to do that, you need this industrial logic.
And that industrial logic, in my opinion, is what the Supreme Court has already given us, which is this mandate to say the executive branch, the fake executive branch, the administrative state, has written all these rules by fiat.
Most of them are illegal.
Like, they're actually unlawful.
They're illegitimate.
And so if you have an executive branch that says, okay, we're going to recognize that most of these regulations are illegitimate.
There's your blueprint for then shaving down the size of the federal bureaucracy, which is then the permanent solution to stop that bureaucracy from perpetuating this kind of illegal ramp into action.
And I think that's the stuff of how you actually save a country, boring as that might sound.
And I think I've never heard in all the, you know, my whole life in Washington, anybody suggest that this is a process that could really be stalled or reversed, the process being the growth of the federal government, which is just inexorable.
Because the purpose of the institution is to protect itself and expand.
I'm not going to paint some sort of exclusively fake- Well, one of the trade-offs could be you're going to have a crash in the economy of Arlington, Virginia, which is well-deserved.
We don't need external individuals to the nation to actually fill those open positions.
We have...
Three million of them sitting in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
Who could say, well, are those people really going to do those jobs?
Maybe they should, actually.
They could be far more productive than the destruction that they're doing to the country right now.
It is a fact that we have more open jobs than we have people in the country.
That's often one of the backdoor arguments made for mass illegal immigration in this country.
But actually, I think for rule of law reasons, you need deportation of people who are in this country illegally.
But if you get 3 million people out of the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., they are Americans, and those are available candidates to actually provide a little shot in the arm to the labor market as well.
To the extent they exist, I think they should absolutely be moved.
Absolutely.
I don't think all of – I think many of those agencies should not exist.
Many of them that do continue to exist absolutely should be moved to other parts of the country.
I don't think the Surgeon General Office should sit in Washington, D.C. I don't think – You should have much of HHS more broadly.
I don't think that the Department of Agriculture should sit in Washington, D.C. I think there are countless agencies, the Department of Education.
I think you're wrongfully insulated in Washington, D.C. Now, certain of those agencies like the Department of Education should not actually exist.
So I wouldn't want to start this process of just saying, okay, let's move them out of Washington, D.C. as some sort of polite, genteel way of avoiding and sidestepping the thing that we actually need to do, which is bring a jackhammer and a chainsaw to the whole thing.
But even those that do continue to exist, you would actually have a lot more accountability to the people and probably even some kind of stimulus, if you will, in parts of the country that wouldn't mind a little bit of that growth getting out of D.C. and coming to their own backyard.
These two things go together, though, because if you actually did take one of those agencies and say, hey, you have to show up to work five days a week and actually you have to go to Topeka, Kansas or Cincinnati, Ohio instead, you'd actually have a good number of the people quit anyway, which avoids the severance costs.
So I kind of like that method is you could kind of get two in one right there is thinning it down and moving it out.
But yeah, move the agencies out.
You should fire about 75% of the federal employee headcount.
If not, you know, immediately on day one, you could ease into that pretty quickly.
Agencies that are redundant can be reorganized that shouldn't exist.
Department of Education is a good example.
Shut it down, send the money back.
Workforce training can move to the Department of Labor and loan collections can move to Treasury.
There's just a mass opportunity for a mega reorganization and thereby downsizing of this bureaucracy.
And it's a one-way ratchet because it's not like if another president comes back, they can write that back into existence by fiat.
They'd actually have to go through Congress to do it.
And so I think this is a...
To call it once in a generation understates it.
It might be closer to once in a century or once in a nation's lifetime opportunity to drastically reorganize and reshape and drive structural change in the federal government.
It was the centerpiece of my presidential campaign.
I spent a year and a half of my life.
It was probably the most, I mean, I took a lot of positions on a lot of things, but this is probably the single most useful and certainly personally important to me part of the policy aspect of my campaign last year.
And yeah, I have been involved, let's just say, in recent months in laying out what the blueprint should look like.
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When I talk about the bureaucracy as something we need to bring a chainsaw to, I actually draw a distinction between the bureaucracy as its own self-perpetuating organism and the individual 3 million people who populate it.
So there are certainly some people who are in positions of authority who are just individually bad people, absolutely, that need to be purged from the federal government and get out and back into normal life, and maybe they can be rehabilitated.
That's not going to be the job of the new government.
That's going to be something that their own spiritual advisors have to help them through.
That's a separate category, but I think that's a relatively small minority of the three-plus million federal civil servants who I do think are probably dead weight, worse than dead weight, because they're actually inadvertently even doing things that are net harmful to the country.
I think it's the machine itself that I think is a big part of the problem.
A lot of these people are people who individually believe that they're carrying out some sort of good, and it comes from this sort of organizational conceit, which is basically skeptical of self-governance, right?
I mean, it's as old as human beings are.
The idea that you can govern yourself was mostly a radical idea that most people thought was laughable and crazy.
I mean, that's why we fought the American Revolution over the exact topic that you and I are talking about here.
Because the basic view is that if you leave it to we the people, you'll burn yourself out of existence through global warming or climate change or you'll harm yourself before you even know it through racial equity failures or climate change failures.
That's the equivalent of what the old European worldview was, was that...
The idea that we, the people, could be trusted to govern ourselves and express our own opinions, that was crazy.
That's why we fought an American Revolution.
Well, it turns out that that ugly monster is just rearing its head again, saying that, no, no, no, you actually can't be trusted to self-govern.
So we'll tell you that you are to give you the satisfaction of believing that you live in a republic.
See, that was actually, they could think of, rewrite the American Revolution through a revisionist lens and say, okay.
You can't tell people they live in a monarchy, but if you can at least keep the parts of a monarchy that are required for society to continue to exist, but fool people into thinking they live in a democracy or a self-governing republic, that's almost good enough.
And that comes with some inconveniences because sometimes it will actually even behave a little bit like a democracy at times, but in the core questions, at least if it was unelected people who actually made those decisions, that machine is actually what protects humanity from itself.
And so the people who occupy those positions are individually people who believe that they are doing the right thing, not even for themselves or that they're trying to harm their fellow citizens.
They're doing the right thing for their fellow citizens.
I'm thinking about the average civil servant working at the FTA or the SEC or whatever.
They believe that if it weren't for them, the silent – the Bruce Wayne figure that they are, right?
The hero that Gotham deserves.
That's how they think about themselves.
And individually, I guess you could say that that motivation, as much as there's a conceit embedded in that, like they're not individually irredeemable people.
I just think that they have become part of a machine that is irredeemable.
unidentified
And so, maybe they'll continue to watch Jimmy Kimmel.
But if we view the bureaucracy as its own target, separate and apart from the individuals who comprise it, I think that's going to A, allow us to be more successful.
And B, allow us to, I think, sell it to the rest of the country, and not in a fake sale, but like a true sale, to say that we don't hold this against the individuals who are working here, who have put in 20 years of work to the federal government, but we owe it to the rest of the people of this country that the job of the federal government is not to employ these people.
So where does the rubber hit the road on that?
Here's one where you could call me soft for this, but I actually think this would be advisable.
I actually think this would...
Drastically increase the probability of success of this happening, but I also think that it doesn't really dilute what we're doing.
It doesn't dilute our purpose.
I would actually favor rather generous severance arrangements with those individuals, right?
Like, we could debate whether that's a year or a year and a half.
A year and a half would be extremely generous.
You could say that, well, then you're eating into some of your cost savings.
Not really.
In the long run, you're still saving a lot of money.
But the whole exercise wasn't really about saving their headcount costs anyway.
The biggest cost of employing the people in this machine is the action of the machine itself.
So if you've debilitated that for a year and a half's worth of severance, well, I mean, what's that?
It's like a year and a half's worth of not having done this in the first place.
Pay that as a down payment to actually make that happen.
That, by normal employment standards, Is actually really generous.
Like if you're working at a company and you're not doing a great job and someone fires you, or even if you are doing a great job and you're part of a division that's no longer part of that company, you're generally not going to get a year and a half's worth unless you're the CEO. You're not going to get a year and a half's worth of pay.
It just doesn't work that way.
You might get two weeks.
You might get two months at most.
So to treat these federal employees far more generously than they would have been in a private sector circumstance.
There's probably people watching this who would think I'm being soft for saying that.
No, I think that's the right thing to do because it will allow us to do this in a way that separates this as a...
against those individuals who themselves have their families and their kids and whatever to say that we're solving more of a structural problem.
And so that's how I kind of separated Tucker is especially economically on the severance piece of this.
Like I want to go in.
I want to go.
I want to go hard.
I want to go aggressive.
But I want to make this less about going after the individuals.
They're still free to watch The View if they want.
And they'll sue and they'll take it to the Supreme Court.
That's also why this has to be done now, not only because it's the window of the electoral mandate we have.
I think the current Supreme Court is on our side in a way that it never has been since the advent of the administrative state, which was around 1920. Like, in the last century, we have not had a Supreme Court that has been as aligned with the vision that I'm describing to you as what we have now.
And fast forward another 20 years, we probably won't, really.
I mean, realistically, in the next 20 years, there's going to be somebody who you and I don't agree with who's probably going to be elected president, and there's going to be Supreme Court justices who either die or get swapped out in that time frame.
So this is a, again, back to a once in a century, maybe once in a national history opportunity to really drive deep structural change in the federal government.
I mean, one of the things that's also true is that massive Leviathan we're talking about, probably, I gave the, we went to this esoteric example about the Fed, but one of the best places.
And best examples of that is the State Department, as you well know, right?
That is, when you think about the swamp and the unelected bureaucracy and the people who set policy but were never elected to set that policy, I mean, the State Department's probably even a far better example than the U.S. Federal Reserve.
There are too many good examples to choose from, but that's— State Department is disgusting.
Well, I think it's behaved, like most organizational bureaucracies, it takes on a life of its own.
And so that's, again, another example of an agency, and it's just another agency, really, that needs to be, you know, we've got to take the same attitude to say that if you've got a bunch of people showing up to work who shouldn't have ever had that job, they start finding things to do that are generally damaging.
And that could include even not only in our own soil.
It is upstream of the welfare state in some ways, too, because it even relates to the immigration crisis, actually, more so in Europe, though I think it probably will eventually be directly linked to the immigration crisis here, too, where part of Europe's mass invasion, if you will, of illegals entering Europe where part of Europe's mass invasion, if you will, of illegals entering Europe is actually the consequence of U.S. disruptions that we created in The war in Syria.
We're different from Western European countries, but if you view the West more broadly and the rise of the welfare state in the West, the welfare state actually creates the need for that welfare state, which then actually creates the magnet that...
Yeah, it's so dark, I can't even think about it, but that's where we're going.
Okay, so within hours of the election, of Trump being declared the winner in this last election, numbers appeared on the internet, which are accurate, which I know you've seen.
That showed the vote totals in the last four elections for the Democrats.
And in three out of the four, including this one, the number hovered between, say, 59 and 65 million votes.
And then you have this weird anomaly in 2020 where it was 81. Huh.
What I care about is how are we actually going to fix it in a lasting way, like in a way that just lasts for a really long time.
I think there would be enough of an opportunity.
I mean think about the majority we're now commanding in the Senate.
I think we can do this nationally where you make election day a national holiday, put it on a single day, and at least for federal elections because state elections are run by states.
But at least for a federal election.
All 50 states have a bare minimum standard of single-day voting, paper ballots, government-issued ID to match the voter file, period.
I think more or less we've solved...
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So how did you, when I saw you in Florida on election night with Trump, and you clearly like him, he clearly likes you.
You know, running against somebody for office is not a natural environment for a friendship to sprout at all.
You know, Jeb Bush was not there.
Yeah.
How did you end up liking Trump?
How did he end up liking you?
Why do you have such an easy friendship after running against him?
I think we're both unusual individuals in ways that caused us to gel, actually.
I didn't see the point in running.
I ran against Trump for sure, and I made my case for why I thought I was the right candidate in the election.
I think that I was the youngest person ever to run for U.S. president as a Republican, and I do think that there is an opportunity to lead and bring in a new generation in some ways, as we have, nonetheless, in the last year.
I guess the whole thing wasn't an exercise that I took super personally anyway.
I think when you take this stuff too personally, it becomes exhausting.
But for me, it was, look, I feel like I have a calling for the country.
I'm running for something.
I'm running for my vision.
And you know what?
Along the way, because it was deeply consistent with my vision, I respected Donald Trump.
Like, in a certain sense.
If you think about a family business or something, you're going to have a guy who started it, bequeaths it to his kids.
At some point along the way, there are some bumps in the road in terms of how that happens and when and when's the right time for the torch to be passed on.
Those would be legitimate.
Disagreements, arguments within the context of family business.
I know many people who have been in that similar position.
And so in that sense of carrying the American torch, we can have like a reasonable debate about when the right time is for that to be able to pass on to the next generation of leaders or whatever.
But I came from a place of actual deep respect for Donald Trump the whole time that I ran.
Because one of the reasons why is it was a fact of the matter that I was...
I don't think that idea would have occurred to me.
I'm an entrepreneur.
I believe in achieving things that have been achieved before.
But that particular thing, I just wouldn't have even considered that possibility had Donald Trump not run, won, and been a successful president.
And so, you know, I said it on the debate stage.
Donald Trump was the greatest president of the 21st century, and I think it actually caused more anger from the other candidates on that stage at me for the rest of the race than Donald Trump or I ever had with respect to each other.
It started with like 10. You know, the last debate I had, there was four of us up there.
That was interesting.
Oh, so many things I would do differently, but that's a story for another day.
You know, I think the hardest part was in the short windows into a campaign that you have interfacing with like 300 million people, I think even the people who were in physical rooms with me understood me at a different and deeper level than the 99.9% of the electorate that never was, but who saw I saw the few windows that they had to see who you are.
Now, the debates, one of the things I learned about them is that it's different for a general election debate if you're going against like Trump versus Harris or Trump versus Biden.
People watch that and for good reason.
I'm glad they did.
But like in a Republican primary debate in the early cycle where there's like 10 people standing on a stage.
Most people don't actually watch that debate or see what happened for themselves, but what they do see is the distillation of it.
The clips, but even just like the verbal descriptions of actually what happened, that's what they get is the synthesis.
So the audience functionally of a primary debate isn't really the electorate.
It's two groups of people.
It's the gatekeepers in the media and it is the people who fund campaigns.
That's the audience that actually matters.
I'm not saying it should work that way, and I'm not saying I want it to work that way.
But functionally, if you're looking at moving the ball forward in a race, that is the group that determines whether or not that event actually advanced your campaign forward towards victory.
And at a certain point in the campaign, I mean, you and I actually spoke a few times over it, including over conversations like this we had while I was running.
The conclusion I arrived at was, here's my strategy.
I'm going to tell you what I actually believe right now.
99% of the time, that was the same thing that I believed four years ago.
1% of the time, it was not, but I'm going to tell you what I believe right now, and I'm going to tell it to you straight without filters.
And it felt like that should be a winning electoral strategy.
I'm not sure it's the winning electoral strategy, but this race was just so different from any other one because, in retrospect, there's literally...
It's foolish for anybody, myself included, to think that anybody else was going to come out of this process other than Donald Trump as the nominee.
And it's because the moment right now that we're in, the people of this country know what they need when they need it.
And they needed a guy who had been there, who was strong enough, who wasn't necessarily an ideologue, but who was a badass, who actually had had the experience and was ready from those learnings to be charged up and go back in and actually take it to the next level.
And I don't think the outcome was going to be any different in terms of who the nominee was, regardless of what I did.
But there was still a lot of learnings through the process.
Now, things like I could have done better, probably a million things I could have done better.
But I think that being unsparing as I was, I think that I wouldn't change.
But to be able to combine that a little bit more with if there's a way for me to allow a lot of people to sort of know me the way that like, like my employees at my businesses know me or my closest friends know me.
Yeah, and I think that he is, he's like the best at it.
And watching him even in the years since I left the campaign has been eye-opening.
It's been kind of inspiring, actually.
And it's made me think a lot about, he's able to take, you know, 20,000 people in a room at a time, but also 100 million people not in the room at that time to really get to know him, like who he is and feel like they actually deeply know him as a person as opposed to just his policies.
I think I was really good at allowing a lot of people around the country to know what my policies were, what my specifics of were my vision for America.
Wearing a, you know, Dayglo vest, and he comes out on stage wearing it, and he says, my staff told me they wanted me to wear this, I want to wear it, and they said to me, it makes you look thinner.
So what about, I've just wondered, like, one of the sort of ongoing side skirmishes that I try to pay too much attention to, but it's a little mesmerizing, is the...
If you're, you know, whatever Dick Cheney's repulsive little daughter or Jonah Goldberg or something, you know, it's like you're not, they're just not impressive people.
They were exercising authority far beyond what they had earned, in my view, in the first place.
Products of nepotism.
And they're just mad that their world ended.
Whatever.
But here's the...
I don't want to be mean about it, though that was mean.
It's a natural extension of division on race, division on gender, division on gender within the household, because they're fundamentally against the household as a unit anyway.
I mean, I think if we get our job right here, let's say we're just going and dismantling the administrative state, actually fixing illegal immigration in this country, and actually having secure national borders, reviving our self-confidence, I can't see how the culture doesn't change.
And in some ways, actually, it's a cultural change.
That might even just be in the wrong framing of it.
That is a small part of the story.
I think in some ways the culture has already changed, and the best evidence of...
That is what we saw the last couple of days.
What we saw on Tuesday night, where, by the way, at the time you and I scheduled this to sit down, I was kind of skeptical because I thought we were going to be sitting here looking at TV screens and counting ballots in Pennsylvania or something like that, which would have been a horrific way to spend time.
But the fact that we're not doing that, and that very night, we actually knew the result in a way that nobody anticipated, suggests that we actually have already had the cultural change in this country, and it was just revealed to be so.
And then to have Hillary Clinton to say, no, no, no, it's not your time.
And then finally he just says, okay, after Hillary loses, I'm just going to do this myself anyway by hell or high water.
That's a whole separate discussion.
Gets his way into the White House.
And then to say the same guy comes back.
And, you know, who knows if the reporting on this is true, but effectively threatens to have him constitutionally removed from office and to lead a coup, unless you bend the knee.
The same guy, only to then watch, again, the woman, instead, who this time was nominated, last time was Hillary Clinton, this time was Kamala Harris, fail at the very mission that you otherwise run.
I cannot even begin to fathom what that feels like.
He is surely...
The happiest person about the election result on Tuesday night in America, right?
Because he's, at least personally, maybe him or Jill Biden, his wife, had to have been the two most, you know, schadenfreude relieved Americans in the country.
But it's in, how is he doing?
I don't know, does that help if you're going through like a state of cognitive decline?
Does something like that, as painful as that is, does that sense of...
Does that aggrievement and desire for vengeance actually kind of sharpen you?
Maybe it does, because it did seem like he actually got a little bit sharper, actually, after he was yanked up.
And the number one determinant of whether you achieve what you set out to achieve is you.
And that applies to the level of an individual.
And if your team is a political party in American politics, then that's true for your team, right?
They were responsible for their own failure and demise.
I saw some interesting things over the last day, and it hasn't been as monolithically crazy as I expected.
I expected everybody just in lockstep in the same way to go the same direction of, you know, threat to democracy, authoritarianism has reached America, and we're seeing certainly a lot of that.
That's like 90% of it.
But I think there were, I think, some thoughtful moments of reflection of, you know, a few folks.
Like, I think, I don't know this guy, but someone sent me his tweet.
Does Iglesias sound right?
Yeah, Matt Iglesias.
He had something thoughtful.
In my campaign, I had 10 truths, 10 things that are true that I lay out.
That was kind of the centerpiece of my campaign.
You might remember.
They sent it to me.
He had nine today, but he forgot number 10 was the joke that somebody sent me.
It is a means to the end of doing what's better for humanity.
And I just thought that framing was, at least as a framing matter, the right way to look at it.
And so, if that's evidence to say that even within a period of 48 hours, you can at least have thoughtful voices on the other side who are willing to look themselves in the mirror, admit failure, inquire about the nature of the screw-up, and maybe even begin to offer some path forward.
I think that actually leaves me...
Of all the times you and I have gotten together, I'm probably in the most hopeful mood I've actually ever been in right now.
And I'm hopeful for the future of the Republican Party.
I'm hopeful for the future of our country.
But a weird part of me is...
Almost hopeful for the future of the Democratic Party.
He gave me a dinner I was at while I was running for president.
We really hit it off.
I like people who are extremely intelligent, and he is in the category of extreme intelligence.
He's somebody who is able to, not only able to, but requires himself to be doing multiple different things at the same time, and he's better individually at each of those things because he's also doing those other things at the same time.
But I think that his significance was twofold.
One is he really expanded that permission structure we were talking about earlier for people who are elite in America, people who define their status based on the number of dollars in their bank account, which I think is probably the wrong way to look at your own status as a human being.
But we all have our biases.
If the richest man in the world and the most successful self-made man in human history Can publicly state his support for Donald Trump, then there's nothing stopping me from doing so, if I believe that's the right answer to it.
And he's pretty darn smart, actually.
So if this guy both can do it from a social perspective, but also is as intelligent as he is to send rockets to outer space and back more intelligently than the U.S. government has ever.
If he can kind of do the analysis and say that Donald Trump's going to be the right choice for the future of the country, then you know what?
Maybe I should do some simpler thinking of my own and have the courage to arrive at the same place.
So in terms of blowing out that permission structure, like that was certainly what I consider to be one of my responsibilities over the last year.
But the person who really blew that out, bar none, was Elon when he came out publicly endorsed Trump.
And I love the way he did it because it was clearly he was just moved by the fact that.
Okay, he's maybe thinking about it.
Who knows?
Who knows where exactly he was in his journey right there?
He and I talked at various points, but I don't know that he was going to come out and publicly endorse Trump in the way he did, but there was this supernatural event.
I do think it was a divine moment in American history where we averted a national disaster by about two centimeters, and Elon just said, okay, it's done.
I'm doing this.
He's an American hero, and I'm endorsing him.
I thought that was number one.
Number two was on just the execution of it, too.
And this election, I mean, Pennsylvania was – it turns out Donald Trump would have won regardless, but Pennsylvania was the key that allowed us to really secure this victory and to just go in and say – got a lot of political consultants and a lot of people in traditional Republican Party apparatuses who have tried to figure this stuff out and say, no, no, no, I'm just actually going to figure it out myself directly and understand here's low-propensity voters.
I'm going to personally go and talk to them myself.
I'm going to spend nine figures or whatever it was in the end, I think it was at least nine figures, to actually make sure that we get the job done and then get the job done, I think was essential, actually, to this victory.
And so I hope he's an essential part going forward of saving the country and using this mandate to shred to pieces that federal bureaucracy you and I talked about earlier.
And I hope he doesn't...
Lose his interest in American politics for a long time to come.
You know, you and I think have been on the side of, because you hear this objection now coming up, which actually infuriates me about, oh, well, what about all of a sudden now, after 14 years of being silent on this from the left, we don't like this influence of money in politics.
So long as we have the game, and I think that this is something for our side to man up into as well, is if you're going to play the game, you've got to compete, actually.
And we can't just win this against the so-called successful elites or whatever.
No, actually, we are better off if we have our own cadre of superhuman heroes who are able to, with their own unique skills, be they cultural leaders or business leaders or whatever, to have our own version of our special forces as well.
Especially since nobody – I mean, I don't like most political donors.
I know them all, and most of them have creepy agendas, or they just want to get their picture taken with a politician, which is like a very low motive in my view.
Yeah.
It's not unique, but he's very unusual in that he doesn't really want anything.
I mean, I, and, you know, I'm not, I mean, we wouldn't mean to commit the sin of flattering you to your face, but I think one of the things I liked about our conversations, and, you know, I... I fashion myself as having some of this as well, is just having a little bit of an intuition of where things are going a little bit.
Just get a pulse of the country and to sort of see it.
I think you and I had conversations over the last year where I think we were both on the same page about early on last year in spring of 2023. Yeah, that's right.