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Sept. 12, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
50:58
Vivek Reacts to the Trump-Harris Debate: Will Americans Buy What the Media's Selling?
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On this week's episode of the podcast, we dive deep into the presidential debate, the one that we just had in Philadelphia.
I was there in person.
But to tie this into the broader context of what exactly has been going on in this election more generally, tie this to the last debate.
Recall the two presidential debates were scheduled together.
What are the implications of that?
Often we react to what we're served up in short news cycles lasting days or even hours, but we don't often take moments to take a larger step back and ask ourselves why it's played out exactly the way that it has.
Is Kamala Harris really the candidate or is she a representative of a broader machine?
That's the conversation we deserve to be having in this country, not just the Republican Party.
But more generally, in the lead up to this election, to cut through the smokescreen to understand what's really going on.
Let's get right into it.
I had the chance to attend the debate in Philadelphia last night, the spin room at least around the debate, and it was an interesting experience.
It was even quite a bit different than the CNN debate that was the one in Atlanta.
The environment was different.
It was a lot more organized.
It was a lot more structured.
Just even the way the press was run, the way the entire city was being run around it, the environment around the debate.
It had a sense of organization to it in a way that the last debate didn't have.
And I share that as a small detail, but to take people a little bit behind the curtain for what I do think is going on here, because I think there are some parallels between the last debate and this one in a deeper sense.
I think there's a deeper project at work in the narrative that the media is trying to sell the public.
Now, what was interesting to me was heading into this debate, the expectations were set low, and I believe purposefully low, for Kamala Harris.
I believe in calling a spade a spade.
Did she exceed the purposefully low expectations that were set for her?
I think that she did.
But I think that this is part of an interesting pattern and I think a concerning pattern dating back to how the media handled the last debate.
You can't view the last night's debate with Kamala Harris without actually understanding it against the context of the first debate that Trump had with Biden.
And I was at that one as well in Atlanta.
Here's the truth.
That last debate did something unique for the media that they really needed in order to bank their credibility with voters.
And it was this.
They set the earliest ever presidential debate in U.S. history.
In the history of televised presidential debates, that was the earliest one in history.
And that wasn't some accident.
It was a negotiating condition for, at that point, the Biden-Harris campaign.
They said they would not have debates, but these are the terms on which they were going to agree to have a debate.
They were only going to have a debate, they said, if this was the schedule of debates.
They had this one scheduled with ABC for September, on the date that exactly we had it last night, September 10th.
But they would only agree to that if there was also an earlier debate in the month of June, before either the Democrats or even the Republicans had formally nominated their candidate.
That was the first time that's happened in the history of televised presidential debates in a general election.
Now, at that debate, in the lead up to the debate, you had No expectations one way or another that was set for Biden because it was a trial balloon.
The reason they negotiated that was it was what in the world of finance or business you would call a free call option.
That means that you have the option to exercise it, say you're a candidate, but you don't have to.
That's exactly what Democrats bought themselves.
It was a bit of a trap that was laid for Trump and for the Republicans to say that if Trump beat Biden so badly that he was going to win the election versus Biden they would still have enough time to swap him out but if Biden somehow surpassed and exceeded expectations that would have reset the otherwise failing race.
Well, they succeeded in getting that debate.
Trump wiped the floor with Joe Biden.
The whole country saw it.
And that started the call to actually get Biden off the top of the ticket.
Now that did two things.
Not only did that result in a free call option for Democrats where they were able to figure out that their then current candidate wasn't gonna be a winner, they got to swap him out for free.
But it also did something really important for the media.
And that's the link to last night's debate.
What it did is it created a shock to the American audience, to the American voters, that even many previously left-leaning networks, cable networks, print digital media publications, all decided to be critical of Biden in a way that they hadn't been critical of a Democrat for a really long time.
They were more critical of Joe Biden during the early part of that summer than they were of Donald Trump or of Republicans.
And what that did was that banked a certain amount of credibility that the media gained with the public.
And I think that that was the second untold benefit of what happened after that first debate.
So the first is the Democrats got a free option.
It says, you know what, if the trial balloon works, we'll ride the horse.
That we're on.
If not, we'll switch to a different horse.
That was strictly value creating, getting a free call option.
Call options have value.
And they got something that had value that they previously didn't have, was the option to swap out their candidate.
But it wasn't just the Democrats that had helped.
I think it gave the media and restored and rebuilt and rehabilitated credibility that a lot of the political media had lost to the public by saying that, you know what, now we criticize Democrats.
We're going to talk about Biden's cognitive deficits.
We're going to talk about his poor performance at the debate.
We're going to talk about how he has ducked questions, even as the sitting U.S. president.
Partificating about the threats to our democracy, failing to partake in the most basic norm of a U.S. president to communicate exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it, and to answer even modest, if not tough, questions from the press.
We saw the New York Times, you saw CNN, you saw every...
which hosted the debate, you saw the Washington Post, you see every major mainstream media outlet then not only turning on Joe Biden, but treating him with the same harsh...
Now, that allowed them to sweep under the rug the fact that for three years, they actually covered for Biden and his cognitive deficits.
They covered for Biden and his policy failures.
They covered even for some of his most disastrous policy failures, like the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way that that was executed.
They completely swept that under the rug for three years.
But in three short weeks, they were able to re-bank some of that credibility by saying, no, no, no, we're not biased media.
They'll say that the media leans Democrat.
No, here's our best proof that we don't lean Democrat.
We're most critical of the Democratic president of the United States and the Democratic nominee for U.S. president in a race versus Donald Trump, where at least for those three short weeks in June and into early July, they could say that, no, no, no, we actually are And like it or not,
I think it's a hard fact that much of the public, especially those who aren't dialed into American politics every day or the political media, Or weren't paying particular attention to the primary process.
So that, you know what, maybe these people are more balanced than conservatives or others may claim.
This is not a biased media.
I could see them right before my eyes, criticizing Joe Biden, criticizing the sitting Democratic president of the United States, criticizing the Democratic nominee, even in his race, against Donald Trump.
So those are the two objectives accomplished by that prior debate.
And that's what really laid the groundwork for yesterday's debate, which, remember, was not scheduled after or anything else.
It was scheduled as part of the exact same plan, right?
The negotiated conditions for these presidential debates locked in both of those debates at the same time.
ABC on September 10th, CNN in June.
And that was all part of, this is not some sort of Some sort of speculative conspiracy theory.
It's just a statement of fact that that was a negotiated plan that the Democrats agreed to as the condition for allowing Joe Biden to debate was there were going to be two debates, one on September 10th, one in June.
Why wasn't there going to be one in July or August?
Why wasn't there going to be ones scheduled at the usual time they have presidential debates in September and October?
No, it was going to be June and it was going to be September and it was going to be under those pre-specified conditions.
They're linked.
There's a deep link between the conditions that created.
It gave the Democrats enough time between June and September to swap out their nominee if Biden performed poorly, which he did.
But it also allowed the media to shore up their credibility such that whatever they were going to do in potentially tilting the scales of how this election was going to be portrayed in the fall, they had to shore up a deficit of credibility they had with the American public.
That's what was accomplished with that first debate in June.
So then we get to what exactly happened.
They won back that credibility and you bank that capital, that political capital and social capital with the public only to then deploy it last night.
And I think what we see both last night and others have said it, I said it, I'll say it again, what was effectively a three-on-one debate That would have been one thing if people went into that without having seen the media criticize Joe Biden.
But now they have this artificial illusion that, hey, the media is balanced.
We trust the way the mainstream media is running this.
They were critical of Biden.
They were excorigating him.
They were harsher on him than Trump.
To now, through that slate of hand, to say, okay, we're actually going to have a three-on-one versus Donald Trump, and we're going to allegedly fact-check one candidate without stopping Kamala Harris at a single one of the many lies, the many deceptive facts or deceptive statements that she made last night on the debate stage, with still the aura of objectivity and credibility.
I think that that is actually, in some ways, more devious and more dangerous and more deceptive Then if they had just stopped the charade around the Joe Biden bit around the month of June, that's exactly what ended up playing out last night.
So they stopped Donald Trump to fact check him for things that he didn't even say.
I thought it was remarkable that one of the two moderators stepped in for the first time in the evening just to make an assertion.
So during the topic of abortion, Donald Trump spoke about the fact that many Democrats have favored radical policies that would permit abortion all the way up to the time of birth.
He cited that there are Democratic politicians in certain states that have advanced certain measures.
That's what he said.
Now, one of the two moderators last night stepped in to fact-check Donald Trump when she was contradicting something that he didn't even actually say, She said that just to be clear, there are no states today that allow abortion after or at the time of birth.
That's not what he said, but to somebody who isn't watching this very carefully at home, who's just tuning in, disconnected, God bless them and thank, probably better for them, from American politics, but checking in on this presidential debate.
It allows them to say, okay, Donald Trump said something, I don't remember exactly what he said, but this objective moderator from media networks that I know, I get a sense of objective, because they were objective, they were hitting Biden just as hard as they were hitting Trump, now comes out and says, no, no, no, Donald Trump has just been put in his place through a lie that he told when he actually didn't tell a lie at all, but that's the appearance they cultivate, to then do that systematically over the course of last night.
That was the beginning of a pattern that you saw yesterday in Philadelphia.
Without actually doing the same for what were a much wider range and a deeper and more concerning set of lies that Kamala Harris told with a straight face yesterday.
Talk about the number of times she brought up Project 2025. You might like some of the things that Project 2025 has to say, you might not.
But whether or not you like it, and some conservatives haven't loved Donald Trump's position distancing himself from that, but it doesn't matter.
You have people on both sides have their own views on the substance of it.
Project 2025 is a different set of policy objectives than that have been embraced by Donald Trump.
He has distanced himself from it publicly.
He says that he's had nothing to do with it.
He doesn't even know what's in there.
Kamala Harris knows this and yet purposefully used that in a way that if the debate moderators were using the same standard they used to quote-unquote fact-check Donald Trump, to say that, okay, because you said that some Democrats are In favor of abortion and permitting abortion all the way up to the time of birth, that somehow we're going to fact check you by pretending that you said that some states actually allow it and we're going to come in and make sure our audience is informed of that assertion.
If you're applying that same standard to the other side, if Kamala Harris is saying that Donald Trump is going to implement Project 2025, you would expect that same debate moderator to say, in fairness, as a fact check to the audience whose perceptions they care so much to protect, you might predict that moderator would say, but yes, Donald Trump has disavowed that several times over, you might predict that moderator would say, but yes, Donald Trump has disavowed that several times over, Vice President Harris, so Didn't hear a word of it.
Same thing with respect to the federal abortion ban.
She said, point blank, that Donald Trump would sign a federal abortion ban when in fact he has been clear, to the point of even getting criticism from some on the right for it, that he would not sign a federal abortion ban into law.
Same thing with respect to her insinuations that Donald Trump has insulted the military.
There hasn't been a shred of evidence that Donald Trump said what many in the then media alleged that he did.
It's now been debunked that Donald Trump ever said something disparaging about military members.
It was a hoax that was perpetuated.
By the political opposition.
Kamala Harris asserted it last night as though it was fact without going challenged by the moderators.
Same thing with respect to her false claim that Donald Trump somehow claimed that it was just fine people on both sides of what happened in Charlottesville.
If you look at the entire context of what he said, it was a clear quote.
quote.
It's been debunked even by left of center publications since.
She said it with a straight face though.
And the problem is many voters at home, many people watching this debate at home, have really no ability to tell that difference.
It's a good thing.
I don't blame Americans.
They Most Americans should not have their lives consumed with following partisan political jousting.
I don't think it's good for the country.
I don't think it's good for most people.
But I also think it's good for most people still to be engaged in being able to know what each candidate has said, what they haven't said, what they stand, what they don't stand for.
And yet the media that claimed this artifice of being objective in the way they went after Joe Biden, after his CNN performance, and the way they went after Donald Trump last night, completely failing to apply that same standard to Kamala Harris when they know that this myth about what Donald Trump said after the Charlottesville incident was actually dishonest.
They did not call her out on it once.
Straight down the list.
Project 2025, federal abortion ban, insinuations about what he said in the military, the Charlottesville fine people hoax, The fact that she claimed that cops died, effectively she directly implied that, say what you will about what happened on January 6th, there were no people who were killed, no cops who were killed, and Donald Trump factually said it, the only person who was actually killed at the Capitol that day was Ashley Babbitt.
Think about her statements about Xi Jinping and COVID-19.
This is particularly rich last night.
The moment where she said, Donald Trump said that Xi Jinping was my friend or something to that effect, when she was now concerned that Xi Jinping was not being transparent about the origin and the causes of COVID-19.
Whoa, just wait a minute.
Go back to the actual facts of this debate back in the year 2020.
They were calling Donald Trump a racist for calling this a Chinese virus.
You could have called it a Brazilian strain or the South African strain or the India strain.
That's totally fine.
But if you called it the Chinese strain, then somehow that was racist.
That's what they were saying about Donald Trump back then.
But she's banking on the fact that voters don't remember exactly what the truth was back then, to create and invent a new reality that Donald Trump somehow was the one who was cozying up to Xi Jinping when he proposed a travel ban from China that many in the Democratic Party opposed, when he proposed greater transparency and labeled it even the China when he proposed greater transparency and labeled it even the China virus the Wuhan virus.
They called him a racist for saying it.
Now, four years later, Kamala Harris is saying that Donald Trump was claiming Xi Jinping was my friend when Xi Jinping was not transparent about the causes, about the origin of COVID-19.
It was many, even in the Biden administration afterwards, that were trying to cover up for the origin of that pandemic.
Now, one of the things I thought was most remarkable about last night, this list of inconsistencies and lies continued throughout.
out.
The moderators could have called her out at any point on any of these questions if they were applying the same standard they did to Trump.
But one of the most remarkable parts about this is her ability to present herself as some sort of transcendent, unifying figure saying, we don't want to go back to the name-calling and the personal insults and the attacks.
When you actually look just objectively at who was leveling personal insults and attacks and engaging in name-calling last night, it was actually Kamala Harris.
The number of times that she called Donald Trump a criminal, the number of times that she used the word disgraceful in reference to Donald Trump.
She was the person actually using those types of adjectives and using that type of mudslinging and name calling, while at the same time decrying the practice of dirty name calling in American politics.
Now, should Donald Trump have been able to call it out if this was a debate where you had microphones that were on in all directions and you didn't have moderators?
Of course.
I think the public would have been able to see that.
But because of the way that this was orchestrated...
So I go back to the first thing that I said.
It was a far more orchestrated affair.
Just the look and feel of it.
Being on the ground in Philadelphia at yesterday's debate.
Far more organized.
Far more set.
Far more professional than the setting that was set up at that first debate in Georgia, in Atlanta.
was almost a concrete poem and a symbol of a deeper plan, is what it was, for two debates that were set up each to accomplish their own objectives, the first to test Biden and discard him as the nominee if necessary, while shoring up credibility for the media, political capital that they would then expend while shoring up credibility for the media, political capital that they would then expend and take to the bank, and cash in on this debate when it came to applying egregiously differential standards in the way they
So the real question right now, for not only the future of this election, but I think the future direction of our country, is whether voters are actually going to buy what they are trying to sell.
So I'm hopeful that most people in this country now have been burned by the news media enough times that they're going to seek out answers on their own.
We saw this in some of the polling and focus groups that were done afterwards.
I thought it was really interesting.
One of the things I wanted to do, people asked me my opinion on how the debate went immediately after it was over.
I don't particularly want to offer that because I want to check my own bias.
I'm in a bubble environment.
Everybody's in a bubble environment right there in the media, spin room, surrounded by, in my case, I was watching the debate with a lot of prominent Republican politicians and leaders across the country, but all of whom have similar views.
I want to be careful.
I'm not trapped in an echo chamber of perspectives that are disconnected with what most Americans at home think.
But I think what you saw was a lot of people at home, which is what I saw in several of the focus groups of undecided voters immediately afterwards, after that debate, to hear what their perspectives were.
And I even talked to some of my own liberal friends and family members.
Liberal friends and then family members were more either outside of politics, may lean conservative, but outside of the world of the daily grind of partisan politics, just to get their diverse range of opinions.
And what they said was, okay, Kamala Harris, my liberal friends, did she perform better?
Yes, she did.
That's what they say.
But it was a performance, right?
It was in the context of performing.
You perform in the context of a performance.
But does that convince somebody on her ability to actually implement policies and execute action that lifts up the quality of life and the well-being of everyday Americans?
I think that's where a lot of people, even on the center-left, were unconvinced because the core question, both heading into during and after yesterday's debate, is that why isn't she actually doing the very things that she was talking about last night?
The moment where Donald Trump hit that nail on the head, I thought, was where he said, we could end this debate right now.
You could just go back to Washington, D.C. You're talking about the border.
You could either sign a bill or sign an executive action that closes the border right now, And yet you're unwilling to do it.
I thought that was powerful because it got to the essence of the difference between talk and action.
Actions speak louder than words, and I think that this is one of the areas where, again, the media has failed to scrutinize Kamala's shift on a lot of the policy positions.
She did get one question to that effect last night.
It was as though they checked the box to say they asked her about it.
But completely let her off the hook in actually answering it.
We did not hold her to task.
I think the media did not hold her to task for her own flip-flops on these policy positions.
They're not flip-flops.
Flip-flop is you say one thing and you switch to another.
And politicians have been doing that for time immemorial.
But in this particular case, Kamala Harris has actually taken actions in certain key areas that affect Americans.
She co-sponsored a bill.
She didn't just say she supported it as a presidential candidate.
She did that, too, in 2020. But as a U.S. Senator, she took active steps.
She co-sponsored a bill with Bernie Sanders to create, effectively, a single-payer healthcare system, Medicare for All, in the United States of America.
She now says she's against that.
Those are words compared to her action.
She now says she is against a ban on fracking.
She, when she was AG of California, sued the Obama administration over granting fracking permits.
Same thing goes for offshore drilling.
She said she wanted to end the filibuster to ram through the Green New Deal, which would end the coal industry and end a number of other energy industries in the United States.
Well, guess what?
Those are actions compared to the fact that she's now disavowing that with her words.
So I do think actions speak louder than words.
But that disconnect was not at all prosecuted by the moderators last night.
And again, it comes back to that banked credibility, the artifice, the sanctimony.
At one point, you got Donald Trump getting a question about Kamala Harris's racial identity going to Donald Trump.
But then you had that moderator, David Muir, last night, who then tossed the question to Kamala Harris afterwards.
A really hard-hitting question.
What is your perspective on this issue?
As though it were an issue in the first place.
That, I think, was the ultimate deceit here.
It wasn't the fact that it was a biased debate.
If it's a biased debate, then it's a biased debate and people can make their own judgments.
But it was the slate of hand of creating the optical illusion of balance by going after Joe Biden the way they did, which actually accomplished their objective, but which then also gave them the veneer of a temporary credibility that allowed them to bring that special air of sanctimony around their supposed objectivity that was dripping last night in the face of what was I think actually far more egregious bias than we've probably seen in any modern presidential debate in history that certainly I can recall.
And I think all of this reveals the heart of what's at issue in this election.
You hear a lot of fellow Republicans refer to Kamala Harris as a far-left ideologue or a Marxist or a communist.
You won't generally hear me leveling that critique against her because I think it gives her too much credit.
Gives her the credit of being an ideologue.
A guy like Bernie Sanders, he's an ideologue.
I disagree with his ideology.
But I can respect anybody who at least has a clear set of principles who guides them in their actions and their beliefs, even if I disagree with most of the content of those beliefs.
Kamala Harris isn't ideological, particularly.
I think last night demonstrated this, too.
We're not even up against a candidate.
We're up against a machine.
It's a...
Perverted, upside-down version, hellish version of the San Antonio Spurs under Greg Popovich or something like that in the sphere of American politics.
You could replace the individual person who's playing in the position, but it's the machine that ultimately achieves its objective.
And that's what's really going on in this race.
This isn't about Republicans versus Democrats.
Not quite.
It's not about black versus white.
It's not about man versus woman.
The media, the powers that be, will try to train you.
Divide and conquer.
Pit groups against one another.
Identity politics.
Vote bank politics.
Don't fall for that trick.
This isn't about Republicans or Democrats even.
It is about the managerial class, the bureaucratic class, and the everyday citizen.
That's the real divide in this country.
You see, in recent days, not only Liz Cheney, but Dick Cheney.
You know, people who've watched my race last year know that I've been no fan of him and His recent endorsement of Kamala Harris has nothing to do with it, but Dick Cheney came out and publicly endorsed Kamala Harris.
I consider this one of the less surprising things to have happened in American politics this year.
And at the same time, you've seen many former Democrats, even iconoclastic Democrats, that have criticized candidates like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden even from a progressive vantage point, now shifting over to support Donald Trump.
So what's going on there?
I think it is evidence of the fact that the real divide is not really between the traditional Republican and the Democrat, but between this managerial class, the people who were never elected to exercise political power, be they in the media, be they in certain parts of the corporate capture machine, or especially be they in the administrative state, the unelected bureaucrats who are writing more laws and setting more policies than even Congress, which was elected to actually carry out that function.
That's who's actually running the country.
It's not Joe Biden.
It's not even really Kamala Harris.
It's not their ideology because I don't think they have one.
It is the permanent state, the fourth branch of government, the leviathan, the swamp, the managerial class, the committee class, the bureaucrats.
That's who's running the show today.
And that's what we're really up against.
We're not just running to defeat a candidate.
We are running to dismantle a system.
That's what Donald Trump meant the first time around when he said he wanted to go in there and drain the swamp.
And I think this time more than ever, he has the toolkit to actually do it.
The U.S. Supreme Court has finally laid a foundation that we haven't had in modern American history with West Virginia v.
EPA, the major questions doctrine that says that if Congress didn't actually pass the law, then a regulator can't just, for major questions, write it into existence by the stroke of a pen with a regulation.
The overturning of Chevron deference in the recent LOPA ruling.
This paves the way for Donald Trump to be able to do what he wasn't even under the legal constraints that applied then able to do in the first term with shutting down that regulatory state, taming it, and lifting our economy in the process.
It's a historic opportunity.
It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
But we're not doing it by running against Kamala Harris.
We've got to understand that we're actually running against that system.
That's what we're going in to defeat.
Now, with that media bias, with the Democrats playing the tricks that they're playing, with that managerial machine, even beyond the Democratic Party in a way that pervades the Dick Cheney's of the world and the Republican Party to behave the same way, how are we going to do it?
Here's my view.
I've said this and I'm going to say it again.
It's the subject of my new book.
It's coming out in a couple of weeks.
For those of you who followed my campaign, it's based exactly on a lot of those themes.
The book is called Truths, The Future of America First.
The reality is we're not going to win this just by criticizing individuals on the other side.
We actually made that mistake for the better part of the last year and a half by going after Joe Biden and his cognitive deficits when Joe Biden isn't even the nominee.
Kamala Harris even used that to her apparent, tried to strike an apparent advantage by saying you're not running against Biden.
Well, it's interesting because you were the very people who said that we were going to be running against Biden, that Biden was the nominee, it was a conspiracy theory to suggest otherwise, until as recently as just a few weeks ago.
I think it was the distance between Kamala Harris being the nominee at the debate last night for when Joe Biden was last the nominee is about the distance that we have still between now and the election on November 5th.
But the real question is, we're not running against that individual candidate.
We made that mistake in the past.
They made us, even when I ran for U.S. President, sign the so-called Beat Biden Pledge.
I said at the time that this is silly.
We're not actually running against Joe Biden.
Why are we training our fire on one man and his particular background when, in fact, the criticisms need to be leveled against the machine that we're up against?
I think we risk making that same mistake now against Kamala Harris.
The more we obsess over her individual failures, I think the more we're falling further into the trap that they've laid for us.
We're running against that machine, and the way we're going to defeat that machine is actually by offering our own vision to this country.
I think Donald Trump did a good job of that on policy last night.
If the last night's debate was decided on policy, and it was the policy portions of the debate, I think it's hands down, in my opinion, clear that Donald Trump won.
And I think it's going to be very clear to undecided voters who don't want verbiage and flowery language.
What they want is actual action.
You saw that in many of the post-poll interviews and many of the post-poll panels.
They were not convinced by the soaring rhetoric at times that was forced by Kamala Harris and whatever her handlers gave her.
What they want to see is actual action of what's going to grow this economy and that border crisis at the southern border and the mass influx of illegal mass migration in this country.
And I think the way we're going to ultimately win this election is to reach those people with our own alternative vision of who we are and what we actually stand for.
And if we're being honest, I think for the last 20 years, the Republican Party hasn't done as good of a job as we possibly can.
That's what's going to be required between now and the finish line.
I know Donald Trump's up to the task.
I think the way in which he laid out a lot of his clear positions last night in a way that Kamala Harris didn't, I think is a good first step.
But even beyond policy, Share with the people of this country.
It's what we've got to do at every step.
Not just Donald Trump, but the Senate races in this country where we're behind in many of the states where we should be ahead.
Donald Trump's ahead in many of the states.
Shows actually what good he is doing for the Republican Party in this race.
Many of those Senate candidates are still behind.
My advice to them would be the same thing.
Focus this final sprint to November 5th on who we are and what we actually stand for.
Answer what it means to be a conservative, what it means to be a Republican, what it means to be an American in the year 2024.
The reason they're trying to slay the traps for us, get us talking about the things they want us to be talking about in the manner that the mainstream media set last night or in other forms between now and the election, forget that.
We're going to offer our own vision for why we believe in meritocracy and free speech and open debate in the United States of America.
Why we believe that even if you disagree with us, you get to speak your mind openly as long as I get to in return, that that's the American bargain.
That the best person gets the job regardless of their race or their gender or their sexual orientations.
That you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.
That we believe in the rule of law.
And the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not the unelected bureaucrats in the deep state.
That we believe in that model of self-governance that set our country into motion the first time around.
That's who we are.
And that's how we're going to win this election, not just by criticizing the other side.
I think that we would do well to actually take sober, serious warnings.
It's like in the context of a sports competition, you don't midway through just decide that you've won the thing and coast to the end.
No, the person who ultimately wins is the one who actually competes all the way through the very end.
And in this final sprint, the work we have cut out ahead of us is not just criticizing Biden.
He's done.
Criticizing Harris, the media is going to give her air cover.
We've got to pierce through that and call that out when we see it.
That's a must.
It's necessary, but it's not sufficient.
The way we're actually going to do this is now level up and say, this is who we are as conservatives.
They will feed you race, gender, sexuality, climate.
Well, you know what?
We'll offer our alternative vision, grounded in the value of the individual, the family, the nation, and God.
That beats race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for our own vision.
Yes, it's controversial.
Yes, God has become a three-letter word that they treat like a four-letter word.
Well, you know what?
Most people in this country do believe in a higher power, and I don't think it should be taboo to talk about it.
Most people in this country do believe in the power of the individual, don't believe in apologizing for success or excellence, even through free market capitalism, as Kamala Harris tried to do to Donald Trump last night to embarrass him for his success.
No, we're not a country that makes you apologize for your success.
We're proud of it.
That's who we are as Americans.
The nuclear family isn't some vestige of oppressive capitalism as the BLM view of an old world left-wing progressive Foucault-derived worldview they try to sell you for years.
No.
The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance and the greatest institution known to mankind for prosperity.
And we're not going to apologize for that.
The idea that I'm a citizen of this nation, not some nebulous global citizen fighting the existential threat of climate change that you heard Kamala Harris spouting off about last night.
No, I don't believe in that.
I'm a citizen of this nation, the United States of America, the greatest nation known to the history of mankind, and I'm proud of it and proud to serve this country in my own way, closing that gap at the 25% recruitment deficit we have in our own U.S. military.
That's how we're going to do it.
Revive a sense of pride and identity that we long for.
That's what we, I think, have as our work cut out for us in this final sprint to the finish line.
Now, is the other side going to continue to lay traps?
I think they will.
If you just trace the history of this election just for a sobering moment of truth here, we've seen unprecedented steps taken that we've never seen in the course of American history in any presidential election.
Major prosecutions against one of the two major candidates by the party in power and by the candidate who's in power, Biden and then Harris, in the middle of an election.
That used to be the stuff of Third World Banana Republics.
You saw civil lawsuits against that same candidate.
when those started to flail, the civil lawsuits and the criminal prosecutions, they tried extrajudicially, outside of the judicial system, without going through the courts at all, I'll remind you, to literally remove Donald Trump's name from the ballot.
So this same election, we're having this debate.
Don't forget, this was the very same election where it was the proposal of the very people who are debating Donald Trump now to say that they didn't even want to give voters the choice by offering his name to be printed on the ballot in states like Maine.
It didn't go through courts.
It didn't go through anywhere else.
It was just one individual, a Democrat, in an elected office that said that I don't want the people of my state and eventually of this country to be able to vote for one man.
That's unprecedented and never seen it in American history.
And you see things get even darker over the course of months.
You see them go after him extrajudicially through the removal from the ballots, through the civil lawsuits, through the prosecutions.
And I think the reality is the heated environment that we've created in this country created the backdrop conditions for what I hope And pray was the worst thing that we see in this presidential cycle was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump that didn't come up once from the moderators, one of the most significant events in modern American history in the 21st century.
I don't believe we've seen an assassination attempt in a generation on a U.S. president.
And yet that happened in this cycle, this summer in the lead up to this final phase of the presidential race.
You didn't hear a peep about it last night.
And yet, against that backdrop, do we think that that is really going to be the final set of tricks from the ballot removal attempts to the prosecutions?
No, I do think that we're going to see some...
Interesting things happen between now and the time of the election.
I think we've seen that at every step of the way.
I think we're going to continue to see some of the most aggressive steps we've seen in American history that have defied historical convention.
I think we're going to continue to see that pattern continue all the way through Election Day.
That's what we're up against.
But then we have to step back and acknowledge, okay, we can't just complain about the playing field that we're playing on not being even.
You know what?
The best advice I give to my kids, I preach it to the left, we've got to acknowledge it for ourselves.
The person who's most responsible for whether or not you achieve your goal.
Not to say that's the only factor that matters, but the number one factor in determining whether or not you succeed in achieving your goal is actually you.
I tell that to my kids.
I preach to the left.
Got to preach it to myself and to our own side as well.
Is the playing field even?
No, it's not.
But it's the one we have.
Winning in this election by a razor-thin margin I don't think is an option.
Not for this country, it's not.
We're so...
Led by the media, deeply divided to this point of believing that the national division runs deeper than it actually does, but this election needs to be decided by a decisive margin.
And you know what?
A landslide minus whatever shenanigans emerge in this race is still going to be a victory.
That's what we require.
And so in order to achieve that, we're not going to get there by playing just the usual partisan tug of war.
It's not going to work.
It's not going to work for electoral success for Republicans.
It's not going to work for the success and revival of our country.
If we want to get serious about this, we have to, for the first time I think in a really long time, Offer our own alternative vision of who we are and what we stand for.
Some of those policies the other side may label as extreme.
Do I think that many of those federal bureaucrats need to be fired?
Absolutely.
Do I think many of those unconstitutional federal regulations need to be rescinded on day one?
You're darn right I do.
But that is how actually you revive an economy.
not only through lower tax burden, not only through the laws that are going to be passed, but through rolling back the effect of that managerial class.
That's what Kamala Harris represents, the use of the regulatory state, the use of backdoor regulation to achieve through the backdoor what otherwise could not be achieved through the front door under the Constitution.
They've been threatening tech companies through the backdoor to censor speech they couldn't through the front door.
They've been effectively using administrative agencies to pass laws that limit small business owners and individuals from being able to live their lives in ways that Congress never actually authorized.
We're up against a corrupt system where many of those same bureaucrats and politicians end up with lucrative careers in the private sector.
I don't mind people making money.
I think there's no apology for that.
But using their private connections in government to do it is wrong.
Why do we still not have a ban on lobbying for at least 10 years until after you've left the government?
Well, the reality is probably what Joe Biden's going to be doing and his family's going to be doing directly or indirectly after they leave the White House.
The fact that they've been selling off the influence of our own foreign policy.
Well, Hunter Biden's collecting money from Ukraine.
Not an issue that came up once last night either.
These, I do think, are the issues that whether you're on the left or the right, we should be able to unite around as Americans.
That we're a country where we want public service to be back again about serving the public rather than lining your pocket.
And I think it's for that reason that we require leaders in this pro-American movement, in this not just conservative movement, pro-American movement, Who come from outside of the traditional treadmill of partisan politics.
The fact that Donald Trump was not a professional politician, was a guy who's actually signed the front of a paycheck, not just the back of one, is part of why his economic policies make a lot more sense than Kamala Harris'.
This is probably a big part of why, and this came out in the debate as well.
He's got a different approach.
He cites all these people who he has fired who now don't like him.
Well, guess what?
It turns out most people who've been in the private sector know this.
If you fire somebody for underperformance, they tend not to like you very much in return.
That's what happened with a lot of the people Donald Trump fired.
He was very plain spoken about it last night, and the truth is he said, I'm a different kind of person, referring to versus Kamala Harris, in that I do fire people when they fail to do a good job.
We need more of that, not less of that in the government.
The fact that the very people who were responsible for the botched withdrawal in Afghanistan, the very people who were responsible for the failed economic policies that created the highest rate of inflation we've seen in the 21st century while wages remained flat for much of that period, The fact that every one of those people, to an individual, to a person, to a T, still holds the job that they do, is a damning indictment of the managerial class that actually runs the show.
All they care about is preserving their own position of authority.
That's un-American.
I do think that I'd love to see the Republican Party, as it has become, Continue to remain the party for governor roles for the US presidency in the future.
Be the party that puts an outsider rather than a groomed political insider in that role.
That's what we have in Donald Trump.
That's what many independent voters are interested in.
They're interested in authenticity.
They're interested in action over the verbiage that we heard on stage from Kamala Harris last night.
But that's the work we have cut out ahead of us.
It's within reach.
And it pains me to see this election at least as close as it looks right now when I know that 80% plus of people in this country share these views.
I've traveled this country over the last year.
If there's one thing I learned from traveling this country over the course of the presidential campaign...
We're not really as divided as the media would have you believe, actually.
If you turn on cable news, you turn on algorithmically amplified social media and political social media, you'd believe that our country, actually at the heart of the individual people in the country, is on the precipice of a breaking point.
I don't quite think so, actually.
I think, to the contrary, being in roomfuls of people, not without a camera in between, but roomfuls of real people by the tens or the hundreds or the thousands across this country.
I've been in all of those countries.
I don't think that we're nearly as divided as the media would have you believe.
Eighty plus percent of people in this country agree on those basic values.
The rule of law, self-governance, economic growth, meritocracy, free speech, open debate.
Eighty percent of Americans agree on that and half the 20 percent are frankly people younger than me who never learned those ideals in the first place who I believe we can bring along too.
But it's up to us to call that bluff for what it is.
And to do that, we're not going to end up doing it by obsessing over one candidate at a time.
She is a cog in a wheel.
Biden was a cog in a wheel.
Biden's cognitive deficits, they were not a bug.
They were a feature to the people who manage him and control him.
Kamala Harris' policy deficits, they are not a bug, but a feature to the people who do and will control her.
The reality is that's a trap that we risk falling into.
We've been led into a trap time and again.
This is the biggest trap of all, is that the shenanigans of the other side and the inconsistencies of the other side and the ever-wavering policy commitments of candidates like Kamala Harris, that they cause us to forget to tell the country who we are and what we stand for.
We're not just running from something anymore, guys.
Now is our moment, more than ever, to actually start running Back to our vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation.
What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States of America?
It means I pledge allegiance to this nation, not another one.
It means the people I elect to run the government, that we elect to run the government, better darn well run the government rather than the unelected bureaucrats who we can never fire.
It means that we're going to shut down agencies like the U.S. Department of Education and countless other three-letter agencies that have really aggregated power at the expense of the American electorate.
I think in some ways that requires not being more moderate, but more of what some in the media will call extreme.
Well, you know what?
The American founding was extreme at its origin, right?
The idea that we the people create a government that's accountable to us rather than the other way around.
Or the idea that you get to speak your mind openly as long as I get to in return on open platforms that aren't shut down in a free country like the United States.
That was a radical idea at the American founding.
For most of human history, it was done the other way.
People were skeptical that voters could self-govern and decide for themselves how to sort out their differences.
That was the whole point of having backroom kings and nobles in the back of palace halls in Old World England, and for most of human history, that made those decisions for the people that couldn't be trusted to make those decisions for themselves.
That's what you're seeing reemerge in the modern American aristocracy as well.
A skepticism that voters, without having tilted the scales of what information they can and can't be exposed to, the voters themselves will make a wrong choice for themselves unless you actually have the heavy hand of elite government interference or elite bureaucratic interference getting in their way.
But that's what's on the table in this election.
I do think that this is one of those elections that's not about the traditional Republican versus Democrat talking points.
It's a 1776 kind of election.
Do we actually believe in those, yes, extreme ideals on which the United States of America was founded?
I do, and I'm proud of it.
Do I think those ideals still exist in this country?
I do.
I think most Americans still believe in them.
I think they still unite most Americans, even in a moment where it feels like we're skating on thin ice.
The common commitment to those ideals runs far deeper than the media would have you believe.
But it is up to us to now step up and stand for those ideals without apologizing for it.
To offer our own vision.
To say that this is where we are running to.
Making America Great Again is not just about some nostalgic vision for a past that we grew up in.
That's a trap we sometimes fall into.
Even when I speak sometimes, I often say, I want to pass on to my kids the same country that I grew up in.
But that's a mistake.
We've got to do better than that.
We don't want to just return to some nostalgic satisfaction of the past.
When we say we want to make America great again, what we actually mean is we want to make America greater than it has ever been.
That's who we are.
That's the ambition.
The pursuit of American exceptionalism is about that, a pursuit.
Acknowledging that, you know, we're not perfect as a country, we never have been, but we're about the pursuit of perfection.
We're going to keep pursuing that that's who we are, that ambition of making America greater.
That's what you hear from Donald Trump this time that I think is even different than what you heard in 2016. I think that second Trump term, I do believe, has an opportunity to be even more successful than that first term was.
But we're going to get there by focusing on that actual vision for our country.
Even in very practical terms, not just lofty, theoretical, philosophical terms.
Seal the border.
Go to the economy.
Stay out of World War III. Restore law and order in the United States of America.
That's something that Americans across the political spectrum, I know, are going to get behind.
But focus on that actual vision rather than falling into the traps that not only the Democratic Party and their puppet of a nominee Kamala Harris and the media industrial complex working with them will lay.
No, we immunize ourselves against that risk by actually offering our own vision and the more we stick to that, the more I still think we have an opportunity.
To win this election, not by a little bit, but by a lot.
I'm going to be traveling the swing states in the coming weeks ahead.
A lot of my schedule I've ended up clearing to focus on.
Yes, I'm doing a lot through the private sector and I'm enjoying that.
Returning to my life as a businessman for part of the way I've spent this year.
But we have an important enough six weeks ahead that I'm clearing a lot of my schedule.
I'm going to be traveling to places like Michigan and Georgia and North Carolina To be able to show up in the places where Republicans aren't traditionally going to show up, universities even in Pennsylvania, going to be traveling, everywhere I can to swing states between now and the election,
to show up not just in the usual echo chambers, sometimes where politicians and those who are running for office may end up, But to show up in the places where we're not going to usually show up, I'm going to go to college campuses.
I want to reach the next generation of young Americans, so many of whom have been betrayed and feel betrayed by the political class that have left them hanging out to dry with a version of the American dream that really is just that anymore, a dream.
The idea that you get a four-year college degree and load yourself up with a bunch of college debt only to realize that that gender studies major from some school in California doesn't really get you that head start on making it in our economy.
That's not an 18-year-old's fault.
That's the fault of a system that sold him a false bill of goods.
I think we've got to show up at the places where traditional Republicans historically at least haven't shown up.
Donald Trump, better than any candidate I've seen in a general election, has done a great job of that.
But I think we need that up and down the ballot to win not just the presidency, but I think hopefully lasting and decisive majorities in the Senate and the House as well.
That's how I'm planning to spend my time in the coming days and weeks ahead.
And if you all do your part, speak your mind openly, do it without fear.
I promise you Donald Trump's going to do his and I'm going to do mine to make sure that we do make America not just great again, but greater than it has ever been.
That we get in there in early 2025 and once and for all take that federal bureaucracy and no longer just reform it, but get in there to do what's needed to actually shut it down.
That's how we save a country.
That's how we save this republic.
That's how we restore self-governance and grow our economy and restore what this country was founded on, which is the idea that you get to achieve the maximum of your God-given potential without any government or system or bureaucracy standing in your way.
We're within striking distance of it.
We got seven, eight weeks left.
The debate was one milestone yesterday, but what's going to determine whether or not we succeed is do we actually achieve Articulate to voters and prove to voters that we have an alternative vision.
And if we do, I continue to like where we stand.
Thanks a lot, guys.
I'll see you when we'll take all of you with us on the road as much as we can digitally as I'm on those college campuses, traveling those swing states.
And you know what?
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