Shownotes Transcript
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.
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Okay, we are very thankful to have tonight someone who is pinch hitting for Scott Besson because Scott had a lot going on, but we'll take Matt Gaetz as a replacement, won't we everybody? Give it up everybody for Matt Gaetz. So Matt, welcome to Turning Point.
I didn't know there were this many conservatives in California. You got all of them, Charlie. I do the Matt Gaetz Show on One America News, and my producer called me and said, Matt, if you show up at the Dell Coronado tonight, you can be on the best podcast around. And I just assumed it would be with Gavin Newsom. And it's the Charlie Kirk Show.
That is true. So, Matt, what's been keeping you busy? I tell you, mostly cheering on what I believe to be the greatest progress that we have seen in the White House in my lifetime. And...
I know in moments like this, there's always a sense to say, well, how come we haven't strung Anthony Fauci up yet by his entrails and imprisoned Liz Cheney and, you know, expelled Adam Schiff from planet Earth on an Elon Musk rocket yet? And I pause for what we are enjoying and what we have achieved, and it is remarkable, and it must be nurtured.
I heard in hour after hour of congressional testimony from Biden administration officials, Mayorkas, that the border was just an unsolvable problem, that it was like a Rubik's Cube, that we just couldn't figure it out under any circumstance.
And now we see with vision and resolve and with a few high-profile deportations to some very unpleasant places, not only is our government deporting people, people are deporting themselves. Yes!
And when we think about the core covenant President Trump has to rescue this economy from the wilderness that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sent us out to, I am proud that we have someone who is willing to do what is necessary to reset what was a deeply unfair international economic order. And I learned in Congress in some pretty tense moments that leverage is really only about two things –
how much pain you're willing to endure, and how much you're willing to dish out. And I think the old Republican Party just wanted to endure pain, and I think the MAGA movement actually wants to dish a little bit out every once in a while. And so, Matt, what would you say are some of the victories that are so noticeably not just different but better than Trump won? The change in culture.
We saw in Trump won. Okay, we spent every day waking up with everyone trying to tell us we were a bunch of Russian agents. I was Putin's lawyer. Trump was Putin's puppet. We won the election because Vladimir Putin told everybody to not vote for Hillary Clinton. And we couldn't collude with Vladimir Putin. We could barely collude with ourselves to put on the next Trump rally during that just electric and exciting campaign that we were a part of.
And so there was an effort to delegitimize. And I think that was...
was upsetting and frustrating. And also in Congress, you had people like Paul Ryan actively working to derail the Trump administration. And those people had power. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have been just fine if we'd have found out that Trump did something illegal and we would have ended up with President Mike Pence. But now, now you have a cabinet that is actually for the president. Isn't that something? That's pretty exciting.
We were dealing with Jeff Sessions, who was off making excuses for Hillary Clinton. We were dealing with people in high leadership positions at the FBI and CIA who were trying to tee up the president for some sort of impeachment or prosecution all along the way. And so I think that unified sense of purpose is important. And within the culture, rather than delegitimizing, there's kind of a curiosity about all of us now.
I saw a little bit of it the other day when our friend Steve Hilton was out on Skid Row talking politics with people who had clearly not done all of their homework throughout life, but who are humans nonetheless and who probably, even if their lives are in shambles, want their life to be better.
and the breakthroughs and the curiosity is something that we have to leverage. Charlie, and it's also, and I'm not just saying this because I'm here, because I say it everywhere, and if you follow me on Twitter, you see I say it all the time.
The generational shift that we have seen and the fact that our politics is no longer so racialized is deeply pleasant to me. It was just all about race before, and now we are building a multiracial, multiethnic, working-class...
Movement of people. And it is inviting and warm, and that's why we are rising. But it's also with young people. I'm going to be 43 years old pretty soon, and if you would have told me when I was under the age of 30...
that a U.S. president could count as their key constituency, their number one approval demographic, voters under the age of 30, I would have told you that was crazy. When I was a young man in the state legislature in Florida, our political strategy to deal with young voters was to try to get them to not vote.
Consultants would come in and say, well, you know, if you put 84 things on the ballot, maybe one of these young people that wants to show up and vote for Obama will just vote at the top but then turn in the ballot and they won't get down to the state senate, they won't get down to the mayor or the city council or the school board. And that was what we thought winning looked like.
discouraging young people from participating and you know why because we weren't offering them that much actually when what the conservatives stood for was more war and inviting more people across our border and selling out time and again and saying that victory was just surrender at a slower pace that was not an appealing idea to young voters but i think we had two conflating facts
One, you had the other side trying to tell them that if they were, you know, they were either an oppressor or oppressed. And that's actually offensive to almost anyone you say it to. And that combined with the crazy gender theory and the...
politics gave us an opportunity and we seized that opportunity because we were fun and we were energetic. If you went to a young Republican meeting back when I was in my 20s, it was boring and everybody was like wearing name tags and a clip-on tie and you go to these turning point rallies and it is the place to be. It is awesome. It is cool. I've had so many parents and grandparents come up to me and say that
the person in their life who they cared about went to a turning point rally with friends and is now picking up a clipboard, downloading an app, knocking on doors, making phone calls, and driving this victory for a generation.
And Matt, let's talk a little bit more about that. I mean, one of the themes of this weekend is how the experts have been wrong. And you covered that really well in Congress. Experts were wrong about the border. They were wrong about masks. They were wrong about the COVID shot. They were wrong about six feet to sell the spread. But the other thing that the experts were wrong about is that Gen Z was going to be permanently liberal.
And one of the reasons why they've moved, we believe, is the work of Turning Point and our organizing. But also, it is a reaction to how their life and their future was stolen from them during COVID and the lockdowns. Can you speak to that? We all think about it in our own lives. You know, what it meant to graduate and walk across the graduation stage with your loved ones there. Or going to prom and getting those prom pictures that you might still flip through. Or...
having the football game where the stands are full and you've had a great athletic achievement or you're in ROTC and every morning you got out there at 6 a.m. and you proved to the United States Military Academy or to the Naval Academy that you belonged because you showed that group dedication.
They were robbed of leadership opportunities. They were robbed of social opportunities, academic opportunities, and it built resentment. And by the way, how could it not build that resentment? And when I used to be a young person...
There was a resistance to the Republicans because the Republicans were always trying to stop you from doing stuff. You couldn't look at this book. You couldn't read that opinion. There was a sense that the moral majority was limiting of the kind of adolescent experience. And now the political left is the...
movement that embraces the cancel culture and the censorship and the idea that certain ideas are so dangerous that we cannot even confront them or encounter them or deal with them. That is nonsense. We have a generation, we have the most socially interconnected generation in all of human history. They want to engage. They want to talk. They want to show up by the thousands that
like they just did in San Diego, and actually see what ideas rise to the surface because of their merit, not because some genderless, purple-haired, woke-topian told you so. With all the talk about tariffs, high prices, and the stock market, most people are feeling the financial pinch. If that's you, don't liquidate stocks and take a loss before calling my friends Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakian at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
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In a world that they are raised in, in their high school classrooms and their college classrooms, they are so intellectually sanitized that there's almost no robust speech. Because you live in this world of you might microaggress. If you don't know what a microaggression is, it's where you say something that is deeply offensive to somebody, but you didn't mean it. So, for example, there's like a bunch of liberal trolls that were trying to disrupt the Turning Point USA event last week. It all fell apart within a week.
I told this story on the show the other day, but it's worth repeating. And the reason it fell apart was that one of the organizers was talking to a group of people. Some of them were black women. And the organizer said, this is too disorganized. We have to get our act together. Well, the black women said that's a microaggression against their community. And they staged a revolt and they demanded a resignation of the head of this Democrat organizing firm. I'm not kidding because she said that she said, quote, this is disorganized.
And they said this is trauma going back hundreds of years against the black community. And the whole thing has fallen apart within a week. Now, I want you to multiply that times a million. Every classroom and government-run school in California has that ideology laced in it. Every college campus has that ideology laced in it. Where if you say one thing, you don't mean it. For example, if you use the term you people and you happen to be talking about a Hispanic or a black person, that's racist colonial language that could get you fired from a job.
And so this is the world that they are raised in. And finally, out of that comes Turning Point USA and our total free speech events where you could say anything, you can have the battle of ideas, and it is unbelievably attractive to a generation that is held ideologically hostage and in a labyrinth of these unpopular tyrannical ideas. And I think we're going to...
I think we're going to hold those voters because it wasn't just colleges and universities. Those very same young people would graduate colleges and universities and show up at a corporate work environment that was forcing DEI training on them. Some went on to the military where, you won't believe this, but in the military, a microaggression was deemed utilizing the deeply offensive terms, mom and dad.
that if you use the term mom or dad, that might be a microaggression against someone who didn't have a mom and a dad. And so you should only use parent. And I'm just kind of wondering if the CCP or the Iranians or the Russians are sitting around. They're trying to get more macroaggressions out of their military, and we're trying to drive the microaggressions out of ours under that circumstance.
And so I think that the rejection of that was driven by this generation and the maintenance of our control of these institutions kind of relies on them. And that's why we have to make sure that they're not just turned ideologically, but that they're up for it, which is a key feature of what Turning Point does.
Look, we were just hoping when Turning Point was at the crescendo that we would be able to play even ball. We would hold serve with young people. We could maybe get a diminution in the delta of votes such that the boomers would save us forever. And the reality is that...
you know, now with this being a powerhouse, they have to go from voters to people who can activate other key constituencies and talk to their neighbors and get even the generation that follows Gen Alpha engaged in those very initiatives. And, uh,
The durability of it is what we must nurture. If we throw our hands up in the air and say, mission accomplished, this is all done, it can be lost. Because that's what the left did, by the way. They became the party that was opposed to curiosity, that was opposed to intellectualism just generally, and embraced this monolith. And we cannot do that. We cannot do that. And this was a constant criticism I had of,
the Congress in which I served, there was such a desire to just be there and be on the team that so much of the necessary work was not being accomplished, particularly on the matter of spending. And if you don't believe me, look at the work of Elon Musk and Doge. What they have done has not only been inspirational...
It has been revealing. It has been revealing about what you get when you govern by continuing resolution and omnibus spending bill. It is true that the closest thing to everlasting life is a government program because once they are baked in,
they are infrequently reviewed for their efficacy and for their results. And I am grateful that that happened, but I think that has to be a guiding light for what we demand of public servants going forward, not a...
not a solution unto itself. So much to unpack there. I'm glad you mentioned this, Matt, because if I were to, so I would give the administration, President Trump and his team, an A or an A plus. And I mean that because in 100 days, what they've been able to do is remarkable. And let's just take one example. For example, the military, you say that Pete Hegseth gets, you know, nonstop negative news coverage. Military recruitment is up.
Military morale is up. These are measurable numbers, by the way. These are not just anecdotes. The morale of the military is up 30%. Recruitment is up 15% to 20%. War game exercises in the South China Sea are up 30%.
Procurement is going in the efficiency direction. Our enemies finally fear us again. All the stuff that we want of our military is happening. And not to mention, we got rid of the COVID vaccine requirement. We got rid of pronouns on battleships. And the one that I love the most that got almost no news coverage, physical fitness standards for men and women in combat are the same. No accommodation based on sex. I know this is the fact that we have to applaud that is pretty remarkable, right?
And, again, nothing against people that want to serve, obviously, but the physical fitness standards were so lower accommodated that a woman only had to be able to do like 11 push-ups where the man had to be able to do 35 push-ups. I have the whole chart. It's so dramatic. The one that was the most scary, though, was the deadlift where a female in the United States military only had to deadlift, I think, like 195 pounds or
where an average male in the U.S. military with gear on in a battle conflict weighs well over 250 pounds. That is an existential threat to our servicemen in combat if a woman has to put him on her back and to get him out of harm's way to save his life.
That is not an abstraction. That is a real national security threat for people that serve. And that's just one of many examples. So we can go through all the great stuff President Trump is doing, and I want to emphasize that. But I think, Matt, you're uniquely positioned to address a current anxiety that a lot of people have in this room. What the heck is Congress doing? Where is the action?
Where is the legislation? We do have these majorities. You've served in the House and you did really well as a firebrand. But why have we not seen just like a volley of bills every week making the Democrats vote against them?
One single subject bills, boom, vote against this. Vote against that. No men and female sports, vote against that. Chemical castration for kids, vote against that. They say, oh, we can't break the filibuster. But then bring it to the floor and get them on the record and expose it and drive the news cycle every single day and play off it. That's not a good excuse.
Matt, I know you will not do air cover at all because you're not in Congress, but help us understand because the impatience of this audience is at record highs with Congress, the approval very high for President Trump. So walk us through that. Yeah, I didn't even talk too good about those folks when I had to go to work with them every day. So I'll tell you exactly. Come on, Matt. Let them have it. I'll be straight, very straight with you. Congress.
Congress is either afraid or corrupt in most circumstances. And the fear derives from the sense of any criticism being dispositive.
I had a lot of colleagues in Congress whose goal was just to not be mentioned. Because they see the stats, over 90% of people in Congress get reelected. And so if you're not getting mentioned frequently, you're not going to be one of the outliers that is at risk of losing the power that you've worked to accumulate. And that is...
really, really drives people to be adverse to anything that requires them to take a side. That's why you see so many bills that you think, gosh, did we really need to rename 13 post offices this week while President Trump is seeking critical trade authority or national security authorities? And then the other part is the corruption.
When I was in Congress, I was the only Republican congressman who refused all lobbyist and PAC donations. And even people I like, even people I would knock on doors for and donate to, would have the audacity to stand before their constituents and say that the hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars that they were getting from professional power brokers was
was not tied to some expectation of their behavior on the other end. And we all know that instinctively, but we forgive people who do it because we say, well, they just have to. You've got to fund your campaigns somehow. And I came to the realization that if that's the way I had to fund my campaigns, I did not want this job anymore. I did not want elections to just be about who got to be valets for the same special interests.
in big pharma or big business or who wanted open borders or trade agreements that hollowed out the middle class while building up the middle kingdom. And so fear and corruption paralyzes the place. And then there is a muscle memory problem.
to just fund everything all at once. And this would be one disagreement I have with the Trump strategy. And President Trump's a far better strategist, so he's probably right and I'm probably wrong. But I think that we should have single subject bills that only deal with one thing at a time.
And I believe that because when you do it the other way, there is no way to scrutinize what is working and what is not working, what is harmful and what is helpful. And when we tried to put up...
reasonable reductions in obviously wasteful programs, there would be a block of Republican votes against us to merely maintain the structure that did not allow that type of review because they may be subject to that review eliminating some of their programs. We had a Republican who sat down in the budget negotiations and said, "I'll be for any cut so long as it's the cross the board to everything and not reviewing individual things."
And I said, why? He said, well, because mine wouldn't survive that review.
And that was like an acceptable answer. And so here's a tangible vote that I was aggrieved by. You see Elon pointing out how USAID was really just a slush fund for the global left for their regime change ambitions and their social engineering ambitions. That's what USAID has largely been. Eli Crane, a terrific congressman from Arizona, put up an amendment to just cut their money in half.
And 141 Republicans voted against Eli Crane's amendment. And those same people show up now and say, we love Doge, we love Elon, cut it. But when they had the chance to vote, they just voted in lockstep because of the fear and because of the corruption. Now I tried everything to break through that. I tried shaming them, I tried altering my own behavior with donors, I fired the guy who sat in front of the building, and all of that was insufficient.
And my only hope is that courage can be contagious with President Trump and with the effort that he has put into this initiative that the members of Congress will do what is necessary. And I think the obvious first step is to take his most popular executive orders and to put them into permanent law. And if we can't get the votes, show who's voting no. I completely agree. Thank you.
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So you take his most popular executive orders that are all enjoined, one after the other, from border to deportations, single-subject, one-page bills. Now, looks like we're not going to get that. We're going to get a monstrosity, a big, beautiful bill. And so...
Walk us through how you're thinking about that. There will be some really good stuff in there. There'll be no tax on tips. There'll be no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. There will be more border funding. There'll be more deportation funding. But where do you think the end product will be? I'm so happy with all of those things and getting those things right. If you got any one of those things right, it would be deemed one of the most consequential presidencies in all of our life. If you could do all of that, it would be incredible. But if we do all of that,
and you keep the structural deficit in place that we have on spending, we will not save the country. If we have a secure border but no economy, we will not save the country. We are headed to some necessary austerity, and that only gets harder the longer you wait. I heard a story from this last week in Congress where they were trying to say, well, where can we get some cuts? And the Medicaid program is an important program, but it is risky.
rife with fraud, and a lot of the waste in Medicaid is driven by the fact that the federal government runs it. Because states would come up with more cost-effective, innovative ways to be able to keep people healthy in their jurisdictions. But no, no, no. We have a system where you have to spend more state money in Medicaid in order to activate a federal drawdown. So Speaker Johnson and some smart folks said...
Tell you what, why don't we do a plan to cap Medicaid at our current spending and then just send it to the states and block grant it, and then some will succeed, some will fail, best practices will emerge, and they'll be copied in our federalist system. And Republicans were so offended that he would have the nerve to cut future expected Medicaid growth that they walked out of the room.
And wouldn't even listen, Derek Van Orden of Wisconsin. And that should really worry us because if we don't believe in unlocking innovation, then this is still going to be a very expensive government to run, far more expensive than we are able to generate in taxes or in any tariff. And so...
I think the problem is structural. I think that you have to get to the single subject bills. I don't believe the big beautiful bill is going to result in substantial reductions in spending and that's still the meat on the bone. That's still the work we're going to have to do. It's not a criticism of the important tax work and the important border work, but the spending hawks have become an endangered species on Capitol Hill and I'll still fly with them.
So I want to now ask about the Democrat Party, and then I do want to do some questions. What would you say is the state of the Democrat Party, and what have we learned since the election, and what are lessons that we can internalize to try to turn this into maybe a decade or two-decade governing majority? Well, I have some impolitic views on this. I believe that the most...
Well, who's left in the Democratic Party are like the beta males, the unsuccessful males, the angry lesbian, pit bull adopting lesbians. Tim Walls. And then the transsexuals. And so I believe that the trans women will very soon be the most masculine force in the Democratic Party.
Because who are you? I see several of you nodding. Who do you think is going to be the most masculine force in the Democratic Party? The beta males or the trans women?
I think the trans women are probably going to kind of take over that. And you wonder how all of this broke out in the election. And President Trump was able to overcome a gender gap with women by having a larger gender gap with men. And so the coalition on the Republican side was like, you know, the non-self-loathing males.
And of any color, stripe, creed, I mean, we had like the cool black guys and the cool Latino guys. We got the gay men pretty much with us for the most part. And then you added, it really put it to, I think women, you could divide into like desirable women and undesirable women. And the Democrats killed us with undesirable women. Yeah.
If no one, I mean, they struggled. But if you were like cool and a woman, you looked around and you're like, well, who do I want to hang out with? Like the cool alpha males and the cool black guys and the gay men or the pit bull adopting lesbians and the transsexuals? And we got the desirable women and I would like to keep them.
And this is a cultural change that transcends politics, right? This is a cultural change that is deeper than just a singular election. What would you say going into not just 2026 but future years, things, a to-do list that Republicans need to get serious about, lessons you've learned from Congress, running for office, going through the process?
I would like to know where JD Vance gets his eyelashes done. That is a question that needs to be answered. No, I... Look, um...
For our party to succeed, you can't outkick your coverage. I think that there are moments where we can go beyond our mandate. I don't think President Trump has done that at all, and I think that's why he's been so successful thus far. The other thing we've got to do is deal with this judiciary issue.
I was going to ask, how do you rein in these courts?
That is not something that a judge should do. The concepts of judicial review did not imagine a federal judiciary of hundreds of tyrants all over the country capable of binding all of us in the absence of an election. That is crazy. And I think Congress could do a lot more to attack that problem. But ultimately, you know what it's going to come down to?
And I asked myself this question when President Trump and I were talking about me serving in the administration. Are you going to be willing to defy a court order if necessary? If you get to a point where...
it's somebody's life or limb on the border or what some Woketopian judge in the District of Columbia says, are you willing to do the right thing? Are you going to allow these people to conduct the foreign affairs of the United States? And we all know how this ends. It's illustrated by a conversation I had with Elon Musk during the transition at Mar-a-Lago. Elon said, Matt, all I need are everyone's passwords.
And I said, well, all I need is the passwords. I said, well, Elon, they're in a lot of places, but why do you need the passwords? He says, well, if I have the passwords, then we will not be inhumane. We will not break any laws. If we have to pay people out, you know, we will, but they will not be able to come to work anymore and do harm to the country.
I said, well, I said, what's going to happen when you do that is that these federal laws and these employment contracts and a judge is going to issue an order that you cannot do that anymore. And he says, and then what will happen? I said, well, then if people don't enforce the order, the federal marshals will show up. And he said, and who do they work for? I said, well, they work for the attorney general. And he said, and then I will make you the attorney general. And then the idea was born. Yeah.
But Matt, I want to spend a little time on this because it's important. That's a serious statement. It's not unprecedented. There have been standoffs between the third branch and the second branch. Article 2, Article 3 were actually designed to be in tension. Famously, there was the old expression, let Marshall send his army.
was when there was a Supreme Court decision. I think it was Andrew Jackson or something, right? It was Andrew Jackson, right? Let Supreme Court Justice Marshall send his army. I don't remember all the details around the case, but essentially what Matt is getting at is a very provocative and yet important truth statement. The third branch of government, the courts, have no enforcement mechanism. They exist solely on faith and
And they exist solely on our buy-in. It's like the U.S. dollar. It's valuable because we say it's valuable, right? It's like everyone believes it, so therefore it is. Now, defying a court order would be, let's just say, there's no going back if it's a big one.
Now, with that being said, Biden defied the Supreme Court. I heard we're not going back. No, I know. That's what I was told. But I want to play this out because this is heavy stuff and it's important. Now, Biden did defy the Supreme Court when it came to student loans. Harvard defied the Supreme Court when it came to affirmative action. But let's say, for example...
The United States Supreme Court, which you have no idea because Amy Coney Barrett's been a disappointment, and hopefully she gets better. But let's just say the U.S. Supreme Court... You know who really leaned in to get her picked? Mike Johnson. And me. I made a mistake. Whatever. So, I mean, she's better than Sotomayor, but still, she's not been great. But let's go, and let's say the U.S. Supreme Court says, you have to give individualized, multi-year due process to every illegal alien. This is a possibility. Okay.
Which would mean that we would deport like 400 people in four years. I'm exaggerating, but right, Matt, it would be... Yeah, what, are we going to have 20 million trials for these people who got in the country? What due process did you get if your job was taken, if your family member was harmed, if your community was changed? But this is where the Supreme Court is considering it, because the precedent says that you have to give due process to every illegal alien. And so, with that being said, of course, not when it comes to the alien enemies, Zach, which is also being debated, but Matt, play this out for us.
If President Trump basically says, let Roberts send his army, what then happens? Well, I don't think he has one. No, I know, but play this out. Yeah, my... Look, the court survives based on the veneer of its legitimacy. And when it does violence to its own legitimacy, that is self-harm that the court is doing to itself. That is not President Trump's fault. That is the court's fault. And...
It's just so fantastical, their belief that these people who are a federal district court judge that nobody voted for, that no one has ever heard of, can define when America is being invaded. That is something that the president decides. And you may not like the president. We've had presidents I haven't liked. But that is solely within their purview. And so when you've got the...
liberal judges engaged in the way they are. It's like trying to have a fair football competition when the referee is wearing the jersey of the other team. It is a futile exercise. And so ultimately, I do believe that there will come that moment. There will be a standoff. Oh, yeah. And so let's just play this out, though. Trump defies it. Yeah. What then happens? Then they will issue an order to the marshals
to effectuate some enforcement of an injunction. And those marshals work for the Attorney General and ought to be told to stand down. Yeah, and so what we're saying is it could be a serious constitutional question. They'll say it's a crisis. They already call him a dictator, right? We'll have a whole other impeachment, but I almost missed those. I really missed the impeachments. I don't know about anyone else. Wouldn't you agree, though, Matt, that we should do this on...
A topic that the people voted for overwhelmingly, where it's a clean-cut case, where it's of existential importance, and the courts, it's gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. So we've played it out. For example, we should allow the Supreme Court to at least have a chance. Would you agree?
Sure, I don't know that we stopped the deportation while that's occurring, but I can't think of more advantageous high ground to fight on than Democrats wanting to re-import an MS-13 member from El Salvador who is a Salvadorian national. I love El Salvador. I spend a ton of time there. I'm friends with the president. I think he's one of the greatest leaders in the Western world.
The fact that the Democrats' cause du jour is to reimport Kilmar Garcia is, like, my favorite thing. I will do anything to help the Democrats keep Kilmar Garcia in the A block of every news story. He was, like, arrested for human smuggling. He beat his wife. He beat his kids. I mean...
This is not like the Maryland dad that they say. Well, I mean, by the way, MS-13 members have children too. Like you guys knew that, right? They didn't sterilize them on the way into MS-13. They have children. And that does not mean that you would not want to return that person back to their home country. And I think our friend Stephen Miller put it best.
the arrogance of any system in the United States, be it a court or the State Department, to tell El Salvador what they have to do with their own gang member.
is just astonishing to me. They know what to do with gang members in El Salvador. El Salvador used to be the murder capital of the world. They locked up over 50,000 gang members and now it is safer to walk the streets of San Salvador than it is to walk the streets of Los Angeles or San Diego. That's right. And...
Just think about the moral sickness. You have a Democrat senator, several, that fly to El Salvador for this gang member. Meanwhile, they would not get on a plane to probably go to try to go advocate for the return of American citizens that are still being held as hostages by Hamas. You know there's American citizens that are still being held hostage by Hamas? And they wouldn't get on a plane to go advocate for that, but they want the MS-13 gang member to return.
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Let's just say one last question on this, Matt. What is one thing that you are most hopeful about that is not necessarily being covered, a story that is not being noticed, that you think that deserves more attention, a real positive development? Well, it's the ascent of J.D. Vance. Look, being Donald Trump's vice president is not an easy job. When you are close to the flame, you know, President Trump can seek your advice, your deployment to a particular challenge, your...
buddy time. He wants to give relationship advice a lot, I've noticed. And J.D. Vance has been a stalwart in that White House. He has been a focused policy expert. He has been a brilliant communicator. President Trump always says, Matt, he's the greatest political athlete of all time. Well, maybe other than me. You know.
But I think that that tells us that we're building to something. Because I did wonder what it would be like after we won the last Trump election, maybe, and there weren't the MAGA rallies that gave us kind of a sense of community that brought us together, and President Trump's campaign moments weren't the unifying vision and direction that any successful movement needs. And to see someone...
right there, ready to take the mantle, ready to ensure that all this work we're doing is not going to just run through the hourglass like sand. It gives me hope that it's all been worth it, that going through the snow in Iowa at negative 20 degrees, which, by the way, after bringing my Southern California wife to Iowa at negative 20 was when I needed the relationship advice from President Trump.
But all of that, going to the swing states and enduring the indictments, the prosecutions, the investigations, we are actually the party that wants this country to be better for everyone and not just our own team. And I really, really mean that. I sincerely believe that the left seeks justice.
their advancement at our detriment and that we don't feel the same way. We actually don't have a vision for the country that just means we win and they lose, that the economy is only better for us, that the dollar is only stronger for us. And I think that that can be something that pulls us together. One final story from when we were out there in Iowa and I was dragging myself in from waving the sign out in the snow.
and there was this barista, and she runs up to me and says, Congressman Gates, can I get a picture? My boyfriend is not working, and I have to send him a picture because he'll be so mad he didn't meet you. He's a big fan of yours. I said, sure, sure. Will you vote for President Trump in the caucuses? Will you caucus for him? And she said, oh, yeah, no, I'll do that. I said, well, if we send this picture to your boyfriend, can you make sure he gets out there and caucuses for President Trump too? And
And she said, Matt, I'm so for President Trump. I'm not only going to get my boyfriend to caucus for him. I'm going to get all of my ex-boyfriends to caucus for him, too. And so it's with the spirit of that barista that we take on the challenge ahead of us. I love it. Let's do some questions. Dylan has a mic here. And let's keep it to questions, not speeches, please. Yes, over there, Dylan. Question one, why is Fauci not in jail? Exactly.
Got a great former Navy SEAL here, by the way. Newcomer. Give it up for him. Great, great guy. Which team are you on? Team three, right down the road. That's amazing. Right down the road, right? Yeah. Go ahead. Right down the road. So I had a question. You brought up the subject of guys who are U.S. citizens who are in Gaza, still stuck there, multiple that are stuck there right now. What politically...
is causing this? Why has this not been solved yet? How come there's, there are guys, U.S. military members who are in Tel Aviv right now who could go and either advise or take care of a mission like this, and instead we're how many years into this conflict? And they're still sitting there, still sitting there. What is happening here? Why are these guys not home? How come there's not
you know, something undertaken tonight to get these guys home? It's a great question. For me personally, it's the most disturbing, and I even make a mistake on this. We forget that there are U.S. citizens that were killed on October 7th and U.S. citizens taken hostage. So it's very easy and tempting to say, okay, it's just a foreign thing. But the contract should be a U.S. passport holder is held hostage. That should be the full marshalling of the U.S. government. At least that's the country I was raised in, right? Right?
I know that, and all that does is that it incentivizes more United States citizens to possibly get scooped up in foreign lands and missionaries to all of a sudden disappear.
I don't have a good answer for you strategically or militarily. Matt, I don't know if you want to comment on that. I know it's incredibly complex. And look, I mean, Israel needs to be able to give the green light, get the green light to do what they do. I go on campuses, as you guys know, and I get a ton of hate because I stand for America and I stand for Israel. I don't care about the hate, honestly, like whatever.
But, again, even on our side, we do a bad job of just making the very simple moral argument that if an American citizen is killed and if an American citizen is currently hostage, that is our problem. It's not an outsourced problem. In fact, it should be a top priority. I mean, I should actually – we should know the names of these hostages, and I bet we can find it, right, that are the U.S. citizens, but they should be like household names.
And just think about the, like, moral sickness of the West where we spent an entire summer getting mad because, like, George Floyd died in Minnesota because he drug overdosed, which he did, by the way. And, like, we're not getting mad that U.S. citizens are currently being held hostage for a year and a half by a foreign terror force. I don't know. It really bothers me. It's a great question. Thank you. Charlie, I have a question right here. Thank you. Bob Niehaus.
There's a long tradition in the British common law having to do with the equities of a matter as well as the legality and the process of the matter. I don't mean equity in the DEI sense. You understand. Without getting into all the constitutional niceties, is that a way for the Supreme Court to find its way to the right answer on this deportation business?
Oh, I think that that's one of many ways. I think that also having a muscular view of Article II would...
would give the court a pretty clear path to say that it is not for a district court judge with a law clerk and a secretary to determine what constitutes an invasion. It is indeed for a president and a national security team to make that calculus. But yes, the court's inherent equity power is one that is less frequently used by appellate courts, probably. Explain the equity power.
Yeah, I mean, a court can always sort of say, well, we have this inherent power to create an equitable outcome here. And it does trace back to the British common law. It's not something you'll find in a federal statute. And it is used in courts every day to shape a particular remedy or at times if someone has unclean hands and is seeking redress in a
In a way, the court's equitable powers can be deployed. But here, I think that it's really who you want to run in the country. Do you want a web of judges that nobody votes for, or do you want the president? And we will have presidents we like and don't like, but I think that any result that is not a vindication of Trump's powers here is a degradation of the democracy. And
How many years did we have to listen to the Democrats telling us we were a threat to democracy? We were a threat to democracy until the voters in our republic actually elected Donald Trump. And now you don't hear that anymore. It's how the judges have to come in and stop the will of the voters from being executed. And it's revealing of the hypocrisy. So a couple thoughts on that. So Matt's exactly right. Over the last hundred years, we've created a figurehead presidency, right?
where they basically just show up and give ceremonial speeches and welcome Super Bowl champions and sign executive orders. It's a figurehead ceremonial presidency. So where has the power gone? So post-FDR, almost all the power was broken into an unelected bureaucracy and an unelected judiciary. Any president that has tried to actually stop this has, let's just say, had a tough time.
Richard Nixon was the most popularly elected president in the 20th century. More than Reagan. He won every single state except D.C., I think, and maybe Massachusetts, if my memory serves me correctly, right? Election of 1972. The most popular. And he's gone within a year and a half. I think he's gone because of the deep state. And that's a whole thing. Of course, he didn't act perfectly, but there is a good argument that Nixon was more innocent than people would believe. However, the point being, this guy was legitimately popular.
And Nixon believed that the president actually should have the power the people gave him. And he was constantly at war with the unelected bureaucracy. He was constantly at war with the FBI. He was constantly at war with the DOJ. J. Edgar Hoover didn't like this. He was like, who's this guy? Who does he think is? We're in charge. You see, the German view of government, which is at odds with the American view of government, is the power rests in the middle bureaucracy.
Not in the people, not in the presidency, but it's the experts. It's imagine they think the power should be in the hands of 100,000 Anthony Fauci's. They know better than you and they design your life. And so Reagan tried to change it and he attempted to do it and he changed some things. But the biggest mistake Reagan ever made was making H.W. Bush his vice president. It was a major mistake. And H.W. Bush ran the government and changed everything.
And then, of course, Trump comes along, and I believe this is one of the reasons why they hate him, is because he has this crazy idea that the people are actually sovereign and they're in charge of this country, and that it's not an unelected bunch of judges and an unelected bunch of bureaucrats. And Trump, interestingly enough, the story of Trump and Trump 1 and Trump 2 is those are the two places that are constantly trying to take him out. It's either crossfire hurricane or some judge doing a national injunction.
Someone spying on his phone calls or someone trying to stop him from drinking too many Diet Cokes. And so this is coming to a reckoning very fast because this is not the system of government that we have. It's something completely different. We have a constitution in name only.
It literally is a ceremonial document. We kind of look at it, we reference it, but they don't actually believe it. There's three branches of government. We exist as if there's four, and the fourth is unelected with unchecked amounts of power, and it's unknown who's actually running it. So this collision course that we're on, hilariously, and this is the final point, and we'll do another question here, is like when they, every time, I said this in the show, and not everyone heard it, and it's very important. Every time you hear threat to democracy, substitute it. It's a threat to their oligarchy.
That's what they're saying. It's very important. It is a word game and a word trick. These people have never believed in democracy. Now, we are a republic, but they don't believe in representative government. They don't believe in the people. They believe in an expert class that is not you, that knows better than you, that will always be in charge. It might be some of you.
Yeah, I mean, if you're a professor or something, right? But the point being... The SEAL Team 3 guy, maybe. Yeah, exactly. He could be it. But you guys can see the issue here. And Trump, this is why they hate Trump so much. Not because he caused it, but because he's exposed it, and he's flushed out this 100-year problem to the surface. It was bubbling up for a long time. The type of candidate they want is someone like Obama that looks very popular and does whatever the unelected people want him to do.
The candidate they fear is someone that's popular like Trump that does none of the stuff the unelected people want to do. And so we want to talk about what we want to fix. We have to control the White House for 8, 10, 12, 15 years to fix this. This is a multi-decade problem, and it can be fixed.
And Matt, talk about this briefly. Trump is putting better people not just in the cabinet positions, but the 4,000 blue book. Can you talk about the blue book? Yeah, I mean, these are the employees that actually run the government, and it's another key difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2. In Trump 1, at any given time, we had about a third of the cabinet working against the president and his initiatives, and we had to be fighting them and keeping them at bay and trying to box them in. Well, now you have a totally aligned, productive, effective cabinet, and you have a totally aligned, productive, effective cabinet,
And so Charlie and I are out there sourcing people for deputy secretary positions, director positions, administrative positions. I moved to Palm Beach with Matt literally from election day to inauguration day. I lived in Palm Beach for this reason. And we're still doing it. I mean, we're still placing people in the government.
and there's a few that still need to get weeded out too, but that is the way to have a vertically integrated movement where in the presidencies to come in four and eight and 12 years, we are credentialing people who see the world we do. And that is something that under the,
Bush rule of conservatism you did not get. You got a neoconservative, neoliberal credentialing system, not a populist nationalist credentialing system. And our ability to generate that now is entirely dependent on the inspiration drawn from Turning Point.
You know, one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto. But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call. That is not what Bitcoin was built for. That's why I use Bitcoin.com. I just did a major transaction on it.
They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys. You control your assets. No one can touch your crypto, not the IRS or not a rogue bank, not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do. This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin, peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.
So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to Bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money. Bitcoin.com. Freedom starts here. We'll get to the next question here. I'm extremely hopeful because people are going to wake up like, wait, why didn't I vote for that? And why is someone who didn't vote get voted for stopping what I voted for? It's an awareness project that is long overdue. Next question. I'm not calling on hands. Wherever Dylan is. Yes.
Hey, Matt. Good to see you again. We miss you in Florida. What is next for you? When are we going to see you back in the light of moving democracy? Yeah, after being, you know, in the state legislature for six years and Congress for eight years, I get this question a lot. When are you going back in? And like getting out of government after 14 years and going immediately back in is sort of like
Being told you're let out of prison and punching a guard on the way out. But I know this about how President Trump operates and really how the government operates.
There are line changes, much like in a hockey contest. And there are people who are doing great work now, who we're supporting and helping to find other good folks, who will, for family reasons or personal reasons or other aspirations, depart government service. And what Charlie and I know is anytime, anywhere, President Trump calls, we'll show up and do any job he asks.
Amen. One or two quick ones because it's getting late. I know people have early flights. Yes, sir. Hello, Scott Jackson. I'm wondering, you know, people generally will continue to do the same bad things without consequences. Hillary Clinton is an example. Never had any consequences. Shifty shift has yet to suffer any consequences. I'm wondering, I'm wondering, is it built? Is it baked into the deep state?
And there's no way this is going to turn around, or will there be consequences at some point to some of these people who have done some bad things? Because until people suffer some consequences, it'll continue. Yeah, go ahead. I'll let you take the first hack at it, Charlie. Thanks, Matt. We got the best possible people of cash in Bongino. If they can't get it done, then there is no hope to get it done. I'm going to be honest. So...
Takes time to write indictments, takes time to figure stuff out. So you say, Charlie, what are the indictments that you think are the most important? Because there's a lot on the board. The ones that have always aggravated me is when people abuse government power. When they do stuff on the outside and they're laundering money from other countries, okay, that's bad. What they did in Trump 1 with Crossfire Hurricane...
From James Comey to Peter Strzok to Lisa Page to Bruce and Nellie Orr to the destruction of the devices from the Mueller report, that whole thing, the fact that that has never been properly adjudicated,
I think the attention is rightful on there. The media would have such trouble covering it if Trump went after those people because they miscovered it and they acknowledged they got that story wrong. So it's a win across the board. And I think there's something brutally evil with the fact that they robbed most of Trump's first term on a lie from the pit of hell that he was a Russian agent because of our FBI. And I think those people need to go to federal prison very quickly for what they did. They should, but they won't.
I hope so. They won't because there's two problems. No black pills, Matt. There's a statute of limitations problem. Some of those are beyond statutes, though. There's stuff that they did that's beyond statute.
And the other is that they did it all in D.C. And, I mean, a Washington, D.C. jury is a very difficult place to make an argument against the people who hold these political views and use the power in the way that they do. And so that realism is imposed upon prosecutorial decisions. But, look, not all consequences have to be criminal. I am grateful that Kash Patel took those FBI agents—
who were kneeling after George Floyd's death and sent them to Fairbanks, Alaska or Thule, Greenland or wherever he sent them. And I think that there are consequences being felt that are not always broadcast. There are a few that I would probably like to have broadcast and I'd probably be doing a little bit of that, but hopefully there's some on the horizon and it does take a little time. Yeah, and then the other ones which are non-political is anybody, and these are so easy, anyone that was involved
in keeping the border open and working with the Mexican drug cartels, NGOs, groups that were taking government money to smuggle human beings across the southern border. We need to start having perp walks of people that kept that border open because I think that is the definition of high treason against a country to allow an invasion to happen uninterrupted. One or two more. Very quickly. Sorry, Dave. I'm not... Where are we at? Where are you, Dylan? Taylor? I don't know where Taylor... Moore? Okay. Moore!
Actually, if this lasts longer than two questions, it's legally an insurrection. All right. Yes, sir. Good evening. Ali Al-Taha. Charlie, pleasure meeting you for the first time. California. Our condolences. Thank you. We've done California so much today, man. I'm sorry. What's the question? The point I'm trying to say here or the question that I have for you, and it really requires a strategy.
Everything that we're seeing here, everything that we're witnessing, California is the line number one. How to defeat California? I think you actually have to win people who are not activated politically now. The math problem in a state where President Trump got 42% of the vote is a very real one. But what I've kind of noticed about this place, spending a little more time here, is that it's hard to get people riled up about politics on our side when things are so wonderful.
It's like, oh my God, I hate that the school wants one of the kids to have a litter box, but let's go surfing. It's 74 and sunny. And the other side are in this self-loathing, you know, they didn't get invited to the prom, and they've got all their personal problems, so they can just pour into politics.
And I don't know how you break that. I think that you have to have a campaign of joy that brings people together. No, I think you do. I think in a state like this, in a state like this, you've got to have something that's fun or people will not do it because there's a lot of fun things to do in this state. Right, Steve Hilton? Yeah. And the other thing is you have to hope Kamala Harris runs.
You have to have Kamala Harris runs for governor. And then you can just go to the people of California and say, she doesn't even want to be your governor. You want to be Kamala Harris's safety school? You want to be Kamala Harris's side piece? You want to be president? And so if you convince people they're better than being her reject option, then maybe lightning can strike here. All right. We'll do one or two more. Yep. Dave is very eager.
Matt, would you give us the one or two favorite ways for people to go into Congress with de minimis net worth and then graduate as multi-multi-millionaires? Yes. And that explains why Matt is not. Well, yeah. No, I believe that for the same reason you don't let the referee bet on the game, members of Congress should not be allowed to trade individual stocks. Yes.
And that is one way. Another way is to... If you're a member of Congress, you have a remarkable ability to get jobs for your ne'er-do-well family members who otherwise can't do anything. The number of members of Congress who have children or spouses who are registered lobbyists...
is astonishing to me, and it is bipartisan. The former Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr's wife and son were both lobbyists. Could you imagine how your interests would fare if on the other side, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee's wife and son was being paid to advocate against you? And so it is through the money laundering of fake no-show jobs, kind of an old mob tactic,
and then the inside information that people get. And I would suggest that you follow Quiver Quantitative on X because it shows the stock trades people make and then the committees they serve on. It's like, oh, well, this agriculture technology was just required by the EPA, and you sit on the Environment Committee, and you bought the stock that makes that tech, and it just went up 8,000%. It happens so frequently, and the reason it is allowed...
is because it happens on both sides. And if we really want to achieve Charlie's vision and all of your vision to save the country, we cannot tolerate that on our side either. Amen. Last question. Charlie, are you all right? Last question of the weekend. Hi. My name's Mandy. I live in California, but this is not a California question. Thank you for pinch-hitting tonight. What it sounds like to me is that a constipated Congress is our main problem. The president has term limits, right?
How can we get term limits in Congress? What can we all do to push that notion forward? Yeah, that was one of the things that we sort of demanded from McCarthy's scalp was a vote on term limits. And we knew we would lose that vote, but we thought it would be revealing to people who cared about it and saw that Republicans were blocking it. Term limits failed.
in the vote of its first committee of reference upon which I served. The person who I campaigned, two people who I campaigned very hard for and consider otherwise good members of Congress killed the bill. Harriet Hageman, who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming, voted against term limits. And the member of Congress for the district you're currently sitting in, Darrell Issa, voted against term limits. Yep. I mean, look, they'll say we have term limits. They'll say there are elections. We all know that. That's a cop-out, right? Yeah.
Okay, good. So, Matt, any closing thoughts about Turning Point USA and the path forward? I really appreciate the work you do. We wouldn't have won the election without Turning Point. And, look, we've got a lot more of them to win. And...
People had to sit in these chairs before you when every polling presentation and every consultant was saying, we hope we can just get this thing within single digits. We hope we don't lose this vote by 25 or 35 points. And so, you know, the work we get to do is the fun stuff. Now we've got the wind in our back. The turning point has happened and we have got to get the cement to harden around a generation that can save this country. So I appreciate you all being a part of it. Thank you, Matt. And thank you guys for a wonderful weekend. God bless.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.