Political Realignment Favors Trump, and Truth About Democratic Party Machine, with Batya Ungar-Sargon and Vivek Ramaswamy | Ep. 896
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east.

I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show. We are just 43 days away from election day. Wow. Six weeks away. And it is increasingly likely that we may not see former president Donald Trump and vice president Kamala Harris in a room together again. There might be an NBC debate or a CNN debate, but probably not.

Trump agreed to the NBC one. She came out of nowhere with the CNN one. Neither one is agreeing to actually do the other person's debate. And it doesn't feel like they really want to. I don't, at least I feel like Trump has decided not to do it. He said he's already done two debates and he's done. Um, so we'll see. They may wind up doing back to back interviews on 60 minutes early next month, which is like, that's again, enemy territory for Donald Trump. It's like,

I give him credit for going into the lion's den over and over and over again. But when they're so soft on and so openly rooting for her, there's a level of frustration in watching it that I don't know, maybe it'll work to Trump's advantage because you again, you see the unfair media, even 60 is going to know they have to ask her a couple of tough, tough questions.

But the whole thing is just so frustrating, isn't it? Just to see how in bed the media is with the left and how you just know going into this that it will be rigged against one candidate. It's messed up. Anyway, before we get to any of that, we're going to have the VP debate next week between Senator J.D. Vance and Governor Tim Walz. It's on the first. What day of the week is that? Is that Tuesday, October 1st? Looking at my calendar.

What? Who am I? This is Tuesday, October 1st. Okay. But as we assess the state of the race, we turn to the polls and some very interesting results from the New York Times and NBC as Vice President Harris's past immigration policies are coming under some increasing scrutiny today. Batya Angar Sargan is opinion editor at Newsweek and author of Second Class. And she joins me now.

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Welcome back to the show, Batya. Great to have you. Thank you so much for having me, Megan. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. Oh, it's always a pleasure to have you. Okay, so let's spend a minute on these polls because it does look like Trump is regaining his advantage in the so-called Sun Belt, the New York Times-Siena battleground poll showing him up five in Arizona, up four in Georgia, up two in North Carolina, which is the only state of those three

that he won last time around, but it's tight. North Carolina is surprisingly tight. You could blame that on Mark Robinson. You could blame it just on, you know, changing demographics there. But what's your thought on the latest round of polling in these three critical battlegrounds?

It does seem like he's regaining some of the ground that he had before the coup that instantiated Harris instead of Biden. In general, it's a very tight race, but it does seem like Trump is polling more the way he did in 2016 than the way that he did in 2020. And Harris is behind Biden.

Biden and behind Clinton in key demographics that she needs to win, including young voters, voters of color, especially men. You know, we know that polling is not always accurate. We know that there are people who still will not admit to pollsters that they're going to pull the lever for Trump. But I'll tell you what I'm looking at, Megan. So in 2020, Donald Trump was polling at 8% of black men.

And he ended up winning 18 percent of black men. So almost double the people who are willing to admit to pollsters they were going to vote for him. He is now polling at 25 percent of black men under the age of 50. And if history, recent history is any indication, that's really what I am sort of focused on. That

So many black men are willing to admit to pollsters. Actually, I see a home for myself in the MAGA movement. Actually, I think Donald Trump is the unifying candidate. Actually, I think my children have a better future under Trump than under Harris. To me, that is extremely significant about the shifting tides in this country.

You know, Baja, you wrote this book, Second Class, and it takes a hard look at the working class of America and how they've been forgotten by the Democrat Party and they've migrated much more to the Republicans. And I think you're the perfect person to ask about what happened with the Teamsters last week for that reason. We didn't spend a lot of time on it last week. There was a lot going on. The president was almost assassinated again, President Trump. And so, but this was a pretty extraordinary moment in Teamster history, right?

And I realize they didn't wind up actually endorsing Trump. But the mere fact that they couldn't, the leadership couldn't endorse Harris, given that some 60% of their members wanted Trump, really does signal some sort of a sea change here on working class Americans.

Absolutely. Let's start with Sean O'Brien, the head of the Teamsters. This man is a national treasure. He is the first leader in modern history in our era, the first union leader to say, you know what? I'm not just going to do what the elites in the Democratic Party expect me to do. I'm going to represent my rank and file where they're at. What a concept.

But what a concept that a leader's job is actually to reflect the people who he was elected to give voice to. And what he did with that power and that leadership was he asked both campaigns, can I come to your national convention? Donald Trump said yes with open arms. He gave him a prime time slot, 10 p.m. the first night, which was the first time the nation had seen Donald Trump since the shooting, right?

He didn't tell him how long he could speak for. He spoke for about 30 minutes. It was a raucous speech, wildly pro-worker, challenging in many ways to the Republican establishment. These were unvetted remarks because Donald Trump wanted the representative of the Teamsters to feel at home in his party. True leadership by both men. And what did the Democrats do?

They banned the head of the Teamsters Union, which represents 1.3 million hardworking Americans from the DNC to punish him for going out there and going to the RNC. And I just think that is so telling, Megan. You have Donald Trump out here with 60 percent of the Teamsters. You know, they didn't endorse him, but that is an endorsement. Right. And meanwhile, who does Kamala Harris have? Who's she bragging about having in her corner?

Goldman Sachs, Oprah, Meryl Streep, Dick Cheney. The tax union, the tax investigators union. Oh my God. Who?

Who wants to vote for the candidate who the people who work for the IRS are voting for? That's exactly right. This is the political realignment around class lines. Donald Trump has cobbled together a mass populist movement of working class Americans of all

races because more unifies us as Americans than divides us. That is the MAGA movement right now. And meanwhile, Kamala Harris is leaning into the elites who have become the Democrats base. That's what we're seeing. And by the way, just one more quick point, the UAW, the United Auto Workers, right? They're very, very much still in the Democrats camp. The thing you have to understand, Megan, is that over a

quarter of UAW members are not autoworkers. They work at universities. They are grad students. They are adjunct professors. Yes, because what happened was the UAW realized that

that autoworkers are Trump voters. And so they started to basically swell their ranks with college educated elites effectively trying to become like one of these white collar unions. When I worked at my last job and they tried to get me to join the union, my last job as a journalist, the union that represented them was the UAW, okay? So, you know, there really is, yes, there is a class divide even within the unions, but

The union leadership in America often really does go, they play the political game and they're in the pocket of the Democrats and they ignore their rank and file, unlike Sean O'Brien. And honestly, Megan, this is a watershed moment. You think the electricians unions, those electricians who are all Trump voters, they're going to let their leaders next time round endorse a Democrat? They won't because they look at what Sean O'Brien did and they say, we want a leader like that.

Oh, my gosh. That reminds me of my mom, who is constantly talking to her electrician, who is definitely a Trump voter. And she gets all sorts of information from him. And I'm like, Mom, have you been on the Internet again? What are you and what's happening? She's like, no, I talked to the electrician. He's definitely pro-Trump. You mentioned Sean O'Brien at the RNC. Here's a little bit of that for folks who missed it. No other nominee in the race would have invited the teams into this arena. Now you can have whatever opinion you want.

But one thing is clear. President Trump is a candidate who is not afraid of hearing from new, loud, and often critical voices. And I think we all can agree whether people like him or they don't like him, in light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough SOB. Yes!

Right. So he that is somebody who understands working class guys concern concerns. And he's not the only one, Batya. John Fetterman. I mean, books should be written about John Fetterman's political career so far as a U.S. senator, like the race, the stroke, him not being able to really speak well or be understood the doubts about him on the right in particular.

And then as soon as he became very pro-Israel, the left turned on him. The pro-Israel right started to reevaluate him. He reemerged as sort of this working class guy who understands their concerns. And now as a Democrat in the critical state of Pennsylvania, it's not like he's endorsing Trump, but he is offering some hard truths about why Pennsylvanians do love Trump.

And why this state, even though it's become bluer and bluer over the past 10 years, is still likely or potentially at least going to go for Donald Trump. It's tight. It's tight, tight, tight. She spent all of her time there. Kamala Harris has basically moved to Pennsylvania. And here's John Fetterman explaining some of what's happened with Trump there.

And I also want people to understand, you know, and it's not science, but there is energy and there's kinds of anger on the ground in Pennsylvania. And people are very committed and Trump is going to be strong. And we have to respect that. You can't even understand it. And it's not like a science that can explain it. But you have to just know that it's real. Trump has...

created a special kind of a hold within the corn and he's remade the party and he has a special kind of place in Pennsylvania. And I think that only deepened after that first assassination. Very honest.

Definitely. It's very amazing. I don't know if you remember this, Megan, but after the debate that John Fetterman did with Dr. Oz, who Trump had endorsed, and Fetterman was right out the stroke. He could barely talk. It was so hard to watch. Your heart really went out for him, right? But everything...

Everybody came out of that and was like, wow, Mehmet Oz is going to win, but not Donald Trump. Donald Trump, he watched it with one of his advisors. I don't remember which advisor it was, but they later said that what Trump said was no.

John Fetterman's going to win because people are going to feel sorry for him. I mean, that shows you Trump's real genius for politics and how people operate. He could see that coming. It is very amazing. You know, John Fetterman has this big stroke, you know, faces his maker and comes out like super pro-Israel, right?

I think it's very interesting that he's able to both stay a Democrat while facing down the far left of his party. I think that shows real strength and character. I mean, obviously, I want him to find his way to Trump and find his way to understanding why so many of his own constituents are so solidly in the MAGA camp and why it's because they want a better future for their children and why they're right about that. But I do think that it takes a lot of strength.

to be attacked so viciously and vociferously from your own side and still toe the line and say, no, I represent where the Democrats ideally should be. And I think, Megan, even for us who are kind of on the other side of things, we should want a better Democratic Party, right? Like we should want the Democratic Party that's represented by John Fetterman to fight against rather than the Democratic Party that's represented by Rashida Tlaib, because we should want this country to

to be having debates that are elevated and about the issues and are legitimate and honest rather than whether Jews deserve to exist, right?

Yeah, right. Exactly. How do we get down to that point? So the working class remains a very interesting issue in this campaign in that, yes, Kamala Harris, if she's going to get elected, it's going to be thanks to the elites. It's not going to be thanks to the working class with whom she's doing very poorly, especially in comparison to Joe Biden, who did much, much better in particular with unions than she is doing. She's fallen precipitously with all these union groups that did like Joe Biden because he had a proven history with them. And

And, um, so now there is a bit of a battle still to get some of them through her vice presidential candidate. She seems to have the big middle finger going for them, like in, in terms of who she sits with the messaging that she gives about herself, but they send Tim walls out there to be sort of man of the people, you know, in his flannel and like a real regular working class guy, like a teacher you can understand you can relate to. And the latest effort was him this weekend, uh,

like working on his car. He's just like a guy who works on the car and kicks the engine around. Here is a bit, a bit of an ad. This is an ad, um, showing him working on this car. Watch.

Everything works on here, except one thing I'm still tinkering with, cruise control. So I'm gonna show you how to fix that. At the same time, we talk about creating an opportunity economy so that everybody can get the opportunity to thrive. To be able to work on this thing, you got a manual. It shows you exactly what to do to fix things on this.

Donald Trump and JD Vance have a manual too. It's called Project 2025, and it's a way to stick it to the middle class by giving tax cuts to the wealthiest. They didn't give me a manual for this if you didn't plan on using it to fix your truck. They didn't create that Project 2025 just to have it set around as a doorstop.

Okay. So according to LA times, this kind of car sells for anywhere between 39 to $59,000. So he's just a regular working class guy with a $60,000 automobile. He can really, he's just like you bought you. That's, that's the, the walls campaigns attempt.

It's so amazing because Tim Walls is like an over-credentialed rich elites, you know, view of what a working class person looks like and sounds like and talks like and does in their free time, right? It's all acting, just like Harris, right? She's acting.

She's acting like a vice presidential candidate. And the point is that it doesn't matter because their base doesn't care. Their base are those same over-credentialed college elites, those same rich people, the Hollywood elites, you know, the tech elites, right? People who make, you know, who work in the knowledge industry and, you know, make between like, you know, 250 and a million dollars a year. Like that is the Democrats base. And so to them, he doesn't have

to come off as plausible to working class people. He just has to come off as plausible to Meryl Streep, right? That she picked the working class guy, right? It's like it doesn't actually have to convince people who actually are working class because they've effectively ceded those people already to Donald Trump.

That's a great point. It was funny because this past weekend, friends of ours had this old Land Rover. It's legit old. It looks like an army tank. And on the back of it, there's a bumper sticker that read, no airbags. We die like real men.

That's great. But I thought it was very funny. Don't, don't try that at home folks. Get an airbag, but they're a very funny sort of middle finger to the, you know, overly protected newfound safety crew on everything. Um, so let's go to Kamala Harris and her outreach to the working class. And that brings me to Oprah. I,

I joke, of course, since Oprah has never, I mean, I would said this on Friday, like when was the last time Oprah actually surrounded herself with actual working class people spent any time with them at all? No, she's on her Montecito mansion ranch with Megan Markle, you know, dining on mimosas midday and taking her Ozempic. This is not somebody, you know, the guys who actually do work on their cars can relate to it all. And

And I know you were struck by the most, and it's tough to pick, but the most inane answer from Kamala Harris. As so many were, this answer went totally viral because it's so empty and it promises absolutely nothing. And it somehow encapsulates everything about Kamala Harris that the left loves and the right can't stand. Here is that moment of her with Oprah on Thursday night's Hot One. We love our country.

I love our country. I know we all do. That's why everybody's here right now. We love our country. We take pride in the privilege of being American. We are an optimistic people. Americans, by character, are people who have dreams and ambitions and aspirations. We believe in what is possible. We believe in what can be.

And we believe in fighting for that. That's how we came into being because the people before us understood that one of the greatest expressions for the love of our country, one of the greatest expressions of patriotism is to fight for the ideals of who we are. By the way, I'd give her $10,000 if she could answer this question. Name three of the founding fathers. Just three. Name three.

She has no idea what came before. I don't believe for one second she has an idea. But with the hands and the look and the distance, we believe, we believe. And then the hand's still up here and so excited like a schoolgirl on her chair. And then the best is the Oprah who does understand when something profound is happening. I mean, we've all seen that. Pretending that this is one of those moments with her facial expression like,

Go on, go on, savant. I've never received this kind of wisdom, not across from the Dalai Lama, not Deepak Chopra, no one. And even Obama, here we are again, lay it on me. No, it was acting, more acting. But your thoughts on that incredible clip?

It's so amazing because you can tell that Kamala Harris thinks she's like nailing it, right? You could tell she's like thinking herself, like I'm crushing this. The thing is, I actually think she was because you have to think about who the audience for that is, right? And the audience for that was there in the room with her, a billionaire sitting across from her. And then the sort of glitterati, the millionaire celebrities who were

on video chat who Oprah had welcomed in, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock.

These are people who have no material problems. They are so rich. So how do you get them passionate about a cause, right? Like you can't solve their problems because they don't have any. You word salad, right? You make them feel like the emptiness inside is going to go away, right? Like you make them feel...

feel like their emotions, right, their emotional response to you, their joy that working class Americans will be silenced once again, right, that that is the equivalent of the civil rights movement, right? Like, that is how you get Julia Roberts excited about something. And so from that point of view, I think Kamala Harris totally nailed it. I will say, I think

from a larger point of view, right? When you get away from the millionaires and the billionaires, have you noticed that every time Oprah says her name, she goes, come on, come on. Right. I see that every time she does that, you know, a swing voter dies and a Trump voter is born in their place. OK, it is just so

ostentatious and ostentatiously empty of meaning. And what we saw from the, you know, Biden running against Trump to Harris running against Trump was the switch from we're running against the threat to democracy that will end our democracy to we're running on this joy campaign. And here's what happened there. When they were running

were running as Donald Trump is the biggest threat to American democracy, what they were really saying was the will of the American people is a threat to our rule, a threat to the rule by oligarchy of the credentialed that had been instantiated by President Obama. Right. Donald Trump is not a threat to democracy. He is a reflection of the electorate. That's how you win

elections, right? To cast that as a threat to democracy is just like how they said, well, we have to put him in prison to defend our democracy. It was the imprisoning our political opponents stage of defending democracy, right? Then there was the instantiating a

coup stage of defending democracy, right? It's all nonsense. What they're trying to do is to prevent the American people from having their say because they believe that they should be able to tell the American people what to think, how to think and who to elect. And they've lost the ability to do that because they are all rich leftists and totally out of touch. So that was

So that was the when they were running against Biden. Right. Now that they're running against with Harris against Donald Trump, what they've effectively done is in their mind, they've neutralized the threat posed by the electorate and the American people. Right now.

they have joy instead because they think that they are going to get away with this, having simply replaced their candidate, you know, thrown out the votes of 14 million Democratic primary voters, and they're going to sail to victory on these vibes, on the joy of the rich. It's the let them eat joy campaign because they think

that they have neutralized the threat posed by the millions and millions of Americans who want Donald Trump. And that's really what you're seeing with this Oprah stuff. It's the let them eat the joy of the rich. That is what Kamala Harris is offering the American people. And unfortunately, because of the way the media works, she's getting very far with it.

Okay. So Baja, you may have missed this on Friday, but speaking of the Oprah yelling, it was a lot. And I said this on Friday, but I really feel like she's just out of step with where broadcasting has gone since she was a star. We, if anything, we've taken the tone down. We don't yell at the audience anymore. It's very jarring. Most young people in particular are used to consuming their news now via podcast and

And on their phone in a way that's not on their living room and just having Oprah pop in and entertain you. It's longer form conversations that are meaningful where you really are searching for explanations that will help you understand something. It's not screaming in people's faces. She's out of touch. And here are our favorite examples. Joining us for this very special event, Unite for America.

Hope and joy rising. And there's been a... Can you feel it? You can feel it. You can feel it. Can you feel it? We can feel it. Chefs for Kamala, love that group. Republicans for Harris, love that group even more. We've got Swifties. Where are you? Swifties for Kamala! Oh, my God. Chris Rock is in the house. Chris, where are you? Chris Rock is in the house! Yes!

Where are you, Jennifer? Roberts, where are you? And this narrow street is in the house. Please welcome Kamala Harris. Oh, my Lord. OK, you get it. She can I say, but she is the leaf blower of television hosts where you're like, be quiet. So annoying. Turn it down. When is it going to end? It's really funny because I went back and rewatched the speech that she gave at the DNC.

there was a lot of talk there about, you know, how we're more united than divided or one America, like, you know, we should come together and elect Kamala Harris and not the threat to democracy. And like they,

like they don't realize like that they literally are undermining everything they're trying to do. I always thought of Oprah as a uniter, not a divider, as somebody who really did have a feel for what average Americans lives were like, you know, evidenced by the fact that she was able to have this, you know, amazing, loyal audience of just normies, like regular people who got a lot out of her content. So this is just so disappointing. Like it's before she got political.

It's before she got political. When she went for Obama, she abandoned all the women who made her a star, who made her a billionaire. She gave them the middle finger and instead leaned into race.

And then she, she campaigned for Barack Obama. She really did help him win Iowa. And now she considers herself a political King maker. And she doesn't realize that she's actually post her relevancy post her massive stardom. And she really should probably just enjoy her $4 billion in Montecito and enjoy it. Like just to have a great time with it, go hang out with Megan Markle, who you also falsely rehabilitated and let her smear the Royal family without any journalistic integrity or questions and

And now she's trying to do the same for Kamala Harris, but she's not a kingmaker. She's not going to make Kamala Harris. If Kamala Harris is going to make it, she probably was helped much more by the Taylor Swift endorsement than she was by the Oprah Winfrey. But I think Kamala Harris is if she's going to make it at all, she's going to make it because Donald Trump's unfavorables, not because of anything Kamala Taylor or Oprah is doing. No, I totally have to agree with you there. I think that she's

Unfortunately, running an incredibly disciplined campaign, you know, not falling to any pressure to give interviews, to have policies whatsoever. And unfortunately for Donald Trump, he's running a very undisciplined campaign, despite the fact that he has the winning argument on every single issue, Megan, on every single

position that Donald Trump has staked out, it is where 65% of Americans are at. And that's whether it's abortion, whether it's immigration, whether it's trade, whether it's his support for unions, whether it's LGBT issues, he's pro-gay, but very, very

strict on trans, right? That is where the vast majority of Americans are at. You know, in distancing himself from Project 2025, this wasn't just brilliant politically. It was really saying to the American people, I am your champion. I'm not going to take the easy points on my side from my base, you know, and betray where I know you guys are at on issues like abortion, on issues like gay marriage, which he took out of the GOP platform.

platform and which a lot of people on the far right were upset about. But that was always his promise was, I'm going to understand where you are at and I'm going to be this in terms of policy, a unifying figure for the working class, for hardworking Americans against the oligarchy of the credentialed. And, you know, Megan, he never gets credit for this. Donald Trump was the first president in 60 years to shrink

income inequality in America to shrink the gap between the hardworking working class and the over-credentialed college elites. In 2019, the bottom 25% of wage earners saw a 4.5% wage increase, their first since the 70s. But the top 25%

only saw a 2% increase. And that is the real reason that they call him a threat to democracy. What they mean is a threat to their rule, a threat to their pocketbooks, a threat to the wage theft of the working class by the over-credentialed top 20%. That's exactly right. And that is why in these latest polls, we see that being reflected now. The NBC News poll that dropped yesterday

When it comes to dealing with the economy, he's got a nine percentage point advantage over her. When it comes to dealing with inflation and the cost of living, he's got an eight percentage point lead over her. And inflation and the cost of living are the number one issue. 28% listed that as number one. And the next closest is threats to democracy, which has 19%. But it's huge.

And, um, what you're seeing here is that people understand that Donald Trump helped them when he was in office, their lives were better. This is reflected in the NBC poll, the New York times Sienna poll that people are telling the pollsters. This is from the, um, New York times writeup of their own poll voters across the Sunbelt say Donald Trump improved their lives when he was president, a worry that a Kamala Harris white house would not.

setting the stage for an extraordinarily competitive contest in three key States. Um, these people feel that Trump will, he'll improve their lives as he did when he was president. Now you, I want to follow up on what you were saying about her,

her remaining underground and not taking any questions. I mean, truly she's, what has she's done? She's done down a bash in that complete puff piece interview. She's done a Philly local reporter in more puffery from ABC, same thing, ABC in that debate, a, you know, absolute red carpet, no tough questions. That guy was, I'm sorry. It seems like a nice man. He was pathetic. It was a pathetic display, sir.

It was disgusting what he did with her. No follow-ups on the guns. Oh, you own a gun? Then why are you favoring mandatory buybacks? Do you still hold that position? Not even an attempt. Okay, I'm getting off course. And then Oprah, that's really what she's done. And there's nothing else scheduled. Maybe a 60 minutes, maybe not.

But if so, it'll be much closer to the election. So we have early voting already underway in a couple of states. So the media plan continues. And now we have journalists out there continuing to fail and continuing to justify this plan, which you would think the media would be the first to object to it. They're the ones getting the middle finger.

The voters are getting the middle finger too, but that's our job is to represent the voters, make sure we get answers. That's where I'm going to pick it up right after this quick break. I'm going to squeeze in a break. We will come back with the latest ridiculousness from team media. Grand Canyon University, a private Christian university based in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, believes that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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It's 100% online, flexible, and surprisingly affordable. Connect with a licensed therapist by phone, video, or online chat at a time that works for you. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. So on the front of the media fail and the media running to cover for Kamala Harris, I give you Stephanie Rule of NBC versus Brett Stevens, conservative, who writes for the New York Times.

on Bill Maher's show Friday. - My fear is that she doesn't really have a very good command of what she wants to do as president. It's not too much to ask Kamala, say, are you for a Palestinian state if Hamas is gonna run that state? - Kamala Harris is not running for perfect. She's running against Trump. We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to,

And in 2024, unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy. I promise that a lot of people have with Kamala is we don't know her answer to anything, okay? But you know his answer to everything. And I don't think it's a lot to ask her to sit down for a real interview as opposed to a puff piece in which she describes her

her feelings of growing up in Oakland with nice laws. Then I would just say to that, when you move to Nirvana, give me your real estate broker's number and I'll be your next door neighbor. We don't live there. It's Nirvana if you can get the Democratic nominee for president to say where she stands on the issue. That's never gonna be attainable. The cluelessness

I mean, imposed by elites in the media like her, right? This is a very important clip because what Stephanie Ruhle is pretending to say is that anything Kamala Harris can do would be better than anything Donald Trump would do. He is such a threat that just getting rid of him, it doesn't matter what she does, right? You know, this is not what's actually happening, though. What's actually happening is that

She is convinced Stephanie rules convinced that a Kamala Harris presidency will be very good for her. And by good for her, I don't mean on abortion because I don't think she's going to need an abortion. What I mean is it's going to be very good for her bottom line, just like the Biden presidency has been activated.

very good for rich people. If you own property, if you have a stock portfolio, you know, the economy is doing very well for you. If you are part of the elites, there was really nothing wrong with the Biden presidency from your point of view. They opened the border. So you now have 15 million illegal immigrants to hire at your beck and call to do service industry jobs that now pay a fraction of what they used to and

all of those immigrants. And they won't be moving into your neighborhood. That's exactly right. They're not going to be moving into your neighborhood. You're not going to face any of the negative consequences because you're not competing with them for resources and you're not competing with them for jobs. You as the elites are the consumers of this labor. So this was all great for you. And that's

the important thing to notice here is they are pretending to consider Donald Trump a threat because he is a threat to their bottom line. He is a threat to their power. He is a threat to their ability to rob working class Americans of wages and give them to illegal immigrants. And they pretend that this is about higher ideals like democracy when at the end of the day, it is about their economic interests

a Kamala Harris presidency will be very good for the rich. It will be very, very bad for working class Americans who see in Donald Trump a champion for their futures and the future of their children. Okay. So well said Baja as always the latest example of this

just her hubris and refusal to speak to anything. And in particular on the issue of immigration, which is so foundational and important, as you just point out, um, was espoused, was made clear by Axios and Alex Thompson, a reporter over there who had a report pointing out that in 2019, when she was running for president,

She pledged a series of executive actions that would unilaterally give so-called dreamers, 2 million of them, a path to citizenship, right? The dreamers are those who arrived as minors to the United States, like brought over by their parents and they were illegals and they've never attained legal status. And this has sort of been an issue that's been debated for many years now. What do we do with the so-called dreamers?

given that name by people who want them to attain citizenship here. And so she wanted to do by executive action an amnesty for all of these people. That's controversial. This stuff can be done. It needs to be done with the support of the American people and a congressional vote.

So they went to her and said, do you still support that? And do you also support this related plan that would shield more than six million illegal immigrants from deportation? You'd give two million dreamers a path to citizenship and you'd shield more than six million from being deported.

Asked this week whether she would take these same executive actions, quoting here from the piece, her campaign declined to answer. They declined to answer. Asked if she had time for a brief interview to discuss her dreamers policy. Harris's campaign declined to make her available.

This is an outrage. I can't laugh and I can laugh at almost everything in the news. This is a true outrage that they are getting away with saying, I won't tell you where she stands on these issues. I won't tell you whether she still stands by her 2019 extremely far left positions. And then the media, good for Axios for reporting it. But then the vast majority of the media just says,

Or you get the Stephanie rules saying it would be nirvana to picture a world in which we could actually know these answers. Yeah, it's really horrifying. The Democrats can't actually answer on immigration because their base, which is the college credentialed elites, want the open border and benefit from it in real economic terms.

but they need swing voters in order to win, right? Who want a secure border and a future for their children, which you cannot have when you have a limitless supply of low wage labor. And so they literally cannot answer the question, which is why she's not giving any interviews. I think there's a real sort of crisis in terms of what she understands about the policy she's supposed to be pushing, but also they only stand to lose by making a policy clear. And unfortunately the elites,

in all of these different industries are helping her with this because they do know that they don't want anybody to know that they benefited from and totally support the open border because they know you can't win an election with that. Immigration is so important, Megan, because it is really

the dividing line between the elites and the working class. If you have a college degree, if you work in the knowledge industry, if you are a person who relies on the English language and credentials to get and keep your job, you will never be threatened by a person illegally crossing the border who doesn't speak English and doesn't have a credential. In

every service that you need to keep your fancy life going will be cheaper for you because there are more illegal immigrants. That's the top 20%. That is their economic agenda. And the Democrats, of course, are playing right into it. And meanwhile, if you are working class, if you are one of the 60% of Americans without a college degree who does the jobs that we rely on to survive, who drives a truck, who looks after old people, who looks after

Right.

of the litter of, you know, from 15 million newly arrived illegal immigrants who they can pay much less, who they don't have to give, you know, leave to, who they don't have to ensure breaks or good working conditions or safe working conditions to, of course, they're going to pick them. And so this immigration question is the dividing line between the two classes in America. And I'll just end with this, Megan. They are always calling

people racist who point this out. It's racist to want a future for your children. It's racist to want to protect the wages of the hardest working Americans who we rely on to survive. Do you think that working class Black men think it's racist to say, I don't

know, maybe we shouldn't have rolled 200,000 Haitian immigrants into this country and given them work visas. Of course, they don't think it's racist to say that in the Democratic coalition, black Americans are the most anti-immigrant people because they understand that yes, they are coming for their job specifically. And this is something that every Democrat understood until 2015 when they had to do a 180 on this because they couldn't stand that Donald Trump was speaking up for working class Americans.

That's so true. Or the black Americans who couldn't get into their community center because they were stashing illegal immigrants in there because these cities are so overwhelmed now. And if they object, they're racist, too. They're they're xenophobic, whatever it is that Americans, I think, are really getting past these labels and just ready to fight. I mean, it's just I was thinking about these issues and how I would prioritize the one I'm most concerned.

upset about if Donald Trump were to lose, like if it's November 6th or seventh or eighth or ninth, depending on when we actually have the vote counted.

That's the number one is as deeply as I care about the whole, what we're doing to children and the trans issue. I do think the immigration thing is, is just far worse, just given the sheer numbers of Americans that it's affecting children, women, everyone in terms of, you know, what, forget like just the trafficking of the women and what's happening to the young girls and the rapes and all of that. But once they get into this country, it's not all of them, but there are too many taking too many jobs, fucking

fundamentally changing the country who will never assimilate and have no desire to. And on top of all that, I've got news for the elites who probably look at me and think I get them and I'm one of them. I've got news for you. If you think this is all great for you, take a listen to Aaron Heitke, former chief border patrol agent for the San Diego sector, who testified before Congress last week on

on how many illegals he had tracked who crossed the border, who have ties to terrorism, and what the Biden-Harris administration told him to do about those numbers, SOT 13. In San Diego, we had an exponential increase in significant interest aliens. These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism. Prior to this administration, the San Diego sector averaged 10 to 15 SIRS per year.

Once word was out, the border was far easier to cross. San Diego went to over 100 SIAs in 2022, well over that in 2023, and even more than that registered this year. These are only the ones we caught. At the time, I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIAs or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public there was no threat at the border. He was told to cover it up. Don't let the American people know.

How many dangerous illegals are crossing into this country? That's just the San Diego guy. Let's get all the border guys out under oath and find out what they were told and try to figure out how many terrorist linked illegals have crossed into the country. Something Kamala Harris,

I assume, also will not answer since she won't even answer for her far less controversial allowing of the dreamers to stay in the country. This one, is she going to answer this one? Obviously not. And no one's going to ask her either, Baja.

Absolutely. And the number one question is, do you really think that she would fire Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of DHS, secretary of DHS? She would not. Why would she? She was part and parcel of the administration that elevated him into his role. And Megan, the thing to know about DHS secretary Mayorkas is every time he was hauled before the Senate or Congress and he was asked, why is the border open? Every single time he would say,

Our corporations are desperate for workers. He literally saw the cartels, these murderous terrorist women raping, child raping terrorist organization as a jobs program to displace American workers. Do you know that meatpacking

That used to be like the job to have if you were working class. The wages were incredible. The conditions were incredible. The retirement was incredible. You know, you could have that job for 30 years and retire and have, you know, a beautiful retirement, solidly middle class life, homeowner, et cetera, et cetera. Our meatpackers now,

are 15-year-old girls who have been raped repeatedly on the way here and supplied for that job by a partnership, an unofficial partnership between Alejandro Mayorkas and the cartels. And if you think that's going to stop under Kamala Harris, I have a bridge to sell you.

So dark. But there's some hope in these polls that it's not going to happen. And I mean, to me, it's not accidental that it's in states like Arizona who have had to deal with this and live this firsthand in a way these other, you know, as you point out, rich fat cats and certainly the Oprah Winfrey's of the world have not had to. Baja, always wonderful having you on the show. Thanks so much for being here.

God bless you, Megan. Thank you so much for having me and for everything that you do for this nation. Oh, you're the sweetest. All right. To be continued. If you're tired of the same old coffee from those mega corporations pushing their woke agendas, listen up. It's time to take a stand and support a brand that truly embodies American values. Blackout Coffee. They stand with hardworking Americans who believe in family, faith, and freedom.

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It's the new Ghost Burger from Carl's Jr. It's a juicy char-boiled Angus beef burger. Yeah.

I don't have any teeth.

Joining me now, someone we've had on many times who is here to lay out his vision for the conservative movement and give 10 hard truths conservatives must embrace to save the country. Joining me now, Vivek Ramaswamy, former 2024 presidential candidate and author of the new book,

Truths, the future of America first, which is out tomorrow. Vivek, welcome back. How are you doing? Good to be on, Megan. How are you? Great to see you. Congrats on the book. We'll get into it. A couple of news headlines before we get there. Sure. Latest polling out today, including New York Times Siena battleground polls.

Showing now among likely voters, Trump's up five in Arizona. He's up four in Georgia and North Carolina is still tight. He's up to it's a state. He won by under 75,000 votes in 2020. Harris was up to an August there.

So it's a four point swing in Trump's favor. But this poll was conducted largely before these reports about Mark Robinson, who's the GOP candidate for governor. He's the current lieutenant governor who is a black man saying he wants to bring back slavery, allegedly in these sex talk rooms. He denies it's him. The evidence that it is him seems pretty good. And

and saying he likes to watch transgender men. I don't know. Trannies have sex with whatever. It's dark. So there's a question about whether that's going to drag Trump's numbers down in North Carolina because people are going to be kind of grossed out by the GOP candidate for governor. But zoom out from that particular controversy and tell me what you make of these little latest battleground polls.

Yeah, so I'm seeing a pattern here, Megan. This is wearing maybe an older hat of looking at noisy data in other contexts. I think a lot of what happens in the political media in a close race like this is you're going to see a random distribution on any given poll taken over different periods of time.

And what you're just seeing is that type of noise, people trying to extrapolate a lot from it. So you're seeing conflicts between NBC's polling and New York Times, CNN polling. You're seeing even what you would look at evolved slight shifts in New York Times' own polling over time, when in fact, that's exactly if you were just doing a random distribution of polling around the noise around an actual mean, the variation you'd see anyway. So

So that's a long way of saying that I don't think this polling or the shifts here matter in one direction or another, especially because pollsters have been particularly bad at predicting what Donald Trump's actual supporters are going to do. And so the reality is, I think I almost trust on the ground instincts combined with polling at least as much. And my sense is it's going to be a close race to the finish. But I think that

you know, in the current trajectory, I actually feel very good about Donald Trump. I'm less optimistic about the Republican Senate candidates. And that's kind of my pulse on where things stand in the race right now. Just to give you an example of real clear politics, the other day put out this little chart. This is Pennsylvania. And it was very interesting, Vivek. It was an attempt to look at how the pollsters did when it came to predicting Trump's vote in 16 and 20.

And this one just looks at Pennsylvania. So it's just a, you know, just a little snapshot, but here it is. Two pollsters overestimated the Trump vote in 2020 Trafalgar by 3.2 and insider advantage by 3.2. Every other pollster Emerson, New York times, Sienna Quinnipiac, CNN, CBS, FNM, Marist and Washington post overestimated.

overestimated the other way and by a lot in some cases, listen to how it went. Dem, um, these are all, um, Democrat overestimations like that, that Joe Biden was going to do better than he did. Emerson 2.8, New York times, Sienna 4.8 overstating what he actually got predicting in the last polls Quinnipiac plus 5.8 for the Dems, CNN 8.8 CBS 5.8 FNM 4.8.

Marist 3.8, Washington Post 5.8. So the overwhelming number of polls greatly overestimated how the Democrat would do. I could give you the Dem list in 2016, which was even worse, overestimating Hillary Clinton's performance. I think the big question in this race right now is whether any of these pollsters has corrected or figured out how to correct the

they're terrible polling because if they haven't, you're right. Donald Trump should be feeling pretty good. Yeah, I don't think they have, Megan. And the reality is it reminds me of there's an old book called A Random Walk Down Wall Street, something to that effect, which basically concludes that a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard, picking stocks that way would either equally perform or outperform on a post fee basis. Most professional Wall Street analysts or portfolio managers.

You see the same thing with respect to the polling. I think a monkey throwing darts on a dartboard might do better than the average pollster here because the equivalent of the fees in the investment industry are like the biases baked into these mainstream media institutions that inadvertently, even in ways that they don't realize in their sampling or the kinds of audiences that skew even 1% over from what the general population is, amplify their own internal biases that you see show up in their own publications or their own news stories.

So that's, I think the reality is that these polls aren't worth much. I'm not telling you anything you don't know or your audience doesn't know, but there has historically been a bias. We know of Trump supporters who are really either pissed off when they get called by pollsters, asking what your, what your vote preference is going to be, or certain people who have been afraid to be able to tell another human being, they're going to vote for Donald Trump when in fact, that's exactly what they're going to do. And the counter argument for the other side in this election, just to sort of, if you're playing the horse race analysis game here, uh,

The counterargument is I think that that culture of fear around saying that you're going to vote for Trump has actually we has actually waned significantly. You have a lot of people coming out publicly, even used to be on the center left, saying they're going to vote for Donald Trump this time around. To me, that's also a signal that the public unacceptability of voting for Trump has also waned, which means that that effect on the polls may have also be a little bit less pronounced in the case of Biden.

people being unlikely to tell a pollster they're voting for Trump. So that could argue in favor of the polls being slightly more accurate this time. But I'm not a horse race analyst person. As you know, I love talking about what I think should happen, what I think is the future direction of the country and what it ought to be. And I think that the reality is experts and non-experts alike probably have the same worth of their opinion in analyzing these polls, which the answer is not should be not very much.

Mm-hmm. Well, there is an interesting piece of information in there about whether the debate helped or hurt Kamala Harris. Even though most people believe that she won the debate, according to the various polls that have come out, here's how it looks in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina.

This is according to the New York Times and their poll. Pre-debate, Harris was up five in Arizona. Post-debate, Trump is up five in Arizona. That's a 10-point swing. Pre-debate, Trump was up four in Georgia. Post-debate, Trump is up four in Georgia. So she didn't gain anything. North Carolina pre-debate, Harris was up two.

Post-debate, Trump is up three. So it was a five-point swing in his favor. So, I mean, it's one of those things where all the media elites told us that he lost, that she crushed him, that she should ask for 10 debates. But the critical swing state voters, at least in the Sun Belt, did not see it that way. Or at least if they did see it that way, they weren't moved to start voting for her. If anything, they were moved to start voting for Donald Trump.

And that's why this is kind of curious. She did come out and say, I want another debate. She refused to do the Fox news debate. She refused to do an NBC news debate. Now, suddenly she says, now what is it? You know, September 23rd today, I want to do a CNN debate. I want to do a CNN debate. And Trump came out and said the following and sought 22. They would like to do another debate.

Although good entertainment value. A lot of people say, oh, it's great entertainment. I've already done two. The problem with another debate is that it's just too late. Voting has already started. She's had her chance to do it with Fox. You know, Fox invited us on and I waited and waited and.

They turned it down. They turned it down. But now she wants to do a debate right before the election with CNN because she's losing badly. You know, it's like a fighter. She sees the polls. She sees what's happening. She's losing badly. But it's like a fighter who goes into the ring and gets knocked out. The first thing he says is, I want to rematch. I want to rematch. So is it the right move, given the analysis that preceded that soundbite?

I think there's a couple of things going on. First of all, with this idea that she won the first debate, I think what many people say when they say she won the first debate is she won relative to the expectations they had for her, which is different than how people actually vote. People don't vote based on whether or not someone exceeded their own low expectations for that person. That goes for whether or not you won that particular fight, that particular venue or that particular debate. That's why you didn't see it really translate into any meaningful, maybe any bump at all in the polling.

Now, there's two things about the debate here worth watching, and I think this is why Kamala Harris wants to do another one, is that even relative to the number of people who watch the debate, a much larger number of people actually continue to read the media's distillation of the debate.

So no matter what happens at the debate, whether it goes well for Donald Trump or well for Kamala Harris, we can pretty darn well count on, especially close to the election, the media's distillation of it, which will last about a week, being positive for Kamala Harris. So she's smart to ask for another debate because no matter how it goes, the reality is it's going to be at least positive, even if artificially generated news cycles around her right ahead of when most people are going to vote on Election Day itself.

So I think Donald Trump's playing this correctly. If it was a little bit differently, if it was a little bit different type of debate, I think the calculus could shift. Right. If this were not a debate in a closed room with two moderators likely to be biased, she says she wants CNN again. CNN already did a debate without an audience. That's one thing we've already seen that we've seen that twice, once with Biden, once with Kamala Harris. I think there's a strong case that Donald Trump has to make, which is what more our voters going to get out of a repeat of that same setting.

versus doing what they've done every presidential debate cycle before the COVID-influenced 2020 election, which is to have a town hall format, one where you're actually talking to voters, where voters are asking the questions directly. One of the things that does, Megan, is that actually avoids a little bit, dilutes out some of the media bias. So as much as you complain about the moderators, there's only so much they can do if the actual questions are coming from voters.

That, I think, could be a powerful and interesting new format that's better for voters. You make a good case that's good for the voting process itself. But I think it also would be a format in which Donald Trump would actually shine and likely mop the floor with Kamala Harris if I had to make a prediction. So I agree he would do well interacting with real humans, something she doesn't seem to excel at. But I disagree on the media bias point because who selects the questions that will be asked? The media. I mean,

I mean, I've been involved in these situations before. You know, the producers and then ultimately the anchors look at the submissions and make choices about which questions they're going to allow, who gets the mic. And it would be all climate change. It would be all, there would be abortion. So I didn't say it would eliminate the bias. Yeah.

It wouldn't eliminate the bias. You're right. But it would dilute it, I think, a little bit. And especially even just that interplay with voters. Donald Trump's really good at that. I think he likes people. He likes the people he leads. He likes Americans. I'm not sure that you could see the same dynamic come across in Kamala Harris's own interactions with voters that aren't prescripted. So my advice to him is if there was an opportunity to go for that format,

strongly consider doing it to do it. Otherwise, yeah, look at the way they both left the NABJ. Trump stayed. He glad handed. He was shaking hands, even though he had gotten viciously attacked at that event. And when she left the National Association of Black Journalists, I mean, it was like stone cold. She turned. She walked out. She did shake hands. But there's a shot of the three moderators like what what just happened? She just left like she like she was leaving a deposition.

So there's definitely a problem when it comes to interacting with live humans. I do want to get to, we talked a little bit about the media in the context of the debate, and there's a couple of things I want to show you. But before we do that, can we just talk about this? This news just broke in connection with the second Trump assassination attempt.

Um, Ryan Ruth is the attempted shooter who was lying in wait and now is in federal custody. And the justice department has just released a piece of evidence against this guy in an effort to keep him from getting bail. And it is a letter that he, they say he wrote to a friend who came forward, a quote witness who is, I believe a friend of Ryan Ralph's who came forward, uh,

and has now revealed the letter to the feds. It reads as follows, dear world. And by the way, this is important. This came, they say several months before the attempted assassination, several months before dear world. This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump,

but I am sorry I failed you. So this is very interesting. Months before he actually tried it, he's anticipating that he will try it and that he's going to fail. And then this letter will be read. I tried my best and gave it all the gumption I could muster. It's up to you now to finish the job.

disturbing. And I will offer $150,000 to whomever can complete the job. Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest know that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less a U S president. U S presidents must at bare minimum embody the moral fabric that is America and be kind, caring and selfless and always stand for humanity. Trump fails to understand any of that. So here's this guy who,

who makes three grand a month, Vivek, and has like kind of a crappy home, but like a home in Oahu, in Hawaii. And his son, he's helping support, who I think is a roofer. And he's thrown out $150,000 offer, a bounty offer,

On Donald Trump, this is weird. And we'll have people wondering whether this is just the rantings of a madman or whether he actually had a financial backer. Right. And why this person didn't come forward earlier. They say, oh, he gave it to me in a box and I just opened it after all this thing smells. What's your take on where we are with assassination attempt number two?

So I wasn't aware of that news until you just brought it up, but it just adds to a total weirdness, a bizarre set of facts that continue to get more and more bizarre, frankly, around both of the assassination attempts. I mean, the fact that we still don't have a recounting, a proper recounting of what exactly went wrong with the Secret Service protection at that Butler rally and all of the conditions around that, which I don't need to rehash.

Now this thing, which is just downright strange as well. Look, I'm a guy who responds to facts rather than to speculate what might or might not be happening. But does that sound like I don't know that there's such a thing as a normal assassination attempt behavior anyway. So you're probably talking about in the realm of people who are doing crazy things anyhow. But this is particularly bizarre where usually the history of these assassination attempts, as you know, it's either mentally deranged or ideologically motivated attempts.

person who's carrying out the act. Okay. You don't have these doubly strange facts to go with it, which has like a public orchestration that's put an element to this. And, you know, it's just another reminder. One thing Megan is it turns out that running for us president apparently is one of the most dangerous jobs you can ever take in America.

I'm not sure I could think of another job where the mortality rate is like, I don't do the math on this, but is it like 5% in terms of either people who have run for become president that have been assassinated in the attempt? But either way, I think that we live in pretty concerning times. And I think that this is

you know, at least let's just give a generous interpretation of another example of a deep mental health epidemic spreading across our country. And, you know, I do think it's going to take leadership both from the top and bottom up to quell what we're seeing as increasingly crazy behavior spreading across the country. Vivek, Kamala Harris won't speak to the media. She gives these, you know,

very friendly sit downs to people who she knows are avid Kamala Harris fans. That joke of an interview on CNN and then the Oprah thing. She now most recently sat down with Wired and what Wired did was ask her a bunch of questions that had become memes on the internet. Like, tell us about your laugh. Tell us about what makes you joyful. It was, I mean, it's just so frustrating stuff.

Yeah. And then you get this. Okay. Peter Alexander, the White House correspondent for NBC News goes to the White House and maybe he could ask some tough questions of Kamala Harris. Maybe he could ask some tough questions of Joe Biden, who had yet another senior moment, to put it charitably, this weekend. No. What does he do? He sits down. He gets a tour of

of a replica of the White House from Dr. Jill Biden. And they let this guy do this as though he's breaking real news. Just watch what substitutes now for real journalism in America, Sot9.

Joining us for this special tour. Hi, how are you? Dr. Biden, welcome to the White House. Someone who knows the place well, the First Lady. The public tours take you to these two floors. You live on that one. Does that look pretty? Is that right on? Oh, perfect. Yeah? Really? The bed's made, so... The bed's always made. It's perfect up there. Why don't you try to sit in the president's... I mean... Here we go. If the First Lady asks, I think I sort of have an obligation to... We'll get a picture of you. ...oblige.

So it's a fake overlap. I'm sorry, like if they had given this to some puff, but this is the White House correspondent, Vivek, the fails on the journalists are too many to count at this point. I really do feel it's a thumb on the scale. Well, it's more than a thumb on the scale. It's a bit of a philosophy, Megan. And this is one of the core themes in my book. And you're talking about that as lies, as artifice. I named the book Truths for a reason. One of the things that I actually exposed towards the start of this book

hits this head on, which is that even if you take the CEO of NPR, for example, one of the things that she has publicly said is that in some cases, our obsession with the truth may stop us from pursuing more important objectives like bringing people together.

Now, you and I may get irritated about that, but before we're angry about it, let's just analyze what's at its core. It is a skepticism of the importance of pursuing truth itself. It is a goal, but on a list of goals and priorities where that may not at times be the top priority. That's a worldview. So when I'm watching that video, that's exactly what I'm seeing, which is that their goal to sort of try their clothing on is.

to bring people together. That's what they will say. And sometimes an obsessive fixation on the truth, so an NPR CEO had to say, distracts us from doing what may be more important.

That's a debate. It's a debate worth having. We can be angry about it, but my own view, and I suspect you share it, is that actually the path to bringing people together runs through truth, the pursuit of truth, runs through free speech and open debate, runs through the path of getting to the bottom of what's actually going on rather than giving people the sense that they're being lied to. That actually divides people and pushes them apart, even if the truth is at times uncomfortable.

So, you know, in any case, one of the things I try to do in writing this book is I want to expose those best arguments for the other side because we can complain about the media all we want. Are they biased? Are they putting their thumb on the scale? Yes, they are.

But there's a root philosophy on the other side that we're up against. And it is one that is skeptical of, if not the existence of objective truth, which some are, it's skeptical of the importance of pursuing it when that comes into conflict with other goals that they deem to be more important. In the case of NPR CEO, I at least give her credit for airing that and being open about that fact, whereas others actually are skeptical of the importance of pursuing truth, but try to pretend like they still are.

It's a deeper ideological, philosophical debate about what is the role of the news media. Is it to seek and provide access to truth or is it something else? And if it is something else, OK, that's a view. Let's talk about it in the open. That's one of the things that I aim to do in this book. And it's part of the reason why, especially after having run for president last year and seen the media front row from a different seat, I really felt compelled to do, which is why we put this out.

Here is Peter Alexander doing his job behind the scenes after, what was it? It was at the DNC or was, yeah, it was after the DNC. So the chief, the White House correspondent for NBC News finds himself with exclusive access to Kamala Harris, newly anointed as the Democratic nominee. And does he, at least in that setting, shout a tough question at her? Here's what happened.

How do you feel tonight? I feel good. Now on to tomorrow. Good to see you last night. Congratulations. Governor Walz, Mrs. Walz, congratulations. Thank you.

It's like they work for the campaign. It's like they, I mean that that's your chance to just ask one tough question. Just ask one tough followup. But there's something in the news today showing that

that she was asked about whether she still holds her earlier espoused position on amnesty for so-called dreamers. And she refused to answer. She refused to answer Axios. They just wouldn't take a position. She was asked, her campaign was asked, because she doesn't get asked anything, whether she still stands by she wants the taxpayers to fund sex change operations for illegals and also prisoners.

And their position was that's not something she has said in this campaign with no acknowledgement of her latest position as espoused by her is that she's in favor. She's never said she reversed it. So this is the disrespect of the American voter that we just don't get to know. They just they just don't they don't have no entitlement to understand her positions.

It's just there's two things going on. One is that they believe her positions don't matter in some in some deeper ironic sense, Megan, that kind of is true. Actually, I don't really see her as an ideologue anyway. I see her as a cog in a system. She's another puppet like Biden was a puppet, frankly, like most politicians and even historical presidents have often been puppets. She's another puppet that's going to be wielded by the special interests that have put her up.

So in a certain sense, there's like a deep ironic truth to the whole thing that our positions don't actually matter. But put the cynical view to one side.

The other thing is that the disparate treatment of a lot of her statements versus things that Donald Trump or J.D. Vance or whoever have said. Right. So you hear about the conflicts in the media's uproar over claims of what's happening with Haitians in Springfield. You get a cats and dogs controversy or whatever. What about Kamala Harris making completely unfounded claims even in this campaign that women are bleeding in parking lots?

Just can you provide one instance of that actually happening? It's a pretty severe thing to say is happening in the streets of America in front of health care clinics that women are left to bleed in the parking lots. Exactly stuff that she has said.

Pretty graphic, pretty specific, not a shred of evidence to suggest that type of thing is happening. So on one hand, if somebody makes an off the cuff comment about what's going on with Haitians in Springfield, that's going to be the entire news cycle for an entire week, supposedly fact checking that without an iota of even fact checking the things she has said even during this campaign, many of which are factually just downright false. There isn't a shred of evidence to support it.

And so I think the thing that's going on with Kamala Harris, a few things. One is that she ran to the left of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 election. I don't know if those are her actual beliefs, Megan. I don't think she has a particular ideology. I think it almost is giving her too much credit to call her ideological. I think the deeper issue in American politics is that the people we elect to run the government, they're not really even the ones running the government. So in some sense, Biden's cognitive deficits are

In the same way, they weren't a bug. They were a feature to the people who managed him. The same thing goes for Kamala's policy deficits. Her policy deficits aren't really a bug. They're a feature for the people who control her and are likely to continue to control her if she becomes the president.

And, you know, there's a theme near and dear to my heart. It's not particularly a partisan point, but I do think that that's a deeper failure in American politics. It's, again, a core core element of what I discuss in this book is how do we restore self-governance in our country? It's not going to be just the fact that we're up against a candidate here. We're up against an entire machine here.

And part of the reason I'm putting this book out is I want to talk about how do we actually dismantle that machine rather than just focusing on a candidate one at a time, which is a mistake that I think we sometimes fall into. Very smart. I will say before I get into the heart of the book, the truth about Joe Biden being a cog in the wheel appears to be evident every day because it does not appear he's actively the president. It

It really doesn't. Every window you get into his schedule, and in fact, the rare occasions you get to see him now, like at a cabinet meeting for the first time in a couple of years, that

that he let his wife run, not the vice president, his wife. He let the first lady run. Now we see him over the weekend on Saturday, there's a press conference. We've got this group called the Quad. We're having a Quad Summit. This is the group that's supposed to take on the world challenges like the rise of the Chinese. It's Japan, Australia, India, and the United States. And he gets up there and he's supposed to be introducing Prime Minister Modi of India, obviously forgets and here's what happened.

So I want to thank you all for being here. And now, who am I introducing next? Who's next? Distinguished guests, the Prime Minister of the Republic of India.

It's so cringey. You can see all the heads looking around there. The people in the audience are uncomfortable. I'm sure Prime Minister Modi was uncomfortable. I mean, Vivek, who is the sitting president? Do we know? Well, look, I think the idea that Joe Biden is the functioning U.S. president has been a joke for a long time. That's not specific to this year. That's been true for the entirety of last year and the entirety of the last three years as well. It's just that it became socially acceptable to say so in public.

once that first debate happened and the media decided this was now inside the Overton window to talk about. I think that, you know, this is a, it looks more like a case of elder abuse. Now who's committing the elder abuse? We could, we could debate it. You brought up the case of Jill Biden looking like she's heading that cabinet meeting. One thing I will say in Jill Biden's defense is that

you know, Dr. Jill Biden's case, she's gotten approximately as many votes, exactly as many votes for U.S. president as Kamala Harris has, which is to say zero. So I think that the idea that the Democratic Party actually might be the most competent among the three Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Jill. I might actually go for Jill Biden. The reality is the Democratic Party of the president really doesn't care about the Democratic will of voters. Only do they not care about it? I think there's somewhat hostile to it. I

I think the reality is they believe that voters may represent the greatest risk to a democracy, that they may not make the right choice, which is why they're against the SAVE Act right now. But you could go straight down the list of policies or the way they've even conducted their own primary process, the way in which they're making sure the U.S. president, who ultimately even is elected –

is constrained enough to make sure that he doesn't actually do something that might represent the democratic will of the voters because it's this managerial machine that's actually running the show. And so that's what I think is going on in the country and it needs to be exposed. Let's talk about that because I saw Elon last week and he was talking about how he really will take this position if Trump wins.

of slicing and dicing the bureaucracy and trying to cut. The question was, what do you think it'll be like 4% of the government budget? And he said, oh, it's gonna be a lot more than that. And he talked about how we'll find off ramps for these employees to join the private sector. We'll help support them for a year or two while they try to find another job, but that the government's just over bloated unnecessarily so. And it's slowing down everything. It's undermining the progress of the United States. This has been a big issue of yours.

I remember when we were preparing for that presidential debate with you, we were looking at your proposal to, for example, possibly just cut everybody with an odd ending social security number, like getting rid of all the people who had not. Let's start with that. Well, and we used to look behind the scenes. Could be even too. I don't have any biases against odd. People would say, this is ridiculous. Yeah, this is absurd. And I was like, I'm an even. You're just upset because you're going to go. Anyway. Anyway.

But the point is simply we need to cut the size of this government. That's part of the problem, that there really are people making massive decisions in these administrative agencies and otherwise that are not elected and who answer to no one. So what do you make of this? I mean, you could be a part of this, but I've also heard the possibility of Vivek Ramaswamy in a Trump administration being the new DHS chief, which is actually really exciting.

A few paths forward for me. We can we can talk about that. I'll turn to it after the election. Senator, governor, cabinet, all things have been speculated on. My view is let's focus on got a job to get done, decisions to make shortly thereafter. But I will say this point about dismantling the federal government. That is something that was the centerpiece of my own presidential campaign. It's a centerpiece of the book that I'm putting out this week as well.

We've got to be honest. I'm a realist about this. You're always going to be taking a risk. It's not that this is the perfect solution that you're going to cut 75 percent of the federal bureaucrats at the exact right amount. You don't know what the exact right amount is. There may not even be an exact right amount, but there's two risks you take. One risk is the risk that Republicans have typically opted for in the past, which is that you cut a little bit around the edges and try to reform it. And you get that right. And if it's not enough, you're going to go back and cut some more.

That approach doesn't work. The approach of incremental reform, in my view, just doesn't work because it's like cutting off one head of an eight-headed hydra. It grows right back after you cut it off. The other risk you take is not the risk of not cutting enough fat, but the risk of cutting so much that you also cut some muscle. And we have to be honest about that. Is that a risk we're willing to take? It's a tale of two risks. Which one are you willing to take?

For my part, I'm willing to take the risk of cutting so much fat that we also cut some muscle. And where we are, we can then at least from a blank slate build up what we otherwise might have chopped that we shouldn't have in the first place. That's the honest approach we have to take. Now, you're always taking a risk. That's the risk I think we need to take for the country today.

Because the reality is most laws today aren't made by Congress. They're made by unelected bureaucrats who write fiats with the stroke of a pen.

And those today historically have carried the force of law. Now, the idea is some of those people, can't they be fired by those who you elect? Not really. The way the system at least has historically worked, according to interpretations, these civil service rules stop you from firing four million of those federal bureaucrats. So you bring up DHS. You know, do we need mass deportations of millions of illegal aliens from this country? We do.

But my caution would be to don't forget the second mass deportation we also need, which is the mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C. And I think it's going to be the combination of those two mass deportations that help save the country.

That's I mean, one of the positions, one of the truths is that there are three branches of government, not four. There are three. And we've had a very helpful Supreme Court ruling on Chevron deference saying courts do not have to defer to what these agencies, these bureaucrats say the law is. That was a very helpful ruling. But that doesn't do anything about the staffers who continue to rule by fiat over us all. Let's talk about some of the other truths in Truths, the Future of America First.

What's the point of writing this book, Vivek? Why are you doing this now, defining the future of America First? Look, I think that there are a few different directions that America First can go. So one of the things I do expose, particularly in the beginning of the book, is that there are some intellectual rifts in our own movement that I think we're stronger for if we recognize on immigration, on trade.

Not so much in foreign policy, but immigration and trade in particular, right? Is it a protectionist objective or is it more of a libertarian objective? We don't touch on that too deeply, but I expose that in the book. But the real question is filling a deeper vacuum. What does the current conservative movement actually stand for? We've gotten very good at...

criticizing the other side, identifying what we're against, right? We're against wokeism and transgenderism and climatism and COVIDism. We're against the race, gender, sexuality, climate agenda. But what exactly do we stand for? And the thesis I offer in this book is we stand for truth, actually. That's what we believe. And the things that I lay out in this book

If I wrote him 10, 20, 30 years ago, I would tell you to save your money and not buy the book because the truths in this book are so obvious that it shouldn't require a book to actually justify them. Today, I'd give you the opposite warning is if you repeat many of the things that you do read in this book, you're going to be potentially taking real risk, risk of losing your job or your kids getting a bad grade in school because that's the cultural environment we live in today.

And so my goal in writing this was to arm a lot of everyday Americans with the hard facts and arguments to be able to have the dinner table conversations that they're otherwise not having. And I do think that's how we save the country, Megan, is all of us starting to speak openly again.

say in public what you'll say in private at the dinner table. This is my fourth book. I've written, this is my fourth book in the last four years, but I did things a little bit differently in this one. This book is not and does not pretend to be an academic exposition. At the end of every chapter, there's five hard truths

laying out five key facts out of that chapter that somebody can take with them to the dinner table on debates about the trans ideology to climate ideology, to whether nationalism is a bad word to the nuclear family, to arm people every day to probably state what their true beliefs really are, but with the benefit of what some of the facts are that this book helps them bring to those dinner table conversations. That's how I think we ultimately saved the country.

It's fun to read it in written form. It's also very fun to watch you debate it live. There was a viral clip of you with our pal Charlie Kirk at, I think, the University of Pittsburgh last week, where a young woman who, bless her heart, seemed...

a little confused on exactly why she's a Kamala Harris voter. And, and Charlie did some rhetorical battle with her. And then you did some, not battle, but had a back and forth with her. That was very interesting when there was an attempt to force her to say, what exactly is it about the Trump agenda that you don't like or the Kamala Harris agenda that you do? And here's just a bit of how that went. I disagree with, uh,

the, some of the laws that are being pushed in Congress that are against the LGBTQ community and the trans community. My view is that if you're a fully grown adult,

18 or above you're free to live how you want dress how you want marry who you want if you want if you're over the age of 18 I agree, but you are not free to indoctrinate children in schools who are not yet of the age of consent you are not free just as you're a 17 year old or 15 year old can't get a tattoo on their own I don't think that you should be able to go or

Until the age of 18, do we agree on the fact that adults should be able to live freely while still treating children differently? If so, we're on the same side of this issue. I agree with the majority of what you said. However, I don't think that you're understanding the implications of the laws that are trying to be passed. My only ask is forget the personal attacks or the stylistic attacks. Focus on substance. The more we debate that, the stronger we're going to be as a country.

So I don't know what platform it was that censored your use of the term chemical castration, but that's what you had said there, that we shouldn't be doing that to minors. This plays right into one of the themes of Truths, The Future of America First, which is there are two genders.

Right. And I think that what we see is when we talk about this across the country, most people actually share the same foundational value set on this and comments grounded in hard biological truth. So I sort of unpack a couple of the trans dilemmas that the transgender ideology poses, even for people who may have hard convictions and where they think their beliefs are. So there's two X chromosomes. You're a woman X and a Y you're a man.

But one of the mysteries here is it is the same LGBTQIA plus ideology that says the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born.

that now says your own biological sex is totally fluid over the course of your life. That's a paradox. It's a further paradox that actually there is no gay gene, but there are two sex chromosomes. So that's actually particularly an ironic case to say that the one that has no gene is the one that's fixed immutably at birth. But the one that has divinative chromosomes is the one that's totally fluid over the course of your life.

There's other contradictions we explore as well, which is the fact that on one hand, if you say that this is a disability or a mental health disorder, you're considered to be transphobic, that if a kid says that their gender doesn't match their biological sex, that that is an evidence of a mental health disorder. That's my belief. But to say that many people will label that transphobic.

At the same time that they will say it is transphobic not to have public health insurance pay for gender affirming care or actual gender conversion surgery because it qualifies under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So I try to go factually through the chapter in arming people at home with at least these hard facts to be able to have the open arguments at the dinner table that they're not having in public.

And one of the things I did in that chapter, Megan, is I closed it out with a personal story from the campaign that I hadn't shared before.

which is actually one instance where there was a, one of the embeds, one of the media embeds or the press embeds on our following our presidential campaign. Yeah. She would challenge me on this issue repeatedly in front of the camera. But one of the conversations we ended up having was actually off camera, but I could tell that it was really meaningful issue to her. It turns out she identified as, as non-binary. So I don't know if she would even object to me referring to her as she, I thought she was a woman and,

And, you know, she ended up it was a deeply personal conversation that we had where I actually got to understand from her own experience. When did she believe that she was of one gender versus the other? What that struggle was like a little bit about her family upbringing, some challenges she had overcome turned out to be one of the hardest working press embeds in our own press corps that was following us. Somebody I thought actually did a great and did her best to do an objective job.

I talk a little bit in that chapter of how we actually built a great personal relationship and bond over the course of the campaign, even though we disagree deeply on my own views or her views on the trans debate and what that means for policy. And I think that that's also one of the paths to unite the country, which is even on issues like this, I'm not going to compromise on standing for what I believe is true. OK, standing for truth.

But that still gives us the opportunity to build relationships with other people by saying that, you know, we're not going to build our relationship based on settling our difference of opinion on this question. But we can build a relationship based on still agreeing or even engaging on matters outside of this particular debate, which we otherwise decided was an irreconcilable difference. So that was one of my takeaways from the campaign. And she remains a personal friend.

Let's get real. Most of the trans community activists will not even speak to somebody like you because their position is you're trying to eliminate them as humans, that you don't recognize, quote, their right to exist. And

they don't. And that's because you won't stand behind the transing of kids in the medical community, minors who can't consent to these procedures. You won't consent to having this ideology thrust upon them in third grade, as was done to my two sons, first, the older at our old school. Like that's where the rubber really hits the road because that's where we're really going to have to fight.

It does. And I think the reality is that goes for trans activists, which is a tiny minority of a tiny overall minority. But what's happening in the country is we're not really suffering from a tyranny of the majority in the United States. We are suffering from a tyranny of the fringe minority.

And the dilemma is our constitution and our republic and the safeguards and the guardrails we have built into our legal system are really good at protecting against a democratic tyranny of the majority. There's nothing really there to safeguard against a cultural tyranny of the fringe minority. That's actually up to us. And, you know, one of the things I've learned, Megan, is that there's two approaches. I learned this over the course of my presidential campaign and observing, you know, other players in that arena as well, is that.

Sometimes what happens is that you have two levers you could pull. OK, one is going to have one country in the end. You're either going to compromise on core principle and policy, or you can actually take a more compromising approach on style without actually being compromising on principle or policy. One of the things I found is sometimes when we fall into the trap of actually going guns blazing on style, when push comes to shove, look at the Republican politicians in the end. Many of them do actually end up compromising on policy or principle in the end.

One of the things I'm trying to do both with this book and the way in which we're going to college campuses like the one you aired before across the country is to be able to engage in an affable manner with people who deeply disagree with us, but without compromising at all on the core principle of standing for objective truth.

So my goal here is not to arrive at a compromise position that, OK, well, maybe we're going to be OK with chemical intervention by the age of 15, but not with surgical intervention at the age of 12. And we call that a day. No, I don't think at the until you have the full age of consent, I don't think you should be able to undergo genital mutilation or chemical castration. And I'm able to say those words here. Hopefully somebody isn't silencing them out like that other tech platform did as we speak right now.

So I'm not going to compromise on the core views that I hold. And I think part of what I try to do in this book is to arm people with hard facts to be able to stay true to that. But

But at the same time, to remember that we're being strong enough to protect our kindness and we do care about kids who may be confused, who are going through a difficult period in their life where they may go through all kinds of psychological struggles, including the fact that they lose track of what they believe their gender is. That's a symptom of a deeper psychological issue that we have to have the compassion to also address.

And so one of the things – I just think we're going to be more successful if we're able to show the country that, yes, it is our inner kindness that we're fighting for, but we're not going to give an inch on truth or our core principles in getting there. I actually think we're going to have to make fewer compromises if we're able to –

stylistically reach people in a way that we otherwise aren't maybe doing the best possible job of. And that too is one of the things that I'm hoping to arm people with through this book is hard facts and arguments, but to be able to deliver them in a way that actually might make somebody take their earplugs out and to be able to just reach, not just the people who agree with us, but especially the people who don't or think they don't.

using our style as a way of opening it up rather than compromising on actual policies. That is definitely you these days. But I have to say, I see Trump, Bannon, and even myself more as

the front line next to Braveheart in that movie, you know, with shields in front and forward because there's really no talking to the people who have changed the laws on this. And it's not just the trans activists.

It's the lawmakers who bend the knee and people who feel like their whatever tax situation, their ability to hire illegals, whatever it is, is more important to them than what's happening to our children as a result of an open border, than what's happening to our children as a result of backing this ideology as though it's something. And those people must be defeated, defeated, not reasoned with. Am I wrong?

Yeah, of course. But I think that's a that is a it's an and. And I think the reality is if our process of defeating them causes us to actually miss the opportunity of bringing along, I think, the vast legions on the other side who aren't really against us but are lost. Then I think we also still lose the broader war of the country that we actually care to save and revive. The other thing I have seen, Megan, and I think this is worth calling out.

is that oftentimes when we do show up guns blazing, what happens in the end? Let's play that forward. We actually do end up compromising quite a bit on policy when push comes to shove. And so I'm proposing a different trade-off here. And this also, the book is called, in truth, The Future of America First. I think this too is part of the importance of the future of America first is I don't care about the appearance of appearing pugilistic. I care about achieving the actual goal in an uncompromising way.

So if you gave me the choice, I'm not saying it always has to be this choice. Yes, but I think sometimes actually it works against us. There's a time to inspire people on the importance, right, and on the importance of the issues and sometimes expressing your outrage over what's being done to our children is

you know, the castration of them and so on also can be effective. So I like, I think you need all different kinds of players in the movement and each has their own role. I've seen you be the other role. I was there. I mean, the second debate in the Republican primary, you were much more feisty and this one and everybody bought and paid for it.

And then I've seen you sort of change into somebody who talks more the way you're talking today. And I see it. It works for you. Well, I think we need it. You need all keys. You need the full you need the full. You know, I think we need leaders who can fight. We need leaders who can fight hard, unsparingly when necessary. One of the things I learned over the course of my campaign, the Megan, a lot of people who even worked for me or my companies in the past, colleagues, close friends, were

One of the things that they said they were disappointed about through the process and it landed with me is that they know I'm a fighter and I'm a competitor. And that's what the American people also got to see last year for me and through the debates and through much of the campaign. But there's also an element of me that's in addition to being a fighter, somebody who remembers what I'm actually fighting for strong enough to protect your kindness. And I think that.

We need leaders who actually can turn on both modes when the right time calls for it. And that's one of the things that I learned from the campaign, but also one of the things that I'm trying to do through this book is you won't see me at the end of a hard fight compromise on principle or policy in the end. And I think Republicans do it too much. But one of the things I've learned is we actually buy ourselves the latitude to hold the line.

when we're able to use multiple different modes of persuasion to get there. So that's one of the things I'm hoping to do through this book and in the future of hopefully doing my part to help save the country. All right, the book is called Truths, The Future of America First. Vivek, thank you so much for being here. Good to see you. Thank you, Maggie. Good talking to you as always.

I want to tell the audience that we're off tomorrow. I have a personal matter to tend to, but we'll be back on Wednesday with Nicole Shanahan, the now former running mate of RFKJ, making her very first appearance ever on this show. Really looking forward to speaking with her and we'll talk to you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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