Transcript: Joe Rogan Interviews Donald Trump

View Main Post

Joe Rogan: All right, we're rolling. Good to see you, sir. Here we go. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, I wanted to play this, but we decided we shouldn't play it because it could get copyright strike and we don't want to get the episode. We don't want anybody to have any sort of a way to get it down.
Donald Trump: Sure.
Joe Rogan: But it was the episode of you when you're on The View. And I think it was 2015 or 2016, like when you were running for president.
Donald Trump: Right.
Joe Rogan: And-
Donald Trump: You got introduced as our friend Donald Trump.
Joe Rogan: That's right. Whoopi Goldberg gives you a big hug and a kiss. Joy Behar gives you a big hug. Barbara Walters gives you a big hug. They all loved you. They were all talking about how you might be... You might be conservative in your financial positions, but you're very liberal socially. They were talking about you in such a favorable light. The audience was cheering. And then you actually started winning in the polls and then the machine started working towards you. But there's probably no one in history that I've ever seen that's been attacked the way you've been attacked and the way they've done it so coordinated and systematically. And when you see those same people in the past, very favorable to you, like Oprah, when you were on Oprah's show, she was encouraging you to be president.
Donald Trump: Last week I did one of her last shows, I think, maybe Thursday or Friday, that was a big deal, being on Oprah's show, the last one. And I was like one of the last shows in that final week. And I said, boy, we've come a long way since that.
Joe Rogan: What was it like?
Donald Trump: Well, the concept, it was really like two different lives. I had a very wonderful life, but I wanted to do this. The Apprentice was still going very strong. We had 12 seasons. And we had actually 14 seasons, 12 years over. They had a couple of them.
Joe Rogan: Well, they canceled The Apprentice when you were running for president, correct?
Donald Trump: No, they had Arnold Schwarzenegger do it. I was involved in that. And I had enough of it. And we did great. It was doing great. But they wanted me to stay. They all came to see me. They said, we're going to give you a contract. They wanted to extend my contract. Mark Burnett is a great guy. And they wanted to extend the contract. Mark said, you're crazy. Don't run, don't run. Nobody gives up prime time, they said. You know, it's one of those little things, which is probably true. Nobody gives up prime time, though, for being president?
Joe Rogan: For running, well, for running against 20-some odd people, you know.
Donald Trump: Turned out to be 18. 18 professional people, you know, mostly politicians. They said, who would do this? I mean, it's a long shot. Actually, the heads of NBC came over. Paul Telagny, all the top people came over to see me, try and talk me out of it because they wanted to have me extend. The Apprentice was doing well. So it was 14 seasons. It was 12 years. We had one, two seasons where we had a double, which rarely happens. It was just a hot show. And I said, you know, I want to do this. What happened is previously, like three years, four years before that, they did a poll. They had Mitt Romney and somehow they put me in a poll and I blew everybody away. I blew him away, which isn't that hard, frankly, but I blew everybody away. And I said, that's interesting because I never really gave it that much real thought. I thought about it, but never real thought. But I saw these polls were very good. And so I was thinking about doing it then, but I had a contract with The Apprentice, plus I was building two big buildings at the time, and I wanted to make sure they got finished up properly, and it was one of those things. The kids were just sort of getting involved. They're very capable kids, but they were getting involved early on. So I did that. I got them done. I had some very good successes. And I came on and then I thought about it for the next one after the Romney disaster. And I ran and I won against Hillary. And it was quite an experience. But it was a different life because you're right, the view. I was on the view many, many times. And they loved me.
Joe Rogan: Just the way people would talk. I mean, even if people had criticisms about you, people that didn't like you, there was always feuds and stuff like that. But the reality was the thing turned on you when they found out that you were going to be president. It was very coordinated. And some people are catching on to that now. There's a lot of people that were longtime Democrats like Elon and Bill Ackman and all these different, very intelligent people.
Donald Trump: And they support me now. Bill Ackman supports me. He's been very supportive too.
Joe Rogan: This is what I wanted to ask you. What was it like when you actually got in? Because nobody really can prepare you for that when you're running for president. You don't really know what it's going to be like when you actually get into office. What did you think it was going to be like?
Donald Trump: So do you mean in office or when I decided to run?
Joe Rogan: No, when you got in.
Donald Trump: So when I was in and won and was in the White House essentially.
Joe Rogan: Yes.
Donald Trump: Well, first of all, it was very surreal. It's very interesting. When I got shot, it wasn't surreal. That should have been surreal. When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on. I knew exactly where I was hit. They were saying you were hit all over the place because there was so much blood from the ear.
Joe Rogan: You would know that better than anyone. When they get the ear torn up.
Donald Trump: Ears bleed a lot. Anyway, so, and I was thinking the other day, when that happened, I really knew where I was. I knew exactly what happened. I said I wasn't hit anywhere else. With the presidency, it was a very surreal experience, okay?
Joe Rogan: What's day one like? You win. You get inaugurated. Holy shit, I'm the president.
Donald Trump: Yeah, that's what happened. So I'm driving down Pennsylvania Avenue. I just built a building on Pennsylvania. You know, the hotel, the old post office it was. We called it Trump National Park. It was a major thing. I got off really the first time I used Air Force One, landed. And we're coming down, and it was very beautiful. I mean, it was incredible. And we're going down Pennsylvania Avenue in the opposite direction. Normally you're used to going one way, and all of a sudden you're going the other way. The street was loaded up, and I wanted to go out, and I wanted to wave to everybody, but that wasn't smart. You know, the kid's a little bit dangerous, right? I mean, when you watch, like, Kennedy and some others, right? But I really felt, I don't know, the love was so crazy. And so I did get out of the car for a brief, you know, just for a very short walk. I thought it was very important to do. And Melania got out with her beautiful dress on that became sort of a staple. People loved it. And Barron and we're walking down the street. But where it really got...
Joe Rogan: Amazing.
Donald Trump: We get to the White House, and now it's a little bit before dark. Beautiful. And we went up to the president's quarters. They call them the presidential quarters. And I'm standing in this beautiful hallway. You know, it's funny. Nobody ever talks about the White House as being beautiful inside. You know, you think it's going to be everything's going to be all metal doors and stuff. It's not. It's so beautiful. I made my money largely on luxury. The hallway is like 25 feet wide. The ceiling heights are every it's so beautiful. But I was standing there and I said to the guys, I want to see the Lincoln bedroom. I had never seen the Lincoln bedroom. I'd heard about the Lincoln bedroom. And I was standing with my wife. I said, do you believe it? This is the Lincoln bedroom. I mean, it was like, it was amazing. Because it's, look, if you love the country, but here you are, the Lincoln bedroom. And the bed, you know, he was very tall. He was 6'6", which then would be like Barron. Would be like Barron Trump. He's 6'9". But 6'6", he was very tall. Then on top of that, he wore that.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, there it is. It's a long bed, elongated bed.
Donald Trump: And because very, you know, people were shorter than, you see some of the chairs are very, very low to the ground actually, but he had the long bed and they had, you had the Gettysburg Address right on that, right under that, you can't see it here, but right there, the original version of the Gettysburg Address. And this is the original, and I'm looking, and I just looked around, I said, do you believe this? Because I was never a, first of all, even if you were a politician, but I was never a politician, it just, I sort of just started, right? And all of a sudden I'm standing in the White House. And it was very, very surreal. That room was so beautiful to me, much more beautiful than it actually is. You know, to me, when I looked at the bed, and the bed, you could see it was a little bit longer, had to be a little bit longer. He lost his son and they suffered, the two of them suffered from melancholia. They didn't call it depression. They called it melancholia and they suffered from it. He was a very depressed guy and she was a very depressed woman, more so than him. And on top of that, they lost their son, whose name was Tad.
Joe Rogan: Tad.
Donald Trump: And it was just seeing it in the little pictures, the little tiny picture. I mean, you can't see the details there. Little tiny, everything in the web was a little tiny picture of Tad. Who he lost, and it was devastating. And he was, you know, he was, look he was in a war. And he was having a hard time because he couldn't beat Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee won like 13 battles in a row. And he was getting like a phobia, like a fighter. You know a lot about the fight stuff. But like I went to a UFC fight and it was a champion who was 14 and one about a year ago. You would know the names. 14 and one, and the only guy he lost to was this one guy, but the guy that he was fighting was like almost just an average fighter, lost numerous times, but he beat this one guy. So I said, okay.
Joe Rogan: I really don't know who you're talking about. I'm trying to.
Donald Trump: Okay. But about a year ago, but the point is that he lost, he wasn't nearly the fighter, but the one who was not nearly the fighter had beaten, he's the only guy that beat the champ like five years before. And I said, I'll take the guy that won the other fight. And that's what happened. He beat him a second time.
Joe Rogan: Sometimes psychological advantages.
Donald Trump: Yeah, it was this crazy thing. Lincoln had a, I don't know, I've never read this. I heard it from people in the White House who really understand what was going on with the whole life of the White House. But Lincoln had the yips about, in a way, as the golfers would say. He had a phobia about Robert E. Lee. He said, I can't beat Robert. Because Robert E. Lee won many battles in a row. He was just beating the hell out of them. You know, they tried to get Robert E. Lee to be on the North. But he said, no, I have to be with my state. You know, the state was his whole thing. And he went to the South. And he was, I've had generals tell me, we have some great generals, the real generals, not the ones you see on television, the ones that beat ISIS with me. We defeated ISIS in record time. It was supposed to take years, and we did it in a matter of weeks. These are great generals. These are tough guys. These are not woke guys. But their favorite general in terms of genius was Robert E. Lee.
Joe Rogan: In terms of strategy?
Donald Trump: Strategically. He took a war that should have been over in a few days, and it was years of hell, a vicious war. So here I am standing there, and again, I had never really done this before. I ran, I ran a number of months before I won. I probably, I guess if you figure max it out, it would be a year, something like that, so I had never run for office. And I did well. I mean, I went into debates. We had 18 people, including me. And then slowly but surely, they started to disappear. We had debates, good debates. Everyone's aware of all this stuff.
Joe Rogan: What I want to get to is like, what was the experience once you got inside? What did you think it was going to be like in terms of like your ability to govern? Like this is your first experience governing anything. You've never been a governor. You've never been a mayor.
Donald Trump: Private stuff. Business.
Joe Rogan: Yeah. But now all of a sudden, you're inside the White House.
Donald Trump: The biggest thing was just that first moment of being in this hallowed, it was really a hallowed place to me. It was beyond, to me, that was the experience. It was a surreal experience. And then with time, that wears off. With time, it becomes your place where you stay. I was doing a lot of, I had two things today, really focused on governing the country and survival. Because from the moment I won, before I got to office, all of a sudden, they came down. I mean, nobody has ever been treated that way. And you see that. I mean, you see we're in the Washington Post very early on. They said, well, now the impeachment stuff starts. And it did. I mean, it literally started from the beginning. So I had survival and run the nation. I had a combination. Most people don't have the survival. They get in.
Joe Rogan: What did you expect, though, in terms of, like, once you got inside, you had to appoint all these people? How many appointments did you have to make?
Donald Trump: Well, you have actually 10,000 appointments now. They're different. You have big ones, and then they appoint 100 people and 200 people.
Joe Rogan: Right.
Donald Trump: But the president really is involved with approximately 10,000 appointments. So you'll appoint a secretary of state and he or she will appoint a lot of people. So it's a lot. But in terms of major ones, you probably have like a hundred, but they're big ones. Treasury, state.
Joe Rogan: And how did you know who to appoint?
Donald Trump: Well, I didn't. I had no experience. I was there 17 times in Washington, and I never stayed over. According to the press, which I think is probably right, over the years, I was only there 17 times. I never stayed over. So now I'm sitting there, I'm saying, this place is gorgeous, but you know, I don't know anybody. It's like you, you go to certain areas and other areas, they may be great, Washington was great, Washington's not so great right now, we gotta fix it, we gotta make it better. Very dangerous place, very badly maintained place. We're going to make it great. We're going to make it better. We're going to bring it back. But I wasn't a Washington guy. I was a New York guy. I was a New York builder and I built buildings in New York and I knew that whole world, but I didn't know the Washington world too well. And all of a sudden you're supposed to be appointing top people.
Joe Rogan: So what did you think it was going to be like versus like, did you have any ideas of what it was going to be like and what was different?
Donald Trump: Well, I was always involved in politics, but usually from the standpoint of a donor. I was a donor. I was a big donor. I gave money to politicians. I enjoyed politics.
Joe Rogan: Mostly Democrats, right?
Donald Trump: Both, really, pretty much both. I actually have pictures of Ronald Reagan in me when I was very young.
Joe Rogan: You were a Democrat until like what year?
Donald Trump: I was a Democrat. I could get you the exact, but the early 90s, the early 90s, I switched over eventually. Actually, they had a reform party. I was thinking about doing that for a little while, but then fortunately I didn't because it's very hard. You know, it's a two-party system. And anytime you hear third party, I know you like RFK Jr. and so do I. He's a fantastic guy.
Joe Rogan: I do, but I thought that being an independent was nonsense. It doesn't work.
Donald Trump: It doesn't work because even if you do great, you're not going to get Congress. In other words, you need now to say, okay, now I'll get half of Congress. They're never going to vote for you. So even if you got there, which is very hard, and I know how you feel about Bobby, and I feel the same way, and he's now with us, but it's pure and simple, it's a two-party system. And somebody, I won't mention his name, but somebody spent $250 million trying to get the nomination as a Reform Party candidate or whatever, and they got just nowhere. You just get eaten, the system eats you alive. So it was really somebody that not only was new to Washington, but was new to politics. So in the office of the presidency, over the years, all those presidents, you've had 92% were politicians and 8% were generals. General Eisenhower, General Washington, right? General George Washington, you had generals. So it's 8%, no admirals, 8% generals. And 92% politicians, you know, they're politicians and they go on. So they never had a business guy or they never had a guy that wasn't elected to an office. They were all, like Ronald Reagan was really, he was a movie actor, but he became the governor of California for, I think two terms, and then he ran.
So you'd never had a thing like this. But I, you know, in terms of me, and sometimes I'd use it as an excuse, and I don't like having excuses actually, but I'd use it as an excuse. I had to rely on people that I respected or liked, but that I didn't know that well because I didn't know them that well. Some of those people I campaigned against because, you know, when you have 18 people, we had mostly politicians running in the election, you know, running in the primaries. And they got knocked out one by one. But I got to like some of them. Some of them I didn't like at all. I don't like them now. And I rely on them and I'd rely on other people. So all of a sudden people would come in. I'd like to recommend so-and-so to be secretary of state. And I'd have three, four people recommend. One thing I can tell you, Joe, everybody wants the position.
Joe Rogan: Of course.
Donald Trump: No, no, but sometimes I'll hear, a lot of people don't want to work with Trump because Trump is tough to work with, et cetera. Let me tell you, everybody wants to be any one of these positions. They'd die for it.
Joe Rogan: Of course.
Donald Trump: Now, they don't want to be known. I mean, there's a particular guy, in New York, primarily, very big, very big, very successful, very strong, very political, although he's not a politician. He'd give anything to be Secretary of State, but if they ask him, no, I don't think I would do it, but in the meantime, begging for it, okay, begging. Everybody, look, everybody wants it. By the way, no matter what you do, but it's very dangerous to pick somebody outside of a politician because a politician's been basically vetted for years. You pick a business guy and they've never been vetted at all and they're the head of a big company or something, but they've never been vetted. You know nothing about his personal life, you know nothing about where he's been. When you put him in, it's a little bit dangerous because all of a sudden they get checked up and you hear things that you say, wow, this is not going to work out too well. So it's very dangerous. Picking people that are outside of politics is somewhat dangerous.
Joe Rogan: So you're kind of stuck in a position where you have to pick established people. And then the problem with established people is established people are already indoctrinated into the system. And they're stiffs in many cases. They're stiffs.
Donald Trump: They're stiffs. They're survivors. I find that, you know...
Joe Rogan: What do you mean by stiffs? When you say stiffs...
Donald Trump: They don't have nothing. They have nothing. Or... They're smart and survival. One little thing. So there was a congressman years before I ran, and I was very close to him. And I needed a license on something, and he was very important in getting the license. But it was a little bit controversial, the license, this particular thing that was being licensed. But I was close to this guy. And helped him and everything else. And I went to him, I said, I'd like to have your help. And he said, let me take a look at it. I said, ooh, that's not too good, but I really hope you're going to help. Anyway, he tapped me along for a long period of time and ultimately didn't do it. And I said, you are a stiff. You could have done this thing so easy, etc. But it was controversial. He was in Congress for many years, like 28 years. And you know, there's a reason when somebody's there for 28 years, you've got to be sort of smart. You know, you have all the scandals. And I realized he was a survivor. And so they never do anything controversial. They never take any chances or speak their opinion. It's outside of the...
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
Donald Trump: And yet I don't disrespect him for it. I actually respected the guy more in a certain way. Because he did survive. You know what? He's been there like for 28 years and he made it through. A lot of people don't make it through.
Joe Rogan: It's a good way for non-exceptional people to survive.
Donald Trump: Well, it is. It certainly is. So you're in there. You have 10,000 appointments you have to make. So you're getting advice from people. And at one point in time, did you have a moment in time where you realized, like, these are bad choices? Like, some of these people I shouldn't have had in there.
Donald Trump: Oh, yeah. I think so. The one question that you'll ask me that I think you'll ask me that people seem to ask, and I always come up with the same answer, is, the one mistake, because I had a lot of success, great economy, great everything. Everything was great. The military rebuilt it. Biggest tax cuts in history. All this stuff. We had a great presidency. Three Supreme Court justices. Most people get none. You know, you pick them young. This way they're there for 50 years, right? So even if a president is there for eight years, oftentimes they never have a chance. I had three. It was sort of the luck of the draw. But I will say that it always comes back to the same answer. The biggest mistake I made was I picked some great people, but you don't think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn't have picked. I picked a few people that I shouldn't have picked. And-
Joe Rogan: Neocons?
Donald Trump: Yeah, neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people, or-
Joe Rogan: People that were just bad.
Donald Trump: People that were into the-
Joe Rogan: Because you got bad advice.
Donald Trump: Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, you're reading about them a little bit today. A guy like Kelly, who was a bully, but a weak person. You know more about bullies than anybody probably around because you deal in a certain sport where the bullies are exposed very quickly. But you know, he's bad. Bolton was an idiot, but he was great for me because I'd go in with a guy like a John Bolton. You know John Bolton. A friend of mine called me up. I was picking Bolton. He's a very smart guy. His name is Phil Ruffin. He's a very rich guy from Las Vegas. He's a great card player. He doesn't play cards, but he's a great player. You know, he's just a natural. He got poker sense, right? You know, the good old poker sense. And Phil Ruffin is a very, very wise kind of a guy and one of the richest people around and has had great success and understands people. So it was in that I was picking Bolton, or I picked Bolton, he called up, he said, don't pick him. He's a bad guy. Now, he wasn't in politics at all. He's in various businesses. He said, he's a bad guy. It always works out bad with that guy. And I said, oh man, I wish you'd told me this two weeks ago. I already hired him, you know, he's here. And he was right, but he was good in a certain way. He's a nut job. And every time I had to deal with a country, when they saw this whack job standing behind me, they said, oh, man, Trump's going to go to war with us. He was with Bush when they went stupidly into the Middle East. They should have never done it. I used to say it as a civilian.
So I always got more publicity than other people. And I didn't. It wasn't like I was trying. In fact, I don't know exactly why. Maybe you can tell me.
Joe Rogan: Oh, I could definitely tell you. You said a lot of wild shit.
Donald Trump: Maybe. Maybe.
Joe Rogan: He said a lot of wild shit, and then CNN, in all their brilliance, by highlighting your wild shit, made you much more popular. And they boosted you in the polls because people were tired of someone talking in this bullshit, pre-prepared politician lingo. And even if they didn't agree with you, they at least knew whoever that guy is, that's him. That's really him. When you see certain people talk, certain people in the public eye, you don't know who they are. You have no idea who they are. It's very difficult to know. You see them in conversations. They have these preplanned answers. They say everything. It's very rehearsed. You never get to the meat of it. One of the beautiful things about you is that you freeball. You get out and you do these huge events, and you're just talking. We've highlighted you on the show many times. When he did this Biden impression where he's walking around, he doesn't know what he's doing. It's funny. It's stand-up. It's funny stuff. But it's like you, and you were making fun of Elon one time, you were doing an Elon impression. It's great. You have like comedic instincts. Like when you said to Hillary, you'd be in jail. Like that's great timing. But it's like that kind of stuff was unheard of as a politician. Like no one had done that. And I think-
Donald Trump: This is a very dangerous business, first of all. It's a very tough business. It's the most dangerous business.
Joe Rogan: Well, for a job?
Donald Trump: Yes. I mean, other than going to war and being a firefighter or being a cop, it's the most dangerous business. It's the most dangerous. Being president is the most dangerous.
Joe Rogan: Especially you. I mean, you haven't even got to the election. There's been two assassination attempts. And they've brushed those out of the news like it was nothing.
Donald Trump: Yeah, they'd rather not talk about them. Imagine if there was assassination attempts on Biden, how hard people would be attacking the right, how they would be trying to get guns taken away from people. They would try to ramp up gun laws. They would try to figure out some way to blame you. If there was attacks on Biden, if Biden got shot in the ear, we would have never heard the end of it. But I think he's in good shape because it's only consequential, presidents. If you take a look at what's happened, look. I'm for having countries pay us billions and billions and trillions even dollars. I took in hundreds of billions of dollars from China. Nobody took in 10 cents, not one other president. I do things that make it, I mean, that don't necessarily make me so popular. I just do what's right. And when you do that, you know, you're more, look at Iran. We would have never had the attack on Israel at all. Iran was broke. I told China, if you buy, you can't do business in the United States under any circumstances. I was going to-
Joe Rogan: We're going to go cold turkey with China.
Donald Trump: Some people think that would have been a good idea anyway. But if you buy any oil, one barrel of oil from them, you're not doing business. I say that to many countries. Iran was broke. They had no money for Hezbollah. They had no money for Hamas. But I make myself, you know, I mean, I understand what I'm doing.
Joe Rogan: You make yourself money.
Donald Trump: Yeah. Yeah. For a bull rider, I tell you, to me, these guys that ride the bulls is worse than UFC. These guys, you see these big monster bulls and you see it in slow motion where the foot is like, you know, an inch away from the head. If it hits him, the guy's gone. But they die, you know, they die.
Joe Rogan: So one-tenth of one percent die, is that what you're saying?
Donald Trump: Yeah, one-tenth of one percent die. And they certainly get hurt badly, really. I mean, they can't walk after a certain period of time. But with a president...
Joe Rogan: If you look at...
Donald Trump: The amount of assassination attempts.
Joe Rogan: And attempts, too.
Donald Trump: And attempts. No, it's a very dangerous position. I never thought of that, by the way, when I did it. You know, you don't tend to...
Joe Rogan: Do you just assume because people loved you on The Apprentice, they were going to love you as a president?
Donald Trump: Well, I figured it would be so easy. You know, it's very interesting.
Joe Rogan: Well, it probably would have been if the media didn't attack you the way they did. If they didn't conflate you with Hitler. I mean, even today, like... Kamala was talking about you and Hitler. They're going to take what you said about Robert E. Lee. Oh, Donald Trump wishes the South won. Oh, he loves Robert E. Lee.
Donald Trump: That's right. He loves Robert E. Lee. They love to take things out of context and distort things. But they don't even have to take them out. They make them up entirely.
Joe Rogan: They do that, too. But, you know, it's interesting when you mentioned the... I was very popular, and all those people loved me. I mean, some of these women, they're so... They're so stupid. And Joy, every time she'd see me, like I'd be in the theater or something, and she'd say, you have to be on the show again. Come on, come on, let's go.
Donald Trump: She loved you.
Joe Rogan: She loved me. That episode. By the way, Whoopi. People should watch that episode just to see what we're talking about. Like I said, we don't want to get a copyright strike, so we're not going to put it up. But if you watch the episode, it's bananas. It's like an alternative universe. And it's only nine years ago.
Donald Trump: Whoopi loved me.
Joe Rogan: Loved you. Gives you a hug and a kiss. And how about that other one, the new one on there, the one from my administration? She writes me a letter. You're the greatest president. She leaves. You know, she worked as like an assistant press secretary. I hardly knew her. But she leaves and she writes me this gorgeous letter.
Joe Rogan: What's her name?
Donald Trump: She was... I don't even know. Anyway, she was in the administration. She's on there currently. Sits in the far right-hand side, whatever the hell her name is. And she writes a letter, the most beautiful letter. She's quoted in the paper. He's a consequential, he was the greatest president, blah, blah, blah. Then all of a sudden she goes in the view and she starts hitting the hell out of me. Because they won't hire her unless... I've had many people go on CNN and they call and say, I don't know what to do. They want to pay me a lot, but I have to be negative on you. I said, be negative. That's okay. There are guys on, like CNN, they won't hire them. Sean Duffy is a, you know, congressman, and he retired. He got a good job with CNN, but he was only positive about Trump. So they kept him, but they would never put him on. I mean, I respect what he did. He could have gone negative. I tell people, go negative. Let my friends make the money.
Joe Rogan: It's so crooked. The press is so crooked.
Donald Trump: It's crooked, but it's also they're diminishing themselves. They're hurting themselves. They're killing all their credibility, and it's opening up the credibility to new media. It's opening up the credibility to independent media.
Joe Rogan: The worst I've ever seen, though? And I've seen the worst. I mean, I've been a part of it. I've seen the worst. Kamala goes on 60 Minutes, gave an answer that a child wouldn't give. It was so bad. And 60 Minutes took the answer out. They took the whole... And they put another answer in. They edited it deceptively.
Donald Trump: Which didn't make sense either, but it was better. They took the... Well, it wasn't editing. It was fraud. This was not editing. Editing is where I'll give an answer and they'll take a couple of words and change them around. Or they might even take a sentence or two off, which is very bad. But that's...
Joe Rogan: It's sort of bad.
Donald Trump: You know, I'd give an answer, which was a very good answer. I always talk about, you know, I like to give long the weave.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, you like to weave things in.
Donald Trump: But when you do the weaves, and you have to be very smart to do weaves, when you do the weave, look at this, just in this one thing, we're talking about little pieces all over here, but it always ends up, no, no, it comes back home for the right people. For the wrong people, it doesn't come back home and they end up in the wilderness, right? But they can take my answer. And you know what, they may take a little piece of it out or something. And they use the term, yes, we want to save time. Well, it's not, but I've never heard. I think it's the biggest scandal in broadcast history, what happened to CBS. So you have CBS 60 Minutes, that's a news program, it's not an entertainment program. It's under their news, it's the head of their news thing. She gives an answer that was, that shows that she's essentially incompetent. And they took the answer. Could you imagine them doing that for me?
Joe Rogan: We can show it if you want people to see it. Can we show it?
Donald Trump: Sure.
Joe Rogan: We get in trouble, we'll get copyright strike.
Donald Trump: Okay.
Joe Rogan: I'll indemnify you.
Donald Trump: But it's drastic.
Joe Rogan: But what was interesting was the other full version was available initially.
Donald Trump: It was like a preview.
Joe Rogan: Somebody made a big mistake.
Donald Trump: Somebody put that preview out there.
Joe Rogan: Some kid put the preview out.
Donald Trump: Exactly.
Joe Rogan: And then the bosses did this or that.
Donald Trump: And then all of a sudden they said, we got a problem.
Joe Rogan: Exactly.
Donald Trump: They got caught by mistake.
Joe Rogan: Well, don't you think that's a bit to me?
Donald Trump: And don't forget, this is election interference and fraud. And it's 60 minutes. It's their news division. So it's a big deal. They give those licenses out, Joe, for free. They should pay a fortune. They're worth a fortune. They give them out for free because they're using the public airwaves. With cable, you don't have that. Cable's different. But, you know, it's just a different deal. But with the networks, they give those licenses. They're worth billions of dollars. They give them out free. But you have to be honest and all. That was bad.
I think that David Muir and that woman that was a site, I never even heard of her, but they kept interrupting me. It was like, I said, how many people am I debating here? I got this one and I got you two. But he went after me 11 different times. You know, it's interesting. I always thought he was a nice guy, but he's just like the rest of them, you know?
Joe Rogan: Well, that's his job, unfortunately.
Donald Trump: No, but not when they're wrong.
Joe Rogan: You're right. Well, the problem was they fact-checked you and they didn't fact-check her. And one of the most egregious examples of that was when she said that there are no troops right now deployed in war zones. There's a very famous viral video that went online of troops in a war zone saying, well, what the fuck are we then? Because there's thousands of them. Dan Crenshaw said...
Donald Trump: The congressman posted on his Instagram all of the various examples of troops that are deployed, thousands and thousands of troops that are currently deployed.
Joe Rogan: Stupidly deployed.
Donald Trump: But the point is, if this is going to be an actual real debate and not a propaganda exercise, if it's going to be a real debate, you have to fact check everybody.
Joe Rogan: Like if someone says maybe she thought there was no, which is also a problem.
Donald Trump: So it's one of two things. It's either it was not true, it was a lie on purpose, which is terrible, or it was the opposite. It was ignorance, which is also terrible.
Joe Rogan: Well, Joe, when I said crime is soaring, he said, no, no, crime has gone down. I said, where did you hear that one? Crime has gone down. I mean, I'm debating with this guy.
Donald Trump: Well, there was amended FBI statistics that came out after that that showed the crime had gone up substantially. And by the way, the statistics were a fraud because when they put out the statistics, they didn't include some of the worst places. They didn't include some of the worst cities, some of the most deadly places. But when the real numbers came out, I turned out to be right.
Joe Rogan: You turned out to be right, but then there's another problem. Unreported crime is way up. Because people have lost, look, the morale that the police department has in a lot of these cities where they've done this defund the police bullshit. The morale of these poor cops, it's fucking horrible. It's the dumbest idea of all time. But what they've done is they've made these cops feel terrible. Like good cops. I think cops are just like everybody else. Most of them are great. It's like everybody else. But if you run into one carpenter and he does a shitty job in your house, you say carpenters fucking suck. But they don't suck. Most of them are great. And that's the key thing with cops. But the point is they did all of these things in this very foolish way. And these cops are suffering the consequences of it. And so subsequently what happens is a lot of crime is unreported. A lot of crime, like you call the cops, they're too busy. They can't even get to you. Or your house got broken into. Sorry. It doesn't even make a report. There's a lot of people that they just give up.
Donald Trump: It's so sad what's happened, and I'll tell you what, I go to police funerals, and we went to one in Long Island. I visited the family in Long Island, a very big deal. It's so dangerous, people don't realize. The car, dark windows, pull over. He's a gentleman, please pull over. Door opens, guy comes out firing. Even if they were allowed to pull out their gun, which they're not, they can't, you know, pull out their gun.
Joe Rogan: Do it in time, yeah.
Donald Trump: They still wouldn't have time. It's every cop's worst nightmare. They open a door, and he was killed, and his partner was hurt, he was killed, and you don't have, I mean, you don't even have an eighth of a second to think, and it is such a dangerous job. That in particular, think of it, you go up to a car, you don't know who's sitting there with a gun, and if they have a gun, you really don't have a chance. You're not allowed to have your gun out, by the way, they have very strict rules. So number one, but even if you could have your gun out, the door opens and bullets start firing out, and especially where they have the dark windows, where they have the darkened windows. It is such a dangerous profession, and it's very hard to get cops now because they're not given any backup.
Joe Rogan: And you're right. You know, they have like an eighth of a second to make a decision that's going to change their life. If they make the wrong decision, they're going to end up on the front page of every newspaper in the country and they're going to lose their house and their pension and their job and their wife is going to be gone and everything's going to be gone. And here's another thing that people don't talk about. How many of them have PTSD? Probably most of them. These guys are seeing people shot all the time. I've talked to a ton of cops about it. A lot of cops commit suicide. A lot of cops are deeply depressed. But we have to give them back their dignity. We just have to give them back.
Donald Trump: You said it so good. You never hear anybody say that. You're never going to have it perfect. You're going to have a bad apple. In everything, in every profession. But every time there's a bad apple, that gets massive publicity, and it taints everybody else.
Joe Rogan: But it's also this very irresponsible thing where people say, defund the police, get rid of the police. Even Kamala Harris was a part of that. It's a very stupid way to look at it. What you should do is fund the police. You should have better training. You should have cops that feel more appreciated. You should have something that helps mitigate this PTSD that all of them suffer through.
Donald Trump: That's right. She was a big part of Defund the Police. That was a big thing for her, Defund the Police, always Defund the Police.
Joe Rogan: It's a political idea, right?
Donald Trump: Yeah, but anybody with that political thought I don't think should be running for president, and I think people are getting wise to it. You know, we're doing pretty well. Now, I don't know. Maybe in a week from now, say, sorry about that. I was wrong. But we're leading everything. And I think we're going to have a very good election. But I tell people, because people are starting to get to know her. But she was defund the police. She was all these transgender operations. You know, if you wanted a sex change and you were in detention and you demanded a sex change, they would give you a sex change.
Joe Rogan: Well, the wildest one is this idea of giving free sex change to illegal immigrants.
Donald Trump: That's right.
Joe Rogan: In detention.
Donald Trump: That is the wildest thing.
Joe Rogan: Is that the biggest problem you have?
Donald Trump: You just walked here from Guatemala. You need to become a girl.
Joe Rogan: But she was in favor of it.
Donald Trump: So think of it. Now she changed. She changed 15 policies. In fact, I'm going to send her a MAGA cap. She stole your idea about no tax for tips.
Joe Rogan: I came up with this idea that honestly nobody ever heard of. Now, it took her two months, but you know what? All of a sudden...
Donald Trump: Well, it caught fire.
Joe Rogan: And she just put it into a little speech.
Donald Trump: Yeah, it became popular. I think we still have that issue. I think that issue is a good one for us. But no, we have a lot of good issues. You know, we had the other day, think of how simple some of these things are. We're trying to get cars built in the United States. Detroit has been really tough. It's been a disaster. They have a huge factory, a huge car auto plant being built by China in Mexico. Make cars, sell them in the United States, put everybody out of business, right? Here we go again. I said, if that plant is there when I'm president, I will put 100% or 200% tariffs on every car. They'll be unsaleable in the United States. And they just announced they're not going to build the plant because they think I'm going to win. Think of it. They're not going to build the plant. This was the biggest plant in the world. More than all of Michigan makes. That's how big. You know, this is what we're getting to. And I said, if that plan goes up, I want them to understand if I win, I'm going to tax those cars at the rate of 100 or 200% a piece so that you won't be able to sell them in the United States. They just announced they're not going to build the plan.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, I read this.
Donald Trump: I did a big favor for our country by doing that. And I'm not even there yet. To me, the most beautiful word, and I've said this for the last couple of weeks, in the dictionary today, is the word tariff. It's more beautiful than love. It's more beautiful than anything. It's the most beautiful word. This country can become rich with the proper use of tariffs.
Joe Rogan: Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs?
Donald Trump: Well, okay.
Joe Rogan: Are we serious about that?
Donald Trump: Yeah, sure. But why not? Because we, ready? Our country was the richest relatively in the 1880s and 1890s. A president who was assassinated named McKinley. He was the tariff king. He spoke beautifully of tariffs. His language was really beautiful. We will not allow the enemy to come in and take our jobs and take our factories and take our workers and take our families unless they pay a big price, and the big price is tariffs. And he'd speak like that, but he was right. And then around in the early 1900s, they switched over stupidly to, frankly, an income tax. And you know why? Because countries were putting a lot of pressure on America. We don't want to pay tariffs. Please don't. You know, they, believe me, they control our politicians. If you look at the kind of numbers that these guys make then and now. But we had a commission meeting in the, I think it was 1887. Think of this problem. We were so rich. We had so much money. We didn't know what to do. So they set up a blue ribbon commission on tariffs. And the sole purpose is what to do with all the money we had. We were so rich because we were taxing other people for coming in and taking our jobs. And China does it. That's what China did. If you want to open a factory and sell cars, if you build a factory here or have a factory, they don't take our cars. They wouldn't take our cars. But if you build a plant in China, you can do that. Elon did that. By the way, Elon is great. That guy is such a great guy.
Joe Rogan: I think you're a fan of Elon.
Donald Trump: He is from a different planet. He's the greatest guy. That rocket coming in. I told the story once or twice. So you may have heard it, because his speeches have been good. Did you see the one last night?
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
Donald Trump: 29,000 people. And the one the night before was the same thing. We are rocking and rolling. But Elon, and I'm talking to this very important guy, I say, wait a minute, I'm looking at something. The television's unmuted, right? And I see this rocket. It's all... Brown from the heat, you know, 10,000 degrees pouring down at thousands of miles an hour. And I see this thing, you know, it's like a 20-story building. And I say to this guy, he's an important guy. Wait a minute. Let me just put you down. Hold on. I got to see this. And I see this, and it's going to crash. I say, it's going to crash into the gantry. They call it a gantry. I said, oh man, that's going to be a disaster because it's starting to get very close. And then all of a sudden you see the flames in the bottom. And then boom, and then you see the two arms grab it.
Joe Rogan: Crazy.
Donald Trump: And I forgot the guy. I had him on the phone. No, I called Elon. I said, was that you? He said, that was me. And I said, who else can do that? He said, nobody, Russia can't do it. The United States, nobody can do it. You know, I set up Space Force, that was me. And that's the first time in 82 years that we opened another branch since the Air Force. And that's gonna be one of our most important things. But think of what Elon does. And he did one other thing that I never heard of it. It's Starlink. I went down to North Carolina, Georgia, the different places. I followed it right down. And they had no communication. The polls were all knocked down. And one of the guys in North Carolina said, could you do me a favor? Do you know Elon Musk? Yes. He endorsed me. By the way, he gave me the nicest endorsement, too. He said, the country's going to fail. You should do the same thing, Joe, because you cannot be voting for Kamala. Kamala, you're not a Kamala person. I know you. I've watched you. I know him better than he is. You know what? Without speaking to you, I think I know you maybe almost as well as your wife. I have watched you for so many years. You're not a Kamala person. You're a Khabib person, but you're not a Kamala person.
Joe Rogan: Nobody's going to know who Khabib is, but he was not bad, right?
Donald Trump: Oh, he was phenomenal. But that's your kind of person. Your weave is getting wide. We're getting wide with this weave.
Joe Rogan: I want to bring it back to tariffs. But wait, before we finish with tariffs, so they said, could you get him? We need Starlink. And I call Elon. He got it for him so fast, saved so many lives. And I said, how was it? They said, better than the wires. You know, they couldn't put them in. They were all gone.
Donald Trump: I used it recently in Utah in the mountains.
Joe Rogan: Did you find it good?
Donald Trump: Oh, it's phenomenal. It's the size of an iPad. You just set it down on the ground, you get high-speed internet. It's incredible. We're spending, just to show you, we're spending a trillion dollars to get cables all over the country, right? Up to upstate areas. We have like two farms and they're spending millions of dollars to advocate.
Joe Rogan: Well, talk about the $42 billion that was wasted on this internet access program. They didn't get anybody access to internet. They haven't hooked up one person. Not one person. They spent $42 billion. They could have gotten Starlinks to everybody with that kind of money.
Donald Trump: For almost nothing.
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
Donald Trump: For a monthly charge. And it would have been incredible. And it's high-speed internet everywhere you want to go. And he wanted to do that. And he wanted to do it. How about this? They built the charger stations, right, in the Midwest. They built eight of them. They cost $9 billion. That's like a gas pump, right? They built nine gas pumps, except electricity comes out. They spent $9 billion. Three of them don't work. The whole thing, there's so much waste.
Joe Rogan: I could sit here and tell you about things that there's so much waste, abuse, and fraud.
Donald Trump: Oh, there's, yeah, I'm sure. I mean, I think everybody's aware of that now. Let's get back to tariffs. When you're talking about, one of the criticisms of your administration was with tax cuts and with tariffs, you increase the deficit. What was the strategy behind that? And did you think it was gonna increase the deficit by a substantial amount?
Joe Rogan: We were ready to rock. I had a bad system. We had horrible tax policy. I made it great. With a much lower tax rate. So I took it from almost 40% down to 21%. Now I'm bringing it from 21 down to 15, but only if you make your product in the United States, which is great. People call me, they said, what a great idea. Nobody ever heard of that before. I don't care if they make the product in Japan. Why should I give them? So it's a 21. At 21, in the first year, we took in much more revenue than we did at almost 40. Think of that. It inspired, now we had other things too. We were able to get people to bring back their money. You couldn't bring back your money. If you had money in Europe, like Apple. Apple had many billions of dollars outside. There was no way to bring it back in. The bureaucracy, the documents, the whole thing. And also the tax was too high. They wanted like half of it or something. Nobody's gonna do that. So they leave their money in Japan and they spend their money there. That was part of what I did. The money came pouring back in. Apple took in hundreds of billions of dollars. They brought it back from overseas. They brought it in.
Joe Rogan: So how does the deficit increase because of that?
Donald Trump: So what happened is this. We were ready to rock and roll, and then we had the COVID thing, and we had to focus on that. And if we didn't give some businesses a hand, you would have had a depression like in 1929. But we were ready to start. We would have very shortly been paying off debt. You know, we have $35 trillion in debt. And I'll never forget it. It was talking about from the standpoint of being in office. I'm in the Oval Office, and I have John McLaughlin and Fabrizio, the two very good pollsters, probably, I don't know, I would say the two best, who knows, but very good pollsters. And we're starting to think about running for a second term. And we had the greatest economy in history. Never has there been an economy like this.
Joe Rogan: And you attribute that to lowering taxes and tariffs.
Donald Trump: Two things. And also I cut regulations more than anybody else. And I asked many of the businessmen from the big companies, the guys running the big companies, I'd say, so if you had your choice, you've had it now for a long time, what's more important to you, the tax cuts, you paid less tax, or the regulation cuts? Every one of them said the regulation cuts meant more. Who would think that, right? Because you don't equate it to dollars, but it actually is more dollars. We had it going, and then we just had to focus on something else. But they were sitting there, these two pollsters were sitting there, and they said, sir, if George Washington came back and Abraham Lincoln was his VP, as opposed to Waltz, how bad is he, by the way? But if Abraham Lincoln was his VP, they couldn't beat you. You have a... And I'll never forget it. The following day, they said, something's happening in China, sir. Could we meet? I said, what's happening? People are dying. And it was all around the Wuhan lab, by the way. There are pictures with little lines, their body bags, all around the...
Joe Rogan: The Wuhan lab.
Donald Trump: And I always said that from the beginning, Joe. They tried to say, first they said it was France and they blamed everybody. But then they say it was bats from a cave 2,000 miles away. So we got hit with that. And despite that, we had the best economy. And when I gave it over, the stock market was higher than it was pre-COVID. I mean, nobody could even believe it. But we saved it. And we were helping businesses. They were dying. You know, they were dying.
Joe Rogan: So it's your belief that if you had a second term, given the policies in place, the way the economy was booming, that you would have been able to pay off a lot of the debt. And that was the strategy.
Donald Trump: If we didn't have COVID... We would have been paying off debt, and we would have had, and don't forget, by growth, the word growth is actually more important in a way, because you could have the same debt, but if you doubled your growth, all of a sudden you're under levered. But still, we should pay off debt. You know, if you viewed this, $35 trillion right now. It's a lot. But if you look at the asset value, if you look at it purely as an asset value, we have oil underground, we have water, we have mountains. I mean, the assets are so enormous. But regardless of that, we've got $35 trillion in debt. We should pay it off. And we would have started paying off debt and probably even given further tax reductions. I want to get it down to 15%. We're going to do more business. But when you get hit with a COVID, everything stops and you have to keep these businesses alive. The businesses were dying. I mean, they were just dying. This whole place, this country was going to die.
Joe Rogan: Are there influences outside of environmental that keep people from wanting to drill for oil and frack and do those sort of things outside of the environmental concerns, which are legitimate, of course, but are there other influences that may be over accentuate or over exaggerate these environmental effects? Are people being influenced in a way where they're trying to keep us from producing American oil?
Donald Trump: Yeah. So the environmental is the biggest tool for stopping growth, the biggest tool. The other is regulation. And if you speak to Elon, he said the regulation now to send a rocket up to anywhere, even if you do everything, it's almost, it's becoming impossible. But they use environmental in order to get people not to do anything. And sometimes I say, you know, I look at some of the, I know the environmental stuff better because I had to build buildings in New York. I had to do environmental impact studies. And I would see some of these guys that I'd hire for a lot of money, environmentalists that would get you through the process, and they'd be up in Albany, that's the capital of New York, and they're up there trying to make it tougher for guys like me that were builders because they'd get paid more money. In other words...
Joe Rogan: I had one guy, highly recommended. You know, I was good at getting permits. I was one of the kings of, I was always very good. But the environmental stuff was always horrible. They could slow a project down 10 years, 15 years. I had a project in Louisiana, big LNG plant. It was, for 14 years, it was gonna cost $18 billion, one of the biggest, like the Empire State Building, laying down on its side times four. Massive, on the coast, on the Gulf Coast. And they said, sir, they're gonna give it up. I said, they shouldn't give it up. What's the problem? They can't get their environmental. They had environmental permits that would fill this whole room up to the ceiling. And they said there was one mistake on one little line. They want him to do it all over again. I said, it's not gonna happen. And I got them their permit instantly. And they built the plant. It's massive.
Donald Trump: So when you're saying that there's people that are making money by making it difficult, are you talking about lawyers?
Joe Rogan: No, I'm talking about environmental consultants and lawyers.
Donald Trump: Environmental consultants profit off of dragging out the process.
Joe Rogan: Absolutely.
Donald Trump: And how do they profit?
Joe Rogan: And they make the process worse.
Donald Trump: How do they profit off that?
Joe Rogan: And I'd probably do the same thing about them, to be honest with you. As a businessman. You know, I want to be honest with you.
Donald Trump: How do they do that? How do they make it?
Joe Rogan: Let's say New York, they go to Albany. Okay. And they convince people that if you have a certain type of plant on the ground that's this big and... In theory, valueless, that it's a rare plant and you cannot even touch it. You can't go near it. You can't put a building on it. You can't do anything. Or there's a little puddle and they call it a lake. And you have to go by the standards of a lake. I said, no, no, that's a puddle. Oh, you have no idea. Guys are filling a little puddle. You have no idea what they do. And they use it as a way to stop you. They use it as a way to stop you and also as a way to generate money.
Donald Trump: I'm curious how they're generating money that way, though.
Joe Rogan: Well, they get fees. They get fees. Massive fees. And people rely on them as experts because they're the people that they go to when they have to run these studies in the first place. But some of them are just bad guys, and they're trying to make it more and more difficult. And they have a lot of power.
Donald Trump: Yeah, I think they maybe had more. They didn't have as much with me because I would get through them. And I understood it. Look, I've done so many, they call it environmental impact study. I did so much to build a building. To build a building in New York is very tough. You gotta deal with, think of it, financing, unions, all the municipal stuff, environmental. Of all of it, to me, the toughest thing was the environmental. Because they could stop you cold with the environmental impact study stuff. And you hire a so-called expert. They say, sir, he's the one guy. He can get you through the morass. It's a morass. It's horrible. They use it as a weapon. They use it all over the country.
Joe Rogan: But there are legitimate concerns about environmental impact. Correct? Look about the BP oil spill. There's a lot of things that do happen that are environmentally devastating. And you want to mitigate that as much as possible.
Donald Trump: You do. Look, during our four years, we had the cleanest air and the cleanest water. I view it differently. I say air. And water. Remember this. It costs much more to do things environmentally clean. China doesn't do anything. When Kerry goes to see President Xi at China, which he probably doesn't even get to see him, but they look at him, oh, yes, yes, we will do, oh, yes, yes, we're going to do that. No more coal, no more coal. And then they approve 58 coal plants for the next, you know, every, they build a coal plant a week. Okay. They build a lot of coal plants. We've covered that. But let me just say though, so here we are cleaning and scrubbing everything and everything's got to, and the air's got to be pure. But in 3.8 days, that stuff floating over China is right over the top of us.
Joe Rogan: Right.
Donald Trump: Same thing with the oceans. They dump their garbage into the Pacific Ocean. If you take a little cork and put it there, in about a week and a half, it'll be in front of Los Angeles. We're picking up their garbage. So nobody ever talks about that. But in a way, the bigger one is even the air. It's the currents. It's an amazing thing. It's been flowing that way for a million years, or long before we were there.
Joe Rogan: We share air with the whole world. We get the Sahara dust clouds over here.
Donald Trump: Absolutely.
Joe Rogan: We get dust clouds in Austin from the Sahara Desert.
Donald Trump: But we get the China, you know, they call it the China curse. We get the China curse. They're bad and their air is dirty. You know, when I went there, I had a great relationship with President Xi. We got along very well. And they treated me better than anybody's ever been treated. Same thing with Saudi Arabia, a number of them. But they laid it out. And I said, this air is good. Do you know, they closed every factory one week before I got there from within 200 miles.
Joe Rogan: That's like what Gavin Newsom did when Xi Jinping came to San Francisco. He cleaned it up.
Donald Trump: He cleaned it up. He got rid of all the homeless people. Isn't that terrible in a way to think, you know? He cleaned it up and then it became a pigsty.
Joe Rogan: Well, the dumbest thing is he said when your friends come by, when you have visitors, you clean up your house. Like, how about just keep your fucking house clean?
Donald Trump: Can you imagine? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard anybody say ever as a governor as to excuse to why you finally cleaned up your homeless problem. And the day he left, it went right back. But in a way, that was a bad thing that he did because he showed what a disgrace that was. What a disgrace.
Joe Rogan: Well, this is the thing that shows you how foolish a lot of these people that are running these cities think, a lot of these people that are running these states think. It's foolish. You're insulting the intelligence of the people that live in that city that are impacted by these people just camping and needles and human feces. There's an app that you can buy. There's an app that you can get, rather, that will show you where the human feces has been documented in San Francisco. It's a poo app. And it's just everywhere. It's just bum crap everywhere.
Donald Trump: But let me give you one that you may not know. Okay. Which I think you know everything, actually.
Joe Rogan: That's not true.
Donald Trump: As a student of yours. But water. You know in Los Angeles you can't get proper amounts of water. Right. And it's unbelievably expensive. And you might have a house in Beverly Hills and they're actually thinking about rationing water. Can you believe it? And I was in the farm court country with some of the congressmen. We're driving up the highway. And I say, how come all this land is so barren? It's farmland and it looked terrible. It was just brown and bad. I said, but there's always that little corner that's so green and beautiful. They said, we have no water. I said, do you have a drought? No, we don't have a drought. I said, why don't you have no water? Because the water isn't allowed to flow down. It's got a natural flow from Canada all the way up north. More water than they could ever use. And in order to protect a tiny little fish...
Joe Rogan: Thank you very much.
Donald Trump: Idaho for a potato, right? But these, they're just, by the way, some land is good for a potato, some land is good for corn. It's the craziest thing. I love the farmers, they're great. They're the greatest. And by the way, they're getting killed right now. They're getting killed because of this stupid administration. So I see this, and I said, you've got to be kidding. I said, you mean you have water? And I looked at it. It's like a valve in your sink, except it's massive. The thing's five times taller than your ceiling.
Joe Rogan: Did you know the center of California was a giant lake?
Donald Trump: They have so much water.
Joe Rogan: You ever see what it looked like before they rerouted it?
Donald Trump: No, I never saw that, no.
Joe Rogan: The center of California, like, what is it, 200 years ago? How long ago did they do that, Jamie? The center of California had a fucking enormous lake in the middle of California.
Donald Trump: So they dumped it into the Pacific.
Joe Rogan: Who knows what they did, but whatever foolishness that they did led to the situation that they're in now.
Donald Trump: Think of those dry forests that burned down all over. You know, the head of Austria said, you know...
Joe Rogan: It's a freshwater lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley, United States. Historically, Tulare Lake was one of the largest freshwater lakes west of Mississippi. Show a photo of what it looked like back then. It's a great system. So that's what it looked like. Look at that image. Go to the one on the third from the right. Yeah. Yeah. That was an enormous lake in the middle of California. Imagine that. That'd be much more valuable property.
Donald Trump: How crazy is that?
Joe Rogan: But how crazy is that? That's what it used to look like, and human beings screwed that up.
Donald Trump: No, they let it go into the Pacific, and then they did something. I don't know what they did.
Joe Rogan: What did they do? How did it go missing?
Donald Trump: It said they drained it in 83.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, they drained it.
Donald Trump: 19?
Joe Rogan: Yeah. 1983, oh my God.
Donald Trump: It went dry a handful of times.
Joe Rogan: Oh, went dry a handful of times.
Donald Trump: Well, you know, lakes do go dry, but that's a big one. But think of it, you could have all of the water you need, all of that land would have more water, the whole thing could be like that little patch. Literally, I'd say, I was with Devin Noon as a congressman, and other congressmen were going up, I was visiting that because they asked me to go up and visit their territory, and I did. But I kept saying, look at this land. It's beautiful, but it's so dry. And I thought they were going through like a desert, like a drought. They said, no, we have water, but it gets real. So I looked into it. And I got it done. I got it done. I could have water for all of that land. Water for your forests. You know, your forests are dry as a bone, okay? Dangerous.
Joe Rogan: That water could be routed.
Donald Trump: You know, you could have everything.
Joe Rogan: Not only dangerous. Billions of dollars a year they spend on forest fires. And, you know, there's a case with the environment. They're not allowed to rake their forests because you're not allowed to touch it. When a tree falls down, after 18 months it becomes very dry. It's like, you know, like real firewood. It's bad. You know, a tree that's up. These are all things I...
Donald Trump: Learned the hard way, the easy way. But when a tree is up, it sucks water. It's wet. I went to that. They had a couple of horrible forest fires in California. And I went, I said, you know, you had a lot of trees standing. Yes, they were healthy trees here. I said, with this intense heat that you could see, they were charred a little bit on the bottom, but they were going to be all right because they're soaking wet because they suck up the water.
Joe Rogan: Right.
Donald Trump: But when they fall, they're like, you know, it's like lighting a match. And you've got to be able to clean. They call it maintain your forest. So I was with the head of Austria. He said, you know, it's a shame. I see all those forest fires in California. And all they have to do is clean their forest, meaning rake it up, get rid of the leaves, get rid of, you know, leaves that are sitting there for five years.
Joe Rogan: We'll certainly get rid of the dead fall.
Donald Trump: And get rid of the trees that have fallen or like... So many things this country... By the way, I had it all done.
Joe Rogan: Could you really rake the whole forest, though? I don't think you could rake the whole forest. I think you can get rid of the deadfall, but raking all the leaves... You could certainly get rid of the dead, okay?
Donald Trump: Yeah, I think that's the real issue, the deadfall. You know, environmentally, they don't want to do that. They said, you know, it's got to be nature and all this stuff. But in the meantime, this is exactly... But you could have... It was the Department of Commerce that needed the approvals, but Gavin Newsom had to sign them. I got it all done. Nobody could believe it. It was all done. I said, I got it. You got so much water. All you have to do is sign. And that guy didn't want to sign.
Joe Rogan: Did he not want to sign because that would be a political victory for you?
Donald Trump: No, I don't think so. You know, he used to say he's a great president and we got along. We did. We actually got along at that point. But I think somebody said you just can't continue to call him a great president. They do say that. But we had it all done. He didn't sign. And then we got on to other things. And every time I go to California, he said, you have so much water. They don't know it. I'm telling you, people living in Beverly Hills, they turn off the water. Same thing with the electric. They want to go to all electric cars, but they have brownouts every weekend.
Joe Rogan: Well, right after they made the announcement that as of 2035, you're not going to be able to buy an internal combustion engine in California. Within a month, they had some announcement asking people to not charge their Teslas. Because the grid couldn't handle it.
Donald Trump: I will terminate the mandate immediately. That will be done, I would say, in my first day, maybe two days.
Joe Rogan: Let me ask you about nuclear. One of the things that when I've talked to people that have a real understanding of nuclear power, what their position is, it's probably the cleanest, safest form of electricity that we could generate.
Donald Trump: Thank you very much.
Joe Rogan: But it's a difficult political issue because you think nuclear power, you think Chernobyl. That's what everybody does. They have this connection. They have the potential disaster. Or Fukushima.
Donald Trump: Well, you're not supposed to enter the land for 3,000 years or something. I think it's worse than that. I think that area is going to be radioactive for probably longer than you can imagine. But the point is they're better at it now.
Joe Rogan: Right. We'll be right back.
Donald Trump: Well, we do, actually. It's being held. You know, we have certain areas where we have great raw earth material, and we're not allowed to use it because of the environment. And we have areas in California that have incredible raw earth, and they're not allowing, and I'm going to open it up. I'm going to let them use it.
Joe Rogan: But how do you do that? How do you do that and protect the environment?
Donald Trump: Because the environment's going to be protected. You can do it. You can make a lake out of it. Okay, we'll put back a lake. I mean, something nice about lakes. You can do things magnificently.
Joe Rogan: You just have to do it carefully and responsibly.
Donald Trump: Absolutely. You have to do it carefully. But the problem, you know, China has all of those areas, most of those areas. And yet when they say go electric with the cars, China is going to be the one that gives us the cars. All of those guys in Detroit are going to be out of business. You're going to make your electric cars over there. We have a thing called...
Joe Rogan: Gasoline.
Donald Trump: And we have more oil and gas under our feet than any other nation. You know, I had, in Alaska, there's a find. It's called Anwar. I got it approved. Reagan couldn't get it. Nobody could get it. I got it all done. It was amazing. They were getting ready to start drilling the equivalent, they think, of Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest finds in the world. It was all set to go. And Biden comes in. One of his first orders were, we're not going to use it. It would have been so good for them. We could have supplied all of Asia with oil and gas.
Joe Rogan: What was the negative? And you talk about money.
Donald Trump: Right. The negative was politically they didn't think it was good for them. That's all. That's all it was.
Joe Rogan: So you don't think that it's environmentally dangerous?
Donald Trump: Taking it from way down deep in the earth, environmentally it would have been fine.
Joe Rogan: So it can be done responsibly?
Donald Trump: Absolutely. Well, I think windmills, okay, so they talk about windmills. I think windmills are really disruptive. When you talk about the environment, they kill the birds. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill someday. That hasn't been cleaned out with all the bird carcasses. It's like massive amounts of birds.
Joe Rogan: Well, they're also a massive eyesore. I went to a ranch in South Texas. We had a drive past this enormous windmill farm, and it's gross. It's dystopian. You're looking in the left and the right, and all you see is these big spinning machines that aren't even that effective at generating electricity.
Donald Trump: Most expensive form of electricity is a windmill. And then they start to rust and rot.
Joe Rogan: And you have to replace them?
Donald Trump: And then they get abandoned by the people that built them.
Joe Rogan: Well, you have to get rid of all that material, too. When you replace those blades, now you have a problem because you have to dispose.
Donald Trump: Right. You have to dispose these enormous windmills. By the way, they say you can't bury them. So I even question that, but I'm not going to get into it. But they say you can't bury the blades. So you have the blades and you can't bury the blades.
Joe Rogan: You can bury the blades. It's not going to matter. You'll find areas you can bury.
Donald Trump: But they come up, this is what I mean, they come up with this, but the environmentalist dream is windmills everywhere. You know what happens to them? After five years they start to rot. After 10 years you have to replace them. Did you ever look at certain parts of California where they have heavy windmills and they've been abandoned? And they're all different manufacturers in all different companies.
Joe Rogan: I haven't seen that.
Donald Trump: It is the ugliest thing. It looks like a graveyard almost, a graveyard of windmills. It's pollution. It's so bad. And in the oceans.
Joe Rogan: It's no different than leaving garbage on the ground.
Donald Trump: How about in New Jersey, off the coast of New Jersey, they want to build. The people are going crazy not to build them. But we have them. The whales are washing up on shore. So in 50 years, they had one whale come ashore. Now they had like 18 come in the last year.
Joe Rogan: What is happening with the whales? I've read about this.
Donald Trump: Well, they say that the wind drives them crazy. You know, it's a vibration because you have those. You know, those things are 50-story buildings, some of them.
Joe Rogan: Right, and they're super sensitive to vibrations and sounds.
Donald Trump: You know, the wind is rushing, the things are blowing, it's a vibration, and it makes noise. You know what it is?
Joe Rogan: I want to be a whale psychiatrist.
Donald Trump: It drives the whales freaking crazy. And something happens with them. But for whatever reason, they're getting washed up on shore. And yet the environmentalists...
Joe Rogan: Conveniently ignored by the environmental people.
Donald Trump: Yeah, but the environmentalists, they don't talk about it. I think there's nothing uglier. I see it in Scotland, I see it all over the world. You have this beautiful valley. It's been there for, you know, in civilization, thousands of years, but millions of years. And all of a sudden, you have these ugly windmills up.
Joe Rogan: Would your plan to replace that with nuclear? What would you do?
Donald Trump: Well, nuclear is better. I mean, I think there's a little danger to nuclear. But, you know, we had some really bad nuclear. They did one in Alabama. They did one in, I think, South Carolina. They do them wrong. They build these massive things. Then the environmentalists get in. I don't want to go into a long story because it's too long for the show. This show is too valuable to talk about concrete. But they have hardened concrete. It's number 12 concrete. It's harder than steel. It's incredible. They put up a wall and an inspector comes along and goes, nope, nope, you're a quarter of an inch. The wall might be eight feet wide. You're a quarter of an inch too short. I'm sorry, you've got to rip down the wall because it's got to be poured contiguously, right? You're one quarter of an inch, I'm sorry, ripped down. You can't rip it down. This stuff, you can't put a hammer through it. It's incredible. Concrete technology is unbelievable, what's happened. You think of concrete.
Joe Rogan: So you think that's an example of over-regulation?
Donald Trump: Yeah, well, you have an inspector that comes along and he says, take down a $25 zillion wall. These things ended up costing $25 billion. And one of them never got opened. But here's the story, so... France does it. France is largely nuclear. And they build small, little, compact plants. And if they need more, they build the same thing and they hook it up and they hook it up because they get too big and too complex and too expensive. And it is very clean. They say it's absolute. You know, my uncle, I had a great uncle who was a great genius, just like other members of my family. But he was a professor at MIT for, I think, 41 years. He was the longest-serving. When I was in the White House, the head of MIT, Princeton, and Harvard came down to meet me. And the MIT person said, I have a book on your uncle, Dr. John Trump. He was our longest-serving professor. He was a great genius, sir. Do you know how? And he knew everything about nuclear. From math to chemistry to nuclear, he knew it. And he said, someday it's going to be the way to go, but the problem is it's so dangerous in terms of war. He said, Donald, someday, and this was a long time, Uncle John, Dr. John Trump, he said, someday you'll have a little satchel at your side and you'll go into a building and you'll be able to blow up New York City. I said, Uncle John, that'll never happen. He's right. You know, he's right.
Joe Rogan: Well, that was part of the problem with giving nuclear power to other countries, right? Like that was the problem that happened with India and Pakistan. They got nuclear power and then they were able to weaponize it.
Donald Trump: The biggest problem in the world today is not global warming. It's nuclear warming. And we have idiots that are negotiating for us. We have a guy that doesn't make it past 4 o'clock. And it's not because of age. You know, I know so many guys in their late 80s, and they're better than you. I said to one guy the other day, I think you're smarter than you were 25 years ago. I've known him a long time. He's 89 years old. He's sharp. I mean, he's great. Biden gives people a bad name because that's not an old. That's not an age. I think they say it because I'm three or four years younger. You know, I think that's why they say it. They say his age. It's not his age. He's got a problem. Two major brain surgeries.
Joe Rogan: He did. He did.
Donald Trump: Those are not good operations. And do you see what he did today? He went running towards the camera and made some apology to Native Americans. And he said that's why he's headed out west. Like he's off the reservation, so to speak, for lack of a better term. You know, it's interesting because during the debate, I was looking over, I'm saying, hmm, this is strange. It's just sort of like strange things were happening.
Joe Rogan: Yeah. Well, he couldn't keep it together, but do you think they knew he couldn't keep it together?
Donald Trump: I think so.
Joe Rogan: Do you think that they wanted, is that why, like historically that debate was earlier than they've been in the past, right?
Donald Trump: Yeah. I think they wanted to get... Well, there's a lot of theories. A lot of people said, do the debate now and we'll get him out.
Joe Rogan: Right. I think that maybe could be.
Donald Trump: Well, that is what happened. So it's logical to assume that that's what they wanted. I think they also said, do the debate now and get it over with.
Joe Rogan: Right. I don't think anybody thought he was going to get out, really. That didn't make any sense.
Donald Trump: The debate got him out, but I think it's very unfair. Look, you have a bad debate. His numbers went down. But I think she's not doing very well right now. And I think she looks...
Joe Rogan: Well, I want to get to that, too, because it's hard to know. Like the whole poll thing is very bizarre for most people because most people don't answer polls. So they read the polls. Were you ever called?
Donald Trump: I've never been polled. If I did, I'd hang up. I was never called by a poll system. If I did, I wouldn't answer. I'm busy. You know how polls are done? Oh, I'm going to get myself in trouble. So I really don't believe too much in them. So.
Joe Rogan: Well, 2016 taught a lot of people about the ineffective use of polls.
Donald Trump: Well, they were very ineffective because I thought I was doing well. I'd go to a place and I'd have 30, 40,000 people. Hillary would go, they have 500 people and they tell me I'm going to lose. I said, why am I going to lose? I had 40,000 people. She had 200 people. But, you know, I have a theory. These pollsters, they charge you a lot of money, too. You know, they charge you half a million bucks to do some stupid poll and they interview like 251 people. I don't think they interview him, in many cases. I don't want to get myself in too much trouble.
Joe Rogan: You think it's bullshit?
Donald Trump: No, I think they sit there, they make a deal, they get a half a million bucks, and they say, Trump's leading 51 to 49. They announce it, and everybody says, oh. Do you understand?
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
Donald Trump: I don't think they... I think in a lot... Look... I'm a very common sense person. I think that they probably don't always poll. Some of them probably never poll. What's the difference between 49 to 51 and 47 and a half?
Joe Rogan: Well, it's also a tiny percentage of the population. I don't think it's representative of the overall population. I don't know of one person in my whole life that ever got called by a pollster.
Donald Trump: Exactly. That's my point. So-
Joe Rogan: Here's my question.
Donald Trump: But I shouldn't say that because I'm doing really well in the polls now. So this week I happen to believe in a verse. I only believe if they're good. No, I like them this month. But no, I honestly believe that there's probably a lot of fraud. I had a poll, Washington Post, ABC, in the Hillary thing on Wisconsin. They had me down 17 points the day before the election. I knew it was wrong because I had a rally. I had 29,000 people at a racetrack and it was like zero degrees, Wisconsin. And they had me down 17 points. In other words, you had no chance. And I won. And I called up my pollsters, good guy, good guy. And I believe he's legitimate. And some of them are, some of them aren't. I said, tell me, why did they have me down so much? I mean, nobody's gonna believe them the next time. They said they don't care. When you're down 17 points, people are going to stay home. They're not going to vote. Because they're going to say, I love Trump, but I'm not going to waste my time. It's cold out. I said, but what do they make at four or five? He said, at four or five, they're going to go and vote. At 17, they're not going to go and vote. Think of it. This is a Washington Post, ABC poll. I was down 17 points in Wisconsin and I won. It's crooked stuff.
Joe Rogan: There's a lot of crooked stuff and I wanted to talk about that too because one of the things that people talk about with you is the denial of the results. And I think J.D. Vance did a brilliant job the other day when he was being interviewed and they asked him, did Trump lose the 2020 election? And he turned it around and said, was there legitimate election interference in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media? And was that a concerted effort?
Donald Trump: Well, they say it made 10 point difference and I lost by one tenth of a point. They say it was 22,000 votes. But look, it was much more than that. And I appreciate J.D. Vance saying that. And by the way, I think he was a great pick.
Joe Rogan: Do you like J.D. as a kid?
Donald Trump: I like him a lot, yeah.
Joe Rogan: You're allowed to say that.
Donald Trump: No, I do. I like him a lot.
Joe Rogan: No, I think he's good. I think he's a brilliant guy, and I think his ability to talk like a normal human being. You did my friend Theo Vaughn's podcast.
Donald Trump: Right.
Joe Rogan: And he just did it.
Donald Trump: How did he do with it?
Joe Rogan: He did great. He just talks like a normal human being.
Donald Trump: Is that why you called me to do this?
Joe Rogan: No, no. He was a nice guy. Once they shot you, I was like, he's got to come in here.
Donald Trump: It's all about timing. It's all about the timing.
Joe Rogan: Timing's good. I think timing's perfect. Do you even have a scar on your ear? You got anything on there?
Donald Trump: I do. What do we say? So, right over here.
Joe Rogan: Oh, it's a tiny little mark.
Donald Trump: It zicked right there. It healed up pretty fucking good.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's pretty good. It's not like some of the wrestlers, some of the UFC fighters.
Donald Trump: No, you didn't get cauliflower here. No, it was sort of like a top shot. Mm-hmm. The point of the bullet was all over the ice, but you see the things take it off a little bit, but it makes me a tougher guy. You know, the fighters love their, you know, Bo Nickel, he's a great fighter.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, I love Bo Nickel. How's he going to do?
Donald Trump: I think he's terrific. He's great. He's a fantastic fighter. He was almost like undefeated in college.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, he's a fantastic wrestler and one of the best mixed martial artists. When is he fighting again?
Donald Trump: He's fighting in Madison Square Garden in November.
Joe Rogan: Oh, that's going to be after the election?
Donald Trump: Yep. So I'll either go as president or I'll be depressed and I won't bother going.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, I think they're having a fight right now. One of the things that was fascinating also was the denial of the election results is a pretty common thing. Hillary Clinton famously denied that she called you an illegitimate president and she said that Russia put you in place.
Donald Trump: Even though she conceded.
Joe Rogan: Yes. You know, she conceded the night of the election because she was beaten.
Donald Trump: Yes, and it was a thing that was pretty common for people, especially Democrats, to deny the elections. There's been many of them, the Bush administration, the dangling chads, all that stuff.
Joe Rogan: Well, look at these guys in Congress, all these sleazebags in Congress that are Democrats, they're still denying 2016. But now they don't so much because, you know, they try and pin it on me. You don't hear them say, but they denied it right up until the end.
Donald Trump: My point is this idea of election fraud is a forbidden topic. And you get labeled an election denier. It's like being labeled an anti-vaxxer if you question some of the health consequences that people have had from the COVID-19 shots. Oh, my God, you're an anti-vaxxer. If you say, and what I say publicly, and I've said this a lot,
Joe Rogan: It's not zero percent. So if you ask me, what is the amount of election fraud in this country? Is it zero percent? No one thinks it's zero percent. I've never met one person, not a super liberal, progressive, far left person or a right wing conservative. Not one person thinks it's zero percent. They think when you have human beings and also you have a lot of weirdness that was going on during the 2020 elections, particularly with mail in ballots. And you had legislatures that had to approve, and they didn't approve, and they went out and did it anyway. And you had ballot, you had old-fashioned ballot screwing. I mean, you had people going up and dropping in phony votes. You had unsigned ballots, et cetera, et cetera.
Donald Trump: There's certain people that think that they have, and the rhetoric is also that you're Hitler, and that in order to stop Hitler, you have to do whatever it takes.
Joe Rogan: That was okay, yeah. Yeah.
Donald Trump: And this is, I mean, you're hearing this now. Kamala compared you to, said your love of Hitler yesterday.
Joe Rogan: Kamala is a very low IQ person. She's a very low IQ. You know, I'm for taking tests too. I think anybody that runs for president should take, they should give them tests. And it's not an age thing. It's not based. If you look back on history, 70s and 80s, some of your greatest leaders in the world, world history, longtime world history, they were in their 70s and their 80s. But I think you should take cognitive tests. I think everybody – they say it's unconstitutional. That's ridiculous. I think Kamala should have a test because there's something missing. There's something wrong with her.
Joe Rogan: Well, I think it's pressure. I think the pressure and the scrutiny – you've been a celebrity for a long time and you understand what this is like. But for someone who's in her late 40s who becomes the vice president, who runs for president, becomes the vice president –
Donald Trump: And then all of a sudden, the weight of the world is on your shoulders. And there's all these people paying attention. A lot of people clam up.
Joe Rogan: But you either have it or you don't.
Donald Trump: Correct. Look, this is an interview. We've covered a lot of territory, right? And, you know, it's fine. I don't care. I want to. I think it's much more interesting. To do an interview with Anderson Cooper... A softball, crazy softball interview. She took two days off and she studied and studied all day long. And then she comes out with a result that was a real embarrassment. That was a really bad interview. She couldn't answer a question. And every question is not answered. I mean, like, what would you do your first day in office? Okay, I'll build a wall. I won't build a wall. There's a hundred things you can say. Just say anything, right? There's something off with her.
Joe Rogan: Well, I also think-
Donald Trump: We're dealing with the smartest people. They hate when I say, you know, when the press, when I call President Xi, they said, he called President Xi brilliant. Well, he's a brilliant guy. He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he's a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not. And they go crazy.
Joe Rogan: Right. It doesn't mean he's not evil or it doesn't mean he's not dangerous. But actually-
Donald Trump: We have evil people in our country.
Joe Rogan: Yes.
Donald Trump: If you have a smart president, he can deal with Russia. He can deal with all of it. Russia would have never gone into Ukraine if I were president.
Joe Rogan: How would you have stopped it?
Donald Trump: Automatic. Two things. I told him. I said, Vladimir, you're not going in. I used to talk to him all the time. You're not going in. I can't tell you what I told him because I think it would be inappropriate. But someday he'll tell you. But he would have never gone in. But you know why else he wouldn't have gone in? Oil prices at $40 a barrel wouldn't have allowed him, wouldn't have given him the money to prosecute that war. Wouldn't have given him the money. I said it with President. I was with President Xi. I said it was almost the same conversation. With Vladimir, it was Moscow. With President Xi, it was Beijing. It was almost the exact same conversation. I said, don't do it. He would have never done it. The day I left, they flew 28 bombers over the middle of Taiwan. Twenty-eight bombers. And it's the apple of his eye. And the same thing with Russia. Ukraine is the apple of his eye. I used to talk to him. I had a very good relationship with him. He wouldn't have done it. He would have never done it. But he also wouldn't have done it because of the... You know, one of the reasons that what happened is, number one, he doesn't respect Biden at all. Not even a little bit. And who the hell would? But he doesn't respect him. But when he saw what happened in Afghanistan, how horribly that was handled... Number one, you take the soldiers out last, not first. Okay, that was their big mistake. And we had that thing charted out, and they weren't obeying us. Abdul is the head of the Taliban. Boom, boom, he had to do all these things. Some he didn't do. I said, nope, you gotta do them all. This guy took, he immediately took all, he left the equipment behind. 13 soldiers dead, but he took everybody out. He took his soldiers out before. A child would know. That's where Milley was so stupid. He was such a stupid guy, Milley. Okay, those generals should have all been fired. The people that were involved with Afghanistan should have all been fired. Then they'd be writing books about him, how stupid he was and bad he was. But you take your soldiers out last.
Donald Trump: I had a big rally, and I saw a child in the front row about a year and a half ago, and I called the child up. I said, do you mind if I borrow your child? Oh, yes, please. And they came up, kids five years. I gave them quick details, you know. I said, we want to get out of this place, and we have this, and we have this, and we have the equipment. I gave them a little thing. I said, do you take your soldiers out first or last after everything's done? You take them out last, sir, a child would know that. We took our soldiers out first.
Joe Rogan: What was your plan?
Donald Trump: And we left Bagram.
Joe Rogan: Well, not only that, we left billions of dollars worth of equipment and military vehicles that they use for parades now.
Donald Trump: The best equipment, you have to embarrass us, the best equipment in the world. The Taliban parade where they've got tanks rolling down the streets and Blackhawks flying is the craziest thing I've ever seen. The fact that we left all that stuff there. We left the best equipment in the world behind.
Joe Rogan: What would you have done differently?
Donald Trump: Well, number one, we would have taken it out. Just so you go back a little bit further, I had a couple of conversations with Abdul. And from the time I had those conversations, because they were shooting our soldiers, you know, with the sniper stuff. They were shooting a lot of them. They were shooting a lot with Obama, much less with me, but they were shooting them. And I said, get this guy on the phone. The press went nuts when they heard this. I had a great conversation with him. It was a tough conversation. 18 months later, there wasn't one soldier that was ever shot at. And even Biden admitted it in a moment of stupidity because he shouldn't admit it. His people went nuts. He said, yeah, well, I will admit no soldier. We didn't have a soldier killed in 18 months in Afghanistan. Not one soldier was killed because he understood what was going to happen if that happened. I didn't have one. So then when I left. After having gotten more votes than any sitting president in the history of the country, and much more votes than he got in 2016, when I left, they started shooting our soldiers. But more importantly, what they did is, they did that whole thing with, you know, leaving. He shouldn't have left, number one, should have left from Bagram, because Bagram's this massive base. It's got tremendous acreage around it, tremendous. It's a very big, it was built many years ago. And part of the reason you wouldn't have taken that is because it goes to China. One hour from where China makes its nuclear missiles, you should have never left Bagram. Number one, they should have left from Bagram. They should have left last. You know, we have Americans that are still there. They should have taken all their equipment out. Every plane, every screw should have been taken out, every tent. And that's when I realized that Milley was a dummy. We're leaving, but I want to get everything out. Sir, it's cheaper to leave it. I said, what do you mean to leave it? It's cheaper to leave it. Yeah, he said it's cheaper to leave it. Cheaper. Cheaper. He said it's cheaper. Not more dangerous. He just said cheaper. I said, I want every plane. I want every tank. I want the goggles. They have night goggles. They have all this stuff that these guys now have. He said, sir, it's cheaper to get out and leave it. I said, so you think it's cheaper to leave a $150 million brand new airplane in there than it is to fly it out with a tank of jet fuel and put it in Pakistan or just fly it directly back? It's cheaper to live. I said, this guy's nuts. I'm telling you, he was so stupid. He was so unwise. He was like an unwise man. And there were a number of them. But I defeated ISIS with the greatest generals.
I had a guy who was so great. I flew to Iraq and I met the real generals, not these idiots that we deal with. And we knocked out, you know I defeated 100% of the ISIS caliphate. They said it would take five years. I did it in a matter of a few, literally a few weeks. And we hit them hard. And he said, sir, we're going to hit them here. We're going to hit them there. We're going to hit them here, there. And I said, this guy's great. I like this guy. I was told it would take five years. That's why I went. I said, how could it take five years? We have brand new fighters. We have the best planes, the best weapons, the best guns, the best bombs. How could it possibly take that long?
And I flew to, I flew and left at 3 o'clock in the morning. Nobody knew I was going. I got on Air Force One and we started flying. And when we reached about half an hour away from Iraq, that was where the airport was, big airport, about a half an hour away, they said, sir, I'm sorry, you'll have to turn off all your lights. Why? We're getting close to our site. I said, you mean we spent $8 trillion that we can't leave the lights? Think of this. 20 years, $8 trillion, and we can't leave the lights on in a plane.
I said, that's okay. Turn the lights on. I'm not going to fight him. This is because it's too dangerous? Yeah, too dangerous, because they see the light up in the air. They'll shoot at it. They'll shoot at it, you know? So I said, turn the lights off. Then they said, sir, we're going to also pull your shades if that's okay. I said, that's okay. The plane was pitch black. All the lights outside, you know, the blinking, the blinking reds, they were all turned off.
And I like to sit with pilots a lot of times. And these guys are specimens. I always say they're better looking than Tom Cruise, okay? And

Event Date: October 25, 2024

Timelines Involved

• - Presidential Election 2024