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Pod Force One
Eric Trump: Inside Mar-a-Lago's FBI Raid, Hunter’s laptop & who is the real "Trump 2028"
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Pod Force One podcast. I'm Miranda Devine, and today we're at Mar A Lago with Eric Trump, who's just written a new book, Under Siege. Eric Trump, thank you so much for joining Pod Force One.
- [00:15]
B
Welcome to Mar A Laga.
- [00:16]
A
Yes, good.
- [00:17]
B
Good to have you.
- [00:18]
A
How exciting to be here. It's such a beautiful building. And every time I come here, though, I can't forget the invasion by the FBI with that FBI raid that happened. It seems like a bad memory now, but do you still think about it?
- [00:37]
B
Yeah, I do. Listen, you know about Biden corruption better than anybody. I remember getting calls about 8 o' clock in the morning, and I get a call from one of my team members, and they say, there's 30 FBI agents with a. With a search warrant. And I go, what are they doing in Mar a Lago? I was totally confused. No, they're coming in, they have a search warrant for Mar A Lago. They want to. And I'm sitting there saying, on behalf of who? On. On behalf of NARA in a National Archives. I go, give me a break.
- [01:00]
A
Like, yeah.
- [01:01]
B
Does anybody actually believe that NARA is authorizing the FBI to raid a former president's home? Because if you believe that, I think you're living in. In outer space, right? Like. Like, I live. And I go, this. Is this happening? Because Biden's not doing, well, anything. His economy was terrible. Inflation was terrible. His response, Covid, was terrible. You know, I mean, the guy couldn't make it through a sentence without stumbling. Right? He obviously had all the problems, many of them, frankly, derived from you with, with, you know, know the, the laptop from hell story.
- [01:25]
A
And, but also, he's. He. He was a hateful person and he really hated your father.
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B
Of course he did. And that's why the National Archives happen to. And I'll never forget they were yelling in the phone, turn off all security cameras. I want all. So each of these rooms have security cameras, right? And, and obviously the patios is a commercial property and it's one of the most famous properties in the world. And I go, I'm not turning off our security cameras. I am not turning off our security cameras. The FBI was demanding, and sure enough, you know, it takes two and a half years, but Eileen Cannon, the judge on the case, end up finding, you know, they ended up admitting to her that they were planting classified fold father's office and, you know, take the photos. Well, I mean, you know, they were fanned out perfectly. They fanned out perfectly on the floor and like, you know, on this beautiful carpet. Like, my father's gonna fan out. Classified. Like, give me a break.
- [02:06]
A
They brought those classified folders in, didn't they?
- [02:09]
B
And you know what? They did? And they leaked them to the media and wanted that picture all around the world. I'll never forget. I asked my team. I go, does my father know? And everybody just went silent. I go, I'll call him right now. He goes, honey, meet me in my office. We were in New York at the time, and I met him. And that's when he put out that tweet, which is, you know, the FBI is raiding the famous Mar A Lago. I can't believe this. This is an invasion of our home. This is the greatest weaponization of government in the history of our country. That tweet went out while they were here. They had just got near half an hour earlier, and they went, Miranda. They went fricking nuts. They went, how dare you tell people that we're here? It's like, how dare you raid our home? How dare you tell people that we are here? They wanted it on their narrative. They wanted to be the people who put it out. The fact that they raided Donald Trump's home and he put it out first.
- [02:53]
A
Yes.
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B
And they were furious. They were absolutely furious.
- [02:57]
A
And they were armed, and they came through and they rifled through. I know, the first Lady Melania Trump's underwear drawer. They went into Barron's room. It was more than just a search.
- [03:09]
B
Of course it was. Yeah. I mean, they were planting documents, they're planting folders, they're taking photo ops. They wanted to take down our family in any way, shape, or form. Right. I mean, this was the continuation of that. The book I wrote, Under Siege, was exactly about this. Any way that they could try and kill us as a family. Any way they could try and embarrass us. The dirty dossiers, the. You know, the Russia hoax, the spying on the campaigns, the leaking our tax returns to the irs. The first impeachment, the second impeachment, the silencing our voice, the gag orders, the. The 91 indictments, the 112 subpoenas that I got. I became the most peanut person in American history for not doing anything wrong. Now, now, Hunter, he had, you know, the laptop from hell better than anybody. Back to that topic. But drugs, prostitution, you know, influence peddling, millions of dollars. Well, of course. I mean. And I always say to him, like, you know, what was he selling? But this is my rhetorical question. I know the answer to this question. But this. What was he selling? Like, you know, having all these entities for. For purposes of. Of what. What's your product? You know what I do. I mean, we have memberships here. We have great golf courses around the world. We have great hotels. You know, who we are and what we do. Yeah.
- [04:13]
A
And what you've always been.
- [04:14]
B
No. Yeah. And what we've done for four generations. What was he selling? And everybody knows the question to that. But yet I became the most opinion person in American history. And I've never gotten so much as a speeding ticket.
- [04:24]
A
Yes.
- [04:24]
B
You know, give me a break. And that's how weaponized this country became. And I mean, think about the irs. I was the one person who could sign for my father on a tax document. Right. I was. I was the only. I was the one that has power of attorney. No one could get to the irs, to any of his tax documents without my signature. Right. It was set up in a lockbox like this. And yet the IRS leaked all his tax returns for a 15 year period of time to the New York Times. Right. And all of my tax returns got leaked. Guess where, too? The New York Times and every other liberal paper. Right. And 91 of my employees, my corporate employees, had all of their tax returns leaked.
- [04:58]
A
Wow.
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B
Right. You know, somebody just got into the IRS and happened. We dealt with this game, Miranda, every single day. They were the most corrupt people in the history of this nation. And my father always said it, Leslie Stahl, they're spying on my campaign. Well, Donald Trump, you can't prove this. You remember the 60 Minutes?
- [05:15]
A
Yeah.
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B
You can't prove this. Donald, Donald, Donald, you can't prove this.
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A
And that's not true.
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B
He goes, you know, and yet, you know, Joe Biden would go on there. The one time he went on there, they're asking him, you know, what flavor ice cream he likes. Right. They did everything they could to try and bankrupt us. They did everything they could to try and, you know, hurt us, to try and destroy our company, to try and destroy our family, to try and divide us as family members, not only as siblings, but also him. And you don't put out a dirty dossier saying that somebody's doing golden, you know, what's. And, you know, tales of prostitution and tales, all sorts of six arrangements, Right?
- [05:49]
A
Yeah.
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B
And it was all made up.
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A
Yeah.
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B
It was all paid for by the other side.
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A
I mean, the Clinton. This is campaign.
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B
This is slander in the highest form. I mean, we actually tried to sue about it, and the judge threw us out of court for it. And you're sitting there saying, you know, it was a judge that was appointed by, guess who? Obama. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton at the time.
- [06:09]
A
So let's go back to those days. And you wrote the book Under Siege. Because I don't. I mean, it was only when I read the book, I knew that your family had been hammered. But we really only have concentrated on Donald Trump. But actually, you, I mean, the things that you had to go through and the fact that you were basically running the Trump Corporation, you were running your father's business, he'd handed the reins to you so he could run for president, and you were so under pressure, you were debanked, you were subpoenaed. Did you ever, like, complain to your father about it, or were you trying to protect him by shouldering all the burden yourself?
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B
Yeah, the latter. You know, I'll never forget, he asked me, I was 33 years old. He goes, you know, you've grown up in this business. I started on construction sites when I was 11 years old. And because I want you to run the company, you know, you've built most of our teams at this point. You built many of our projects. At this point, I want you to run the company. And I thought, oh, this could be great. I'll run hotels around the world. I run golf courses. Very good at doing this.
- [07:12]
A
But that's a huge vote of confidence. Like, he, I, I don't know him very well, but I know him well enough that he really values talent. And there's no way he would have given his son that responsibility for all of his money and business if he didn't rate you.
- [07:27]
B
If we weren't exceptionally good at what we did. Yes. And by the way, it's not just money in business. It' tens of thousands of employees worldwide.
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A
Yes.
- [07:34]
B
And so I step into that role, and I thought it would be wonderful. I thought it'd be great. What I didn't realize is I wasn't going to have the constitutional protections that he had as Commander in Chief. Right. And so obviously, you have protections under speech and debate laws. You have protections associated with the executive branch. Guess who's the one person who didn't have those protections, who was the conduit to his entire life. And that was. That was me. Right. I ran every entity. I ran everything for our family that was outside of Washington, D.C. and I did so very well. And these are great businesses. These are honest businesses. These are businesses that have been around 30 years before. My father even dreamt of going into the politics. And that's why, starting day one, he Went down that escalator, subpoena after subpoena. The Washington posted really famous story the day it was 12 minutes after my father's hand came off the Bible in Washington, D.C. this is when the impeachment of Donald Trump begins.
- [08:18]
A
Yes.
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B
They didn't give my father 12 minutes before they start talking about impeaching him, meaning the entire American people spoke like he beat Hillary, not by like a small margin, like he beat Hillary by a lot of. They didn't give him 12 minutes and they're already talking about how they were going to impeach him, how they were going to try and destroy him.
- [08:33]
A
Well, because they'd cooked up the steel dossier that we were just talking about and the whole. That he was a stooge of Vladimir Putin's story. And that got seeded. And I think a lot of Republicans believed where there's smoke, there's fire.
- [08:48]
B
Sure, sure. And they don't anymore. And that's why the mainstream media in this country is dead. My wife, she's got a great show, right? Brilliant. She obviously co parent company with the New York Post. But you getting 2 million people, 2 and a half million people on a Saturday night at 9:00pm, Caitlyn Collins on CNN will get 400,000 people on prime time, prime time, 9:00pm same time slot on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you know, I mean, what does that say? Mainstream media in this country has said. And why is your podcast doing so amazingly well? Because people want independent voice. And why is Joe Rogan doing so well? Because people want independent voice. That's what's happening. And so you've got a very different dynamic. The second time Americans don't buy the bs. Thanks to you. Thanks to us. Thanks for, to my father's voice. Thanks to me maybe screaming from the, you know, the courthouse steps in New York every single day for a long period of time. There's only so many times you can cry wolf. And they did it first with, with Russia Gate. And there's a lot of people who thought that we legitimately. I remember walking to a restaurant in New York and a guy stands up, Robert Mueller is coming, you mother, Robert Mueller is coming. And what's kind of funny is the only thing that Robert Mueller found was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party and. Yeah. And so, you know, all of a sudden, Russia, you know, the Russiagate kind of imploded. Now remember, Russiagate was actually their October surprise.
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A
Yes.
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B
Right. You had Podesta coming out and saying, you know, he would define an October surprise as something that you pop on an opponent so late that even though it's not true, you don't have enough time to disprove it by the time the election rolls around. So. So Russiagate was their October surprise. You know, fortunately, it didn't work. Well, then October, you know, it really. Russiagate kind of morphed into, how do I allow somebody who actually knew something about politics, which was Hillary Clinton, to save face and that she lost in a defeating way to a family that didn't know a damn thing. We didn't know a damn thing about politics. I joke all the time like, we didn't know what the Iowa caucuses were. We didn't know what the delegate game was. We knew nothing about politics. This is the first time we were up there. My father always asked me. He's like, honey, can you go defend me on Megyn Kelly tonight about immigration? I go, this is great. Sure. I have no problem. I've spent a lot of time on tv. I don't know a damn thing about immigration.
- [10:54]
A
I mean, but you've learned fast.
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B
She. She raised $1.5 billion. We raised 300. We didn't even raise 300. My father largely put in his own money. So you're talking about 300 million versus 1.5 billion, and all of a sudden we won. And now they need to justify the fact that a bunch of people who couldn't spell politics.
- [11:12]
A
Yes.
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B
Beat them at the game that they had been in their entire lives and captivated them. And why do you think they kept the Russian narrative going for three years? I was the guy that got the call saying, from the F. Eric, we hear there are secret servers in the basement of Trump Tower communicating directly with the Kremlin. I go, guys, come over. Come over. Come have a great time. Honestly. Listen, you could probably have somebody here in five minutes. Clearly, you can't move servers in five minutes. Just any room you want to check. Just go have a great time.
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A
Did they come?
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B
Of course they didn't.
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A
Right.
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B
And guess what? They. They allowed that narrative to perpetrate. Right. For a three year period of time. And by the way, in doing it, they destroyed a country. Right. They created massive divide. They wasted so much time. They wasted so much effort. They destroyed young people's lives as they brought people in for deposition after deposition in front of Congress. People who couldn't afford this. People who weren't represented.
- [12:03]
A
Yes.
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B
Scared the hell out of them. Yeah. And beyond that, they actually pitted the two biggest nuclear superpowers against each other. Also, one greedy woman could potentially get a Couple extra votes or so she could justify how she had lost in such embarrassing fashion.
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A
Barack Obama was also embarrassed because I think Donald Trump's election was a repudiation of everything that he stood for. So he was certainly involved in telling John Brennan and James Comey and James Clapper to go and cook up that fake intelligence community assessment, which, again, was all about Russia.
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B
No different than they did with Hunter Biden with the 51 intel agents. Same people who signed off on the fact that it was, you know, Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation. I'm looking at it.
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A
And our story was Russian disinformation because we're Kremlin stooges, too.
- [12:55]
B
Well, I mean, they also threw the New York Post off of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and everybody else because you had the audacity to publish a story that was 100% true. Yet you have Maggie Haberman and these people from the New York Times. Ironic, by the way, that I received number one on the New York Times, given how much I rallied against the New York Times.
- [13:12]
A
I mean, honestly, just as a sidebar, that is incredible that you managed to get on the New York Times bestseller list because they will move heaven and earth to ensure that conservative writers don't get on. So you. It's because you sold so many. It was just like your father winning in 2022.
- [13:30]
B
Big to rig, too big to rig. I literally said that every single day I go, I have to make this too big to rig. There's no chance. And I. And I did buy, like, 3 or 4x. But it's a brilliant book. But the question is, why didn't you get it? Why. Why didn't you get the Pulitzer, right? You were right on that story. They threw you off of every channel saying it was Russian disinformation. It came around. And yet the people who got the Pulitzer Prize were wrong about it. They. They got the Pulitzer Prize for Russiagate, which ended up being totally false. I mean, what they did was actually just defame and slander. They got the story wrong, and yet they got a Pulitzer Prize. But yet you got the story right, Miranda. And guess what they did to you. They threw you off like. Like a dog off of every single one of these platforms. And they came after you viciously. In fact, if I remember, Twitter at the time, before Elon said that the only way that they would allow the New York Post. This is another journalist, right? This isn't even a person. This is. This is a major journalistic.
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A
The oldest newspaper in America and the fourth largest by circulation.
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B
They wouldn't allow you back on Twitter.
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A
No.
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B
Unless you remove the article. That was 100%. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. You're the one that deserves the Pulitzer.
- [14:36]
A
Yeah. And to the Post great credit, we never did that. And our. In the end, Twitter apologized. But within a couple of weeks, your father was also thrown off Twitter and Facebook. I mean, he was the sitting President of the United States, deplatformed. And even Emmanuel Macron in France was horrified by that, that these unaccountable oligarchs, they really were oligarchs or oligopolies anyway, these companies had the nerve to do that to a sitting president. And now Mark Zuckerberg sits at your father's table. How do you feel?
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B
Well, let me get back to that one for a second, but I'm going to get to the first part.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Ayatollah, they all had Twitter accounts. But yet my father was the guy that got kicked off. And by the way, your dials were turned down. My dials were turned down. If you're a conservative in this country and you repost a story, guess what all of a sudden the dials were. I didn't gain a single follower for an eight year period of time. Now, I think I became more famous or more well known over that period of time by about 100 fold, but yet I didn't gain a single follower because they just capped me. I'd have friends who are like, I can't find you on Twitter. I type in, they're typing Eric T R U M. And it wasn't until they typed in the M did at Eric Trump come up. Now all the parody accounts would come up, all sorts of nonsense would come up, but they wouldn't allow me to actually come up. That's how bad that was. The censorship was. But I gotta tell you a Zuckerberg story, because I've actually come to like him. There was a point where I absolutely detested him. Yeah. And that's when he put $400 million in 2020. And then you go into Facebook and you type in, you know, polling location, whatever, and nothing would come right. Nothing about Trump would come up. Negative things would. And then all this great stuff about Joe Biden would come up and it was $400 million. Right. I mean, a lot of people would argue that it was in violation of campaign finance laws and everything else. So sure enough, I saw Zuckerberg. He was, he was at inauguration and he was sitting right behind me. And he's one of the only people in that room I didn't meet. And I turned around and I shook his head. Should have shook his hand.
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A
Should have shook his head.
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B
I should have shook his head. I could have reached down and shook his. I shook his hand and we had a really nice exchange. And later on, Statuary hall, there was a. There was a lunch right after inauguration, right after my father was sworn in. He came up to me in a really friendly way. I'll never forget this. And I legitimately believe he meant it. And he kind of checked me with his shoulder, right? He, like. And he goes, let's fricking go. Let's go. And. And he had his hand out and he was like, half hugging me and we're shaking hands and. No, I. By the way, I truly appreciate it because I actually believe he was sincere the second time. Meaning, like, you know, and.
- [17:09]
A
Well, also for his company, I mean.
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B
You know, I think he realized how badly they were misled. I. I think he realized how wrong he was. I think he got tougher. He started doing the jiu jitsu stuff. I'm not sure if that played into it, like, you know, spike testosterone or something associated with a combat sport or. I don't know what it was, but I.
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A
He'll do the same with the Gavin Newsom.
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B
Probably. Probably. There's a lot of people out there that. That are fake. But. But I legitimately, I detested him in 2020 based on what he did with his platforms and kicking us all off. And then all of a sudden in 2024, it seemed like he was a different person now. My father had won, and so that changes a lot of people. I can't tell you how many people texted me on November 8th of 2016 when we won. I got 10,000 text messages, mainly from people that I hadn't heard from in 20 years. The people that you heard from every day didn't bothered to text you because you heard from them all the time. It was amazing how quiet 2020 was. And then I can't tell you how many text messages I got on November 5th. It was just really November 6th because it was deep in the morning where all of a sudden it's, you know, they remembered you again. It's interesting how the world works that way.
- [18:16]
A
Hi, guys. Nancy Grace here. Do you ever hear or read a headline and wonder what happened? We go to the scene, track down leads to help us understand why we want justice. Please join us. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace Monday through Friday on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. I always marvel at how really generous, spirited your father is. And, you know, he doesn't seem to hold grudges, which is the opposite of what, you know, the mainstream media describes him as, vengeful and so on. But he was very merciful to Hillary Clinton after he won the election. There was a lot of stuff that could have been gone through. And even now he's quite merciful about Joe Biden saying, oh, he didn't know what he was doing. Are you like that, or do you hold a grudge?
- [19:20]
B
I hold a grudge against people who attack people that I love much more than I do about people who attack me. Yeah, I can get over that. I can compartmentalize that. Right. It's toward me. There have been so many people over the years that have gone after my father, and unfairly so. And there's so many of those people that I absolutely detest. So many people that were in his life who then failed to be in his life, and then as soon as he won again, decided to reemerge. Yeah. And I. I see these people. Oh, my God, the list of Miranda. The list is the list of long. And I'm sitting there saying, I know exactly who you are. Yeah. And I know when you were here.
- [19:54]
A
Yeah.
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B
And you're an opportunistic person.
- [19:56]
A
Yeah.
- [19:57]
B
And no, I remember those people. Much more so when. When again, somebody I love is being hurt by a person than. Than when it's directed toward. Toward me. But at the same time, I mean, make no mistake, my father remembers that as well. Yeah. You know, at the same time, he has to play the game. Right. If. If in politics, if you were enemies with every person who had ever crossed you, well, guess what, you probably have no friends.
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A
Yes.
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B
And I think he. He recognizes that, but I think he also realizes who the really good ones are. And that's why, in a certain way, that the break. I call it the break, but the break, you know, 2020 to 2024, I actually think was racing that ever happened to us. And I remember how painful that was that night. We had won that election. Not a single reasonable person in the country believes.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That Joe Biden got 16 million more votes than Barack Obama did by sitting in a basement in 2012. By sitting in a basement with zero charisma. Like, yeah, give me a break. Like, he got an exponentially larger share of the African American vote than Barack Obama did. Like, no one believes it. And it's funny. My father posted this the other day. So ask, ask Barack Obama. Like I don't even think Barack Obama, if somebody credibly asked him, would say that he thinks that Joe Biden got 16 million more he wouldn't want. Of course he went for his ego, but he also realizes it's ridiculous. And at the same time, as painful as that was, because I, you know, I knew we had one. I mean, I do events across the street from Joe Biden. I'm not on the ticket. I have a couple thousand people show up for me.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And he'd have no one. He couldn't fill the little yellow circles. Right. None of it made sense.
- [21:22]
A
But a lot of it was the censorship, the, I mean even just censoring Our story. $400 million.
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B
A lot of it was cheating. A lot of it was mail in ballots. It was, was death by a thousand cuts. Right?
- [21:35]
A
Yeah.
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B
God works in interesting ways. It was actually the single best thing that ever happened. I mean, now all of a sudden you have the Senate, you have the House, you obviously executive branch of a 6, 3 majority on the Supreme Court. You have my father who understands, who has the name of meaning. He knows who these people are.
- [21:50]
A
Yeah.
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B
And he has them pegged at this point. And he knows the games of Washington D.C. and then I think last but not least, it would be very hard to just, you know, there's a lot of great people in his, his first Cabinet. Right. But there's also a lot of people that you might not want to. Right. I think all of a sudden it took the bad times to realize who the true hardcore fighters were, like John.
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A
Bolton versus of course J.D. vance or.
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B
Yeah, of course. Right. And, and the Rubio's in this. And second of all, you have a coalesced party, so you've got a killer cabinet, you've got coalesce party, you've got obviously House, the Senate, Supreme Court, the executive branch, and you have a media in this country instead. It was crippling when they were coming after us for Russia collusion, because there's no way to beat that back. The only tool you had was kind of Twitter at the time, but you were getting censored as you tried to utilize it. Now with independent journalism, they could never pull the same hooks that they did before.
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A
And I think the American people are not as naive anymore. They don't trust the media like they used to.
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B
Well, I mean the media's approval rating is, is, I think lower than Congress is like shocking. It's, it's actually hard to believe, but it's Definitely single digits.
- [22:52]
A
Would you ever go in? I mean, I know you love the 2028 Trump 2028 cap. And people always assume it's about Donald Trump, but it could also mean eric.
- [23:02]
B
TRUMP, Don Jr. Well, we were, we were, we were in our office one day and we created this, we can do print on demand hats. And so we added the eight there instead of the four. And my sister knew it was wonderful. Very close to me. She threw it at me. She's like, you gotta put this on. She posted a picture. And Miranda, I mean, I can manipulate the media, I think better than you could manipulate like a five year old child at Halloween. Right. Like my kids at Halloween. And the media starts melting down. I start getting, you know, Bloomberg and this and Time and Newsweek and you know, New York Times and does this mean that Donald Trump is going to subvert the Constitution and break the laws of the United States and they're just melting down as they're doing it? I'm taking my phone, I'm just snapshotting it, I'm just posting on my Twitter and I mean, everybody's loving it. Everybody's having so much fun as the media's just, they're going crazy. And so a couple hours later, this wears off and she goes, I think we need a slogan this time. And we came up with a slogan, rewrite the rules. So it's Trump 2028. Rewrite the rules and the media melts down again. And you know, would we ever do it? First of all, I think you have a different Republican Party now. And I think you have a Republican Party of fighters. You no longer have the Ben Sasses, you no longer have the, you know, the, the Mitt Romney's. Just a very different party you had in the past. And so I think you're going to have a lot of people. Second of all, my father's taught people how to fight. Yeah. In a way that they did not know how to fight under the George Bush years and the McCain years. You know, I mean, McCain got blown out of the water right in, in his race that he ran and, and we, we didn't.
- [24:31]
A
I mean, and he's the reason that we have Obamacare.
- [24:33]
B
Who was the prize fighter at the time, Jeb Bush. I mean, right. Like, give me a break.
- [24:37]
A
Low energy, Jim.
- [24:38]
B
All of a sudden we've got, we've got people who really understand. Yeah, we're right on all the issues. Politics is exciting again. I mean, I went out trick or treating with my kids two nights ago and everywhere I went, it was people wearing a little Donald Trump costumes. Really? It was the guy with the hair, you know, and it slicked back and. And you had, you know, they're all wearing red ties.
- [24:56]
A
Really?
- [24:57]
B
And isn't that a beautiful thing? Yeah, like, isn't it a beautiful thing when. When all of a sudden you've got kind of the youth generations that are engaged.
- [25:04]
A
Yeah.
- [25:04]
B
And then you saw what happened to Charlie Kirk, and, man, did they energize the youth generation. I mean, by martyring somebody that they endured.
- [25:15]
A
Yeah.
- [25:15]
B
You know, you just locked in the votes for the next 50 years. Of the 20 to 30 crowd, probably more than that, but let's just call it the 20 to 30 crowd.
- [25:25]
A
12 to 30. I mean, little kids, by the way, Jolly.
- [25:28]
B
That's probably right. And you think, you think you ever had kids dressing up as Jeb Bush or. Yes, George, like. No, of course you didn't. Right. I mean, Donald Trump made politics fun again. And so I think those are all really accretive to this country.
- [25:41]
A
But does that mean you would run? Or you're saying that there are so many other people you don't need to.
- [25:45]
B
No, listen, I'm saying, I think for the first time, the Republican Party really has a bench because it's a new Republican Party that's surrounded by new issues that think differently.
- [25:52]
A
And I still have an answer. Do you have a baton in your knapsack for politics, or are you turned.
- [25:58]
B
I think we've gotten really good at it. Right. And the reason I say we've gotten good at it is we didn't have a choice. Like, we either fought for ourselves or we died, you know, or we just didn't win and your dad would have been in jail. I did a thousand events every single, you know, I mean, thousands of events. I did standing on tractors with a bullet in the middle of Iowa. I understand it. I understand the game. I understand the system as well as anyone. And I think I really understand America now because, I mean, I wore through shoes. You know, you saw how vicious we were on the campaign. We did not stop for months and months and months on end. At the same time, it's incredibly kind of tolling. Like, you better have a family that's ready for it, because they're coming. They're coming after you. They're going to try and destroy your. Your wife, they're going to try and destroy your kids. They're going to try and destroy your spouse. They're going to try and destroy everybody around you. Because that is the game that the other side plays and they are vicious. And so I'd probably revert to the answer that my father gave a long time ago if there was no other choice. And not so bad that you do it. But I'm happy, at least temporarily, to be retired from politics, as he does a great job in Washington.
- [26:58]
A
Do you say, you say they'll come after you? I mean, if the Democrats take back the House next, in the midterms next year, there's already a, like a drumbeat that I can see. And it's about crypto and your family. Reuters last week had a big story about how Your company's made $800 million this year just on crypto. Why did you get into crypto? Because I remember not so long ago, your dad said it was a scam. So what was that about?
- [27:28]
B
We didn't have a choice. We got debanked by every financial institution in this country. We got debanked by bank of America. We got debanked by Chase, we got debanked by. By everyone, First Republic. We. We.
- [27:37]
A
Meaning what that they.
- [27:39]
B
Meaning? In the middle of the night, I was getting letters from all of these different banks in this country because Obama was going. And Biden and all the rest of them were going in saying, hey, you don't bank. These guys. You don't know. You don't. You don't keep their bank accounts.
- [27:51]
A
And when was that?
- [27:52]
B
I got, I got a letter from Capital One, early 2021. Raj got a call, letter from Capital One. You know, all your bank accounts are hereby being closed. You know, you've got a very short period of time to, to get. Now, these are the most complicated commercial buildings in the world, right? Hundreds, if not thousands of tenants, hundreds, if not thousands of. Of employees.
- [28:12]
A
So millions of dollars in these accounts.
- [28:15]
B
Much more. But beyond millions of dollars in accounts, hundreds of millions dollars that flow through the account. So you might have a tenant that pays the rent, and then you pay real estate taxes. Or, or you might pay, right, you know, your 300 employees at a property, and you pay every single vendor and you pay construction costs and brokers and it. And everything that goes in, in the middle of the night, you know, 300 bank accounts just gone. Gone. And in that case, it was.
- [28:39]
A
So what did you do?
- [28:40]
B
It was Capital One. That's when I found crypto, honestly, because I realized that there's nothing that, that the big banks can. Can do that crypto can't do. Better, faster, cheaper, and more transparent.
- [28:49]
A
So what is crypto?
- [28:50]
B
Yeah. Oh, I mean, crypto has a lot of different forms. Right. But I mean, crypto can be decentralized finance where, where everything's done on smart contracts. Crypto can be the tokenization of the US Dollar. Right. And you know, that's called, generally speaking, stable coins where you can have a digital dollar. Why is it that on a Friday afternoon I can't send a wire transfer if it's past 5 o' clock in the afternoon. Right. And then you're, you're locked out until Monday. Now J.P. morgan loves this. You know why J.P. morgan loves us? Because they get the float on, you know, tens of billions of dollars that are sitting there, the interest in it for you know, a three day weekend which they otherwise put in their pockets. Isn't that, isn't that convenient right now? Now why can't, you know, using cryptocurrency, I mean the answer is it happens every day now. And it's, you know, it's 11 o' clock on a Saturday night, you're having a glass of wine with your husband or your wife and you send out a payment that hits the intended recipient's account one second later and at 1/100 the amount of fees that the big banks charge.
- [29:46]
A
Right.
- [29:47]
B
Of course, the big banks, like Venmo, no question, is exactly like Venmo. It's a cheaper version of Venmo. But, but you know, Venmo will run on crypto rails as well. You know, why is it that it takes 120 days to get a loan in this country where you have to go through a KYC and know your customer, et cetera, et cetera. Why is it if you have assets you can't just borrow against your assets do so almost instantaneously and they go buy the house that you just drove by five minutes ago with your, her spouse and move.
- [30:12]
A
One of the reasons though that they have know your customer is to stop, you know, mafia or like Chinese bad people or Ukrainians or Russians, the type of people that Hunter Biden was doing business with. Yeah. So I mean that, that, that helped the banks figure out that Hunter Biden was doing bad things. So in a way that's needed.
- [30:34]
B
Yeah, but you can do that on the front end of the process, not on the back end of the process. Meaning if I've banked with JPMorgan Chase for 25, five years, they probably know I passed a new customer, otherwise they wouldn't thank you. Right? Yeah. Ta da. Congratulations. The same thing can happen with cryptocurrency. So again, there's nothing that can't be done Cheaper, faster. Why is it, if you're a homeowner, Right. If you want to go get a mortgage, why is it that, you know, you need to bank with Wachovia, that has the largest buildings in the world in every single city. Now, every single one of those buildings has fire command. They have drivers, they have engineers, they have windows, they have glass cleaners, they have, you know, somebody stocking the executives refrigerators with water. Why can't that just be handled automatically? And it can be vis a vis blockchain. And. And it was the cancellation by the big banks.
- [31:19]
A
Yeah.
- [31:19]
B
That caused us to find cryptocurrency. The very same people who are coming after us for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that we wore a hat that said make America great again. My father was running for political office. We're also going after the people who believed in bitcoin, who believed in stablecoin. And the reality is we have to win this war. Right? We have to win this, this, this fight. We have to be the first people there. Cryptocurrency, if you fast forward three years, five years will be the way that financial systems run 100%, you can count.
- [31:47]
A
On it, around the world.
- [31:49]
B
And the fact that China was beating us at the race, the fact that the Middle east was beating us at the race, we've got to be able to win. We are the superpower of the world. We're the largest economy in the world at, you know, 32 and a half trillion dollars. We better win the crypto race. And I have never been a bigger believer in anything in my entire life, and I've never been more proud of a venture.
- [32:07]
A
Wow. And so is it similar to where you set up Truth Social, just trying to create your own uncancelable domain?
- [32:17]
B
Pretty much. I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing. We had to create Truth Social because my father was thrown off of Twitter.
- [32:23]
A
Yeah.
- [32:23]
B
And this was long before Elon X. And, you know, some semblance of free speech was returned, earned. There was no free speech. And so guess what? We went out and we created it. There was no banking. So guess what? We went out and we created it.
- [32:37]
A
So do you feel now that you're completely protected, that you've got the armor up? Because obviously the Democrats are going to do all kind of dirty tricks if they do win the House. What have you done to protect yourselves? And are you worried about threats, physical threats, like Charlie Kirk, Your dad has been almost assassinated twice.
- [32:57]
B
Well, I mean, that is under siege. Right. I mean, I came up with that Name based on the fact that we were debanked and they tried to screw up our family and they made up the dirty dossiers and they impeached my father. And then they silenced us. And then the gag ordered us. Remember, every judge was putting gag orders on my father or family. They did all of this. Right. And that's the concept of the siege, right? Destroy the company, destroy the family, destroy your reputation. Weaponize the media, weaponize every aspect of the federal government. Spy on your campaigns. Right? That's the siege. And then one day they tried to kill my father.
- [33:29]
A
Yeah.
- [33:30]
B
And then they tried to do it eight weeks later at a golf course. He has about two miles away from where we're sitting right now.
- [33:35]
A
Yeah.
- [33:35]
B
And Charlie Kirk's a guy's on the stage with a hundred times to Charlie, he was a good friend of mine, and guess what? I get to see blood flowing out the front of his neck. They wanted Charlie Kirk's voice gone, and they want my voice gone. And Miranda, I hate to say this. They want your voice gone. Right. And they sure as hell want my father's voice gone. And what. What happened is they thought that they could inflict so much pain, so much anguish, so much financial destruction, so much stress that everybody was going to quit. They thought that if they shot Charlie in the neck or they killed my father, then this movement, this Make America great movement would just implode. It would just turn into fizzle away and turn into dust. And they got it wrong. Every single time they hit us, we became stronger every day. They put my father in that courtroom and they read out another guilty verdict on nonsense. Okay? At the same time that Alvin Bragg was allowing people out of Rikers, I mean, he was emptying Rikers. You know, this. The day the verdict was. Was being read from In New York, 34 felony convictions for doing nothing wrong, which has all been overturned. Now, you had a madman in Times Square with a machete hacking the hell out of. Hacking the hell out of tourists, Right? Yet he's going after my father for $100,000 non disclosure payment that my father didn't even make in shutting down New York for. For months on end. But he doesn't give a damn about the people who are taking big dives and hacking the hell out of tourists in literally the epicenter of New York. They wanted my father gone. They wanted his message gone. And by the way, it was all coordinated with Washington D.C. when you see the visitor logs for the White House. And Alvin Bragg was there, and Letitia James was there And Nathan Wade was there, and Danny Willis was there, and Jack Smith was there. And they were all being directed to get to Donald Trump. They were all being directed to get his family. And it's all been overturned. I mean, they dug so deep in each of these cases that they always found themselves. And isn't that great? But, but again, they also wanted him dead. And they want to inflict serious harm. And the more they did it, the more they lost the American people who were sick and tired of the nonsense. I mean, you mentioned that, you mentioned the mug shot. It's really interesting. Like, yeah, my father's saying there, dude, do I really need a mug shot? Like, I'm the most recognizable person on planet Earth. I'm guarded by Secret Service. I can't just leave the country unannounced. I can't hide out. Like, where, where's Donald Trump going to hide that? Somebody's not going to recognize him anywhere in the world. And yet you had a corrupt judge who's sitting there saying, no, absolutely, we need the mug shot. And you had a, you know, you had obviously, Fanny who, who demanded it. And yet isn't the great irony of the world the fact that that's probably the one thing that helped us with the African American vote the most and minority communities.
- [36:05]
A
It was an iconic shot, though. I mean, that was. Your father somehow managed to look incredible. And he, he. Stoic, stoic. Every single emotion that you would want him to have, like, fierce, strong. Everything was in that photo.
- [36:19]
B
You know what it did? It took those very communities that had been so abused by the very system that were coming after this guy, and they've done this to us.
- [36:28]
A
Yes.
- [36:28]
B
And I've seen this before, and I don't like it.
- [36:31]
A
We know this system is rigged.
- [36:33]
B
I don't like it. And, you know, the enemy of your enemy is, is oftentimes your friend.
- [36:36]
A
Yeah.
- [36:37]
B
Isn't that really amazing? Donald Trump became their friend almost instantaneously because he became relatable. Because the same people that were corruptly going after those. The difference there is my father had a lot of zeros behind his name. He also had a seriously loud voice, and he could fight. You know, unfortunately, there's so many people in this country that when the government goes after them, they can't fight and they implode and they don't stand a chance in, in the world. And those tactics and those antics pissed a lot of people off in this country and, and made them immediate fans of Donald Trump who were saying, this is, this is crazy, especially as you have judges in New York City whose daughters are the head fundraisers for the digital fundraisers for the Democratic Party. Yeah. And a judge Mercer and Marshawn. Yeah, daughter was literally like, you know, the head digital fundraiser. She, you know, for, for the other side. And yeah, he wouldn't recuse himself. Just do the right thing, recuse yourself and just go to an impartial judge. He wouldn't do it. But isn't it really interesting how Marshan also got Alan Weisselberg, Marshawn also got Steve Bannon. He got every single. And guess what? He hammered every single one of them. He broke them into submission because it was a crooked system and both of.
- [37:46]
A
Them ended up in jail. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro and also the CEO of Trump Organization, as it just said, Alan Weisselberg.
- [37:53]
B
And you don't think that was, that was coincidental? Like of course, you know, like they did that. They, they spoon fed a guy and all those cases have been 100% overturned. But they did that because they wanted to break my.
- [38:04]
A
Judge Boberg the same in Washington D.C.
- [38:06]
B
They knew if my father was in jail that guess what, his voice would be gone. You know, they knew that if my father was dead, his voice would be gone. They knew if my father was, was bankrupt and the company was gone, then the Trump name would be off of the skyline of New York.
- [38:19]
A
Are you satisfied with the answers that we've got from the Butler assassination attempt? Thomas Crooks, 20 years old. Why do we know nothing?
- [38:27]
B
We know nothing. Yeah, I, in fact, I'm. Not only am I unsatisfied, I'm wholly pissed off about it. And I remain unpissed off. I remain pissed off about it. We know nothing. We see a picture of a kid who looks like he's 14 years old.
- [38:41]
A
Yeah.
- [38:41]
B
And we've seen no other pictures of him. We don't know who he is. We know he has multiple cell phones. Trying to figure out what 20 year old has multiple cell phones. The kid was cremated in like five days or six days. Like, give me a break. Like most family pets, no autopsy take longer to be cremated. I am very far away from being conspiracy theorist, but nothing about it looks right. We know, we know nothing about this guy. Yet they decided to go in and deprive every single January 6th quarter grandmother who went walked through the the Capitol. Right. And took a selfie. They know everything about them. They got into their phones, they violated their rights. They found everything that they could. They put real effort into it. And we don't know a damn Thing. And. And I am. I am wholly, wholly unsatisfied.
- [39:26]
A
But why do you think that is? Because I. I know back in. I think it was March or May, whenever I interviewed your father on Air Force One, and he said he gave the order. Then he said, I want to know from the Secret Service exactly everything about it. And then the answer is, oh, the Secret Service doesn't know because the FBI has taken over. But it's your father's FBI. So what, is Cash Patel hiding something or is he not able to get to it or what?
- [39:55]
B
So Cash is a friend of mine, and I love Cash, and I love Dan Bongino. They've been friends of mine for a long time.
- [40:00]
A
Have you asked them?
- [40:01]
B
No, I haven't asked them directly. What I will tell you is I think my father's being a gentleman about the whole thing. He said that in the past that he satisfied. And listen, when you're the president, United States, first of all, I think his job to bring calm, and I think he's absolutely done that. He's brought calm about the situation in a time where it warranted somebody not being calm. Second of all, there's probably national security things there. Right, Right. That's what I would suspect. And so, yeah, you know, for him to come out and say I'm satisfied is one thing. He's the person that took a bullet to the. I'm a guy who's not satisfied. I think it's a joke that we don't know. What do you think it could be, Miranda? I have no idea, nor do I want to speculate. Let's just assume for a second that it's just a young deranged kid. And let's hope that's what it is. Right? I mean, I really hope that's yes. Then you know what? Come out and tell the American people everything that there is to know about a young deranged kid who tried to kill the 45th president of the United States and a person who is soon to be the 47th President, United States. Right. And if there's more to it, tell the American people that there's more to it. But what I am not okay with is, is the fact that zero answers have been given. Zero. We know nothing about him. We've seen one picture of this guy, we know nothing about him. And then the rest of the media swept it under the rug, and that's.
- [41:18]
A
What feeds conspiracy theories. And there are lots of theories about Deep State and so on, and you only quell those with transparency.
- [41:25]
B
This country's not satisfied with the responses they've given. They're just not. And I will take that to the grave. And again, Cash is as good as it comes, and Dan is as good as it comes. I hope one day, and there's probably reason for it, but I hope one day somebody comes forward and truly gives the American people all the information they need on who the person is and what they were trying to attempt to do. And hopefully they've gotten into their phones like they got into everybody else's phone. I think the American people deserve it, and I think the world deserves it, to tell you the truth.
- [42:04]
A
Tell us about what it was like growing up having Donald Trump as your father. And I just want to preface it by saying that having spent so long looking into the Biden family, and it's very dysfunctional, and yet Joe Biden was always fated as a great father, always talked about himself as a great family man. And not many people comment on the fact that Donald Trump's children are adults, are also well adjusted and get on so well with each other and with him. And I think that's a tribute to him as a father. But you tell us.
- [42:35]
B
Well, I think it's a great irony that the one compliment Hillary ever gave my father until, like, two weeks ago, I think she finally complimented him for getting Middle east peace. Right.
- [42:42]
A
Yeah, she, she's trying not to get indicted, you know.
- [42:44]
B
Yeah, yeah. 100. But, you know, she came out and said, listen, you know, I, I, I, it was during one of the debates, they said, what do you admire about the other person? She said, I admire, you know, Trump's kids. They all turned out to be great. And, yeah, it's hard when you have five.
- [42:57]
A
Yeah.
- [42:58]
B
Right. Like, there's, there's, you'd have one dud. One dud or one bad apple. And honestly, Donnie Vodka and I are inseparable. Yeah. Have done amazing things in, in life. Great accomplishments, have always worked extremely hard. You know, again, I wouldn't be the guy running the company if I wasn't incredibly capable of doing this. Certainly not at 33 years old, responsible for tens of thousands of employees around the world. Tell us hundreds of companies.
- [43:21]
A
But there's a great story in the book about how your father just basically plonked you on a building site and at, I think, 12, and you just had to roll up your sleeves and learn with the workers.
- [43:34]
B
Well, his rules were always no drinking, no drugs, no smoking.
- [43:36]
A
Yeah.
- [43:36]
B
Get good grades, no tattoos. Right. And don't trust anyone. Right. I mean, that was pretty much. But the Other thing my father would not, you know, allow, my mother wouldn't allow it either was, was, was either excess money or excess time, right? You give a type A kid too much time, too much money, bad things are gonna happen. Yeah, listen, right? I went to, I went to school in New York City. One of the biggest, one of the best, one of the most prestigious, probably the most prestigious. I went to great boarding school, one of the most prestigious. I went to one of the most prestigious colleges. I didn't know too many kids that didn't find them their, their way into, to rehab, really who. And most of them were plagued by two things. Way too much free time and way too much money and being type A and being young and stupid and not having a purpose and not having a job and not having a bedtime and having zero supervision and a couple other things, right?
- [44:24]
A
But parents who didn't really care about them.
- [44:26]
B
My father would put us on construction sites. We were making minimum wage. We'd show up, you know, on the site at 7 o' clock in the morning, normally ended about 4 o' clock in the afternoon. We're breaking the walls, we're running conduit, we're running H vac, we're tired as hell by the time the day rolls up and you know, you made your 22 bucks or whatever the hell you made that day, the last thing you were doing is taking that money and going and buying a bottle of vodka or, you know, a, you know, 24 pack of beer. You just, it was too valuable, you know, the sweat, the, the, the pain, the, you know, calloused hands. At, at that point, did you enjoy it? And I loved it.
- [45:00]
A
Right.
- [45:00]
B
I would have done it for free, honestly, because I, I love, I love building. But so, but the side effect of that was also at the end of the day, aside from not wanting to use that money in terms of bad habits, you're so damn tired, you just want to go to bed and do it again, right? So guess who wasn't staying up until 1 o' clock in the morning partying because you actually had a job and you had a purpose. Me. So you were staying out of the nightclubs and you were staying out of the bars and you're staying away from cocaine, Were staying away from the hard drugs. And my father got the recipe right. You know, he did it in his own way, but he got it right.
- [45:29]
A
Kept you busy.
- [45:31]
B
I'm not sure if I can say that of certain counterparts of ours who didn't. I mean, I will happily as a, as the expert in the laptop from hell. I will happily give you my laptop anytime.
- [45:40]
A
I was going to ask you, you left any laptops lying around?
- [45:43]
B
I will. I would delete the password and you can go through every file in my laptop and see if I have anything that's even remotely salacious.
- [45:50]
A
I think it'll be quite boring.
- [45:51]
B
Yeah, it's going to be boring. You're going to see a lot of pictures of two beautiful kids, a beautiful wife and, you know, and, and that's about it. And no, my father was a. He was an amazing father and somebody admired tremendously.
- [46:02]
A
And your mother, Ivana was a Czechoslovakian champion skier, wasn't she? She was a. She was an athlete. I mean, she was an Olympic skier.
- [46:11]
B
She was as tough as they came. Great, unbelievable skier. Ski for Czech national team, almost went to the Olympics for, For skiing. But she was also, you know, she could grace the runways of. And she did, right? I mean, she probably spent more time. And you remember days very well. You probably remember her from, from, from overseas as well, from London and other places. But she was on Esquire and Vogue. I mean, when those magazines had real cachet. Cachet and pizzazz, right? I mean, you know, to be on the COVID of Vogue was, Was the ultimate back then and, and she was on it over and over and over. I mean, they were the ultimate power couple. And she was amazing. But she was, she was tough as hell, right? She was, you know, I, in, in the book, I joke that she was kind of Lindsey Vaughn, you know, Claudia Schiffer and, you know, and, you know, Joan Rivers kind of melded into one, right? Because she had no filter, right? That made her very special. But she could be incredibly elegant. But yes, you could tell the toughest construction worker to go f himself, right? And she had that in her. That's. That was the communist upbringing. But yeah, she could be fun, she could be glamorous. She was an unbelievable athlete. She was, she was an amazing woman.
- [47:09]
A
And you used to go, you and Don Jr. Used to go to Czechoslovakia during the holidays, didn't you? And so you experience firsthand the deprivations of communism.
- [47:18]
B
Pretty much, if we weren't working, we were in communist Czechoslovakia. This was before the wall fell. This is before the, you know, kind of early, very early 90s. You know, this was the late 80s and this was a communist country. And all of a sudden you show up as, you know, well, American kids and There are no TVs and there are no fruit, right? It's just a very different society. It's a. Amazing people, great people, but also very gray. I mean, this was under the influence of. Of. Of communism for. For years and years and years. You know, you didn't have movies, you didn't have Hollywood. You didn't have the level of free speech that you had. You didn't have the pleasantries. I mean, you just had.
- [47:52]
A
So what did you do over there? And did you enjoy it or did you just.
- [47:55]
B
We mowed the lawn and we made bone arrows and With a stick and, you know, a piece of twine, and we figured out a way to occupy ourselves that were very unconventional. Right. Very different than maybe my kids today, who. And I try to do everything I can to keep my kids off of iPads and things like that. But, like, you know, you look at the world that kind of we grew up in and. And the experiences that we had.
- [48:15]
A
Yeah.
- [48:16]
B
Versus, you know, these kids were, you know, they're riding home from school in the G wagon on, you know, two iPads. It's like, you know, in Palm Beach, Florida, it's just a very. It was a very different world at the same time, I think kind of those experiences, which were so unconventional. Don't. Don't get me wrong. I grew up in the, you know, grew up in the penthouse of Trump Tower as well. So, like, I saw the dichotomy, but.
- [48:36]
A
There wasn't holidays at Mar a Lago.
- [48:37]
B
You know, there was a dichotomy here. Right. You saw that. The two ends of the.
- [48:41]
A
But that must have taught you something about capitalism versus communism. I mean, you saw it firsthand. Yeah, you're in. No doubt.
- [48:50]
B
Yeah, it did. It also kind of taught you how to be a social chameleon. I do. I do as well with the construction guys who I adore on construction sites as I do with, you know, the high rollers who grace the patio right outside. And I always have. In fact, I might do better with the construction guys than I do. Right. And I think my father's always been the same way. I mean, he was. He was much better. He was always better with that electrician. He loved those guys. He loved the people who could build, you can tell. Create who. Who actually brought something to life a lot more than kind of, you know, the socialites who, you know, grace these rubber chicken dinners in New York City.
- [49:20]
A
Well, that's the whole thing with the ballroom. Whenever I have interviewed your father, he's so enthusiastic about the things he builds and makes and rearranging things in the White House and portraits and, you know, shoesing up the Oval Office, but the ballroom particularly. And that's about building things. I don't think people understand that.
- [49:40]
B
That's one of our biggest common bonds. And in fact, we'll go back and forth on it. And I called him the other night. It's like 11 o'. Clock. Don't forget hang points in the ballroom. So hang points are the, you know, they're kind of structural eye hooks that you put in the ceiling so you can hang, like speakers and things like that. Right. And it's a detail that any architect who wasn't doing this every day of their lives would absolutely, absolutely overlook.
- [49:59]
A
Right, right.
- [50:00]
B
And instantaneously say, hey, yeah, that's right, that's right. You know, hang point. So I go, I'll give you our exact grids. We set them up in certain grids. And, and I'll give you, I'll give you our exact grades. But he comes alive when it comes to those conversations. I mean, there's nothing. Donald Trump is a builder, right? Yeah, he's. He's a builder. He can bring things to life. I mean, the fact that literally East Wing is ripped down. He's going to build and I know, I know. Great building. It's all I've done my entire life. This ballroom is going to be not good, not. Not great. It's going to be fricking exceptional. I mean, it's going to be. And you've been the East Wing before, right? The East Wing was nothing to write home about.
- [50:31]
A
And I've been to Turnbury to the ballroom in the ballroom.
- [50:33]
B
So I built every inch of that ballroom at Turnbury.
- [50:36]
A
Did you?
- [50:36]
B
It's, it's going to be that in Scotland.
- [50:38]
A
It's gorgeous.
- [50:38]
B
It's. It's the best one, the best anywhere in the world. And it's going to. The White House ballroom is going to be that on steroids. And, you know, it's a great thing. So Barack Obama spent $347 million fixing up the White House in 2010. I just read this the other day. It's crazy. So, like, you know, dollar adjusted, you know, time adjusted value of money. You're probably talking about close to a billion dollars. Yeah. And you see none of it. And yet my father is spending 00 taxpayer money. He's gonna, he's gonna fund it, slash, fundraise for it. Right. So he's gonna put in his own money, slash, he's gonna go out and. And obviously fundraise for it. So the ballroom is gonna cost the American people a zero. And you're Making an amazing mark. I mean, you're creating an unbelievable structure. So $347 million, 15 years ago, they created nothing. Probably painted a couple walls and, you know, did a little pressure washing. And yet look at the mark he's going to make on the White House. And by the way, something the White House needs, like they. They need. They need to be able to hold functions. They need to think about how expensive it is to move a president every single time. You need to go to a little gala versus being able to do it. And you don't want to teach at the White House.
- [51:34]
A
Yeah, State. State dinners in a team. Doesn't work.
- [51:37]
B
It doesn't. Doesn't look good.
- [51:38]
A
No. And. And back to just you, Mum. So I know in the book. Book you have. There's a sad part that you talk about where you actually found her. Yeah, tell us about that.
- [51:49]
B
So she lived on 64th Street, New York. And, yeah, we had a terrible day. Found her, loved her. You know, she suffered with certain ailments and one of them was, you know, just. Probably drank too much and that ended her life, there's no question, too early. And.
- [52:03]
A
Because she fell down the stairs.
- [52:05]
B
She did. And. And that was. That was an ugly day. We loved her. She was amazing woman. Amazing woman. I mean, taught us, taught us everything. She was. She was great. She was kind, she was beautiful, she was elegant, you know, and yet, you know, if we got this far out of line, you'd have these fake long nails, dig into your throat. And then Miranda, she always liked to wear her ring inverted, right? Her wedding, and she'd always forget about it was just like a European thing. Sometimes people wear watches inverted, right?
- [52:30]
A
Yeah.
- [52:31]
B
And so she grabbed you with her little nails and you really screwed something up at this point. All right? And you get one of these, right, that. The flick across. And so on the way across, you just get diamonds across the side and on the way back you just get bruised. Bruise, bruise. So like, you know, one side of your face would be cut, the other side.
- [52:45]
A
And so she was the. She was tough and she was a disciplinarian. Not your father.
- [52:51]
B
If, if you had to get through her to go to my father, yeah, you were in real deep crap because she, she had already taken a pound of flesh out of you. And that's probably taboo in today's culture, right? You know, you're not allowed to touch your kids. And I appreciate that. I respect that and everything else, but what I will tell you is it worked. I mean, yeah, a couple times. Probably a reason A couple times she grabbed on and, you know, pants down and his. His ass is black and blue and, you know, it. It. It certainly worked. It certainly worked for me. She was. She was an amazing person, amazing mother.
- [53:17]
A
And, and do you do that with your kids now?
- [53:19]
B
What, spank their ass? Yeah, now I like to. Anymore.
- [53:22]
A
No, no, but I mean, are you the disciplinarian or is Lara.
- [53:26]
B
We both are. You don't want to cross Laura. She's. She's tough, as you, as you well know. And, and she's a great singer. She loves you, by the way, and do so. And if it has to come to. To me, I think the kids knew they, they really messed up, but it's. It's tough raising kids are. Are tough.
- [53:42]
A
Yeah. Especially nowadays, I think, with social media and electronics and so on.
- [53:47]
B
Yeah, that's right. But, you know, there's. There's been plenty of times where, you know, my son's messed up and he's running around the block over and over and over and, you know, you can. You make him, you make him pay for. And a little bit of physical exercise.
- [53:57]
A
And, and also being in Florida, I guess, compared to New York. I think we mentioned, we were talking before about how the schools here don't brainwash kids like they do in New York.
- [54:07]
B
It's one of the reasons I left New York. I mean, aside from the Letitia James and the city turning crazy and, you know, the COVID lockdowns. I remember when my father went to Walter Reed when he, when he got Covid and I got kind of this, you know, what seemed to be a drunken text from, you know, one of the people at school. And don't bring your children to school tomorrow. Make sure they're dropped off by somebody else. Our faculty and our parents are petrified of getting Covid from your family. I'm sitting there saying, I live 240 miles away from Washington, D.C. like, like, can you transmit Covid Visa via the telephone? And I just, I look brutal one day, I'm like, why are we still here? You know, and that breaks my heart because, listen, I'm a New Yorker.
- [54:43]
A
Yeah.
- [54:44]
B
And I can't tell you how many, you know, people we have in New York. I can't tell you how many properties we have in New York. I can't. You know, I mean, I love New York.
- [54:51]
A
The Trumps are synonymous with New York for generations, of course.
- [54:54]
B
And I'm sitting there saying, what the hell are we still doing? Yeah, you have, you have a system who will just come after people who have done so much for a city. I mean, my father built a skyline of New York. I run all those buildings today. You know, I mean, look what he did with the Walman rings. Look at what we did with Ferry Points. Right? I mean, Ferry Point was a garbage dump for 32 years. They spent $320 million trying to build a golf course. After 30 years, they couldn't do it. Bloomberg called us up, and we got it done in 18 months. I mean, wow. We did the same with Walmart, Rink. You know, the. You know the story very, very well. We did so much for that city, you know, paid so much in taxes, you know, did so much to promote New York. And they came after us like we were dogs, all because it benefited their, you know, political ambitions. And it's the story, and it's so sad. They drove so many people out of this.
- [55:36]
A
Yeah.
- [55:36]
B
I mean, right now. So I live in Florida now, Miranda. Right. You have. You have Ron DeSantis, who's literally talking about eliminating all property tax in the state of Florida. Right, Right. And yet you have.
- [55:45]
A
And there's no income tax already.
- [55:46]
B
A socialist. There's no income tax already versus a city tax and. And a state tax. And you have a communist who's effectively running for mayor, who's saying that he's going to further increase your taxes in New York as everybody leaves. And you're just sitting there saying, what are we doing? New York is the greatest city in the world. We just had safe streets. Clean streets.
- [56:05]
A
Yes.
- [56:06]
B
You just stayed out of the way. No one. Pretty striking. No. No one could beat New York.
- [56:10]
A
No.
- [56:10]
B
And if Florida couldn't beat New York, no one could beat. Meaning unlevel playing field. No one could beat New York. And. And yet they somehow decide to turn into a social experiment every single day.
- [56:20]
A
Yeah.
- [56:20]
B
And mess up the greatest capitalistic city anywhere in the world.
- [56:23]
A
I don't know why. Now we always ask people about the secrets of success. And, I mean, obviously you. You're. I'll ask you two questions because I want to ask about yours, but also your father, from observing him up close, what is it that's given him this sort of ability to rise above?
- [56:41]
B
Yeah. So it's been myopically focused on everything he does. I mean, he's just determined, stubborn, will take, you know, will not take no for an answer, and works harder than everybody. It really does do it from the heart. Right. There's all these people who are kind of, you know, they lack spine. And now he came out day one. Hey, you know, there's an invasion on our southern border. They are not sending the. The best. They're sending their drugs. They're sending the rapists. They're sending the criminals. They're sending them. And I'll never forget, you know, it took a day and a half, right? And then all of a sudden, you had. The manufactured outrage came out. Now everybody's thinking it. Everybody knows this to be the case, right? But it took, you know, all the papers a day and a half to manufacture. How dare him? He just insulted, what a racist, you know, the Hispanics, which is not true. They, they all agreed with exactly what he was saying, you know, and guess what? You watch the New York Times polls the next week, and he, he shot up 15%, right? Because he was saying what everybody else was. Was thinking. And then, you know, he did that over and over and over again. And, and he didn't cower, he didn't quiver. He said what was on his mind. It wasn't politically correct. He didn't care if he was going to lose wealth to it. He didn't care. He didn't care. He just spoke from the heart, and he was brutally honest, and he did so in such an unvarnished way. So he did that, you know, he was true to himself, and he worked harder than anybody could possibly work. And he really believed. I mean, he really, really believed. He didn't run for president because he wanted to write a book, you know, and want to sell an extra three copies. He ran for president because he, he believed and, and he proved a lot of people wrong.
- [58:15]
A
And do you think having such a close family around him also helped him weather the storm and survive?
- [58:23]
B
Yeah, there's no question. I mean, we didn't have anybody other than family, you know, cracked me up in, in, you know, 2024. Every single day, there'd be another congressman who was approaching me, would love to endorse your father for president. I go, this is, this is amazing. Because honestly, in 2016, we didn't have anybody. It was like my father, Don and I. Yes. And then, like, Laura came into the situation a little bit later when she started running North Carolina. But, like, we didn't have anybody. You know, we had Kellyanne Conway, you know, one or two others, but, like, we were this little, you know, band of misfits who didn't know anything about politics, who went out and just fought like hell. And my father was in Pennsylvania, I'd be in Ohio. And if he was in Ohio, I'd be in Michigan. And, you know, and we spoke from the heart. And we gained a lot of earned media, and somehow the whole thing worked. And by the way, he had a better message, and he had a much better voice, and people adored him, and it resonated. His message resonated to Americans because so many people are just left behind in this country. And.
- [59:16]
A
And do you think also. It's because I feel about him that he's uncontrollable. Like, no one can actually force him to do something he doesn't believe in or doesn't want to do. That takes a very strong will.
- [59:28]
B
Yeah. Uncontrollable and probably unpredictable. And I think those are both beautiful things. Now, I think he's very calculated in the way he knows the goal and he knows how to get there. You know, this isn't. He didn't stumble on two presidencies and, you know, the number one show arguably in reality TV history, the greatest real estate empire, you know, privately owned, probably anywhere in the world. Didn't just happen by mistake or by. By great luck. Right. I mean, it was very calculated how he got there, you know, in all ways. But, no, he's always been very unpredictable, and I've seen it my entire life. You know, when everybody else was swimming downstream, he'd be going the opposite way. You know, in the early 90s, he was, you know, a billion dollars in debt. Yeah. The banks were coming after him. Interest rates in New York City were, you know, 20%, and everybody was frozen.
- [60:15]
A
Where were you at that time?
- [60:16]
B
I was. I was young. I was in grade school.
- [60:18]
A
Right. Did that affect you?
- [60:20]
B
But he was literally. The guy was buying commercial buildings while, you know, people were, you know, didn't have the money at the time because no one had money. If you were in real estate again, you had 20% interest rates, and everybody was dying, and. And yet, you know, so many of our great properties he literally bought in times when people were just. You couldn't give properties away.
- [60:39]
A
So he had the nerve to do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [60:41]
B
He had the nerves again, and I would use a different word if it was a little bit more politically correct and we weren't on this. But it took, you know, it took cojones, backbone, and, you know, it took a lot of backbone and those same things to hop into a presidential race against 16 Republicans who actually knew something about politics, including governors of states and other people, people who had hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of super PAC money built up. They were the anointed one from the Republican Party. Only to know that if you somehow got through all of them not knowing anything about politics. You have to run against the Clinton dynasty, maybe the greatest dynasty of the last century, until he came along.
- [61:19]
A
That takes enormous self belief.
- [61:21]
B
Yeah. It takes enormous courage, and it takes enormous. Again, I won't use the word, but it, it does. And, and where does that come from?
- [61:28]
A
Is that just something he was born with? Is that his parents?
- [61:32]
B
I always think it's this masochistic type tendency. All right. It's, you know, like people who enjoy the propensity to pain. Normally, it's probably used in a different context, but I think it's probably, you know, suits this context pretty well. No, I think, I think, you know, the tougher things get, the, the calmer he becomes. I think the more stressful and harder things become, the better he becomes.
- [61:52]
A
Are you like that?
- [61:53]
B
He's, he's always been a pressure player. You know, I've seen him and he's a great golfer. Right. But, yeah. Can't tell you how many courses we've opened where, you know, he takes the, you know, the first tee shot.
- [62:03]
A
Right.
- [62:03]
B
And you'll have a thousand people there and you'll have every cell phone camera in the world. And he stripes it right down the middle every single time. And I've seen real good players. I'm talking about pro level players who get up there and can't handle the pressure and they end up duck, hooking one into the, you know, the woods. He never gets, he never chokes and go back to the debates. Go back to, you know, 2016, you know, Megyn Kelly, you know, you've called people X, Y and Z. Only Rosie o'. Donnell. Right. Or, or, you know, Hillary Clinton with the, you know, I'm just happy that Donald Trump isn't responsible for creating, you know, the laws in our nation. Yeah. Because you'd be in jail. It's. He was always that kind of PowerPoint player where quick wish. Yeah. But, you know, in those times that somebody wanted to take him out. Yeah, he just, he always won. You, you never made money betting against Donald Trump. Never made money betting against him. He's a, he's an amazing person. I, I love him dearly.
- [62:52]
A
To me, he personifies America. You never make money betting against America.
- [62:56]
B
Yeah, you, you, you also always win if you're willing to fight. And I really believe that, you know, it's. People love the fighter. Americans love the fighter. We're a nation based on the fact that we were fighters. Like, we, we weren't. This story is pretty damn unconventional. Like. Yeah, you know, it's not easy. No disrespect to the Brits. Right. But the Brits didn't exactly.
- [63:14]
A
Australian.
- [63:14]
B
So you're Australia. Well, you're kind of. Yeah. Brit by default, right. A little down there.
- [63:21]
A
Australians don't like that.
- [63:22]
B
But. But the, you know, they weren't. They weren't exactly. They're not exactly thrilled, to say the least. Right. And. And let's. Our. Our entire society, our entire country was founded off of us being fighters. If we weren't fighters, we just wouldn't have. Wouldn't have been here. And.
- [63:37]
A
And just last question. Are you like your father or are you more like your mother? What's. And. And who of the kids is. Is like Donald Trump?
- [63:47]
B
Yeah, I certainly have the same passion for. For building. I mean, I love. Real estate is ingrained in our soul, you know, concrete steel, you know, it's what we love. Plans are what we love.
- [63:58]
A
Yeah.
- [64:00]
B
I'm like her. I love. I've always been big skier. Right. I probably have his twisted personality, and I say that in the most respectful way. My mom had a very twisted personality, too. And, you know, very funny, you know, can be sarcastic, can be witty. You know, that stuff, like, comes from both my parents. And I think we've all got his drive and her drive. You know, these were people who charged very hard. I mean, you want to talk about the epitome of like, type A people.
- [64:22]
A
Yes.
- [64:22]
B
That would be my mother and that would be, you know, clearly, clearly my father. And. And so, no, I'm a lot like him. I'm a lot like him in a lot of ways. It may be a place where I'm a little bit different is I don't need to, you know, I don't need to be in front of the camera.
- [64:35]
A
Right.
- [64:36]
B
I can sit behind and, you know, the days where it's beneficial to be in front of the camera, I'm happy to be out there. The days where I would rather just operate and do what I do every single day and run a great company, I can sit back behind a desk and I don't need to be out there. I can be quiet when it's advantageous. I can be loud when it's advantageous. I can focus on real estate when it's advantageous. I can help him in the political arenas I did so effectively when it's advantageous. The days I have to go fight attorney generals and, you know, and try and keep these. These animals off of our backs, I can do that. And, you know, the days I focus on building great hospitality team at a hotel in a city around the world. I can, I can also do that. You know, I've become a little bit of that chameleon for our family and, and, and I'm proud of that.
- [65:18]
A
Well, you've done a great job and now you've topped it all off with being a best selling author. And it's a great book. I know you wrote it by yourself, which is pretty amazing. Didn't have a ghostwriter, so it's a terrible art.
- [65:30]
B
So we, we have a little thing called Rot Return on time. Right? Yes. Writing a book is a terrible article.
- [65:34]
A
No, it's terrible.
- [65:35]
B
But I can tell you, unless you're.
- [65:36]
A
A big best seller like you are.
- [65:37]
B
I, I can tell you it's one of the most cathartic things I've ever done and I had a lot of fun doing it.
- [65:41]
A
It's wonderful.
- [65:42]
B
Yeah. I love that this will hopefully one day be sitting right next to your book because you have a, you have a story that's beyond incredible and, and one that I think opened a lot of people's eyes. The very same fight. It's the same that I talk about.
- [65:56]
A
It's the reverse. Yeah. Thanks so much, Eric.
- [65:59]
B
Thanks, Miranda.
- [66:01]
A
Thanks for joining us on Pod Force One. I'm Miranda Devine. You don't want to miss next week. Please leave, leave a comment below to let us know what you think of this interview. And don't forget to subscribe and like.
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B
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