00:00President that night, remember I just met with him that morning talking about becoming his
00:04running mate, and I'm like, sir, how you doing? And he's like, I'm fine. He'd just been shot in
00:09the ear. I'm fine. You know, nearly lost his life, but totally fine. He goes, how's it playing out
00:14there? I'm like, Mr. President, I think it's playing pretty damn well because remember that
00:18he had that photo where he raises the fist iconically. And I said, I think that photo
00:23is going to go down in history as one of the great photos. And of course, I was right about that. So
00:28the morning of the convention, the morning he announces me to be his nominee, he calls me at
00:34around 1145. And I'm not kidding you, I don't answer the phone. And I don't know what had happened. We
00:40had just landed in Milwaukee. We've got three little kids. You know, it was a hot day. We were trying to
00:45get through all the security to get to our hotel room. I don't know what happened. So I call him
00:50back 15 minutes later and he answers the phone and he says, JD, you just missed a very important phone
00:57call. I said, yes, yes, Mr. President. And he said, I'm going to have to select somebody else now.
01:07And of course, you know, my heart stops and I think he's actually going to do it. But then he
01:11asked me to be his running mate. He actually talks to my son and you know, the rest is history, right?
01:16The rest is history. So that's, that's the first story. The second story that I'll tell you
01:20is we've probably been in the Oval Office for all of 10 days and I'm sitting there and we have a phone
01:26call with a foreign leader. I won't mention who, and it's a tough phone call. There are some,
01:30some tough issues that we have to work through with this foreign leader. And he asked me to come
01:34sit behind him at the Resolute desk so that if I need to say anything, I can just speak directly
01:39into the speakerphone and it's early in the administration. So there's not a whole lot in
01:43the Oval Office yet. And there's this sort of wooden box with a red button sitting on the Resolute desk.
01:50And I think to myself, that's probably not a button that you want to press, right?
01:53So we're talking to this foreign leader and the president looks over at me, puts the foreign
01:58leader on mute and says, this is not going very well. And he presses the red button
02:03and, and I, my eyes get really big and I'm like, Mr. President, you know what, what just happened?
02:12And he's, he looks at me and he goes, nuclear, nuclear. And two minutes later, a guy walks in
02:22with a Diet Coke and he looks back at me and he says, it wasn't nuclear. It's just the Diet Coke
02:26button. And that's, so that's the kind of guy, my fellow Republicans that we have as the president
02:35of the United States, a guy who can do a good job, but keep a sense of humor.
02:45And, and I've learned a ton, even in 130 days, 140 days, however long we've been in office. I've,
02:51I think I've learned more. I've had more on the job training than I think any person in the history
02:56of having a job for all of about five months, because the thing that I've learned about the
03:00president of the United States. And I guess I kind of knew this a little bit, but I've really
03:04learned it, seeing him interact with foreign leaders, with congressional leaders, and just
03:08doing the job of president of the United States is what makes the president so successful is he has
03:14the best instincts about people of anybody that I've ever seen in my life. He knows when somebody
03:19is selling him a load of BS. He knows when he's making progress, when he needs to cut something
03:24off. He knows when he's dealing with somebody that he can trust. And he knows when he's dealing
03:28with somebody that he can't trust. And I think if you think about everything that comes across
03:33the president's desk, I mean, just on, I guess this is yesterday on, on Monday alone, the president
03:40of the United States, of course, we were trying to figure out what we were doing with the Israel
03:45Iran situation. Of course, we had just launched the wildly successful attack that destroyed the
03:51Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow and elsewhere. Thank you.
03:59But we know the Iranians are going to counterattack, and we're kind of trying to figure out,
04:03is it going to be a real counterattack, or is it going to be something more symbolic, more
04:07face-saving? He's dealing with congressional leaders about the one big, beautiful bill that cuts
04:13taxes on overtime, cuts taxes for tips. Thank you. Really, really is the most important generational
04:23tax reform that we've had in this country in 30 years, and also provides billions of dollars
04:29to replenish the southern border funding that encourages us and empowers us to kick out the
04:36illegal immigrants and to stop the flow of illegal immigration into our country.
04:44So we're doing all these things, and that's just one Monday at the White House, and there's no
04:49person that could possibly, you know, read all the briefing materials, the tens of thousands of
04:55pages of background on all this stuff. But what you need in the, in that Oval Office is you need
05:00somebody with good instincts. You need somebody who can tell when a person is negotiating on behalf
05:05of the American people, and you need somebody who knows when they're negotiating against the
05:10interests of the American people. And I'll tell you, you do not want to be a person in Donald Trump's
05:15Oval Office who's negotiating against the interests of the American people, because they'll throw you
05:19the hell out and tell you exactly what he's going to do. And that, and that is what I think makes him
05:31an effective president. It's what makes him an effective leader for the American people. And I
05:35will say, I'm obviously extremely biased, but 130 days into this term, we have got a lot to brag on
05:43from the Trump administration and what we're doing in Washington, D.C. Let me,
05:47let me run just a few, through a few of the ways in which the Trump administration has been wildly
05:56successful. And let me start with the thing that is, of course, in the news. And what the president
06:01said going back 10 years, if you look at the campaign in 2015 and 2016, and he said it consistently
06:08through his second term, is that he does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. It's very simple.
06:15It destabilizes the entire region. It gives this terrible regime leverage over the United States of
06:21America. As the president often jokes with me, everybody in Iran calls the Iranian leader,
06:27the supreme leader. That's, that's a pretty amazing title if you think about it. But he looked at me
06:31in the, in the, in the situation room a few days ago, and he said, Mr. Vice President, you don't have
06:36to call him the supreme leader, but you would if the guy had a nuclear weapon. Because the leverage
06:41that nuclear weapons give you to destabilize the world, to destroy our economic interests, to destroy
06:48our national security interests, you don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear
06:53weapon. So what did the president do? For 60 days, he negotiated aggressively to encourage that Iranian
06:59regime to give up those weapons peacefully. And by the way, he was more than willing to accept a peaceful
07:05settlement to that problem. But again, this comes back to instincts. When the president realized that
07:10there was not going to be a peaceful settlement to that problem, he sent B-2 bombers and dropped 12,
07:1630,000 pound bombs on the worst facility and destroyed that program.
07:27And I think there are a lot of Republicans, by the way, I count myself among them,
07:31who after the past 25 years, they don't want to get involved in another long term protracted
07:36Middle Eastern conflict. We all saw what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan. And so what I call the
07:42Trump doctrine is quite simple. Number one, you articulate a clear American interest. And that's
07:47in this case, that Iran can have a nuclear weapon. Number two, you try to aggressively diplomatically
07:54solve that problem. And number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming
07:59military power to solve it. And then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a
08:03protracted conflict. That is the Trump doctrine. And to the Americans who are worried about this
08:14becoming a protracted conflict, I think the president solved that very quickly. Not only did
08:19we destroy the Iranian nuclear program, we did it with zero American casualties. And that's what
08:24happens when you've got strong American leadership. Now let me talk to you about something else. For
08:35every month that you've got inflation numbers and jobs numbers and wage numbers coming out,
08:41you know, I'll come into the White House and I'll say what, you know, that this happened now about
08:44five times, where every seems like every economist and every financial journalist in the world says
08:50that Donald Trump's policies are going to lead to higher inflation, they're going to lead to lower
08:55jobs, they're going to lead to lower wages. And for now, five months in a row, every single time we
09:00come to the news, and it turns out the economists' expectations missed. Because wages are higher,
09:06inflation is lower, and our economy is roaring in a way that it has not in a very, very long time.
09:11That is thanks to good presidential leadership.
09:13And I'll bring it back to instincts, because when the president came into office, he said,
09:21frankly, what he's been saying for 30 years, that we have got to stop allowing foreign companies to
09:27take advantage and foreign countries to take advantage of the United States of America. Why,
09:32why in God's name, would we allow cheap slave labor manufactured stuff from a foreign country to
09:41come into our country, undercutting the wages and jobs of American workers? And the reason we allowed
09:47that to happen is for 30 years, we had a bipartisan failed consensus that we ought to let cheap plastic
09:53garbage come into our country at the expense of American jobs and the American families who depend
09:59on all those jobs. You know what President Trump said? On April the 2nd, he said, if you try to
10:04undercut the wages of American workers. If you try to bring in this crap, if you try to expose the
10:11American worker to an economic unfairness that you don't force your own countries to deal with,
10:16we are going to slap a big fat tariff on what you bring into this country. We're going to penalize
10:22you for, for once. Finally, we had an American president who said, if you want to destroy the
10:27wages and the jobs of American workers, you're going to pay a big fat penalty because of it. And that,
10:32I believe, has saved the American economy. We were just listening in to those remarks there from
10:38Vice President J.D. Vance in Lima, Ohio. Let's light away for a two-minute break.
12:50Let's now turn our attention now to Ohio as Vice President J.D. Vance is making remarks
12:56at a GOP dinner.
13:04We're going to have to pay a tariff.
13:05If you want to undercut American auto workers,
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