On Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy answered reporter questions on the ousting of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) after a Michigan town hall.
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00:00 [INAUDIBLE]
00:10 >> You're with who?
00:26 >> I'm with CBS.
00:27 >> CBS, okay, cool.
00:28 We'll just go across, well, I'll just make a couple comments on being Michigan.
00:31 So why are we here?
00:33 First of all, I think it's an important state and it's a good cross section.
00:38 I'm pretty sure I've spent more time here than any other candidate in the race.
00:42 This is our second trip in the last couple of weeks and
00:45 we had done several trips before that too.
00:47 You have a disastrous governor in this state.
00:50 And Gretchen Whitmer is an abomination of a governor.
00:54 Gavin Newsom takes a lot of the flack and appropriately so.
00:58 But you wanna look at how many of the top 50 cities,
01:01 I think it's like eight of the top 50 cities in crime are in the state of Michigan.
01:05 Two of the top cities in terms of crime, top ten cities in the country are in Michigan.
01:10 We're going to Flint now where crime is running rampant.
01:12 We're here in Saginaw, which has a really sad state of crime,
01:17 in part falling at the feet of this governor, shut down this state when she
01:20 didn't have to, and so I think she's an example of a national disaster.
01:24 An embodiment of a Democratic Party that is in the chokehold
01:28 of a fringe minority to whom she's bending the knee.
01:31 And I think the part of the, says, well, I said I wanna shut down the FBI.
01:34 What a farce that the kidnapping or the alleged kidnapping plot of Gretchen Whitmer,
01:42 the reason some of those people were acquitted was that that was itself an FBI plot.
01:45 So in many ways, Michigan ends up being ground zero for
01:48 many of the problems I'm talking about at a national scale.
01:51 Dependence on China, the Goshen plant that we're going to,
01:54 shamefully a CCP owned, a CCP controlled, and
01:59 CCP, a company that pledged allegiance to the CCP,
02:03 operating a battery plant here in Michigan.
02:05 It's the embodiment of a state, we're going to Flint and
02:08 forgotten cities, that I think other candidates in both parties have frankly
02:11 forgotten, we're not gonna leave it forgotten.
02:14 That's why we're here, and
02:15 I think that not everything's gonna be done by the US President.
02:18 I think we need better governors in states like Michigan.
02:20 That's what it's gonna take to revive this country.
02:22 It's a big part of why I'm here.
02:23 So we'll take a couple questions and then we'll go.
02:25 >> You said on Twitter you'd be willing to deploy a smart Democrat.
02:29 Did you have anyone in mind?
02:30 >> I think smart Democrats exist.
02:33 I think most of them prefer to hide from me.
02:36 So if one of them wants to step up, I mean, the only reason I said that is because
02:39 the Republican Party is apparently completely afraid of open discussion,
02:44 if it involves somebody like me.
02:46 If it involves Ron DeSantis, they're perfectly fine with it on Fox.
02:48 But the fact that they swooped in to cancel what was a pre-planned discussion,
02:53 with two guys, by the way, who disagree like hell with each other,
02:56 that's me and Chris Christie.
02:58 But the one thing we agree on is that we'll always face off with somebody who
03:01 disagrees with us.
03:02 The fact that the RNC swooped in to silence open discussion in the party
03:08 says a lot about where we are in this race.
03:11 This is the moment where the establishment is deciding they wanna close ranks,
03:14 a closed door retreat of mega donors trying to narrow the field with
03:18 their single obsession of how to find one candidate to take on Donald Trump.
03:22 It is corrupt.
03:24 And I think that both parties are corrupt.
03:25 The super PAC puppetry in both parties, I think,
03:28 has drained the lifeblood out of both major political parties.
03:31 And so, Mike, there'll be a smart Democrat that sees the same thing happening
03:34 on that side of the aisle, but
03:36 that actually wants to debate the issues free of the super PAC puppet masters.
03:39 Sure, I'm sure that exists, and I'd be happy to have that debate.
03:42 But one of the things I've learned is how corrupt the establishment in
03:45 the Republican Party itself is.
03:47 They don't want the voters to actually decide who the nominee is.
03:50 They want that decided in the way the old world England model used to do it,
03:54 in the back of palace halls.
03:56 So this time those palace halls are the back of super PAC conferences
03:59 that decide who they think their puppet really is gonna be.
04:02 And I'm done with it.
04:03 >> What's your thought in terms of what happened to the Speaker of the House and
04:06 everything?
04:07 >> I think that a little bit of creative destruction can be a good thing from
04:09 time to time.
04:11 And so everybody's so busy talking about who's gonna be the person figuring out
04:15 the slot where nobody's talking about how you deal with the $33 trillion national
04:18 deficit and border crisis of historic proportions.
04:20 I prefer to talk about the what and the why.
04:23 If it says what's the plan to replace the Speaker?
04:25 My question is what's the plan to address the actual crises this country's facing?
04:29 That's where I'm focused, and so I would like to see some good come of this.
04:32 And I'm confident that if we're actually dedicated to talking about the issues,
04:35 some good can come of this.
04:37 >> Donald Trump said that he may testify in this trial that he's in right now.
04:42 Do you think that that is a smart move?
04:43 And do you think that he should consider, if he's talking to a judge,
04:48 he should talk to you guys and debate you guys.
04:50 Do you think that that can kind of ease him into something that can happen with
04:54 you? >> I'm not a legal analyst of a particular
04:57 court case.
04:58 I've lost track of which court cases are happening when.
05:01 I think the reality is a lot of the prosecutions against Donald Trump,
05:03 the prosecutions in total are politically motivated persecutions.
05:06 They're distractions from the real debates we need to be having in this country.
05:11 And when I look increasingly at the Democratic establishment,
05:13 I'm increasingly convinced that is by design.
05:16 They knew exactly what they were doing in the timing of bringing this spate of
05:19 cases all at the same time.
05:21 And sad to say their plan appears to be working out for
05:23 them in the timing of how they've scheduled out these trials,
05:26 which purposefully distracts the nation.
05:28 The left is masterful at deflections.
05:31 I talked about it in there,
05:32 blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability for
05:34 the real issues we need to be talking about.
05:36 Failures in our education system to our military.
05:38 Wokeness is a convenient deflection.
05:40 Now they're using the Trump trials as a convenient deflection too, and
05:42 I don't wanna play along in that game by falling into that trap.
05:46 >> Is there someone in the House Republican caucus who you would
05:49 want to see take over as Speaker?
05:51 >> I think there was some speculation this morning about Donald Trump
05:53 potentially being nominated.
05:54 I don't think he'd be a bad choice.
05:55 I think that right now we need to shake things up.
05:58 And I think that there's a value in chaos at times.
06:03 If you want a status quo that has given us a $33 trillion national debt,
06:08 a porous and dangerous southern border, dependence on an enemy in communist
06:13 China that we depend on for a modern way of life with an an iota changing it,
06:16 a flailing economy we haven't seen since Jimmy Carter,
06:19 corruption at the highest ranks of the government in both parties, and
06:22 frankly, weaponization of the justice system of a kind that resembles
06:25 a third world nation.
06:26 If that's the status quo, then yeah, I think a little bit of chaos may not be
06:30 a bad thing as an alternative to that status quo.
06:32 But I think it needs to be somebody who's willing to actually not just play by
06:37 the genteel rules of what got us to the mess that we're in, but
06:41 somebody who's actually gonna break the system and get us out of that mess.
06:44 >> I don't think anyone in the House would do that.
06:47 >> I'd be open minded.
06:48 I'd be open minded.
06:48 I don't spend my days walking the halls of Washington DC or Congress.
06:53 I'm an outsider coming in.
06:54 But whoever that is, it needs to be, I think an outsider may not be a bad thing.
06:58 And I think whoever it is needs to behave like an outsider to really shake up
07:01 the way things are done in Congress.
07:02 >> Just real quick on those strikes and that, what would you-
07:04 >> So look, I'm sympathetic to the workers.
07:06 I don't have a lot of patience for the union bosses who I think are just using
07:09 the workers and politicizing them in the same way that Biden is.
07:12 But I have a lot of patience for the workers.
07:14 People are going through hardship, but the real picket line needs to be in
07:17 Washington DC at the feet of an administration
07:19 that has left these workers holding the bag.
07:22 Inflation, higher prices, higher mortgage rates for their homes, and
07:25 flailing and stagnating wages at the same time.
07:28 That's a triple whammy.
07:29 That's gonna change on my watch, but
07:31 I think the real picket line needs to be in Washington DC.
07:34 In the meantime, we need a president who's gonna get the job done.
07:36 That's why I'm gonna do it.
07:37 >> Thanks.
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