‘Are We Still Doing This, Man!?’ Vivek Ramaswamy Loses It When Confronted With Own Words About Trump

When Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president as a Republican in 2024, his campaign was fashioned as the most relentlessly supportive of former President Donald Trump. Yet just two years ago, Ramaswamy had brutal criticisms for the former president in his book, Nation of Victims, which forcefully rejected 2020 stolen election theories and said embracing them would be bad for America.

“It was a dark day for democracy,” he wrote. “The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”

On this week’s episode of Mediaite’s Press Club, Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin asked Ramaswamy about a series of comments he made criticizing Trump and his election lies. In response, Ramaswamy accused McLaughlin of “relitigating the past” and trying to “line edit, nitpick, and airlift” from his prior comments.

Ramaswamy also spoke about his view that it’s “problematic” for Democrats to label Trump and his movement “weird,” whether he’d take a job in Trump’s cabinet should he win the 2024 election, his acquisition of a minority stake in BuzzFeed, and what he wants to do with the struggling media business.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Read a transcript of the conversation, edited below for length and clarity.

Let’s start with your investment in BuzzFeed. You bought an 8% stake in the media company earlier this year, and you vowed to rescue it from whatever depths BuzzFeed currently finds itself in. What’s the latest?

So I’ve had an initial meeting with the management. And for those who aren’t familiar with the background here, before I ran for U.S. president, my background was as an entrepreneur. Before that, I had been a professional investor. I had a career as an entrepreneur, built a number of companies, and I’m very understanding of the fact that many companies, especially young companies, have to go through many iterations, may face challenges, and ultimately where they end up may not be exactly what they imagined on day one when they set out.

But BuzzFeed does strike me, and it struck me at the time that I made the investment, as a company that has at once struggled, but has major potential if they have a real pivot in the way they run their business. And so one of the things I had an experience to do during the presidential campaign was to understand what I see as some major gaps in the media landscape. One of those gaps, I think, is just building trust with an audience base. BuzzFeed no longer runs BuzzFeed News, but they did. And BuzzFeed News – despite doing some interesting reporting in certain areas, such as reporting on the Uyghur treatment in China, which is interesting and won high acclaim in the United States – nonetheless had, I believe, systematically failed to build trust with their own user base. They eventually shut that part of their business down.

But that heritage of the company’s history replicates much of what I see in the media today, a media that has lost its audience trust. So in the era of new media, in the era of content creators that are able to reach people via platforms, one of the things you’re able to do is to sidestep those traditional media brands. If you’re going to have a media brand, it’s got to stand for something.

So what I proposed as a shareholder to BuzzFeed is that they have failed to define what their brand actually stands for. The good news is that they do have a brand. Most people know BuzzFeed. They just don’t know what it stands for. They have good distribution pipes. They reach upwards of many, many tens of millions of followers on social media via YouTube and otherwise that I think are being under-exploited and underutilized as a business.

The business, unfortunately, is losing money. It has more debt than cash right now, and it was in a troubled position when I became an investor, became the second largest class A shareholder, outside shareholder, and made known my initial views in the context of a letter that I sent to the management and the board. We’ve since had some dialogue with both the CEO, the CFO, and a member of the board that joined the conversation with several of the directors that I’ve proposed to have joined their board. One of the things I think we need more of, both in business culture and our culture more directly, is open dialogue with different ideas. And for that first conversation, the way I framed it to them is I want to hear the best arguments for what their strategy is, even clarity on what exactly their strategy is, which I think has been as yet pretty unclear to public market investors. That was a good, constructive first interaction, and we’re having a series of interactions that I expect will take place in the coming weeks and months.

You mentioned it has more debt than cash. On that note, Jonah Peretti, as you know, has voting control of the company. From what I understand, the plan is to wait until December when the debt comes due, and then you might have a better shot at seizing control?

We can stick to what I’ve said in other public context, the letter I’ve sent to the company and the other comments I’ve made are public. But what I’ve said overall is that the game theory in this situation is a little bit different than in a normal activist situation where you have founder control. The reality is there’s more debt than cash on the balance sheet. Some of that debt comes due, or at least it’s putable to the company in December of this year. And I think that that force is a time window for this company to really take a long, hard look in the mirror, ask itself, who are we really? Do we have a coherent brand? Right now, I think the answer to that question is no.

And if BuzzFeed comes out of this with a decisive brand and a decisive purpose for existence and realigns a lot of its business and its cost structure accordingly, I think there’s a lot of potential here. I think it has the potential to be a company that’s far more valuable than it is today. Sometimes if you have an inward-looking management team that has historically not been really faced with outside activist or shareholder pressure, they may fall into their own traps. And so I hope my involvement will be a force for good in creating value at the company. And I am glad to say that our first interaction, the first meeting that we had, was constructive, and I’m looking forward to continuing those conversations.

Are there any other companies that you’re looking at that have successfully done something close to what you’re trying to do here? What is the model, as you see it, for the BuzzFeed that you want to see and that you think could grow?

Look, I think that what I’m talking about at a certain level is entirely unoriginal for a company that has run cost overruns relative to what its core business actually can support, a company that has started with a unique and defined mission but veered away from that mission in part in the face of major changes in an industry landscape. You see this all the time, and I think part of the beauty of American capitalism, particularly in public markets, is that it does allow for positive shareholder activism to drive changes, in which case you have management teams that at times have been somewhat insular in their views. So the examples would be far too countless to enumerate here of outside perspectives brought in by shareholders who are looking at creating value. I think defining the core mission of the company is something that’s missing here. I’m open to a very constructive dialogue with the company, but I think the worst-case scenario of all is to have a name of a company or a media brand that no one really knows what it stands for. And sadly, I do think that that’s where the company has found itself in recent years. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.

Do you have an idea of what you would want that core mission to be? You outlined some of that in your letter.

I laid it out in my letter. I offered a view, a distinctive view that fills the gap of what BuzzFeed’s reason for existence is or could be. Right now, there’s a wide-open gap in the media landscape of a business that really just tells customers the hard truth outside of an Overton window that is otherwise, I think, limiting for many mainstream media companies. The reality is you have social media platforms without the content filters or ideological filters – take something like X which has no content filter or ideological filter. That’s one platform that exists.

On the other hand, you have a lot of media companies that are publishers, not content platforms, but publishers that apply content quality filters. So quality filters, but with that comes an ideological filter. I think there’s a wide-open gap in the marketplace right now for a media publisher that at once, yes, applies that content quality filter, but at the same time does so without an ideological filter. And I’m not just talking about in the realm of news and politics, culture, sports, economy, business, politics, all of it.

And I see an opportunity to also fill a gap that many Americans I believe are hungry for, which is the open exchange of ideas. You don’t really see that either on the right or on the left in the realm of political or news media. But I think you see even less of it in other areas of media as well. And so my vision, even if we take BuzzFeed to one side, for the existence of the media company that’s missing today, is one where you have distinctive, high-quality voices, but with actually diverse ranges of views interacting with each other and platformed by a common brand. To me, that’s a powerful brand, the brand of the pursuit of truth through the open exchange of ideas. I just don’t see that existing in the media landscape today, and the country would be better off for it. But because of that, for that very reason, I think the demand for it exists. I think the business case would be very strong as well, to build a distinctive brand around that.

If you don’t have a distinctive brand, there’s no point in having a central corporate holding company of a bunch of media properties in the age of new media, right? People build their trust with individual personalities or individual content creators anyway. So to the extent you’re going to agglomerate or aggregate all of those into a brand, the one thing that you’re missing is the coherence of what that brand actually stands for. That’s what BuzzFeed is missing today. I have high confidence that there is an opportunity for a media company, be it BuzzFeed or another, to capture this wide-open opportunity sitting there right now. And that’s what I laid out in my letter to the company. But in my capacity as a shareholder, my top goal is offering whatever perspective and driving whatever change maximizes the value of the company. That’s the goal. They haven’t done it well, admittedly. The company’s stock relative to when it went public, those facts speak for themselves, but I don’t think it has to stay that way. And I’m hopeful that we can continue to have a constructive path to hopefully creating value there.

I want to talk about the media and the 2024 election. Donald Trump, whom you support, still hasn’t conceded the last election, which creates a challenge for the media, which has to now prepare for the likelihood that if he does lose this next one, he will claim that it was stolen as well —

Can I just say a word about that? Just to provide some level of historical context, Donald Trump is now running, it would look like, against Kamala Harris, who back in 2016 called Donald Trump an illegitimate president. Hillary Clinton said the election of 2016 was an illegitimate election, that there was Russian interference that caused Americans across the board, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, to question the outcome of that election, the legitimacy of that presidency. So I hope that what happened in the last month, and here I’m referring to the assassination attempt that, thank God, was not successful, if that is a wakeup call to all of us, let it be that we can’t resort to histrionics in our politics to say one candidate or the other is an existential threat to democracy, but instead to have a reasoned, thoughtful exchange of competing visions for the country.

Donald Trump offers a very different vision for the future of the country than that which Kamala Harris offers. That’s fine. The beauty of the country is we ought to be able to have that and air that debate in a way that voters are actually able to make that choice without feeling like they have a gun to their head, literally or metaphorically, with respect to the threats of the existence of democracy, which I just don’t think is constructive. So if you want to go to election denialism, who started this discussion, go back to Bush v. Gore. You have people who didn’t vote to certify that election. I just think looking backwards to that, I just don’t find it that constructive, versus an honest and rich and when needed, contentious debate between competing visions for the future.

Well, you’ve said that the 2020 election was stolen by Big Tech. What do you mean by that?

Well, look, I stick to facts. What we know is that certain stories were systematically suppressed that would have, we know through polling, had an impact on the outcome of the election. The most notable of them, you will well know, is the Hunter Biden laptop story. Not only was that dismissed, it was systematically suppressed. The New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in circulation, founded by Alexander Hamilton, had its own account locked on Twitter, now X, then Twitter, that stopped them from even publishing a story that we now know to be true, but was dismissed systematically.

If you were on Facebook or other messaging platforms, even in the equivalent of email, if you were to try to share that story from The New York Post, that was suppressed. I think that had a more profound impact on the outcome of the election than any magnitude of political consultant-made advertisements on television. If you look at a lot of the polling, independents answered afterward that if they had been exposed to that information, it would have caused them to evaluate the candidates differently. I think that’s regrettable. I don’t think we want to live in a country where large, quasi-monopolistic, coordinated-with-state actors, tech companies, are suppressing the information that’s available to the voting public. I don’t think that that’s good for democracy. I don’t think it’s good for America. And I hope we don’t repeat those same mistakes next time around, which is why I’ve been so intent on pointing that out.

Twitter did censor The New York Post reporting, which was obviously a foolish decision. The reporting was accurate.

It was a damaging decision. It was more than foolish.

But that’s not stealing an election. That’s a company making a decision you didn’t like. There are plenty of things that happened during the election on both sides. On that standard, you mentioned Hillary Clinton, she could claim that Wikileaks stole the election from her in 2016 by leaking the DNC’s emails. But again, that’s not stealing an election, that’s just being a sore loser.

So I want to say a couple of things. I want to be clear about what my view is. I believe that Big Tech tilted the scales in a way that had a potentially outcome-altering effect on the 2020 presidential election. Do I think that in the case of censorship, not making more information available than was, that’s a very different point, but suppressing the existence of information that otherwise could have been made available to voters, do I think that is good for American democracy? No, I don’t actually. I think it’s very destructive for American democracy. And so why bother to relitigate the past? You’re not going to change the past.

But what you can change is the future. Part of what we knew in 2020 was a lot of those tech companies were actually under threat, under duress, even from lawmakers, including Democratic lawmakers, that said they were going to bring down restrictions, Section 230 limitations, other forms of antitrust limitations on those companies unless they censored certain forms of disfavored speech. And I just think that that type of state action, when the government is doing through the back door what it could not do through the front door, I think we’re all worse off.

And to your point, if you look through most of American history, if you go back far enough, you could have examples of conservatives doing this every bit as much as liberals doing it. I think it’s equally bad both ways. If the same shoe fit the other foot, I’d be saying the same thing. My only point is, and this even relates to some of what I’m trying to do through the private sector, even as it relates to our discussion on the future of media, I think our country is at its best when we are able to freely exchange ideas in the open. When we, yes, may need to fiercely disagree about them, but still fight to the very end for the other side’s right to be able to express their views.

And that was one area where I was really rooting for Joe Biden’s success early in his presidency. He said he wanted to run on uniting the country. I think he had an opportunity to do it. As an American, I’m sad he squandered it. I think that if he had been elected and he said, you know what? To those tech companies, this is at a point where Donald Trump, the now Republican candidate for president, frontrunner for U.S. president, former 45th president of the United States had no social media platform. To be able to say to those tech companies, we’re a country where no matter who you are, you get to express yourself and express an opinion. And even though I disagree with everything he says, I think it’s wrong for the United States that voters aren’t able to hear it. Let’s platform him. Let’s hear the man, and I’m going to defeat him and his ideas through the front door.

Boy, I think that could’ve united the country, and I think we missed that chance. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. And that’s why I continue to believe that this is an important issue that can unite Americans. No matter how much we disagree, we’re going to stand for your right to say it and have access to the information you need to be able to make correct decisions as a voter.

This is a slightly different argument from Trump’s claim, which is that the election was stolen through outright fraud. Do you disagree with that claim from Trump?

I’ve shared with you what my views are. I ran in the primary and I have my views. I do think that the strongest case for election interference in the 2020 election, it’s driven by data, is that the outcome of the election would have been different had voters had access to that Hunter Biden laptop story.

Do you think that there was voter fraud specifically?

Of course there’s voter fraud, that’s well-known.

Enough to overturn the election?

That’s the open question. And here’s where I am. I said this earlier. I’m going to say it again. The only point of talking about this is are we going to make for a better country in the future by making changes? Here’s what I do favor. I think this would be healing for the country, I think this would be a massive step forward for public trust in the United States of America, if we accepted a system of single-day voting on Election Day, make it a national holiday, a uniting day, to say this is one day we all take to think about our civic duties. We cast that ballot with mandatory government-issued ID to match the voter file, and you even look at what’s happening with CrowdStrike or other risks recently, paper ballots to backstop it.

If we get to that place, which I think most Democrats, most Republicans find to be reasonable, then I’ll commit to you that I would lead the way, and I believe most Republicans, I’d call on them to do it too, to be done with complaints about election integrity, questioning the outcomes of elections. I will pledge to be vehemently opposed to doing any of that in the future if we get to a rational system of how we conduct elections that actual Americans have public trust in. So I don’t think that’s too much to ask. Again, just for clarity, not unreasonable requests, if they are, push back on me, I think we should debate it. But single-day voting on Election Day as a national holiday, with paper ballots and government-issued voter ID to match the voter file.

And I do think what bothers a lot of people and gives them that sense of mistrust is the vehement level of opposition to those voter ID requirements. If this was something that everyone could agree on, move past, I don’t think we would have concerns about election integrity in the country, but the fact that there’s such vehement opposition to say that to be able to drive a car, you need ID, but to say that somehow you’re going to call that a racist policy or unacceptable policy in the context of showing up to vote, I do think breeds a lot of public mistrust. So I care about uniting the country. I care about moving us forward. If we get to that place for reasonably conducting elections, by the way, they do it in Puerto Rico this way, one of the territories of the United States. I’ve been to Puerto Rico, talked to people who are involved in that process. It works reasonably well. Basic measures. If we get that in all 50 states, you have my word I will be the person who is leading the way in saying that both sides need to be done talking about election integrity or questioning the results of elections. But I think that’s a reasonable place where we can move forward as a country and be united around it.

You said it’s an open question, which is notable because you wrote the opposite in your book in 2022. Just two years ago, you wrote that there was no evidence of fraud.

I said I hadn’t seen evidence. [Editor’s Note: In his book, Ramaswamy wrote that “all of our government institutions… unanimously found no evidence of significant fraud” and “Top election officials in virtually every state, regardless of party, said they’d found no evidence of any significant level of fraud.]

Can I just ask a question? I mean, I’m interested in the future. That’s why I’m having this discussion, it’s what I’ve said several times in this discussion, I want to make the United States of America a better country. I don’t think it is productive for either side to go back and obsess over relitigating the past. And the only reason I’m even bringing up the Hunter Biden laptop story is because I think there are lessons in it for the future.

What’s the lesson here? I believe our country would be better off if we strengthened our election integrity and public trust in elections with voter ID requirements. Make it single-day. Make it a national holiday to permit everyone to do it. And I think that that will actually bring the country together. So I’m just not interested in having retroactive games of which side said what, when, gotchas, from Republicans doing it or Democrats doing it. I’m just not interested in it. I think I’m interested in the future of the country, and I do think that this is part of the reason why you have public loss of trust, not just in government, but in the media and other institutions.

My best advice to the Republican Party, and I think the Democrats are probably well served with the same, and our country would definitely be well served by it, is if both parties offer a vision for the future. Learning from the past, yes, but a vision for the future to say, here’s how we’re going to make for a stronger United States of America. That’s just the scope of what I’m interested in right now. 100 days out, less than a hundred days out from one of the most important elections, if not most important election in my lifetime. That’s where I think I’m interested in spending my airtime. And if you are, I’d love to join you in that.

Forgive me for asking about the past, but this isn’t ancient history. This is two years ago, and Donald Trump is running for re-election again, and you’re supporting him. The reason I ask about your book is that it was published just two years ago and —

Just open it up and quote it right now. Do you have it handy?

Yes. You wrote about January 6th, “It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters and is running for executive office again.”

And that person’s name was Stacey Abrams, is what I said in the book.

And then you said Donald Trump.

And then I put in Donald Trump. Yeah. Look, I’ve been very clear about this, and I think we just have a difference of interests in what we think is really important for the country. My time as yours is, I’m sure, is limited. All of ours is. I think that it is best served for the country to focus on how we take all of the learnings of the last five, ten and twenty years as a country, to marshal that to a different vision to how we make our country stronger. That’s what I’m interested in. That being said, my point is, and it remains to the extent that you remain fixated, if I may say, on relitigating the past, Stacey Abrams to Hillary Clinton to Al Gore and his supporters have a long history of denying the outcomes of elections. Even in the 2020 election, you had Nancy Pelosi leading the charge not to seat somebody who was elected to Congress from Iowa.

I don’t care to relitigate all of that. I don’t think it’s productive, but I do think our country will be stronger if both sides are able to move past questioning the results of otherwise well-conducted elections, if they’re actually well-conducted elections. So the right solution is to accept the solution that I will tell you, speaking on behalf of a majority of the Republican base, I think it’s an overwhelming majority of the Republican primary base. There is a clear, practical, unifying solution to this problem of public mistrust. Whatever you think the problem might have been with the last election or not, the problem of public mistrust itself is a problem for the United States of America. I care about solving that problem. I think we have a very practical way to solve it. I think Republicans would do themselves a service, and I am happy to lead the way on this by saying that we are done questioning the results of elections if we get to a rational outcome of a practical, implementable solution. The country that put a man on the moon, if we can do that, we certainly can do this. If Puerto Rico can do it, we can certainly do it this much with our own elections.

And that’s just what I think it’s going to take to save the country and to save, actually, our public trust in elections. I ran for president because I’m deeply worried about the future existence of the United States. I think we’re skating on thin ice, and I just don’t think it is productive to engage in these retrospective gotcha games. I could do it in reverse for the last 25 years amongst Democrats, and you’re tempting me to, but I just don’t think that’s productive. And I think that this is part of the poison in the United States of America, as opposed to having honest, earnest, competing visions for the future.

So I hope as a fellow citizen, from one to another, I hope that’s not too much to ask. However, if it is, I think that we’re in trouble. But if it’s not, if two people who have differing views on the past are able to have a constructive discussion about competing visions for the future, even if they’re deeply different ones, that I think is good. I think relitigating and playing gotcha games, we both could do this dating back twenty years. From Hillary Clinton, to Al Gore and his supporters, to the people who didn’t certify that election, to Nancy Pelosi not seating a democratically-elected congressman from Iowa in the same election that Trump lost, to the Big Tech interference in the last election, I’m not interested in that. It seems that that’s what you’re interested in. My ask to you would be, how about we have a productive discussion about competing visions or very different visions for the future?

We don’t have to relitigate the 2020 election. But I do want to understand how you went from just two years ago calling Trump’s conduct “downright abhorrent” to supporting him in 2024.

I’ve said this during the campaign, if you were paying attention to the campaign, and maybe we’ll just agree, because I find this to be a little bit of a waste of time if we’re just mired in the past, and I think there’s just more productive ways to spend time than this.

I think it’s a reasonable question, how you went from calling him “downright abhorrent” to supporting him.

I’ve answered this a million times. I hate to break it to you, but there’s the lack of originality in this for somebody who ran a presidential campaign.

I have yet to hear the question answered.

So I think the facts that came out surrounding what the government initially put out around January 6th versus facts that came out later did have a palpable change on my perspective. The fact that there were video files and evidence that was withheld for a very long time that later became public, the fact that there were people charged, and I’m pretty civil libertarian to my core. I was against a lot of the post-9/11 actions that the government took. I was against a lot of holding even alleged terrorists without the due process rights that we think are afforded by our constitutional heritage. When you learned a lot of what happened, then my views did evolve. Yes, they did, and I was very open about that in my interviews with CNN and everybody else. I just think it’s more productive not to rehash things that we’ve already talked about ad nauseam versus actually maybe broaching some new territory at an interesting point in our country’s future.

So in your view, because you wrote in your book that the institutions are —

Are we still doing this, man?

The book is two years old. It’s a reasonable question.

I think your complete absence of interest in, I’ve raised the possibility of it a few times, your demonstrated absence of an iota of interest in actually discussing two important competing visions for the future within 100 days of an election, and instead to go back and try to line edit, nitpick, and airlift when we have an entire year of, I’m not a new character here. Ran for you as president, from CNN to everybody else, we’ve been through this. That footage exists. I find this to be, and I’ve explained it, we can do it again ad nauseam. I just don’t think it’s productive. Why are you so reluctant to engage in a competing vision of the future? I think there are differences of opinion on where the country should go. Why the reluctance to talk about it in the short time that we do have? It is a short time, I’m sorry to say.

You laid out in your book, very persuasively, how Trump threatened institutions when he left office.

People can read my book. It’s called Nation of Victims. You could check it out. It’s the second book, I’ve written four books in the last three years. Each one successively builds on what my views were in the last one. Woke Inc. was my first. I’ve openly said I agree with about 95% of what’s in there, not 100%. I’ve written four books in three years. The fourth is coming out later this year. Read them. That’s great. I have laid out what my views are with clarity, and my top view right now on this set of questions is we have a chance to fix the issue, the issue of public trust in elections. We have lost our collective American sense of public trust in elections. Kamala Harris, to Hillary Clinton, to Stacey Abrams, to a lot of figures on the left as well, have questioned the outcomes of elections. I don’t think that’s good. I don’t want conservatives to continue to have to be in a position to do the same thing.

There’s an easy fix. What I would love, and I would love your perspective on this as somebody who may have different points of view than mine on certain questions, what is the best counterargument against single-day voting on Election Day, making it a national holiday, and requiring government-issued ID for voters, as they do in Puerto Rico? Consistent with what we require for someone if they’re going to drive a car. I’ve laid out what some of the benefits would be. Enhancing, significantly enhancing public trust in elections. What’s the best counterargument for that view?

I don’t think there are very good counterarguments. I think the argument people would have is that it limits people’s access to vote. You objected this week to Democrats trying to frame the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird,” which is the new talking point of the Harris campaign. You called it “dumb and juvenile.” Is that what you mean when you talk about the free, mature exchange of ideas? Do you think that political candidates should aspire for more mature rhetoric and debate?

I think that mislabeling or just substituting for debate, and instead castigating an entire group of people as weird, I think it’s problematic. And I can go into it in some depth here. I think America and our heritage, our founding fathers, were in some sense weird compared to old-world standards, right? Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. He invented the bifocal spectacle. Thomas Jefferson invented a swivel chair, a polygraph test. They had beliefs. Joseph Priestley was welcomed to the United States from old-world England because he had beliefs that defied the traditional Anglican church.

So I just think part of what makes America great is that we don’t dismiss ideas based on being weird. And even worse, we don’t just say, oh, you’re a group of people who have a heterodox idea. That’s weird, and I’m not going to engage in it. The way we’re going to actually engage each other is by engaging in the content of our own ideas. So I do think that it is a little bit adolescent, a little juvenile to say, whoa, they’re weird. No, I don’t think that’s the way we should do it.

And by the way, I try to be consistent. I think when I ran my campaign, a lot of Republicans had a different view. They said that we just want to go back to a normal America. You didn’t hear that from me. Because normal compared to what, weird compared to what? I don’t just care about making America great again. I care about making America greater than it has ever been before. I think if your allegation against the other side is that they’re weird, there’s two problems with that. One is it denies the possibility of exceptionalism. Albert Einstein famously didn’t wear socks. Nikola Tesla had a weird issue with the number three. You could go straight down the list, there’s a German philosopher, his name is slipping my mind. But his famous quote is, “The only thing worse than madness is the utter absence of it altogether, which leads to imbecility.”

And America is the opposite of that spirit, so it denies the possibility of exceptionalism. It got under my skin a little bit, even to see a guy like Pete Buttigieg use the word weird multiple times over the weekend to talk about JD Vance and Donald Trump. It hurts a little bit because I knew Pete in college, actually. And one of the things that’s almost certainly true about him is he was probably viewed as weird for much of the ’90s, growing up as a hyper-articulate, scholastic, high-achieving gay person in the 1990s in Indiana. And that’s too bad. But when I got to know him, he wasn’t somebody in college who I remembered as denigrating people who disagree with him as weird. That’s one of the reasons I actually respected him.

So the other thing is it actually makes national unity impossible. When you designate the other side as weird, now what are Republicans in a position to do? But the Republicans could have at least as strong of a case saying, you’re weird because you can’t define a woman, because you want to fight for men competing with women in women’s sports, because you want to take away our gas stoves. That’s weird. And then it becomes a context of which side is more weird, measured against a self-referential standard, as opposed to saying that American exceptionalism involves embracing ideas that might seem weird at the time.

JD Vance, maybe you like his solutions, maybe you don’t. But our fertility crisis is a major problem in this country. We’re well below replacement rate and we’re going to an economic Armageddon if we get to a ratio of workers to retirees that’s less than 2 to 1, which we hit in the year 2060. But the problem with this level of discourse about labeling that side weird is no one’s talking about that, which is a if not existential, major economic ticking time bomb for the country, and instead talking about which side is weird versus not. It just feels un-American to me.

And so, yes, calling that out in forceful terms, I think is useful if we’re able to also progress that discussion, to say that we’re not in the business of calling one side weird. And I challenge you to take the hundreds of hours of footage of whether I’ve ever leveled that accusation against a Democrat. No, I haven’t. Am I one of these people who say I want America to be normal? What is normal? America is exceptional. That’s a worldview. And I think that it is anti-American to charge at the other side, the idea that somehow the fact that they’re weird, it’s the TikTok era’s way of saying “basket of deplorables.” Basket of deplorables was to the Facebook era what weird is to the TikTok era. And I just don’t think it’s productive for our country, our culture, or the possibility of national solidarity. And so, yes, I am against it, and I stand by that.

I want to look at the other side of the aisle. Trump this week on Truth Social called Kamala Harris “lying Kamala,” called Nancy Pelosi “a witch” and “batshit crazy,” and he accused Fox News hosts of being on “the Soros payroll.” Is that any better in terms of rhetoric than Democrats calling him weird?

So I think that there’s a couple things going on here. One is this was a systematic strategy, not one person who is in the Democratic Party is authentic in their own style of fighting, of how they compete in the ring. I think it was over 175 times in 48 to 72 hours on cable television that top Democrats invoked that word weird. So this became a systematic campaign strategy and vision. I’m okay with individual politicians being the most authentic version of themselves.

Even if it’s juvenile?

As an overall systematic strategy to label an entire group of people, that’s one thing. And I think that there’s also a big difference here. I have a different level of concern, whichever side it is, if you’re denigrating the other side’s voters as a basket of deplorables or weird. I have a deeper issue with that and a deeper concern about that than I do of individuals sparring with each other.

But Trump has done that too. Trump says that if you’re Jewish and you vote Democrat, you’ve lost your mind.

Well that’s as sarcastic of a comment as Joe Biden saying that if you vote for Donald Trump, then you ain’t Black to a Black audience. And I’m not somebody who makes an overly big deal about him having said that. So I think that we have to preserve some level of ability to engage in humor. Humor is also unifying as a country, and I think a lot of people who just see individual clips of Donald Trump but don’t know him, if you’ve watched over the last 20 years, he’s a funny guy. And I think Joe Biden, in fairness, in that particular comment he made, was too engaging in humor.

And so I think if we’re just looking at what’s actually true, what’s just the truth of the matter, you could airlift one particular quote or not. And I’m not here to defend one individual person or another individual person. I’m just here to tell you what I believe is true. I think that our country is in trouble if our political discourse and the kind of argument we make depends on which side labels the other as weird or nonconformist, because it requires a reference standard that is something other than the United States of America as a whole. Instead, I think the right question is how are we going to make America greater than it’s ever been before? And the number one way we’re going to do that is by actually engaging in the open exchange of even unconventional ideas.

And we would be remiss if we didn’t get to the content of what spawned this. We have a fertility crisis in this country. Countries from Hungary to Singapore have adopted what we would view as extreme measures to address that problem, still with very limited success. And so the idea that because JD Vance proposed some level of solutions, maybe they’re the right solutions, maybe they’re the wrong ones, and you are completely entitled to your view on whether those are the right or wrong solutions, I think that we repress the innovative culture if we just say, if you say something that falls outside of my version of an Overton window, you’re weird, and your people who agree with you are weird. I don’t think that’s productive.

I do think that having a competing vision from a Democrat that says, I would approach this differently, but here’s how we would deal with the fertility crisis, that’s compelling. That’s what I see as actually missing. And that’s where I want to see our body politic go. We’re not there now, but I think we can get there. And I think it’s a big part of why I’m interested in conversations like the one that you and I are having. I’m interested in potential private sector action to de-silo the media and cultural commentary and political landscape. And you know what? If I was to go back and run for president, for all of the political disadvantages that strategy presented, I would still go back and do it again the exact same way, because I just think that is what the country needs right now. And I’m hopeful that, and I know this, most ordinary Americans are rooting for the same thing. I just hope more people in the political leadership do the same.

And if you look, it sounds like you were looking at a few of my recent posts on X, look at one that I made about a week or two ago, I’ll repeat it here. My best advice to the Republican Party is don’t focus on Kamala Harris, actually. I think that some of the criticisms of Kamala Harris, I don’t think end up being particularly compelling to an independent voter anyway. I think the right strategy, self-interested to win the election, but also self-interested for the country, is offer our own vision for who we are and what we stand for as Americans. And what is our vision for the future of the United States of America? And I think that the biggest risk is that, frankly, we get distracted by a lot of the shenaniganery of which candidate gets swapped in or not, and when to instead forget to offer our own vision. And for my part, that’s what I am most intently focused on.

If Trump does win in 2024, would you consider working in his cabinet?

Yeah, of course I would. I want to have a maximal impact on the country. I’m also considering other paths. For me, the top focus is a lot changes depending on what happens in the next several months leading up to the election. And so my focus is on doing whatever I can to make a positive contribution to the right outcome in November. After that, one of the things I found is that when I make my own personal, elaborate plans, it never goes according to that plan anyway. I’m guided by the same purpose that led me to the presidential race in the first place, which is that I do think that we are in the middle of a national identity crisis, a loss of our self, a sense of who we are as a nation. I ran for president because I think that there’s an opportunity still to fill that gap, especially to reach the next generation. There’s a number of paths for what’s ahead for me, whether it’s through the executive branch, whether it’s through the legislative branch, whether it’s in the state of Ohio versus at a national scale. I’m evaluating all of those possibilities. But we’re gonna have to see what happens this November before we jump the shark there.

Of all of the Trump primary opponents, I’d say you’re the one who finished the race with a higher profile than you started with, you really built a national brand, and you did so with a unique media strategy. How did you do that and what should Trump do in the general that you did in the primary?

I think authenticity is, all else equal, a good thing to expect of public officials. So each person is different. So you got to look inside and say what’s important to you. As I shared with you, one of the things that is important to me as a core value, I think it’s a core American value, and it’s certainly a core value to me, is the open exchange of actual debate and ideas, that I think makes the country stronger. So I believe that, I’ve long believed that, I wanted to run my campaign accordingly. One of the things I said is anytime somebody is a protester, we had a number of protests or interruptions. We had other competitors in the primary that took a different approach there, security guards escorting people out. My approach was different. Give somebody the mic if they want to be heard, and they’re going to come here with a different point of view, they get to be heard.

When you’re the only person in a room who believes what you do, I think it’s a good thing for you to be able to have the space to say it, but in return to stay in that room and hear what everybody else has to say in response. Those were probably some of the best moments in the campaign, and some of the most productive moments of what came out of the campaign, I hope, for the country, especially amongst younger people on college campuses and other areas that we visited. Same thing with respect to talking to media. I think that other candidates took advised, maybe well-advised strategy, of not talking to people who would ask them confrontational questions, stick with the conservative media.

I actually took the opposite approach. Again, I think our country is at its best when we’re actually able to exchange competing visions of ideas. I learned a lot through that experience, some for the better. I think mostly if I was to do it again, I would do it exactly the same way. But I would go in eyes wide open to the risks with that strategy. Many of the podcasts that we would do were multi-hour podcasts. And I think that there is a separate, not Republican versus Democrat political battle, but there’s a separate industry battle going on between legacy media, cable news outlets, which develop basically short-form or snippet content, with longer form modes of reaching voters in other ways. And those two things come into conflict with each other, where if you and I are having a two-hour conversation, I’m going to say something that has context attached to it from what I might have said an hour ago. I think cable news has the ability to snippet that into two-minute snippets that I think leave a lot of people, frankly, who aren’t accessing that new media with a contextless depiction of what someone said.

So that’s not just specific to me. I think it probably applies across the board. That incentive structure now explains to me why a lot of my other fellow peers running in that primary didn’t necessarily gravitate to those long form formats. Maybe they were politically smarter than I was. But nonetheless, even if I was to do it again, I would still do it the same way. I think that’s the right way to go.

I visited places like the South Side of Chicago, which is not a traditional place that Republicans go during a primary. My campaign advisers told me it was a waste of time, money, and a lot of risk. And considering that I didn’t win, I got fourth in the Iowa caucus, maybe they had a point. But I do think that for me at least, it was some of those experiences that were the most enriching ones, when I was talking to audiences that didn’t agree with 100% or even most of what I had to say. But I think that I left those rooms, and I think those audiences left those rooms getting something out of it that probably doesn’t usually come out of a normal political campaign.

So my best advice to the Republican Party is show up, show up in the places not just where we’re supposed to show up, or are predicted to show up, but show up in unconventional places too. We’re not running to lead a party. We’re running to lead a nation. And the reality is, that doesn’t mean you should change your views or modify what you have to say, but at least demonstrate that part of what unites us as Americans is our commitment to still say, you get to have your own views as long as I get to express mine in return. We leave it to the voters to decide which of you governs. And that’s what makes America great.