Vivek Ramaswamy: Trump, Conservatism, Nationalism, Immigration, and War

The way I would do it, 75% headcount reduction across the board in the federal bureaucracy, send them home packing, shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, rescind every unconstitutional regulation that Congress never passed. In a true self-governing democracy, it should be our elected representatives that make the laws and the rules, not unelected bureaucrats. Merit and equity are actually incompatible. Merit and group quotas are incompatible. You can have one or the other, you can't have both. It's an assault and a crusade on the nanny state itself. And that nanny state presents itself in several forms. There's the entitlement state, it's the welfare state, presents itself in the form of the regulatory state. That's what we're talking about. And then there's the foreign nanny state where effectively we are subsidizing other countries that aren't paying their fair share of protection or other resources we provide them. If I was to summarize my ideology, in a nutshell, it is to terminate the nanny state in the United States of America in all of its forms, the entitlement state, the regulatory state and the foreign policy nanny state. Once we've done that, we've revived the republic that I think would make George Washington proud.

You are one of the great elucidators of conservative ideas, so you're the perfect person to ask. What is conservatism? What's your, let's say, conservative vision for America? Well, actually this is one of my criticisms of the modern Republican Party and direction of the conservative movement is that we've gotten so good at describing what we're against. There's a list of things that we could rail against, wokeism, transgender ideology, climate ideology, COVIDism, COVID policies, the radical Biden agenda, the radical Harris agenda, the list goes on. But actually what's missing in the conservative movement right now is what we actually stand for. What is our vision for the future of the country? And I saw that as a deficit at the time I started my presidential campaign. It was in many ways the purpose of my campaign because I do feel that that's why we didn't have the red wave in 2022. They tried to blame Donald Trump. They tried to blame abortion. They blamed a bunch of individual specific issues or factors. I think the real reason we didn't have that red wave was that we got so practiced at criticizing Joe Biden that we forgot to articulate who we are and what we stand for.

Yeah. So let me ask you about progressivism.

Yeah, you had a pretty intense debate with Mark Cuban, a great conversation. I think it's on your podcast actually. Yeah.

I don't know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind wish there's a good ideal, to bully people and to do bad things. I don't know what it is. This has less to do with left-wing versus right-wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So part of what you've seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure. So you've seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about in the military. You think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the state objectives that we had. And I think by all accounts, it was a policy move we regret. Our policy ranks and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really by all accounts was not at all responsible for 9/11. Nonetheless, if you're part of the US military or you're General Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military's actual substantive failures.

Yeah, speaking of shutting most of it down, how do you propose we do that? How do we make government more efficient? How to make it smaller? What are the different ideas of how to do that? Well, the first thing I'll say is you're always taking a risk. Okay, there's no free lunch here. Mostly, at least. You're always taking a risk. One risk is that you say I want to reform it gradually, I want to have a grand master plan and get to exactly what the right end state is and then carefully cut with a chisel, like a work of art, to get there. I don't believe that approach works. I think that's an approach that conservatives have taken for many years. I think it hasn't gotten us very far. And the reason is if you have an eight-headed hydra and you cut off one of the heads, it grows right back. So that's the risk of not cutting enough. The other risk you could take is the risk of cutting too much. To say that I'm going to cut so much that I'm going to take the risk of not just cutting the fat, but also cutting some muscle along the way, but I'm going to take that risk.

Can you steelman the perspective of somebody that looks at a particular department, Department of Education, and are saying that the amount of pain that will be caused by closing it and firing 75% of people will be too much? Yeah. So, I go back to this question of mission, right? A lot of people who make arguments for the Department of Education aren't aware why the Department of Education was created in the first place, actually. So that might be a useful place to start, is that this thing was created, it had a purpose, presumably. What was that purpose?

So, you mentioned Department of Education, but there's also the Department of Defense. Yes.

Okay, I'll give you an example that's really difficult. Tension, given your priorities. Immigration, there's an estimated 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States. You've spoken about mass deportation. Yes.

Yeah. Let me ask you to, again, steel man the case for and against Trump. So my biggest criticism for him is the fake electors scheme, the 2020 election, and actually the 2020 election in the way you formulate it in the Nation of victims is just the entirety of that process, instead of focusing on winning, doing a lot of whining. I like people that win, not whine, even when the refs are biased in whatever direction.

Sure. What kind of peace deal do you think is possible, feasible, optimal in Ukraine? If you sat down, you became president. If you sat down with Zelenskyy and sat down with Putin, what do you think is possible to talk to them about? One of the hilarious things you did, which were intense and entertaining, your debates in the primary, but anyway, is how you outgrow the other candidates that didn't know any regions. They wanted to send money and troops, and lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they didn't know any of the regions in Ukraine. You had a lot of zingers in that one. But anyway, how do you think about negotiating with world leaders about what's going on there?

Okay, let's go to the China side of this. The big concern here is that the brewing cold, or God forbid, hot war between the United States and China and the 21st century. How do we avoid that? So a few things. One is, I do think, the best way we also avoid it is by reducing the consequences to the United States in the event of that type of conflict because, at that point, what you're setting up for, if the consequences are existential for the United States, then what you're buying yourself in the context of what could be a small conflict is an all-out great war. So, the first thing I want to make sure we avoid is a major conflict between the United States and China, like a world-war-level conflict. And the way to do that is to bring down the existential stakes for the US. And the way we bring down the existential stakes for the US, is make sure that the United States does not depend on China for our modern way of life.

Speaking of what you do next, any chance you run in 2028? Well, I'm not going to rule it out. I mean that's a long time from now and I'm most focused on what I can do in the next chapter for the country. I ran for president, a million things that I learned from that experience that you can only learn by doing it. It was very much a fire first aim later when getting into the race. There was no way I could have planned and plotted this out as somebody who was coming from the outside. I was 37 years old, came from the business world, so there was a lot that only could learn by actually doing it and I did, but I care about the same things that led me into the presidential race and I don't think the issues have been solved. I think that we have a generation that is lost in the country. It's not just young people.

So you've mentioned the first primary debate, so more than almost basically anybody I've ever seen you step into some really intense debates, And you're on podcasts in general in all kinds of walks of life, whether it's debates with sort of protestors or debates with people that really disagree with you, like the radical opposite of you. What's the philosophy behind that, and what's the psychology of being able to be calm through all of that, which you seem to be able to do. Well, I enjoy debate and for me, I think just in ordinary life, forget about a formal debate setting. Whenever I've received criticism or a contrary view, my first impulse is always, "Are they right?" I mean it's always a possibility, right? And most of the time what happens is you understand the other side's argument, but you emerge with a stronger conviction in your own belief, you know your own beliefs better if you can state the best argument for the other side, but sometimes you do change your mind, and I think that that's happened over the course of my life as well. I think no one's a thinking human being unless that happens once in a while too. And so anyway, just the idea of the pursuit of truth through open debate and inquiry, that's always just been part of my identity, part of who I am. I'm wired that way.