Former president Donald Trump has proposed an idea to abolish the income tax and replace it with more tariffs on foreign goods. Is this a good strategy if Trump wins the presidency? Sen. JD Vance gives Glenn his take: "We want to tax production less. We want to tax making stuff in China more...it's a really smart idea to reward [Americans] for making things." Plus, Sen. Vance details his proposal to dismantle ALL federal DEI programs: "The way that our federal government has interpreted [diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives] is to explicitly allow racist decision making."
TranscriptBelow is a rush transcript that may contain errors
And J.D. Vance is on the phone with us. J.D. Vance, senator from Ohio. Also a short list. For Donald Trump.
I'm sure he's going to -- he's just dying to talk about that. Because they always are. Everybody on the short list. They're like, oh, please, ask me about that. So, go ahead.
Spill it. Spill the beans. Spill the beans.
J.D.: My favorite topic.
GLENN: Yeah, I know.
J.D.: I said this, Glenn. I have not talked about Trump about it. Yes, I am aware that they're looking at me. And I think they're probably looking at 20 other people. And I'm sure they will make this decision. And if it's me, like I said, repeatedly, I would be interested in it, because I think it's important to help him. Because if he doesn't win this election, this country is in a tough spot. So that's pretty much it.
GLENN: Now, you were in the meeting with him yesterday, right?
J.D.: I was, yeah.
GLENN: Yeah. Because he said, the guy I'm going to pick is most likely in this room with us now.
J.D.: Oh, I didn't see that.
But unfortunately, for the oddsmakers, there were like 49 other people in the room. So it doesn't help.
GLENN: Yeah. So tell me a little --
J.D.: Yeah. Let me just sort of set the stage. One is a very positive meeting. You obviously have people who are more allied with the president and his agenda. You know, like me and Bill Hagerty and Marco Rubio and so forth.
And you also have people in the rooms, who are very -- you know, even in the last couple of months, have been very critical of the president.
And I think what you saw is just a recognition that we have to unify to the Republican Party. When there's an election.
GLENN: Thank you.
J.D.: And look, there are guys that are running, that I wish their primary opponents had won. And I wish we had a different candidate representing the Republican Party. But there isn't a single person running, at least in the Senate, who I would rather have as a Democrat take their spot.
The other thing that is really interesting, Glenn. You have to realize, the internal psychology of Republican senators right now. They're looking at every single one of these Senate ballots, in the polls.
Suggest that whether it's by five points or 15 points, our Senate candidates are running behind Donald Trump, in the core battle states. If we actually want to take back the Senate with a solid majority.
We need the president to help us close the margin between our guys and his margins.
And I think he will help us do that. As we get down the stretch here.
There's just a recognition here. That you happen into something, especially into this cycle. And if we can get that thing to reverberate to the benefit of our Senate candidate, we can win a major, major victory in the United States Senate.
GLENN: And he was -- he was really kind of conciliatory yesterday. He seemed to be in good spirits.
And, you know, recognizing that we -- you know, we don't all agree on everything.
At least that was the impression that I got from his conversation.
Would you -- would you agree with that?
JASON: Yeah. I agree with that, Glenn. He was extremely friendly.
He was obviously in a good mood. I think, you know, he made -- he was very friendly to Mitch McConnell, of course, who has not always been the best ally of Donald Trump.
He was friendly to everybody in the room. And, you know, he said like, look, even when we disagree, our disagreements pale in comparison to the Democrats.
And we're at this stage. And, you know, I've done this now, Glenn, twice. I've been in politics for two cycles. Where right now, we're sort of in the hurt feelings stage.
Where a lot of people who didn't win primaries, grassroots activists, donors, state chairmen and so forth, they're kind of frustrated. And they're exhausted from the primary season.
And they're not thinking about the future. And I just think, you know, Trump is maybe the only guy in the party who can kind of stand before everybody and say, look. Yeah. Maybe your guy didn't win. Maybe we haven't agreed on everything.
But now it's time to save the country. And to do that, we have to win.
GLENN: He said yesterday, that he was. And I'm going to get to something that you want to talk about. The DEI programs going away, which is so important.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll get to you in a second. But one more question on this meeting yesterday with Trump.
He said that he wanted to abolish the income tax, and replace it with tariffs.
J.D.: So that was not in our meeting. I think it may have been in another meeting that take. I saw the headline. That was not in our meeting.
Look, this is a fascinating proposal. And we can talk for a while about it.
But, you know, we have to sort of think about, when we tax something, we get less of it.
And we should ask ourselves. We have to raise revenues for the military. And Social Security and so forth.
GLENN: Correct.
J.D.: What do we actually want to raise revenues from? And my view would be, we want to tax production less. We want to tax making stuff in China more.
Well, that's what a tariff fundamentally does. Whether you get rid of the whole income tax. I think it's a really smart idea to say, we want to reward people for making things. We want to reward productive work. We don't want to reward making stuff in the home country of our chief rival.
And I think that's fundamentally where Trump's head is on this matter.
GLENN: Yeah. Well, I will tell you, I think if we don't take control of the Senate and the House and the White House, we're just going to be treading water at best.
If they win those, we are -- we are done.
They have -- they have put so many deadly fruit trees in all of our agencies, and all of our government.
That I just don't see us being able to survive it. The fundamental transformation will be finished, in the next term.
And you have introduced legislation to dismantle all of the federal DEI programs, from the federal government.
Thank you!
J.D.: Yeah. We have. And to your point about the Senate, Glenn, this -- the Senate, of course, we approved all of the political appointees. And if you want to root out the Deep State of the bureaucracy, you need political appointees who are aligned with the agenda.
And what this legislation does. I'm not an idiot. Joe Biden will not sign it, but Donald Trump would.
And what it would do is really destroy the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy that exists in our country. And people say, well, who doesn't like diversity, right?
Doesn't diversity mean, you have my Mexican restaurant down the street.
No. The way the federal government has interpreted this. Is to explicitly allow racist decision-making. Primarily targeting white and Asian-Americans. Now in the 21st century.
But explicitly racist decision-making. And contracting and hiring in the provision of grants. Some of these programs, by the way, have been held flatly illegal by the federal courts. For example, there was a farm program, that explicitly excluded white Americans from the provision of farm assistants to our farmers, and that's ridiculous.
You can't discriminate, whether black or white, against people on the basis of their skin color.
This would proactively root this stuff out of our government, and it's a very important first step to getting basic merit back in our federal system, Glenn.
GLENN: Yeah, and I don't think even black farmers would -- would have wanted that.
I mean, maybe some would. But, you know, farmers rely on each other.
And they need to help each other.
Because, you know, if Bill's crop is down year. It might be my crop down this year.
We're all in this together. The last thing you want is now new racial barriers between neighbors.
Where he gets the help from the government, and we don't. It's not a good idea.
GLENN: It's not a good idea at all, Glenn.
And to your point about how black farmers feel about this stuff. If you look at public polling on this. What you consistently find is that black Americans.
And most Americans don't like racial quote as. They don't like racial discrimination. Whether it benefits them. Their group or harms their group.
One group of Americans that seems to really like racial quote as are very high education, white Americans.
GLENN: White. I know.
J.D.: That is the one group. That is the one group that seems -- by the way, they're not going to lose out, when the quota system comes out. Because they pull all the strings.
But they're not doing it for the good of the country. I think they're fundamentally doing it because they look down -- they look down on white Americans who don't have their same education status.
And a lot of -- one of my theories, Glenn. A lot of what is broken about America. High education whites who really hate low education whites.
And I think you see this as a main driver of a lot of very stupid public policy. And, frankly, a lot of very evil public policy in this country. So we have to root it out. That's what I'm trying to do.
GLENN: I mean, it's really -- I mean, this -- can it wasn't like this before. Because our education system was much more local. You know, and -- and not as -- you know, you didn't have all of the smart people, going to this one college. And so they were only surrounded by really, really smart people.
And then get married to the same kind of thinking. You know, you would have a great disparity in -- in education and experience in families.
All the time.
But now, the elites, they wouldn't marry into a farming family. They don't understand it. They don't like it, generally speaking.
JASON: No. That's right. Glenn, so there is this real classism, right?
I think that's a much bigger problem than racism in modern America. But it's actually made our American system much stupider. Because to your point, you know, the smart kids would be woo become doctors and lawyers and engineers. And the kids who didn't like school as much, would sort of do something else. Sort of everybody lived together and worked together. And the community kind of worked together.
When you silo people by education, what we find is that we send people to colleges, and they don't get good training in useful skills.
They increasingly get indoctrinated in how to be crazy people.
Even the educational institutions stop serving their function. When you stratify this thing in a way.
And I think you're seeing evidence of that in our country right now.
GLENN: What are the chances that this even passes?
I know Biden will not sign it. But you think it will even get passed?
J.D.: Look, I don't think it will get out of the Senate. I think the House will support this.
What we're trying to do is plant seeds. One of the things that happened in the 2016 campaign, is Republicans really expected Trump to lose. So when he actually won, there wasn't the foundational work that had been done, to make the -- the -- you know, just to pass a bunch of legislation.
GLENN: Good. Good.
J.D.: We're trying to do that. We're trying to set up the next administration for success.
And at the very least, have a debate about what kind of country we want. Do we want a country that discriminates based on race? I think the answer is no, and I think 90 percent of people agree with me.
GLENN: Do you believe that the -- the next administration can fire enough people, to make a difference in the Deep State?
BRIDGET: I do, Glenn. But it will be one of the most important fights.
I think the two things that hopefully President Trump does in his second term. And I know he wants to do. That will cause massive backlash from the media. We need to support a large number of illegal immigrants that have come here the last number of years.
And we also really need to root out the federal bureaucracy, to make it more responsive. To make it smaller.
But to make it really democratically accountable to the people elected president.
The media will howl about this stuff. They will call it fascism. They will call it every name in the book.
GLENN: It's the opposite!
J.D.: It's the opposite. Exactly. It's accountability.
That's the opposite of fascism. And, frankly, we have fascism at the bureaucratic level. Where people's lives are controlled by people they never elected, right?
That's not democracy. That's not the Republican form of government. So look, this is the most important thing structurally that we have to fix at the government.
I think Trump is committed to it.
And I think the question is: Do you have enough Republicans in there, who have the willpower and the courage to fight alongside of them? And I think that's the big question.
GLENN: I hope -- yeah, well, we have a lot of people like you, where when we did the Tea Party thing years ago, we didn't -- we didn't have -- we just didn't have the people in there, who really, truly had the foundation that they had been thinking about for a long time.
And I think we do now. We have a lot of really good people. We need more. But this is the best chance, of success, that I've seen in -- in a very long time.
The Tea Party turned out to be, you know, we were really fighting the -- the Deep State, in the Republican Party. And I think that one is on its last legs.
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J.D.: We need to win the fight, Glenn. If we don't, I think we could really lose our country.
GLENN: Yes. I agree. JD. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Senator J.D. Vance from Ohio. This is a good seed planting. Because DEI does need to go from all of our federal agencies and federal programs.
Thank you so much, J.D. Appreciate it.