Howard Lutnick Exposes Washington’s Biggest Lies

Do you go to New York much?

Never. I closed my house.

Oh, wow.

I basically tricked my wife. You know how your wife always wants to renovate your house?

No idea.

My wife always wants to renovate my house, right? Every minute I've been alive, my wife has wanted to renovate parts of my house. So we moved out once, a year and a half ago. We moved out for a year and a half about 6 years ago, and she only did half the house. She still rued the day that she only did half the house.

Really?

Yeah. So that was the deal. What I did is, I bought a house and said, “You want to renovate the house?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Great. We hired a contractor.”

Wait, you bought Bret Baier's house?

No. Yeah, that's a beautiful house. I can talk about whatever you want. By the way, I'm happy to talk about serious things, casual things.

Howard, thanks for being here. Thanks for joining David Friedberg and me on the All-In podcast. I want to take a step back before we talk about today and instead talk about your friendship with the president—how it started, how you guys got to know each other—and walk us through the moment when you frankly went out on a limb a little bit, stepped up, became the campaign finance chair, and then just that evolution.

I've known the president since I was 30 years old. I used to go on what we call the charity circuit in New York.

Sure.

There's basically a charity party every night when you live in New York. Like the rubber-chicken dinner. Literally, the rubber chicken.

And so every night you go out. The boss of my company, Bernie Cantor, got tired of going, right? He didn't want to go, so he would send me with his wife, and I would be her walker. You know, I'm the 30-year-old CEO of the company. I'd take her to the party, and after the party I'd put her in a limo and she'd go home, and DJT would say, “Well, let's go out.” So we'd go out.

It wasn't planned, but he was at the party. He's 45; I'm at the party, 30, and we chased the same girls.

Okay.

By the way, here's the thing about Donald Trump: He was the most famous, the most fun, and the most interesting person 30 years ago, 33 years ago. I mean, here's the best thing: He's been on the cover of Time magazine 59 times.

No way.

Then he leans over to me and goes, “And 20 were good.” Who can take that?

Yeah.

When other people have a bad cover of Time magazine, they'd crumple and be sad on the floor. Who can take that?

So, Howard, is it that he's just totally wired to understand that moment of being a public figure, or what is it that's so unique about his ability to navigate that over 40 years?

I think it adds energy to him. Everybody else's energy—what they don't understand is that people bring negative energy to Donald Trump, and they're just charging his battery. Your energy around him comes to him.

When I come at him with a lot of energy, he comes back with a lot of energy. It doesn't matter. He never steps back. He just sort of takes it like a centrifuge and then hurls it back at you. He's been that way always. This is not new. This is just who he is.

Right. Right.

Those other people who attack him think they're attacking him, but they're charging his battery. They're literally charging his battery. So he comes back bigger, stronger, bigger, stronger.

Once you understand the man, he's the most intuitive person that you've ever met.

Yeah.

People say, “Well, okay, people who know me know I don't suffer fools.” They have all these derogatory statements about the guy—my left-liberal friends, all these derogatory statements—and they know me really well. They'd say, “Well, how can you work for him?” I'd say, “How can I work for him?” He's the most intuitive person. He senses it. He knows it.

He calls me up and says, “Panama Canal.” That's what he says. He goes, “Panama Canal. It just feels wrong.” Then he sends me on the quest to go look at it. I didn't do anything; I just started the quest to go look at it.

The mouth that's east is a deep-water port by the Chinese. The mouth that's west is a deep-water port by the Chinese. They're building bridges over it, so our ships and our military ships should go under a Chinese bridge right in our hemisphere.

Then I said, “Okay, let's go prove it.” I have a friend of mine who owns a big shipping company. I said, “Take 2 iPhones, put them on a stand, and just go through the Panama Canal. You know, the Panama Canal—they sort of drag ships through like this. Just video both ways.”

Seventy percent of every letter is Chinese. I'm talking about the sides of container ships and the stores. I'm not talking about signage, just random signage like you're riding on a road. It's all Chinese.

Then I do the research and call him back, and I say the magic words between me and him: “I have your path.” I've done it. I've done the legal work. I've done everything. So when you start talking about it, you have a foundation. It's not just you talking.

People think he's just talking. He's never just talking. He has people behind him who bring him his foundational, structural outcome.

And then what does he do? He went and played golf that afternoon. He called me at 7:00 in the morning and said, “What do you got?” We talked from 7:00 to 8:00. He went and played golf, right? That afternoon, there's the American flag in the middle of the Panama Canal in some Truth he puts out. That's the fun part.

So you work for the most intuitive guy.

Yeah. Unbelievably smart, unbelievably thoughtful, who knows what he's doing. It's so fun for me.

Howard, let's just go back one second. Scott Bessent told us the story that about 18 months ago, he saw all this data about what was happening under Biden, and he was so concerned that these deficits and debts were getting out of control. He went to the president and said, “How can I help? Can I help?” That's a story.

But was there a moment for you that was rooted in something other than friendship? Was there something on the ground where you said, “Hold on a second, this is a train wreck and we need to do this”? You were the finance chair for the campaign.

Well, no, I wasn't the finance chair. I was the transition chair.

Transition. Okay.

I ran transition, which we'll talk about, but let's go through this. I'm friends with him, right? But I'm building my business—a young guy building my business. Then 9/11 happens.

Yeah.

Okay. I'm friends with the guy. I'm just friends with the guy. But then 9/11 happens. He's kind and sweet, calls me all the time. Just a good human being. Nice, warm, caring, good human being.

But then I'm knocked out. So what do I do next? I try to rebuild my company and take care of the families of 9/11. I lost 658 people who worked for me.

We had a policy: We wanted to work with people that we liked. So when we had an opening, we didn't use headhunters. We would say to everybody at the firm, “Does anybody know anybody who'd do this job?” No.

A young lady who worked for me said, “My best friend is an HR person.” They have to have capacity. But once they have capacity, imagine we hire that person. Now what happens is, it's not one big happy family. But people really, really care about the company.

That's our company, on the top 5 floors of the World Trade Center on 9/11, when the plane hit it. It killed everybody at the office. My brother Gary died at 36. My best friend Doug died at 39.

I had just turned 40 that summer. I had a party—65 couples—for my 40th birthday. Twenty-seven people at my party were killed.

Jesus.

My friends. These are my friends. So I'm driven to take care of the families of the people who died. I commit 25% of all our profits. But the company's destroyed.

We went from making $1,000,000 a day. I was a rich guy, right? What's the definition of a rich guy? No personal debt, no corporate debt. Cantor Fitzgerald: no debt.

How do you survive 9/11? If you don't owe anybody any money, the only money you're losing is your money.

Your money.

So we survive, take care of our friends' families, and then build the company back up.

I was a special guest on Celebrity Apprentice, the first season of Celebrity Apprentice. Piers Morgan wins.

Did he fire you?

No, no, I wasn't a contestant. I'm a little beyond being a contestant. I was a special guest. I'd come in—if you see during the auction, I'm standing next to him at the auction, and I'm helping him. I'm just his friend, sort of as an extra, all along the way.

You kept the friendship going as you were rebuilding?

We're friends all the way, but I'm rebuilding my company.

Yeah.

I'm not interested in politics. I don't do anything in politics because I've got my head down.

Right.

We had the financial crisis. Cantor Fitzgerald did great in the financial crisis.

Had you ever donated to candidates at all or not?

Yeah, New York candidates.

Okay.

Right, New York City. Think about it: You're in New York. You try to pick social liberals, fiscal conservatives, right? If that even exists anymore. But if you're in New York, you have to pick. And look, I grew up in New York, so I'm socially liberal.

What else could I possibly be? So, early, when Chuck Schumer was young—before he became what the president now calls a Palestinian—I raised him money and gave him money. Donald Trump gave him money. Same; I did too. He was what he said he was: a social liberal and fiscal conservative. So we'd all give to those kinds of candidates, but mostly giving to get along and to be able to ask them a question if you needed to ask one. There was really no drive in that.

Like I said, the first 4 nights I slept in Washington in the last 20 years were when Donald Trump was elected. I'd come down, visit a little, and go home. What was I staying here for? So he calls me at the end of October 2023.

Okay, so he had already had his first term. You didn't support or get involved?

No. I gave him money, and I gave Hillary money.

You gave Hillary money in the first term?

Yes, because Hillary was incredibly helpful to me post-9/11. Remember, she was a senator, and New York needed help. Hillary was incredibly helpful, and I was driving the team to help New York rebuild because I had relationships with a whole bunch of congressmen, and they were going to do nice things. Bill Young ran House Appropriations. Bill Young was my friend through a whole variety of things.

I used to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and I would bring music there for the men who were injured in the military and were in Bethesda Naval Hospital. My wife and I would walk around, and I would engage the young men with music. I'd give them music and ask them what CDs they wanted—this was when CDs were still around—and I'd bring up a Walkman.

My wife would pull the family outside, and she'd pay a year of their mortgage and all their expenses. What people don't realize is that when your son loses his leg, Mom and Dad come flying in and stay by his bedside. What job do these people have that allows them to be at their son's bedside when their world is falling apart because their son lost his leg? The world is falling apart, but at home their world is falling apart.

So my wife would just try to figure out how much money it was and give them a check. No form, no nothing—just give them the money and help them. I would bump into Bill Young and his wife. They ran defense appropriations, and they were there just being good human beings. So we became friends.

He said to me once, “Is there anything I could ever do to help you?” I said, “Look, you run defense appropriations, and you're a congressman from Florida, while I'm a Jewish guy from New York who's in finance. If there ever were 2 skew lines that were never going to meet, this is it—2 ships passing each other. We have nothing in common.” So I said to him, “Look, we're just going to be friends, right? We're never going to do anything.”

Then he ran House Appropriations. When New York needed money to rebuild after 9/11, they went to see Bill Young to try to get a bill passed. He said, “How can you come see me without Howard?” This was post-9/11, so I'm running New York, and Hillary did a really nice job for New York.

I told DJT—I call him DJT because I've known him forever—I told him that I can't forget. I'm just not the person who's going to forget. Of course, I gave him money, but I give it, and, by the way, he still tortures me for it. You know what the best part is? That's what a good friend does. Other people would sort of curl back.

Right after he got elected, he had a dinner in New York. He invited me because I'm his friend. While he was giving his talk at his first dinner in New York, he said, “Wait, wait—Hillary supporter,” and pointed at me. I stood up and said, “Hey, everyone,” and sat down. He was just sassing me because I gave him tons of dough. He knows I love him, and it's fine.

So we're in 2023, and he calls me and says, “Will you help me?” I had not thought about politics. I gave him money in 2020 for reelection—probably 10 million bucks. I raised him 15 million bucks. Once I'm on a side, I'm on that side the whole way through. I'm raising him money in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. While he's president, I'm totally on his side.

But I'm just his friend. I'm not engaged because I'm still rebuilding my life. Then, in 2023, he calls me and says, “Will you help me?” I actually thought about it, and that was the first time I really thought about politics. Then I said yes, and I gave him 10 million bucks right then and there.

I started talking to him. I started going on the campaign trail. I started doing research. I started gaining knowledge. I talked to him about everything. I talked to him all the time about everything.

Did you love it? Because our friend David Sacks—we were talking at dinner last night—he seems to love it. There's nothing not to love.

As Donald Trump says, this is 1,000 Super Bowls. For him, it's 1,000 Super Bowls; for me, it's only 100 Super Bowls. If you're dedicated to America and willing to wear America's clothing, stop worrying about yourself, care only about America, and have no objective post. The president hates when these people raise money afterward from people they've met in here.

I'm never going to work again. This is all I care about. I'm just going to help America. So he asks me to help him, and I start thinking about it. I start studying everything. I read everything about the White House and everything else I can possibly read because I'm just that way. Then I start helping him.

I wanted to learn how he picked the judges, including the Supreme Court, and why he did it. I'm very detailed. So I started studying what transition is, and I started studying tariffs because he wanted to talk about tariffs. He's always thought the trade deficit was wrong and basically a rip-off of America. I started studying everything about it, so he and I would talk about it and we knew everything about it.

Then he picked me to run transition.

Okay, so we're going to talk about tariffs in a second, but double-click into transition. What did you find that was so interesting? What's an example?

There's a book called The Gatekeepers that people gave me. “Oh, you should read this book.” It's about chiefs of staff. There's another way to call it: The Jerks.

What they do is, imagine you're the gatekeeper.

The gatekeeper of what?

Of the man who was elected president of the United States of America, and he needs the gates kept from him. If you listen to the Nixon tapes, you hear him scheming to try to learn anything, because what happens is everybody reports to the chief of staff, and the chief of staff reports to you.

You can't get on Air Force One without asking the chief of staff. You can't get a document unless you have the chief of staff. No one can come see you unless you have the chief of staff. If they take your phone away, you know what you are? You're imprisoned. That's The Gatekeepers.

I said to Donald Trump, “Look, you fired Reince Priebus, who was your chief of staff. Then you fired John Kelly as the chief of staff. Then you fired Mick Mulvaney as chief of staff. Then you would have fired Mark Meadows, but you didn't get a chance because of the next election.” So I said, “Why don't you redefine the job? What you need is a chief of staff who's actually your chief of staff, not one who's the gatekeeper.”

Susie Wiles is perfect for Donald Trump. You know why? She lets him be him. John Kelly took away his phone, so he couldn't communicate with anybody, whereas Susie embraces who he is, helped him get elected, and ran a great campaign. She's perfect for him in this role.

That's what I brought: an understanding of him and an understanding of the role. That's why I convinced your friend David Sacks. Every time he said, “I can't do it,” I would call him and say, “It's an emergency. It's an emergency. I need to see you.” He'd fly in and go, “What is it?” I'd go, “You need to join the administration.” He'd go, “That's what the emergency was?” I'd go, “Of course.”

And, Howard, was that when you conceived DOGE originally, in that initial transition?

All right. So DOGE—we should talk about DOGE and tariffs. DOGE came in early October 2024, before the election—the beginning of October 2024. I called the president and said, “I need to spend an hour with you because I have my big ideas.”

He said, “Look, I'm not sure what to do on October 7th. Why don't we figure out what I should be doing on October 7th?” So we decided we were going to go out to the Ohel, where a super-religious Hasidic Jewish messiah is buried. The people who wear black hats think he is the Messiah, and they have a crypt for him where you write a note and put it in.

We agreed we'd go out to that gravesite, and we'd probably win 60,000 of those kinds of voters, which is pretty cool for a day.

And then we drove there and back together, the two of us, so I had an hour and a half with just him and me talking. I said, “I want to balance the budget in the United States of America, and this is the way we’re going to do it.” No one’s ever checked the just-under-$4 trillion of entitlements. Every politician thinks what you have to do is take the retirement age from 65 and make it 70, and do this and this and this and this, because they never think about the money.

Totally. Right.

But people like us would totally say, “What’s the first thing you do? What’s the value I’m getting for my money?”

Totally right.

And what you find is, if nobody has ever—ever—I could say the word “ever” 12 times—looked at where the money goes, then there’s not even a process to get it back when you send it to the wrong person. You just send another one out. Think about it: “Well, I sent it accidentally.” Notice how it’s accidental. It’s always accidentally sent to the wrong person. Really? You wouldn’t ever say the 5.9 million people who work for the government—there could be some crooks in there, right? No, no, no. It’s all accidental. What a load of nonsense this is.

There’s some percentage of this. You would say, “Just zero-base it and let’s figure out where it’s got to be.” It’s 25%. We’d all say, if it’s never been checked, how could it not be 25%? How could it not be? And the answer is, that’s $1 trillion a year, right?

Okay.

So I said, “I think we’re going to cut $1 trillion a year in expenses, and then I think through tariffs and other means we’re going to get a trillion dollars in incremental revenue, and we’re going to balance the budget.”

Sorry, let me ask one question. How do the tax cuts—the extension of the tax cuts—fit in?

They’re there. There is zero basis. That means where I was yesterday and where I am tomorrow—“Oh, it’s a tax cut.” No, it’s not. It’s the exact same thing as yesterday, as today. To say continuing yesterday tomorrow is silly.

So, let me ask you about tariffs. Having studied it yourself, when there are higher tariffs, people purchase less and things cost more.

No, we’ll talk about tariffs. Let’s just finish DOGE.

So, I’m in the car with him, and I said, “I have one favor to ask of you. If we can balance the budget for you, will you agree to waive all income tax, you see, for every person who makes less than $150,000 a year in the United States of America, which, by the way, is about 85% of America?”

And the reason you want to work for Donald Trump is he looks at me and goes, “Sure.” You realize the president of the United States said, “If you balance the budget, sure.” And he’s not lying or kidding. He’s like, “Yeah, that seems like a great idea.”

Right. Right.

Then I tell him, “Okay, I’m going to go recruit Elon because Elon’s all in.”

Yeah. Right. He’s already said he’s all in. He’s already said he’s going to Pennsylvania.

Yes. Right. So I call Elon, and I don’t know Elon. I don’t know. But he’s perfect for this. I use my superpower, which is that I call everybody else I know who knows him, and they arrange it. I’m texting with him, and he agrees to meet me on October 14.

So I fly down to Brownsville, Texas. He’s going to catch the rocket on October 14, so that’s what he invites me down for—the rocket catch.

That’s right.

Actually, he’s not inviting me down for the rocket catch. He’s just inviting me down because that’s a good day for me to meet him. So I fly down and see the rocket catch, which is awesome.

Yeah. Awesome.

By the way, it was a very pivotal day in the campaign. If you remember, Biden sort of didn’t pay as much attention to it. Trump was pretty engaged. Elon was supportive of Trump. So when he actually caught the rocket, the media was almost frozen, waiting for it to fail, and it didn’t fail. It worked, and it was just incredible.

I was waiting for Elon. I flew down to see Elon with my son, and we watched the rocket. Then they say, “Okay, he’s going to go hang out with his engineers and party with them.” Seems reasonable. It’s like an hour, hour and a half, and then he just goes dark.

You’re still waiting.

I’m just sitting there waiting. Then they take me to the equivalent of a Margaritaville, where you have a basket and can get quesadillas and a Diet Coke in a red plastic thing that’s about this tall. It's got 4,000 ounces of Diet Coke in it.

But now, to his credit, he sends me all the executives from SpaceX to hang with me, but he’s dark. What happened is he took a nap. He was up all night doing the engineering, and he went to sleep.

When he finally wakes up, I’m just sitting there doing the thumb-twiddle. I don’t really know him, so I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m hoping he sees me.” Then he wakes up and says, “Come to my house. I’ll see you at my house.”

His house is 1,200 feet. It’s got the furniture I had when I graduated from college. I’m not kidding. It has plastic chairs.

So I say, “We’re going to balance the budget. I need to cut $1 trillion.” He’s like, “I’m in.” He says, “I think we should cut 80% of the federal government because the essential employees, if the government shut down, are 450,000.”

Yeah. Okay.

And there are 5.9 million people who work for the government. How can 450,000 be essential if there are 5.9 million? So he says, “Like Twitter, I think we should cut 80%.”

I say, “I know how to cut 50.” He says, “I want to cut 80.” I say, “I know how to do 50.” He goes, “Are you with me or against me?” I go, “I know how to legally do it. What do you have?”

My son says it was like 2 alpha dogs just fighting with each other for the first half hour. Then X comes in, and he has to walk his son X out. So he walks his son X out, and I’m thinking maybe the meeting’s over, because we’ve been together a half hour, 40 minutes. Maybe it’s over because he got up and walked out.

He comes back and sits down. He says, “Howard, this meeting is great.” That’s what he says. We sit down and map out the plan.

I tell him what a gratis vendor is, because I designed it. I wasn’t going to go into the government; I was doing the transition.

What is a gratis vendor?

A gratis vendor is an approved vendor for the United States of America that gives product to the government. It doesn’t sell it. Therefore, I don’t have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor, because I’m giving it to you. And if you give it to Article II, which is the president’s stuff, then the president can accept it, because it’s a gift.

What’s an example of this, just to make it concrete? I write some software?

You write some software. I write some software for the Commerce Department to do a better job of XYZ. You just give it to me, then I do QA on it and can take it. If you sell it to me for $1, we go into government hell—the whole rigmarole. But if you give it to me, then I set up—

So I said, “I’m calling it DOGE,” and I registered the name DOGE.

You said that, of course. And were you familiar with Dogecoin and Elon?

It’s Elon.

So what happens is, in the Defense Production Act in World War II, in order to get all the great executives of America to help with production, they named everything after jazz singers or things associated with the people who were on the committee, which would make them laugh and smile.

Okay. Right.

So I picked DOGE so he would laugh, and he said, “Get the fuck out of here.” When I said we were going to name it DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—which I didn’t think of; it was floating around on the internet in June. But I literally registered it as the Department of Government Efficiency, as a gratis vendor, and I said, “This is how I’ve done it for me.”

Yes.

So that I can run Cantor Fitzgerald, you can run SpaceX. You don’t have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff, because you’re not working for the government. You’re just giving stuff to the government. You’re literally giving of yourself, but you’re not looking for anything. You’re not taking any money, you’re not owning anything, you’re not doing anything. You’re not on that side of the wall; you’re on this side. You’re outside.

We had fun. We talked for 2 hours. Then on my Twitter feed, I took a picture of me and Elon outside and put up, “Welcome to DOGE. We are going to rip the waste out of our $6.5 trillion government and balance the budget. We must elect Donald J. Trump president.”

I probably had 25,000 viewers at the time, and I got 45 million views.

Wow.

It was me and Elon.

Yeah.

And that was the beginning of DOGE.

Then I ran the transition. For the transition, we had a room in Mar-a-Lago. There was a big conference table in the middle, 4 85-inch screens on one side and 4 85-inch screens on the other side, so you and I could talk to each other.

Yeah. Okay.

The president sat across from me. Elon sat—

And then I’ll tell you one other story about Elon. So, he wins the election. The president wins the election. He accepts it Wednesday at 2:00 in the morning. Elon’s not on stage. If you see, I’m on stage. Elon’s way in the back of the room. There are 1,000 people in the room.

2,000 people. He’s way in the back. He goes home. Thursday afternoon, I call. I’m doing a dry run of the launch of my transition. The president is superstitious. He’s never had one conversation with me about the transition. He totally trusts me. He wins the election, and now he’s got to look. I said to Jess, “He hasn’t talked to you ahead of time about who he wants, about one job, about one thing.”

Until the election, because he’s superstitious, it’s, “Don’t waste your time. Don’t jinx it. Just go win. You’ve got to go win.”

So I’m doing a dry run, and I call Elon and say, “Where are you?” He goes, “What do you mean? I’m in Austin, Texas,” or whatever. I go, “What are you doing? I mean, what is the point of you spending 3 weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the guy get elected if you’re not going to help him pick the Cabinet? Come on, right?”

The way President Trump works, he makes decisions by orchestra. He likes lots of views and opinions. He likes them. Anybody who says, “The last person who sees him gets him,” that’s because they don’t know him at all. It’s an orchestra. I would say, “Okay, I’m the first violin.” At the time, I would say I was—I would describe myself as second violin. This is an orchestra, so the president isn’t going to make a decision with me and him alone.

The president is sitting across from me at the conference table. Elon is to his left, Susie to his right, J.D. to my left, and Linda McMahon, who was my co-chair, to my right. She wrote all those EOs that he did. That was what she was responsible for, and I was responsible for personnel, but she was with me for personnel. Don Jr. was to the right, Stephen Miller was there, and there were always 12 people in the room. It was never me and him hushed in the corner doing this and that. Never.

I would put 8 candidates on one screen, with one big candidate on each screen. People would walk in and go, “Where did you get that photo?” I’m like, “What do you think I did? I took 3 of your photos.”

I’ve heard secondhand stories of this room during the transition. You walk in and everyone’s photo is up on the screen. Everybody’s in the room. So that’s a candidate for a role, and then you guys would debate it?

Yeah. There was a big picture of the person, their key highlights of the résumé—not boring details like their education. Then you would click a button and see them speaking for 20 seconds at a time, 4 of them. So it’s about 80 seconds, and you’re not speaking about the job. It’s just, “How do you present?”

Totally.

And what you can see is his whole Cabinet can talk.

Totally. All of them. Totally.

Because he picked them knowing, “I need you to be able to talk, to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there.” That’s key to him.

The way I would joke to people is, “How do you do it?” I go, “Watch the pitch. You throw him a curveball, he wouldn’t swing. You throw him a fastball, he wouldn’t swing. You throw him a slider, he hits the ball, hits it to my glove. I go, ‘Here you go.’” You go, “Well, how do you know that?” I go, “Because I’ve known the guy for 33 years. I know what he wants.” He loved the process.

You know what happened? You saw what happened, right? First, 8 candidates, 12 jobs: national security. He says, “What do you want?” I go, “8 to 4.” I put up 8 candidates. I recruited everybody. I had 150 of the best Republicans in the United States of America. They each gave me 5 people, who then gave me 10 people. I had thousands of people to pick from. The whole government was set up to pick from. Then we picked candidates. I had 8 for every job.

Yeah. Eight. Eight. Eight. Eight.

That’s Friday. Sunday comes in, from 4:00 to 2:00 in the morning. I fly everybody in for the 2. I prep them. We go in and meet them. Two to 1. Final interview. Give him the job.

Wow.

Bang. Monday—Monday, we’re done with national security. Now we’re rolling on, and it just pounds out. Why? Because he had every candidate. Everybody knew it. Everybody was prepped. Everybody was aware. Everybody was done.

That’s why I had to beat the heck out of David Sacks, because I needed David Sacks to be in the government. I recruited David. I pounded on David. You can ask David. I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally said, “Okay, I’m going to do it.”

Yeah. Right.

And I did that for everybody. I made sure he had the greatest choices. Every once in a while, he would call me at night and say, “Throw this guy in. Throw this guy in. Throw this guy in.” We vetted everybody. But I didn’t take out anything negative. I am not a negative person. You can tell. I’m positive. So why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate until I get picked?

There was no game theory. A lot of people speculated there was game theory—that we’d put in a mix of people, assume some wouldn’t make it out of committee, and then end up with the ones we wanted. Everyone was the number-one choice. Only one.

What happened with Matt, Howard? How did that process work?

The president was tortured by his attorney general in the first term, and we were not going to have that ever again. So we needed a strong backbone and strong capacity, which Matt Gaetz has. I know Matt Gaetz, and he has it.

But we did not know what that vetting was going to say in the report from Congress. So here was the idea: We fight for him and fight for him to get through, and then we read the report. The report’s not bad.

Remember, the president’s been tortured by people blaming him for stuff that never happened. “Oh, 30 years ago, he raped this woman in the dressing room of Bloomingdales.” What a load of crap, right? It’s just not true. None of it’s true. It’s ridiculous.

So he comes at this saying, “I know you’re going to get tortured with ridiculous stuff, right?” Then he says, “If it’s ridiculous, then we support Matt. If it’s not, we have Pam Bondi right here, right now.” That was lined up so that everybody knew she was right here, right now. It’s 3D chess.

So we read it: Pam. It was like Pam in a hundredth of a second. Pam is a rock star. You could argue, “Well, why didn’t you pick her first?” You know what? He’s the president. He plays 3D chess. He did it his way.

There was no candidate up there who wasn’t right. We could talk about all the detail, how we thought about it, what went into it, but it was so thoughtful, so intuitive, and so right. What does it produce? The greatest Cabinet ever: the most capable, thoughtful, and best able to communicate.

We shouldn’t betray confidence, but we were in a room earlier this week with several of them, and everyone had a moment to speak. It was unbelievable. Every single one of them—you’re thinking, “Could have been a leader of the country.” They’re all great.

That’s the point. He picked greatness.

I was the recruiter, so I was recruiter-in-chief, but I can understand why now, by the way. Think about it: If you take someone like me and say, “Just be a headhunter,” I swear to you, I can be the greatest headhunter ever to live. Think about it. What are the odds of saying, “Okay, Howard, your whole job is just to be a headhunter. Find the best guys”? I promise you I’ll be really good.

Can we go back to DOGE? You talked about the DOGE vendors. Maybe there’s other stuff that you can do with executive action, the president can do with DOGE, et cetera. Can we talk about congressional budgets? How do we actually balance a budget without bringing Congress along? Is the plan to bring Congress along?

I’ve asked this of Scott Bessent. I’ve asked this several times since we’ve been here. It’s the thing that gives me the most heartache and the most headache, because I worry about whether this actually gets there, given congressional interests.

I think Congress works with something called scoring. If it comes from their pen, it counts. If it doesn’t come from their pen, it doesn’t count. But the fact is, money always counts. It just doesn’t count for their scoring.

Their scoring is only part of the game. The outcome of the game is what matters to me, Elon, our Cabinet, and Donald Trump. And I’m telling you, the outcome of the game will be driven by me and Elon.

A funny part of it is, I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden. He doesn’t want to leave Pennsylvania because he’s committed to Pennsylvania. So I convince him he’s got to come, and we have a plan.

Everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God. I’m the only one who introduces Elon. Elon comes onstage with me. There’s the 2 of us onstage in Madison Square Garden—the only time the 2 of us are onstage. I’m the fourth speaker. He’s the third from the end. J.D. is second from the end, and Donald Trump is last.

He’s supposed to say—when I say to him, “How much are you going to cut?” The deal was he was going to cut $1 trillion. Then he’s supposed to say, “And how much are you going to earn?” I’m supposed to say, “$1 trillion.” Then we’re supposed to say, “Together, we’re going to balance the budget of the United States of America.” That’s the little thing.

So I ask Elon, “How much are you going to cut?” He says $2 trillion. Because we’re in front of 22,000 people and the place is erupting, he says $2 trillion. I’m sitting there going—I think I said, “All righty, then,” or something like that. What was I supposed to say?

No, you were caught off guard. But, I mean, it’s quite something. How much are you going to earn?

No, because he said $2 trillion. I got it all, don’t worry. Like I said, “All righty then,” and that was that. So then I walked offstage, and he said $2 trillion. What am I going to say?

But the answer was always right: 25% of the waste, fraud, and abuse is $1 trillion, right? And he’s got to cut and find $1 trillion of waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s my job: to raise $1 trillion of exogenous new revenues—new revenue for the government. I’m telling you, I’ve been here now 2 months, and I am more confident it’s going to happen and more excited.

Tell us how it happened.

Well, hold on a second. Howard, let’s finish this, and then we’ll move to tariffs and revenue generation. There’s a lot of domestic terrorism. Is that the response to try to slow down the expense side of the house? Is it basically to put fear into people who are trying to find this waste and fraud? Is that what it is—the burning of the dealerships?

I describe it to people this way: let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, wouldn’t call and complain. She’d think something got messed up, and she’d get it next month.

A fraudster always makes the loudest noise—screaming, yelling, and complaining. Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processing system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Whoever screams is the one stealing, because my mother-in-law is not calling. Come on. Your mothers, 80-year-olds, 90-year-olds—they trust the government. They think, “Okay, maybe it got screwed up. Big deal.” They’re not going to call and scream at someone, but someone who’s stealing always does.

What happens is that the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, or inappropriately getting the money have an inside person who’s routing the money. They’re going to yell and scream. But real America is going to be rewarded, because here’s the key: we have to give people the benefit of the doubt. Not one penny should stop going to someone who deserves it. We’re the richest country on Earth.

Here’s the way I say it: we have a $6.5 trillion budget and $4.5 trillion of revenues. We lose $2 trillion a year. We have a $29 trillion GDP, which people don’t understand and which I’ll explain a little bit, and we have $36 trillion in debt.

What number didn’t I say to a businessperson? What’s our balance sheet worth?

I say $500 trillion. The president says $1 quadrillion. But at $500 trillion or $1 quadrillion, with $36 trillion in debt, we’re rich. We don’t have to take one penny from someone who deserves Social Security. Not one penny from someone who deserves Medicaid or Medicare.

What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who’s not hurt, who’s been on disability for 50 years, which is ridiculous, and who has another job. Do we have to monetize our assets? We need to be smart. That’s all we need to be.

I’m going to tell you things that are just smart. They’re not, “Oh my God, that’s the most brilliant thing ever.” This is just smart. There are so many smart things we can do. Like, you know, we’ll talk about the post office.

Think about this: the post office has 625,000 people who work there, and they go to your house every day. You know what the census does? The census hires 625,000 people, trains them, teaches them, interviews 2 million people, and hires cars.

You’re a genius. That’s pretty smart, Howard.

Right? It’s obvious, right? But here’s what it is: I’m really good at pattern recognition. Tell me 625 of one, and I can point out 625 of another. This is the genius I bring to the government. Seriously, this is a core function.

By the way, you’re responsible for all the core data collection as well, aren’t you? Isn’t Commerce responsible for generating a lot of the GDP and economic data?

I get to talk about GDP and how I’m going to clean up the nonsense in GDP. I can explain that. If you make a tank and someone buys a tank, that is GDP. But 1,000 people thinking about buying a tank, who take your tax money, and I give it to them, and they go, “I wonder, should we buy a tank or not?” That’s not GDP.

You’re saying government spending should not be counted in GDP?

No. Government spending to buy a tank should be counted. Government spending that’s nonproductive should not.

This is so important. I don’t think a lot of people realize this. How much of GDP is nonproductive government spending?

How about we do one thing? GDP: “D” means domestic, and “P” is production. It’s not consumption. If I go out and buy a Toyota, that’s not GDP. If I buy a Chevy that’s made in America, that’s domestic production.

People think it’s a consumption model, but it’s not. There’s another one: gross domestic income. That’s also good. By the way, they grow at about the same rate. It’s kind of fun.

The key for me is to take out the part where, if I cut 1 million government employees who are nonproductive—meaning they don’t make tanks—it’s going to look like our GDP declined. But what really happened? Our expenses went down.

This is so important, by the way, because people talk about a recession, and a lot of people create a lot of red lights and alarm bells about how we’re going to go into a recession if we cut all this spending. But the follow-on effect of cutting nonproductive spending is that the workforce and those dollars flow into more productive parts of the economy, where we make more things, create more jobs, and create higher wages. That’s the theory that you guys are trying to execute against. I don’t think a lot of people in the general public fully understand how important that is to explain and get across here.

If we put 3 people behind us, and they sat behind us and did nothing, and each of us gave them $125,000—just like this: “Here you go”—and they just sat there, what is that? That’s not GDP. That’s me taking my money and giving it to them. We produced nothing. We have no purpose on Earth. It was my money. The income I earned was mine, and I just gave it to them. They didn’t really earn income. It’s really a transfer-payment model that is currently considered in GDP, and it’s nonsense.

So if I stopped paying them, what would I do? The first thing you’d say is, “Well, then why am I paying so much tax?” Bang. Now we’re in the concept of, Howard, do you have an intuition about what the actual GDP number is?

I’m sure you’ll see a different number if you take out nonproductive spending.

But I’m not going to talk about it until we release it, because that’s the proper way to do stuff. I’m going to break that out for the last 20 years, and what you’re going to see is 15% every time in the quarter just before an election. All the government spending happens right then and there, and all of a sudden you have this jump in GDP.

It goes, “Whoop,” and then they can—what do you think the first quarter is? Whammo. Or the second quarter is whammo. Why? Because you pre-spent it. Then you have this whole thing, and it’s gross.

You’re like, “Really?” But it’s so manipulated. To your point, the game that’s being played is: we’re going to take taxpayer dollars that people don’t understand. Once you give it to the government, we’re going to create these waves of fake growth that try to tip elections, so that the grift, the waste, and all the fraud can then continue for as many years as possible until the jig gets replayed over and over again. It seems like the buck is stopping with you guys because you’ve exposed it.

That’s the idea: to take $1 trillion of waste, fraud, and abuse out, and then make $1 trillion from having other people reset global trade. Once you understand global trade, how it makes sense, and where it came from—

Can you explain that to us? Sorry, before we get there, I want to ask one last question on the cuts.

Can we speak in a more empathetic way? That $1 trillion of spending flows into someone’s pocket. Some percentage of that pays people a salary, and they live on that income. I think this is important for you to highlight, because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and DOGE and the budget cuts by saying, “You’re destroying jobs. You’re taking money away from people who need their jobs. Why are you rich people taking it away?” Are people going to lose their jobs?

I’m going to give you a sad example. We all remember during COVID there was the PPP money. It was proven that $200 billion of the $1.2 trillion was going to Chinese fraud gangs.

What? Why was that proven?

You just make up a company, right? You know, Joe’s Deli. You make it up, say you’re in trouble, file, and they send you money. Why wouldn’t Chinese gangs do that? Come on.

People showed the government that those people were taking that money, and instead of stopping, they said, “Yeah, but we can’t stop because there are real people who need the money.” And so what happens is, because no one’s ever been fired for sending money to the wrong place—

People send it on purpose. I'm not saying everybody sends it on purpose. I'm saying there are some people who send it on purpose, some people who are complete morons, and an enormous number of people who work for the government who are awesome—amazing people, right? But what percentage?

If there are 5.9 million people who work for the government, you're like, “Wow, that's so many, and we're paying them all. How many do you really need?” I mean, if the answer is 2 million, wow. And we could talk about how we understand it and how we're going to retrain society for the AI industrial revolution, which is coming and is going to create the greatest set of jobs and greatest set of growth ever. Ever.

Okay. But then—we can talk about that. The key is, stop sending money to the wrong place so we can make sure we can always defend sending money to the right place. I would never allow, if I can stand it, not to pay somebody who retired at 65 their benefits.

I find it disgusting when we're the richest country in the world and some politician says that, in order to save Social Security, rather than getting rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse, we should move it to 70. How about no? How about we're rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain of being a great American, but let's put great people in charge.

That's really well said. I think that's really well said. Okay, let's put a pin in this, because—so let's have Howard explain to us global trade as you understand it, and then the context of tariffs, maybe historically, and what role they play now.

So I remind people that on the Earth there were the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages meant that the world knew how to read, and then, because of religious and other actions, they burned all the books. Literally, the Earth stopped learning how to read for 500 years or 400 years. We didn't know how to read, and we knew how to read before. So how could you forget?

America was built on tariffs with no income tax. No income tax until 1913. None. Greatest, richest country in the world. So when Donald Trump says, “Make America great again,” what he's talking about is from 1880 to 1913, when the country had so much money that we had blue-ribbon commissions, which you guys would have been on, to try to figure out how to spend the money. And no income tax.

Then we put in the income tax in 1913. Why? Because we're entering World War I. And don't we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life?

Then what happens is the world goes into chaos. We come out of chaos, right? And then we're starting to think, What do we do? What do we do? In 1929, the stock market crashes. In 1933, we start to say, “Oh, oh, God, we forgot—we need to do tariffs.”

How can you do tariffs when the markets crash? The world's going into depression, and you're going to do tariffs in 1933? You can't charge the rest of the world money unless the rest of the world's okay. So it was too little, too late, right?

Then we come out of World War II. It's 1945. We need to rebuild the world. So we decide we're going to take our tariffs down and we'll let them—here's the key—we'll let their tariffs be up, and we will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild. We'll let them rebuild, and that's what happens.

In 1945, we have the Marshall Plan, right? And we do it in Japan, of course, because they need to be rebuilt. What's the difference, right? So they need to be rebuilt. Then we have the 1950s and the Korean War. So we let them rebuild, which means low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Low tariffs here, high tariffs there.

Then we have the Vietnam War, right? So now all of a sudden we have all of Southeast Asia: low tariffs here, high tariffs there. You know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear? Kuwait.

We spend almost $100 billion freeing Kuwait. You know which country has the highest tariffs against the United States of America? The number-one country with the highest tariffs against the United States of America: Kuwait. And you think, “What?”

But here's what it is: If you go back to this understanding of the way America thinks, you need to be rebuilt. You were just destroyed, right? All their oil wells were on fire. You remember Red something? He was the guy who capped them all. There were fires in all the oil wells, and he capped them all, and it was amazing.

So we let them put up high tariffs. But you know what the problem is? Then we forget, right? And we let it go. So Donald Trump comes in and says, “It's got to stop.”

So that's an incredible context for tariffs now. It's like it was a long-term strategy that essentially says, “Okay, great. There's rebuilding to be done, sort of almost out of the largesse of America. We're going to enable that to happen. So we'll lower tariffs here, and we'll support the high-tariff regimes over there. We let it happen. We let it happen on purpose.”

But it's an incredible thing you're also saying, though, which is that it's inexorably linked to this repetitive machinery of war, because they create these boundary conditions over and over again—always in situations where there's so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to do this.

Correct. That's exactly right. So then you say to yourself, “Okay, I get the 1940s, I get the 1950s, I get the 1970s, right? But the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s—what? Time out. 2020?”

So Donald Trump gets elected in 2016. Who understands this? Okay, let me give you a hint: Donald J. Trump. Who else? Nobody. Nobody. You'd say, “Wow, he understands.” And how long has he been talking about it? 40 years. Why? Because in the 1980s he's saying, “What are you doing?”

Well, let me give you the economist's counter, which—and then you can respond to it—is that tariffs on imports in the United States will ultimately pass to the consumer: higher prices; it's inflationary. So the things that our citizens are buying get more expensive, and as a result they buy less, and it's recessionary. It shrinks the economy, it shrinks spending, it shrinks consumption.

Can you respond to the typical economist refrain on this? Maybe they're isolating the imbalance.

Okay. India has a 50% tariff on average. 50. We have, on average, 4%. I would say to the person who said that, can I ask you a question? What are you talking about? They're 50 and 4.

Here's what you're talking about: When we're all equal and everything is free and fair, if you raise tariffs and they raise tariffs, isn't it bad for society? The answer is, of course it is. But there are 2 differences.

Number 1, let's do human beings first before we go to the math. Let's go to human beings. Once upon a time, we had an auto industry in Detroit, and in Ohio—but Detroit. Then some genius named Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement for corporations. You can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada.

Now, if you were General Motors, I'd say it's like my birthday. But if you're a worker who comes from Michigan or Ohio, they just signed—you know what they signed? The worst statistic I'm going to tell you today: the average life expectancy of the high-school-educated workforce.

So, by the way, in the United States of America, 2/3 of the workforce is high-school-educated, and 1/3 is college-educated. The difference today in average life expectancy between those 2 categories is 7 years. A 7-year average life-expectancy gap. It's not the air. It's not the food. It's not the medicine. It's despair.

My grandfather worked in the auto factory. My father worked in the auto factory. I have a good life. I'm going to do Friday Night Lights and football. I mean, it's going to be a good life. I have a good middle-class life. I'm a member of the United Auto Workers. Life is going to be good.

The factory moves to Mexico, and I am just screwed because the government of the United States of America didn't care about industrial policy and didn't protect me at all and let cheap labor in Mexico. I'm sure the Mexican people went from $4 an hour to $5 an hour, and they're kicking it. But I destroyed you.

And that is an incredible failure of industrial policy, which nobody wants to talk about. But you talk about it in terms of average life expectancy. And you're talking about reshoring and rebuilding the life of the people who are America.

That's why you elect Donald Trump president. You elect him because I didn't spend 1 minute doing politics until he asked me to help him. But when he asked me to help him, I started spending time with him. When did I learn this, and who taught me this? The president of the United States.

This is not me teaching him. You understand? This is him teaching me. And you can see him talking about it in the 1980s. He's been talking about this for 40 years. And what it does is it means: reshore.

So, number 1, we have to care about human beings.

That's a globalist view.

Yes. If I take my production and move it to Mexico, it's better for me, Mr. Corporation. But it's not better for me, Mr. U.S. citizen of the United States of America, who's working at a car plant. That's bad news for him.

And that's number 1. Now let's go to number 2, which is the math of it all. If we say free and fair trade, I want to remind you: There ain't no such thing. There is no country in this world that is free trade. Zero. And we are the lowest and the dumbest, because everybody else is higher and more protective.

So they protect their farmers. Here I am sitting at the dinner. Modi comes to town, and when Donald Trump and I have dinner, after the niceties Donald says, “Go ahead. Go ahead, Howard.” And I said, “You have 1.4 billion people, and you brag to us about how amazing your economy is. Why won't you buy a bushel of our corn? We'll buy a bushel of your corn, so our farmers can go to him, but his, of course, can come at us, right? Why is that okay?”

We could go into all the stuff that—oh, I don't even want to go into it, because if I had another hour, I could retell you stories that are fun with that.

But just address the price inflation that arises from tariffs.

Talk to the average person who says the cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50%.

Inflation comes from printing more money. Let’s say the United States of America had $1 trillion. That’s all we had. That’s it. No more. I want to buy a bottle of water, and you want to buy a bottle of water. One came from America, and the other one came from Fiji, right? Then I tariff Fiji, and that water is $1.25 and this water is $1. That’s not inflation. That means that one’s more expensive, but I can choose to buy this one.

This toy might be more expensive and that toy is not. I get it. But that’s not inflation. Here’s inflation: snap my fingers. Now we have $2 trillion, right? That water is $1.50. That water is $1.25. Everything’s more expensive. That’s inflation.

So, inflation without tariffs is everything’s $1.25. Inflation with tariffs is $1.25 and $1.50. You have to understand: inflation doesn’t come from tariffs. Certain products—if I put a tariff on a mango, right? We can’t grow mangoes in America. We just can’t grow a mango. If you put a tariff on a mango, the mango would be more expensive.

But if the president chose to put a tariff on a mango, then the mango is more expensive. That just becomes a consumption tax. It’s like a sales tax. It’s a sales tax. It’s a consumption tax. If I want to buy a mango, it costs more money. And you can offset that with a reduction in—

But then that’s just like another version of income tax.

Okay, so the idea is to not do that. That’s the idea. The idea is to choose things that are going to reshore. Exactly. Come here. This is so important. Hire my people. Bring it home.

By the way, I want to speak as an entrepreneur. I see the economic incentive when I see the price for certain things go higher because you have to import and pay a tariff. I’m like, why don’t we make that here? We should be doing that. There’s going to be a lot of that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that will arise from making things. This is just how the markets work.

Someone will say, $2 trillion so far. He’s been in office for, like, 7 or 8 weeks.

$2 trillion of committed domestic production is coming back because of his tariffs. TMC is saying, "I'll build semiconductor wafers." Everything we do, they’re going to build it here. That work is never coming unless the tariff.

What happens is you bring it here, you create the jobs here, and then they avoid the tariff. By the way, those jobs are better-paying and more productive than the government-funded jobs.

What do you want to do about the narrow set of products that are more high-value than the mango, that maybe can’t be made here, or at least can’t be made here in the next 5 to 10 years? TSMC can make chips. I think that’s great. ASML, which makes the extremely complicated lithography machines, as an example, can’t necessarily do that for another 5 or 6 years here.

So there are these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market or perturb a market where there is no multivendor solution, right? But that’s still critical. How do you think about that set of stuff?

You know, the beauty of putting Donald Trump in the White House is it’s giant three-dimensional chess. We all have Stockholm syndrome for the Internal Revenue Service. We think we like the Internal Revenue Service.

When we say we’re going to charge a tariff on other countries that lean on us, rely on us, bleed on us, and can’t live without the oxygen that is our economy, remember that while we have a $29 trillion GDP, we are the consumer of $20 trillion. This is the key thing: we buy everybody’s stuff.

Who’s more important? Let’s say they have an economy that produces stuff and we have an economy that buys stuff. The customer is always right. We all know the customer is always right, because if no one buys it, they can’t produce it, right? Everybody needs our economy. China consumes less than $10 trillion and primarily tries to figure out how to sell to itself. They don’t buy anybody else’s stuff. We are the world’s consumer. We’re the world’s customer.

We want them to come here. If they can’t come here, what if you pass—let’s say there was a 20% tariff, and in order to sell his goods, he knows he can raise the price 10%, but he can’t really raise it 20%. So he eats 10%, and the price goes up 10%. Let’s just say that 20% goes into the coffers of the United States of America.

The president of the United States said we’re going to balance the budget, and then his goal is to drive down income tax in the United States of America, including wage tax. What has he said so far with that in his pocket, knowing that this is what we’re going to try to do? What does he announce? No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. Why is he saying those things? Because he knows that he’s got Elon, who’s going to cut, and Howard, who’s going to raise, and he’s going to have the tools to deliver on his promise: more money for folks to spend. They’ll have more money to spend.

If you actually get the External Revenue Service right—which, of course, I named—you know, I wrote a Truth and I sent it to DJT. I wrote, “This is my huge idea,” with one of those things that goes like this, you know, on the “my huge idea” thing. It’s the External Revenue Service, but it only matters because I work for him. If I worked for Joe Biden or anybody else, they wouldn’t care at all.

The fact that he loves a great idea the minute you say it and it becomes his idea—my idea is useless. A good idea in his hands—

If we went back to “Make America Great Again,” which is pre-1913, which is: let them pay, you don’t pay. What that means is, let them pay. Try to balance the budget. Try to waive tax on everybody who makes less than $150,000. Look what you did for America. Holy moly. Look what you did.

By the way, labor costs come smashing down because it’s tax-free. If their earnings are tax-free, they’re happy to work because they get the money. What happens is, the cost of labor comes down because we’re run correctly as a government. This is what I’m trying to do.

Speaking of potentially great ideas, can you tell us about the Trump Gold Card?

Sure.

Whose idea was that, and how did that come about?

John Paulson had a call with Donald Trump and was talking to him, kicking around the idea: Why do we give away visas? We should sell them. Donald Trump calls me, gets me on the phone, and we all talk about it. Then we go from there.

My job is to figure out, as I always figure out, how to do it. What’s the path? Let’s go figure it out. Of course, in about 2 weeks from today, it goes out. Elon is building me the software right now. By the way, yesterday I sold 1,000.

Oh, you did? I created a Polymarket on how many you guys are going to sell this year. I’m curious to see how many. That’s fantastic. Do you want to tell people just the rough terms?

Sure. If you’re a U.S. citizen, you pay global tax. So you’re not going to bring in outsiders to come in and pay global tax. If you have a green card—which used to be a green card, now it’s a Gold Card—you’re a permanent resident of America. You can be a citizen, but you don’t have to be. None of them are going to choose to be.

What they’re going to do is have the right to be in America. They’d pay $5 million, and they have the right to be an American as long as they’re good. As long as they’re good people, they’re vetted, and they can’t break the law. We could always take it away if they’re evil or bad or something. Not mean, but if they do something horrible, you could take it away, right?

The idea is, if I were not American and I lived in any other country, I would buy 6: 1 for me, 1 for my wife, and 1 for each of my 4 kids, because, God forbid, something happens. I want to be able to go to America, and I want to have the right to go to the airport to go to America and for them to say, “Hello, Mr. Lutnick. Hello Mr. Lennox and the Latin family. Welcome home.” That’s what I want to hear.

I don’t want to hear, “I can’t come here,” when there’s a horrible war or a horrible whatever. I want to be able to go home. Once I’m home, I might as well build a business.

You have the most productive people in the world going to start spending time here. They’re going to have a family office, they’re going to hire some people, and you’re not going to tax their external worldwide income. I only tax the money they make in America, which is what we do now. Their global income stays out, and they pay $5 million.

How many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world? How many?

There are 37 million people in the world who are capable of buying the card, in case you were wondering. Thirty-seven million.

That’s a lot more than ChatGPT told me. Who are capable of buying it? How many do you think he’ll sell?

The president thinks we can sell 1 million. So, $5 trillion.

I think a million is reasonable. As an outsider who came in, got my green card, then got my citizenship, and now pay global tax every which way known to man, if this were available 15 years ago after the Facebook IPO, that's what I would have done. It would have been much better for me, theoretically. Now, I'm happy to pay the tax.

So, the idea is—and it's going to go fast. Meaning, you apply, right? We take your money, and you know the way computers work now: they have these cool things. They're amazing. You put stuff in and they actually check everything. It's fantastic.

You don't even have to plug them in anymore. It's amazing. They get the information through the air. I mean, you could do a better vet than anybody in government has ever done it before in 1 second, right? Better than they've ever done it before.

So I'll tell you a quick story. Monday night, Elon was telling us about this, Nean Sachs. One of the things he was saying is that he's been helping you build this site. But one of the most difficult parts of it is that all of the CPB infrastructure to do all these checks is a lot of cobalt mainframes, and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten—

This is a huge opportunity. It's incredible that the most advanced nation in the world deployed systems in the 1970s, which at the time probably felt very cutting-edge to everybody in the room, but, to your point, they have not evolved in the last 50 years.

There's always a reason, okay? And the reason is a great reason, which is that in the mid-1970s, we changed the way government accounts for software. We took a 10-year contract, and you have to take the contract up front. So if I'm signing a contract with you for 10 years at $1 million a year, I have to take it against my budget for $10 million. So I'm not doing it.

See, I'm only here for 4 years. So what happens is, when was the last time we bought software? 1975. Where? Everywhere. Why? Because it's illogical.

Now what I'm doing is I'm saying, "Okay, I have to collect tariffs, right?" So I go to one of the great software companies on Earth and say, "I want you to build for me, for America, the greatest customs processing ever. We're going to take a photograph. It's going to know what it is. It's going to go through AI. It's going to know what it is. It's going to know what the tariff is. It's going to determine the percentage. It's going to know the weight."

When you weigh the thing plus the package, it'll know what it weighs. You don't even have to open it. It'll weigh exactly the right amount. You'll do this and that. These are all things that I know and all things I could figure out.

Because you know the way gold works: a gold bar is about 40 pounds. The way I know that gold bar is they weigh it, and they weigh out 13 digits of decimals. Basically, if you touch the thing, it's not going to be 13 digits of decimals. So you have a perfect scale and you weigh it, and that's like the code.

Yeah, right.

Because you can't touch it. If you touch it, you'll change it, and you can't get it right out to 3 digits. It's just not possible. So that's what we do with stuff. You know what it weighs, right? 3 T-shirts—if you send in the same 3 T-shirts, they always weigh the same.

What's incredible is that you're convincing these companies to basically do right for America and build this software for you. Do you think that's going to be a movement throughout the government, or is that—

Here's the idea. I say, "Build it for me for free."

Yeah.

I put it in for free. I don't know what other countries in the world you think are going to buy now, right? If it works for us—well, remember, you have to connect to me. So every country is going to buy, right? And it's a great business model.

If the greatest customer in the world says they'll take it, life's good, right? So what should the greatest customer in the world get? I don't know, a good deal, yeah? And you've got a guy like me there.

Everybody else is like, "Howard, you have to change how government operates if you're going to scale that. You can't go negotiate every contract out there for every department." I mean, it's not that hard when you say it's free. You know, free is not that hard.

Yes, it is.

And then what I do is I get the head of that technology company. I use my superpower, which is my friendship with Donald Trump. Then I go in the Oval Office and we call him together, right? We call the CEO together and make him promise the president. Promising Howard is really nice, right? Promising DJT, that's something else entirely.

So I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that they'll build it right now. Let's see him react.

Yeah, it ain't going to happen.

So when you get Elon to say, "I'm going to build it for you," and he says it in front of the president, how great is that? You've got the greatest technologist, the richest guy in the world. He says, "I'll build it for you." You're like, "Thank God," right?

And then I go to the heads of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. They're all for America building for us, right? For free, right? To make America better, because they are great American companies. In exchange for that, we're going to help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness.

Just towards fairness, because you can't get me to do something outside the world of fairness. But I tell you what: if it's unfair, I'll be on your side as hard and as positive as I possibly can be.

Talk to us about some of the hot-button markets that you're going to have to navigate. You are in charge of export controls, which is a very important thing in AI. We don't allow export licenses for the most advanced NVIDIA chips. We don't want training necessarily to be done outside of the United States. We're okay with inference happening outside the United States in certain conditions.

Maybe just talk about that for a second. How are you going to navigate AI? How do you think about that from your seat?

All right. I'll give you an example that's sort of live right now. So we have DeepSeek, we have Qwen, we have Doubao. I don't think we should be having apps in America, and I don't think we should have their website in America, because they all go back home, okay?

But it's open source, and I want our American companies, including college students, to be able to download it and build on it. But I want to make sure that there's no part of it that says, "Send it home to China," or "Store now and analyze later." So I need that out.

What I want to do is embrace what you guys know. You guys are used to product evaluations. So let's do a security eval.

Exactly.

And say your industry can't get overwhelmed and overrun by the Chinese, because what happens is, if there's a policy, all of a sudden 100,000 people from China come in and say they're John Smith and Todd Peterson, but they're not, and then you think the vote is this way. It's easily manipulated. So we have to be very careful.

My first instinct is to lean on that, and that's why I say it's important to have David Sacks as my partner: someone who knows it, someone who can live and breathe the industry. So what we're going to have is a security evaluation, and if the security evaluation model says that this is a good model, then people can download it.

But it sounds like what we're good at. I don't want to create, like, "Oh, this is what I don't want to do." I want us to do it, but I've got to figure out the right way to do that, right? And that's important.

Articulate the standards, articulate the concept, and then let a lot of these private-market actors help fill in the gaps and compete.

The only thing I think I really need to do, and that's with regulatory, is post-quantum cryptography.

Yeah.

Okay. I think that is vital to us.

That's right.

You know, I would bet this happens during this administration. I know. I'm going to put it out, because we all have passwords.

For those who are watching who don't know this, our passwords are called asymmetric, right? Yours is different from mine, right? That's the key, and cryptography is just the computing. So, asymmetric-key cryptography: you have your password, I have mine, and they're the key. That's right, right? Obviously, the central hub has our key. Duh.

A quantum computer, we know, can break all of them in a nanosecond. All of them in the whole world, including the CIA—all of them. RSA-2048, all of them can get broken in a nanosecond by a quantum computer.

So the defense of it is called post-quantum cryptography, right? We know how to do it, and we'll come out with a rule that says America's got to protect itself—new standards. And, by the way, every once in a while, you need to have a new standard that says it's coming. We know what it is. Please, God, go put it in, because we need to have it in. We need America to deliver.

Great segue. Let's segue now to a couple of things that we can join together in this concept. Crypto, obviously, Bitcoin. You guys announced the strategic Bitcoin reserve, but broadly speaking, you also announced this idea of the sovereign wealth fund.

Can we talk about what the vision behind that is? How do you want that to be executed? How do you think it should be run? What assets are on the table? What assets and strategies should never be on the table? How are you thinking about it?

The greatest customer in the world—the United States government, the most powerful, the greatest customer—buys stuff.

We walk in and say, “We’re going to buy $2 billion worth of COVID vaccines.” When we buy them, Pfizer and Moderna stocks are going to triple because then we say everyone has to have this vaccine. If Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal he could, and Howard Lutnick walked in the room, Howard Lutnick would say, “What do you think? 20% warrants?” We’d make $50 billion off of nobody. We didn’t take it from anybody. We didn’t do anything to the shareholders of Pfizer, whom we just tripled with our order.

How many of my customers in my life have required that from me? All of them. This isn’t, “Oh, Howard, this is the greatest new idea ever.” This is just business proper. So I don’t view the sovereign wealth fund as a risk. I view the first couple of years of the sovereign wealth fund as Scott Bessent and me making money Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

People say, “But you can’t invest and lose. Don’t you lose money?” No. Why? Well, if I have Big Daddy—the United States of America—behind me, right? I’ll give you an example. We buy missiles episodically: launch a missile, buy a missile; launch a missile, buy some missiles. The people who sell us missiles have either bad quarterly earnings or good quarterly earnings, but they’re episodic.

I’ll sign a contract with you—a 10-year contract, cancelable at the end of 5 years—to buy X amount of missiles, and I’ll pay you quarterly. Then they can take that contract and finance it. Their financing costs go down, their earnings are steady, their multiple improves, and their stock doubles. In exchange for that reasonable thought, how about a few warrants? Give me some stock. For people who don’t understand, give me a little bit of your stock. But don’t give me the stock; just give me the upside. If I help your stock go up just a little bit, I get to share in it.

You know what I do? I wipe my beak a little bit, and then I take the money for the United States of America and put it into the Social Security system in the United States of America. So why have—then all of a sudden, the Social Security system says it’s $4 trillion in the hole. If we cut the waste, fraud, and abuse out, it becomes $1.5 trillion.

By the way, Frank Bisignano, the greatest executive—the greatest payments executive ever to join the U.S. government—is about to get confirmed and take over the Social Security system. Frank ran Fiserv, a $120 billion public payments company. When Donald Trump asked him in his interview, “Can you handle Social Security? It’s $1.3 trillion a year,” he said, “Well, see, I handle $500 billion a day.” My whole life, all I worry about is getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s all I care about every single day: $5, $2, $1. He said, “This is going to be the most fun I’ve ever had.”

This is a Donald Trump administration. This is something from another planet. Of course, I recruited Frank, and I get to have my piece in the game. But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion, then it’s only $1.4 trillion in the hole. We make $1.4 trillion. That baby is finished forever.

Is the sovereign wealth fund a balance sheet for Social Security? Does Social Security become more than what it is today? Does it, over time, offer bigger, greater benefits? Is it basically a pool that holds equities? Historically—and we talked about this on our show—it’s only ever held Treasuries. But it’s really kind of a fake Treasury. It’s got $2.7 trillion today, but if we had bought the S&P 500 in 1971, when we went off the gold standard, with the cash flows that have come in and gone out of Social Security, we’d have a $15 trillion interest in the S&P today.

But you’d have to have Donald Trump be president the whole time, which was not a thing, right? Is that the objective—that the sovereign wealth fund is basically for the benefit of retirees in this country and becomes like a sovereign wealth fund? We have a $36 trillion debt of the United States of America, and we have a budget deficit of $2 trillion. Donald Trump wants to knock down the $2 trillion, and then he’s focused on the $36 trillion, of which Social Security is part of it.

How he allocates it—he was elected president of the United States. I was not. I like the Social Security idea because it’s really easy to explain to people and sell to people, so they understand it. But the fact is, it’s the same money if I put it in Social Security or put it against the debt of the United States of America. I’m going to let Donald Trump make that decision. You know why? Because it’s all his, and none of it’s mine. So he will decide that, and he will play it his way.

But Scott Bessent and I will make more than $1 trillion for the United States of America during our term, which is pretty darn cool, right? We’ll use that, and if that reduces our debt, great. But that’s not the policy of how we’re going to balance the budget. We’re going to balance the budget with Trump cards, tariffs, and getting rid of scams.

I’ll give you a scam example. Every boat you’ve ever seen—every single cruise ship, supertanker, and container ship—you’ve never seen an American flag on any of them. In fact, have you ever thought about the flag you’ve actually seen? All of you would say, “I have no idea what that flag is.” Why is it some flag I’ve never heard of? Liberia is number one. You go, “What? No one even knows where Liberia is.” The answer is, it’s a flag of convenience. They sell the flag for about $10,000. They literally say, “Here, you can have a flag,” and you pay no tax.

What happens is, a cruise ship in the United States picks up American passengers, goes into the Caribbean, comes back to America, treats the port as an expense, and all the profits are made in the Caribbean, where it pays no tax. That’s what I call a tax scam. It’s unfair to America. We’re going to fix that in America. We’re going to try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams.

Ireland is my favorite. The country of Ireland had a $60 billion budget surplus last year. We lose $2 trillion, and they make $60 billion. You say, “Ireland? What do they do?” They have all of our intellectual property for our great tech companies and pharma companies. All our great tech companies and great pharma companies put it there because it’s low tax, and they don’t pay us; they pay Ireland. So that’s got to end.

When those things end—tariffs, the Trump card, and getting rid of tax scams to get fair taxation—that’s my trillion. Elon’s got to do his trillion. Whenever I see him getting off the rails, he and I go out and have a strong conversation together: “You’ve got to do your trillion.” You’ve got to focus not on small potatoes, but on big, big, big, big, big things. I need you to do your side of the trillion.

As it turns out, I’m going to do more than a trillion because I’m me. Elon’s probably going to do more than a trillion because he’s him. Our objective is to smash down the Internal Revenue Service and change America.

Imagine America. This is just an imagination moment, okay? We have a balanced budget in the United States. We’re starting to knock down America’s deficit. We can cut taxes, and we have a gold card—a Trump card—that lets you come to America. Which entrepreneur have you ever met who wouldn’t buy one and wouldn’t start building businesses when they think the tax rate here is going to come down, eventually to 20%, and eventually to 15%? You won’t be able to find a plot of land in America.

You know what I predict will happen? Just like in the medallion industry for taxi cabs, there’ll be a financing industry that builds up around these gold cards, or Trump cards, that great entrepreneurs and great executives will be able to finance their purchase along with someone getting a venture capital interest or equity interest in their business. We’re going to take that money—we’ll sell them every year—so they’ll knock down our budget deficit.

Ultimately, if Donald Trump is right and we can sell 7 million cards, you realize there is no debt in America? No debt in America is $1 trillion a year in debt coverage. You know what that changes? That changes the Internal Revenue Service. You start to rethink.

I just want to remind you: We are the richest country on Earth. Our balance sheet is $500 trillion. I’ll give you an example. What’s the court system of America worth? How can Nvidia be worth $3 trillion without a court system that protects it? There’s no such thing. Everything about us—the infrastructure—is awesome. You know what happens? We get beaten upon, and we actually believe it.

You could ask Doug Burgum about how undervalued a lot of our real estate is in this country and the potential for it. Think about Biden closing off 635 million acres. This is like electing Joe Biden head of Saudi Arabia, and he closes the oil wells. All of a sudden, Saudi Arabia falls off the face of the earth, broke. What are we doing? We care about Americans. Let’s make Americans’ lives great.

Howard, we want clean water. We want clean air. We do it better than everybody else. But if we don’t, here’s the hypocrisy: We won’t mine lithium in America to make a battery, but the Australians mine it with coal, and it’s messy because they do it messily.

By the way, we breathe their air in 3.4 days, but who’s counting? Then we take it, put it on a truck, put the truck on a supertanker, and drive this supertanker that pollutes the living heck out of the world across 12,000 miles of ocean. It puts it on a truck and gives it to Elon to make an electric car. Why don’t we mine the lithium in Nevada?

Almost anything that we could possibly conceive of needing over the next couple of decades exists in the continental United States. We just have had no incentive or regulatory structure that enables its development. We need to care for ourselves and make America—America first.

How about maintaining clean environmental standards?

Well, maintaining environmental standards. Look, we’re never going to do something that’s not 100 times cleaner than everybody else, because we care about clean water and clean air. There’s none of us who doesn’t care about clean water and clean air.

Someone gives you a pill and says, “This will save you.” Then you look at the statistic, and it saves 1 in 1 million people. You’d say, “Why am I taking this pill?” They say, “Well, it could save your life.” You’d say, “Yeah, but it’s 1 in 1 million.” That’s not logical. That’s the point.

There’s a regulation that’s the right thing, and there’s a regulation that’s the 1-in-1-million pill. Why do we give a baby a hepatitis B vaccine? Do you realize we have a brand-new baby, and we hold it up and give it a hepatitis B vaccine? The only way you get hepatitis B is from unprotected sex or a needle. Why are we giving it to a baby?

You know what the answer is? Corruption. Someone in the government got paid to put that in the rules, because there’s no justification. I haven’t met a medical doctor who says hepatitis B vaccines on brand-new babies make sense. By the way, you know what the worst part is? They only last 10 years. You need a booster in 10 years, so the baby’s going to be 10.

We’ve got to really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Americans, and I think we can be. I think that’s why I’m so excited. That’s why our cabinet is so excited. That’s why it’s so much fun to work for Donald Trump, because I’m just speaking from his playbook.

If you had met me before he said, “Will you help me?” and went out to dinner with me and said, “Tell me about government,” I’d say, “Government? You mean I pay them taxes?” That’s it.

Are you having the time of your life? The most fun ever, because every idea I have either gets blown up or shot down. I come up with lots of ideas, and he says, “Nah, too complex.” That’s fine.

Yeah.

But when I come up with the External Revenue Service and he says, “Great idea,” and then he speaks of it in his inaugural address, right? It’s his idea, because I can’t do anything with it.

Howard, last question as we wrap. Tell us about your family and your kids. How do they think about all of this? Your sons are running Cantor now. How’s that going? Just give us the lay of the land. How’s the Lutnick family?

All right. I have the best wife. I’ve been married 30 years. She lets me be me, and she’s gorgeous, spectacular. I love my girl.

Imagine this: I’m not joining the government. I’m not joining the government. I’m doing this DOGE thing with Elon. I’m not joining. I’m not joining. “Honey, we’ve got to move.” Two weeks after Election Day, I said, “Honey, we’ve got to move.” I’m like, “We’re moving. In 5 weeks, we’re going to live in Washington.” The fact that that wasn’t unsettling would be the understatement of a lifetime, but she’s been the most supportive and fantastic.

I have 4 kids. My oldest son is about to turn 29. I was taking him to kindergarten, so that’s why I’m alive. My second son, Brandon, I dropped him off in nursing school and then took my oldest son to kindergarten.

So the two oldest boys are running caner now. Then I asked, “Is it going well?”

Is it going well?

I don’t know.

Of course you’re not supposed to know. It’s kind of fun. I would love to talk to them about it.

You have no idea, but I’m not allowed. I’m literally not allowed. And, you know, we all know the phones.

Since the phone’s always with me, I assume the phone is listening. Ever since we couldn’t take the battery out of our phone, the phone is listening. So I never talk to my son. I’m sure they’re happy, but I don’t know how it’s going.

My daughter is going to go to med school, and she’s on a gap year now. My youngest son is also on a gap year now, and he’s going to start Duke in the fall. So I have the best kids.

My kids have lived with me and with this kind of energy and positive momentum, and with my wife being just a spectacular mom, keeping them. What we taught our kids is a fun one. I taught them 2 things.

I would sit down with my kids and say, “How great is your life?” They’d go, “Great,” because they came home and said, “Hey, I got a bad grade. The teacher doesn’t like me.” It’s a classic line, right? I’d say, “How good’s your life?” They’d say, “Really good.” I’d go, “Could it be any better?” They’d say, “No.”

“Well, do you realize your teacher has given up her whole life to teach you? How much money does she make? She’s given her whole life to teach you. Can I ask you a question? Is it her job to like you, or is it your job for her to like you?”

Who’s failing in what you just said? It’s your job to have her like you. So when she says, “Raise your hand,” raise your hand. The other thing is, do me a favor: color inside the lines.

In high school, if she says the sky is orange, the answer to the test is orange. When you get to college, you can argue with the professor all you want. In high school, color inside the lines. Give the teacher what she wants. Make sure she loves you, and you’re getting a good grade. Those are the rules of life.

My wife beat that into my children so that they would have it in their souls, in their moral character. Someone who’s fighting for you needs to have your love and respect back. If you take them for granted, if you treat them badly, if you treat them like, “Aren’t I so great?” then you deserve what you get.

My wife has taught that moral fiber into my children, and it resides in them. The other thing my kids have is empathy, which is a very unusual thing for young people. It’s because they were raised with their father crying every day.

I cried every day until October 21, 2004. Every day, because I thought of someone I hadn’t thought of, or someone would say, “658 people died,” and I just—there’s no way you can process all of that death without crying. The only reason I remember is because, as I fell asleep, I told my wife that I didn’t cry that day, and she wrote it down. That’s the only reason I remember.

My kids are fantastic. They’ve been incredibly supportive, and my wife’s the best. She lives with me in Washington. We bought Bret Baier’s house, so I have a nice house, big enough for my ego to expand. Very important. Chamath hasn’t found one that big yet to look at.

Howard, you’re an incredible American. Thank you very much for everything. This was really fun, having you come talk.

Honestly, this has been one of my favorite conversations we’ve had. He’s like this all the time—not just when we have dinner at Nikesh’s house, who’s a good friend of ours and runs Palo Alto Networks. You just push the button, sit, and listen. You can listen to him for hours.

By the way, I’ll echo the point you made earlier: I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller. You’re on another level, but the storytelling is what’s so powerful about this cabinet and this administration. I think it’s going to take some time to get the message out, but there are incredible ambassadors to do so with.

They are so capable. Each of them is so capable and thoughtful. I am honored to be on this cabinet with them.

But we all get to work for Donald Trump, who can intuitively tell you, “Go fix eggs.” Brooke goes and fixes eggs, and eggs are down like 40%. Brooke fixes eggs. How awesome is that? Gas is down 40 cents, and he’s only just begun.

If we get the Constitution Pipeline in New York passed—and I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Hochul on the unbelievable oil and fracking they have in New York, and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it, but they refused to unleash it—he’s going to force the Constitution Pipeline, which, by the way, will cut gas prices on the East Coast of the United States of America in half.

And that’s Chris Wright, that’s Doug Burgum, you’ve got Brooke Rollins. You could just go down the list. Scott Bessent is so thoughtful and elegant. He just goes step by step by step. You have really the most fun cabinet working for the most intuitive, smartest guy to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk.

We’re going to make America great again—not as a slogan, but we’re going to balance the budget and we’re going to change America.

Thank you, Howard.