Ted Cruz: Trump's First Week, Texas vs. California, Immigration, DOGE, Greenland

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the All-In Podcast. We're here at the inauguration of our 47th president, Donald J. Trump, and we have a very special guest joining us for our coverage: Senator Ted Cruz from the great state—now my great state—of Texas. Welcome to the All-In Podcast, and welcome to Texas. It's pretty great.

Where'd you get the boots? Any chance I can get a recommendation here?

That's easy. These are Lucchese. The factory is in El Paso, and they're handmade there. They're beautiful.

And these particular boots have the Senate seal on the front?

They do.

Oh, that's cool. That's strong.

And on the back, they have the Come and Take It flag.

Whoa. I was about to ask you: Do you know the history of the Come and Take It flag?

Since you're a new Texan, this is important. He started saying “y'all,” so he's adapting.

You’ve got to stop giving me a hard time about that.

Texas, in the 1820s and 1830s, was part of Mexico, and the dictator of Mexico was General Santa Anna. There's a little town in South Texas called Gonzales. General Santa Anna sent an order to the Texans—which is what we were called back then—to hand over their guns. There was a cannon that guarded the city, and General Santa Anna said, “Hand over the cannon.” The Texans responded by making a flag with an image of the cannon and, underneath it, the legend “Come and Take It.”

They flew it over the town, and that was the beginning of the Texas Revolution. The epilogue is that Santa Anna came in with about 6,000 soldiers and did, in fact, take the cannon. Gonzales was a tiny little town, and the Texas Revolution was very much like the American Revolution: We lost every damn battle. The Alamo was a slaughter, Goliad was a slaughter, much like Washington, where he lost and lost and lost.

Then, at San Jacinto, we won. General Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna, and we became our own nation: the Republic of Texas, from 1836 to 1845.

That says something about resiliency, doesn't it?

It does.

Let me ask you a question. Having lived in New York and grown up there, and then spent 20 years in California—now my second year in Texas, or starting my second year—it's amazing to me that you're allowed to build things in Texas, like homes or factories. The price of homes has gone down 2 years in a row, whereas in the other 2 places I lived, home prices go up every year—10% or 20%. You don't have state income taxes. How is all this possible?

Just looking at it from first principles, how are you able to accomplish so much development in Texas when, in California, the NIMBYism is so extreme? Literally, if you want to build a cancer ward for children, they'll stop you because it throws shade on a protected species of flower.

Yeah, it's a great question. California used to know the answer to this. Fifty years ago, California was the economic engine of the country. Unfortunately, you're cursed by idiot politicians who are destroying this mighty economic engine.

None of this is rocket science. In Texas, we believe in freedom. We believe in low taxes and low regulations. To understand the state, Texas was basically founded by a bunch of wildcatters—guys with fourth-grade educations who began drilling holes in the ground and, one after the other, became the richest men on Earth.

The ethos of Texas is interesting. A number of years ago, I was visiting with a CEO and an executive team of a company that had moved from California to Texas. They didn't have any Texas ties; they were just fed up with California, so they moved to Texas. They'd only been in Texas for a couple of months, and I asked them, “All right, what's the biggest difference?” I thought maybe they'd say taxes, regulations, or lawsuits. Those were the 3 things I was going to guess.

Their answer blew me away. They said the biggest difference was the culture. What they said was, “In California, if you're in business, you're a pariah.” They said, “Look, there's an exception for tech and an exception for Hollywood.”

Well, that was their view. But they weren't in tech or Hollywood.

They were in sanitation, which was not a sexy business. The way they described it, they said, “If you're at a party and someone asks what you do, and you say, ‘I'm a businessman,’ people turn around and walk away.”

As a Texan, I’ve got to say that is weird. We lionize entrepreneurs.

California was a pioneering state. It had the Gold Rush. What happened? It's always easy to blame idiot politicians, but in a democracy, those politicians are elected by the voters. What happened to the voters that caused this change in California compared with where the voters went in Texas, when both came from a pioneering origin—as did all of America?

There is a cause and an effect. You go back to 1987. In 1987, Ronald Reagan signed amnesty into law. At the time, there were 3 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. Congress went to the American people and said, “We have a deal for you. We're going to secure the border and fix the problem of illegal immigration forever. In exchange, we're going to give amnesty to the 3 million people who are here illegally.”

In 1987, the American people said, “Okay, that sounds like a reasonable deal.” They took the deal. We now know what happened: The amnesty happened, but the border was never secured.

What did that mean for California? The highest concentration of illegal immigrants was in California. In 1988, California voted Republican in the presidential race, as it had for 6 consecutive election cycles previously. 1988 was the last year California ever went Republican in a presidential race.

I think the amnesty law played a significant part. The federal law changed the voting composition of the state. You also had public-employee unions in California that realized they could vote themselves more and more of the largesse of democracy.

Jason brought up a really important question to kick this off. There are so many examples—Texas is one, and abroad the UAE is another—where there's a high degree of quality infrastructure, civility, social services, education, and security, but you don't have the traditional taxation.

How is Texas able to keep the wheels on while a state like California, which has a $322 billion budget, is completely falling apart? You see everything at the federal level, but when you go back to your state, you see that you don't have the same level of taxation. Your real estate taxes aren't that much higher than California's, are they?

The real estate taxes are a little bit higher, but we have no income tax, so it more than makes up for it.

It's 2%—1.5% to 2%.

That's the principal avenue of taxation. You have real estate taxes and sales taxes, which is where the state and local governments get their taxes, but no income tax.

Some of it is that government does less. There's a philosophy that government doesn't have to spend and provide everything. Government provides police, firefighters, roads, and the basic responsibilities of government, but it isn't engaged in funding every pet project of every politician.

You look across the country, and it is not a complicated migration pattern. People are fleeing bright-blue states with high taxes and high regulations, and they are coming to red states with low taxes and low regulations.

It has now been more than a decade during which we've had over 1,000 people a day moving to Texas. When I was first elected 13 years ago, we had 26 million Texans. Today, we have over 31 million Texans. We've added 5 million Texans in 13 years.

The biggest state people come from is California. The migration pattern is interesting: You get a lot of California-to-Texas migration, while New Yorkers tend to go to Florida more. We get some New Yorkers, but for whatever reason, West Coast folks seem to prefer Texas and East Coast folks seem to prefer Florida.

I actually think the competition in terms of where we lose people is healthy. We lose people either to Florida or Tennessee. Those are about the only 2 places people are thinking of leaving for, and I love that competition. I want Florida and Tennessee to be out there fighting, saying, “We can create an even better environment for small businesses and jobs.”

The number-one reason people come to Texas is that Texas is where the jobs are. You want an environment where small businesses are doing great, but people also want to be safe. You look at things like defunding the police or Soros prosecutors who let murderers go, and that gives people a pretty acute incentive to get the heck out.

We were involved in the recall of Chesa Boudin on our podcast. David Sacks, our compatriot who couldn't make it, is busy working with you guys here.

This crime issue seems to have made people lose the script on who the state is working for: the taxpayers or the criminals. In Texas, it is extraordinary that you've figured out you can prioritize the people who aren't committing crimes and not cater to the people committing crimes. I'm saying this in the most facetious way possible, but it's just common sense.

It feels to me like Californians have had enough, and it's just going to take a decade or 2 to unwind it. Let's double-click on immigration, since the great state of Texas has to deal with this more than anybody.

This is a land of immigrants. We are all immigrants on this land; that's our tradition. You're sitting next to 2 extraordinary immigrants, my besties Chamath and Friedberg. Do you believe America is for the Americans who are here, or do you believe we should be getting the best and brightest to come to this country?

Look, absolutely both. I have for a long time described my immigration views in 4 words: legal good, illegal bad.

I think most Americans and most Texans agree with that, and most immigrants do as well. There's a right way to come to this country. There's the way you came to this country, and there's the way my dad came to this country.

My dad was born in Cuba. He grew up in Cuba and fought in the Cuban Revolution when he was a teenager. He was thrown in prison and tortured when he was 17 years old. He came to Texas in 1957. He was 18, couldn't speak English, had $100 in his underwear, and washed dishes making 50 cents an hour.

But he came legally. He had applied to the University of Texas, had gotten in, and came on a student visa. He was an 18-year-old freshman. He started going to school, came legally, worked, and in time started a small business.

Was he able to see your success? Is he still with us?

He is. My dad is 85.

What a dream for him.

He is my hero. He's incredible. When you have lost freedom, it's personal to you.

People sometimes ask, “Why do you do politics?” I grew up as a kid sitting on the floor with my cousin Bibi, my dad, and Bibi's mom, my aunt. She was also imprisoned and tortured in Cuba. We would sit and listen to them tell stories.

All I ever wanted to do, from when I was 3, 4, or 5 years old, was be a freedom fighter. It was inspiring, because what they said—and still say, and they're both still going strong—is, “If the only thing that prevents us from tyranny is having good people in office who will fight for our freedoms, then do that.”

I literally jump out of bed every day because I look at the U.S. Senate and think it is basically the Roman Colosseum. You strap on some armor, grab a battle-ax, and go fight the barbarians. That's an amazing opportunity. I feel blessed and fortunate every day.

You are in the arena. We were talking with Ro Khanna, a congressman from California, earlier today, and we talked about how there might be good policy put forward by one of the 2 parties. Do you think there's too much of that in Washington?, but the other party's intention is always to get more seats, more attention, and more votes, and hurt the other party?

We end up having conflict over policy. A lot of people talk about how everything has become too politicized, as opposed to having the great debate. I love The West Wing, and they always talk about the great debate. We don't have that anymore. We don't talk about the fundamental policy decisions; we talk about what the Republicans said and what the Democrats said.

It gets personal and political, as opposed to everyone taking their hats off and talking about what's right for the country. DOGE is a great example, in my opinion, but I'd love to hear your point of view on how things operate in Washington today.

I agree with your point at the outset, which is that we need to talk to each other. I worry that we are too polarized and tribalized. The left only listens to left-wing media, the right listens to right-wing media, and anyone who disagrees with you gets screamed at.

The sense of community we used to have has been badly unraveled. On social media, if someone agrees with you, you unfriend them, and we're all in these little echo chambers.

We're all patriots—all Americans—but we're living in alternate realities. What you're doing is really important. I'm grateful for this podcast because we have to talk to each other.

I do a podcast every week called Verdict with Ted Cruz. We have about 1 million unique listeners who listen to the Verdict podcast. We do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday every week. My podcast is beating CNN.

I think the reason is the same reason people listen to you guys: You're actually talking about issues, and you're not just screaming at each other. It's not Jerry Springer—go grab a chair and fling it at somebody. It's a real and substantive conversation.

One of the things I've done and enjoyed is taking the podcast on the road to college campuses.

What has that been like?

We did one at Yale a couple of years ago, and about 700 students came out. About a third of the students were left of center, and I knew that because it was right after Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed. I made a reference to that, and about a third of the room began cheering.

I stopped and said, “The fact that you're cheering at that shows that we're obviously coming from different places on the political spectrum. I want to thank you especially for coming here, because you may not agree with me on everything, or even most things, but thank you for coming and being part of a conversation.”

We did about 90 minutes of all Q&A. We had a rule: If you have a hostile or antagonistic question, come to the front of the line. We spent 90 minutes having a real conversation.

Afterward, I went out with an Orthodox rabbi on campus and we got a drink. He said, “Ted, I've been working on Yale's campus for decades. This is the biggest group of students I've seen have a positive, civil, constructive conversation about conservative ideas in 20 years.”

There's something about the podcast format. You're taking a little bit of time; you're not rushed in 6 or 7 minutes like you are on the weekly shows, where I see you all the time. That's sparring, and you're just trying to get a message out in 3 or 5 minutes.

Here, you can open it up, listen to each other, invite guests in with different opinions, and learn something.

Specifically on the immigration issue, which seems to be the one that's tearing us apart, there's so much consensus. We want the border closed, we want immigration to be legal, and we want to bring in a certain number of people through a system.

I did my research on this. Places with consensus, like Canada, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, seem to understand that you need to match immigration to the reality of unemployment and to the jobs you need.

The one criticism I have of politicians—which I think you're one of, sadly—is that you don't talk about it in numbers. We need this many nurses, this many doctors, and this many construction workers. We have 4% unemployment. Great job to our politicians for helping with that. We can bring in 2 million people this year. If unemployment goes up to 5%, we're going to bring in 1.5 million.

I wish the discussion could be more granular and use numbers. You could say, “It's not 500,000; it's 450,000.” If we were making a business decision together, we'd say, “We have to deploy these resources to get this outcome.” But the issue is so contentious and polarized, and not fact- and number-based. Why can't you guys put some numbers on paper?

There are a lot of numbers that matter intensely. Let's start with one point: When you talked about low unemployment, that number can be deceptive, because we also have one of the lowest labor-force participation rates we've ever had—62% right now.

There are millions of people who have just dropped out of the labor force altogether. They're not counted in the topline unemployment number, but it's still a real challenge. We have healthy young adults who should be working and are not working.

Why aren't they working, in your mind? Is it because they have the resources not to?

I think it varies state by state, but when you have a welfare state where you get paid for not working, that's a bad incentive. People end up not working.

The statistics are really crushing. If anyone doesn't work for a year, the odds of going back to the workforce drop precipitously. Once someone gets into the habit of dependency, it's very difficult to break.

I've said a bunch of times that I try to think of every policy from the perspective of easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder. I think about my dad when he was a teenage kid in Austin, washing dishes. Thank God some well-meaning liberal didn't come to him and say, “Rafael, let me take care of you. Stay home. Let me send you a government check. Don't work so hard.”

That's utterly destructive. It breaks your self-respect and your individual responsibility.

It comes from an empathetic place. You see people in need, you want to help them, and you use government as a tool to help people in need.

The fundamental issue is that, in many cases, that creates an incentive model that makes it very difficult for the situation to find a solution on its own—a market solution. Over time, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and you have cascading effects that I believe we're now realizing in this country.

I estimate that somewhere between 40% and 50% of the people employed in this country are employed by the government or by government service providers.

You're right that much of it is not from ill will. We do need to have a real conversation about what works to lift people into prosperity.

All of us know this in our own lives. If your kindergartener is struggling with math, there isn't one of us who would do our kid's math homework for them. We know that's not helping them. If your daughter doesn't learn arithmetic, it's going to hurt her for the rest of her life. You've got to work through that problem with her, even if it would be easier for you just to finish it for her.

We know that in our own lives. The old adage is, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” We know that with people we love, but when it comes to public policy, a lot of people don't think about it more broadly.

Back in 2017, I did 3 different CNN town-hall debates with Bernie Sanders. I like Bernie because he is an unapologetic socialist, and I'm an unapologetic capitalist. We had 90-minute town-hall debates about which system was better for maximizing human prosperity and abundance.

We didn't insult each other. Neither of us called the other a son of a bitch. We talked about the facts.

Let's take socialized medicine. When I pointed out all of the problems socialized medicine produces in every country where it has been implemented—the United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere—Bernie's answer was, “It wouldn't be that way here.”

The reality would not be the same here? Every year, about 50,000 Canadians come to America for what they call medical tourism because they can't get the medical care they need in Canada.

I will suggest a question, particularly for those of you who are Californians, that I love asking advocates of socialized medicine: Why didn't California adopt it? You've got a Democratic governor and a Democratic supermajority in the legislature. There's no constitutional impediment. California could adopt socialized medicine today.

It's not the mean old Republicans stopping them. The legislature looked at it and realized it would bankrupt them.

Vermont, Bernie's home state, could adopt it. The reason you don't see California, New York, Illinois, Vermont, or any blue state in America adopt socialized medicine is that it wouldn't work. People would flee their state.

Their answer is that they want to do it to everyone in the entire country, so you can't flee unless you're willing to leave America. You're stuck.

What's challenging, Senator, is that you then have compromises that get you to a point where the federal government has a big enough role in health care.

My opinion is that much of the inflation in health-care costs arises from the federal government's role, in the same way that the federal government has a role in student loans, which has driven up the cost of education. The federal government also has a role in providing loans for housing, which has driven up the cost of housing.

Education across the board distorts the free market, but the empathetic solution is that we need to provide access to those who can't get it. At the end of the day, it inflates the cost of all of those services and ultimately the quality of the services.

I'll give you the anecdote. My brother lives in England, and he and his partner just had a child. They went to the delivery room, but they couldn't get a bed. She was in labor, and they could not get a bed to have the baby.

I think it took them 36 to 72 hours to actually get into a bed while she was in labor. It was the most insane thing. He's calling me, saying he can't get a bed. I'm saying, “You're living in the freaking U.K. This is supposed to be one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.”

That's the outcome of socialized medicine. Along the way, you get the inflationary effects we're dealing with in the United States today.

I'm with you.

Let's move on. You're the quarterback for the next 2 weeks of the Trump administration.

On Monday, we're going to see a flurry of executive orders. I think it will be in the neighborhood of 100 executive orders.

Wow. That's shocking.

That's the number they're talking about. I’m actually pretty happy about it. Will I agree with all 100? I don't know. My guess is I'll agree with the vast majority of them, but I don't know everything that's in there, so we'll see.

In some ways, it will make it almost impossible for the Democrats to react, because where do you focus?

Chamath, that's actually a point. My wife Heidi and I met on the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, and we both served as young people in the Bush administration. I think back to the beginning of the George W. Bush administration. One of the first things he did was have the EPA revoke a rule on arsenic. For about 6 weeks, the media saturated the airwaves with, “The evil Republicans want to poison our children with arsenic.”

It dominated everything, and they beat the living daylights out of him over it. When you get 100 executive orders on Monday, I think that's how much outrage there is. That arsenic quantum of outrage will be directed at everything, which makes it very hard for Democrats to oppose anything coherently and directly.

It gives this administration an opportunity. What I'd like to see is the administration delivering on the mandate of this election.

What were the takeaways? If you had to distill them, what are the specific priorities?

Number 1: Secure the border. I believe that will start on January 20 by ending catch-and-release, so that when people are apprehended, they are detained and sent back to where they came from.

I think that will be followed up very quickly by arresting criminal illegal aliens—murderers, rapists, child molesters, gang bangers.

I also think there's a mandate to end the federal government's war on energy and on Texas oil and gas. That will lower prices at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and on every bill people are paying.

If you look at the top 2 issues in this election, they were illegal immigration and safety, and inflation and the economy. I think we will also see a lessening of the job-killing regulations on small businesses and a return to thriving, booming economic growth.

What regulations would those be?

There are a host of them. Energy is the easy example. The Biden administration put in over 90 different regulations and executive orders, all designed to drive up the cost of energy.

So the input gets higher and everybody suffers.

Exactly. I expect pretty much all of those to be reversed.

On energy, we ought to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy. Beyond that, I think there is also a mandate on the economic side. The 2017 Trump tax cuts are expiring this year, and we're going to extend them. My hope is that we make them bigger and bolder.

That will take some time. We'll do it through what's called the reconciliation process.

On foreign policy, under Biden we abandoned and alienated our friends, and showed weakness and appeasement toward our enemies. I think that will stop on Monday as well.

Senator, you just said 5 things, but you didn't say DOGE. There's an inflation problem. There's no way you're cutting taxes without cutting government spending and taming inflation. Don't we have to cut federal spending?

How important is DOGE? How real is it? Is it a marketing gimmick? How much can actually be done? Does this require legislative authority and a longer-form process, or is there going to be a lot of very quick action?

I'm happy to answer that directly, but let me first say that one thing you just said, with respect, is incorrect. You said there's no way we're cutting taxes without cutting spending and having inflation stay down. That's objectively false, because that's exactly what happened in the first Trump term.

The 2017 tax cuts led to CBO making apocalyptic projections. As the economy grew, tax revenue went up. Federal revenue went up every single year after we cut taxes.

So we cut taxes, and sadly, we did not cut spending. I tried mightily to cut spending, but we didn't have the votes to do it. Inflation still stayed down, and the economy was booming.

But is there a deficit mandate?

I am excited about DOGE. Elon is a good friend, I admire the hell out of him, and I'm thrilled that he's a Texan. I've joked with Elon that he doesn't just think outside the box—he doesn't know there is a damn box. That's a great thing.

Elon calls me periodically and asks, “What the hell is this government thing? How does this work?” I'm trying to give whatever guidance I can.

How you deal with a disruptor in government is going to be an interesting challenge. Elon is very smart and very creative. I want to see some big, bold, creative ideas.

I'll give you 2 warning signs. Number 1 is the phrase “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Anytime someone talks about waste, fraud, and abuse, they don't really want to cut government spending. Why? Because there is no waste, fraud, and abuse caucus. No one says, “I'm for the waste.”

It's the easy place to go: “We'll cut the waste.” If you actually cut real government spending, there is always, always, always a constituency that is pissed off because they like the thing they're getting.

Somebody will be mad.

That's right. That's a challenge.

Secondly, at least in the first term, Donald Trump did not campaign as a small-government conservative, and he did not govern as a small-government conservative.

At the end of the first term, we were in COVID, and the government was in the business of sending out checks, and more checks, and more checks to people all over the country. Trump wanted the checks to be even bigger.

A lot of people in the White House asked me, “Ted, can you go try to talk him down from this?”

That's a tough job.

I went on Air Force One and sat with the president. I was trying to make the case that we didn't need these gigantic stimulus checks. He gave me the back of the hand and said, “Ted, no one ever lost an election by spending too much money.”

I said, “Yeah, but they did bankrupt the country.” I did not succeed.

You should have asked him to keep the same number of checks, but make each check larger and make the signature bigger.

That's a good idea. I'll go with it.

He likes that.

Are you a small-government conservative? If no one were going to be able to run for reelection, what percentage of Congress do you think would support a massive reduction in government agencies? How much of this is driven by, “I have to get reelected”?

I'm very much a small-government conservative. I'm also a passionate advocate of term limits.

I have introduced, in every Congress, a constitutional amendment that would limit senators to 2 terms and House members to 3 terms. I think term limits would change that dynamic in a very significant way.

Career politicians in both parties oppose it. On any big spending bill, you unfortunately have a bipartisan coalition in favor of spending: essentially all of the Democrats and about half of the Republicans.

There are about 20 of us who will vote against a trillion-dollar spending bill. We are frequently begging our colleagues to do the same.

To be honest, I don't think we will ever see real spending restraint without strong presidential leadership. It will never come from a Joe Biden or a Kamala Harris.

If Elon and Scott Bessent convince President Trump to lean in aggressively on cutting spending, great. But that hasn't happened so far.

What would it take for voters to eventually get there? It would require voters to back a candidate with that message, but no one seems to see that. What everyone sees is, “I want to get X, and the only way I can get X is if I get the government to do X for me.”

It varies. It takes electing strong leaders. Elections matter.

I think I've probably campaigned for more candidates for the Senate, House, and governorships than any Republican in the country. I travel all over the country, endorse candidates, and follow the old Bill Buckley rule: I support the most conservative candidate who can win.

That varies. A candidate who can win in Texas is different from a candidate who can win in Maine.

I can tell you that in Texas, when I ran for the Senate in 2012, I'd never been elected before. I'd never been elected to anything. Literally, the last thing I was elected to was student council.

You may not remember this, but you actually wrote me a check for that race. We looked it up.

We were together in Utah. Peter Thiel had an event, and we had a breakfast. Ted was surrounded by a handful of us who were speaking to him, and what I would describe as every traditional Democrat from central casting. He went through the firing squad and came out the other side, and I thought, “Wow, this is really great.”

I was very happy to donate.

You were a Democratic donor back then.

I was a Democratic donor. But here's the thing: Ideology matters. When you make decisions about how you think the country should run, you should stay loyal to that.

What happens instead is that people stay loyal to a party. The minute you do that, the whole thing breaks. That's what's broken.

I think the great thing Donald Trump did was conduct a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.

Undoubtedly.

And then he committed to the reset. That's the most important thing that happened. You don't have to go and kick the tires. What will they say? What does Karl Rove say? All of that is done. The whole thing's flipped over.

Hey, Senator, you had an anecdote from me 2 nights ago about a conversation regarding Denmark and Greenland. Do you want to tell us what you think?

My view on Denmark and Greenland is that I did a podcast 2 weeks ago about Denmark, Greenland, and Canada. I put all 3 of them on my Verdict podcast and put them on a spectrum.

Let's start with Canada. I think the president's remarks about Canada were just trolling. I think he was screwing with Trudeau. He was sitting at the table and decided, “Why are you even a country? You ought to be a state. You should be a governor that I send.”

Jason, I send you texts like that all the time.

I would have paid to be sitting at that table to see Trudeau's face.

It was reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump turned to Rand Paul at the end of the debate stage and said, “Why are you even on this stage?” And then there was, “What is it with your hair?”

It was the same sort of comment—just messing with him.

That may be the most epic troll of all time, because I think it literally pushed Trudeau into resigning.

Crazy, huh? Why would he do that? He should have just said, “Yeah, you know, we're our own sovereign country.”

He was already, I think, going to go.

He likes to go with the trend.

That's what happens when you're a weather vane.

I couldn't resist tweeting, “Trudeau lasted really long for a son of Fidel Castro.”

No, no. Keep telling us about Canada.

Denmark and Greenland are different. Greenland, on the other hand, is a very serious policy proposal. I think there are enormous national-security and economic reasons why acquiring Greenland makes a ton of sense.

Look at Greenland's location in the Arctic. It has an incredibly prime location. From a national-security perspective, God forbid we ever get into a shooting war with China or Russia, ICBMs are coming right over the Arctic. Greenland is a prime location to deal with that.

We're also seeing more shipping lanes coming in and around the Arctic, and China and Russia are both competing for prized access there. Greenland makes enormous sense from that perspective.

It also makes enormous sense from the perspective of critical minerals and rare-earth minerals. Greenland has vast amounts of them.

What I said was that we should pursue this seriously. I had a conversation this week with the Danish ambassador to the United States. Denmark is a little freaked out by all of this conversation.

Here's what I told the ambassador: “Denmark is our friend and our ally. You will continue to be our friend and ally, but friends and allies can have conversations.”

The ambassador said, “Greenland's not for sale.”

I said, “That's fine. Everything's for sale. We're going to have a conversation.”

One of the things this has produced is a growing independence movement in Greenland. If Denmark does nothing, it may end up getting nothing for Greenland because Greenland could break off on its own.

Exactly.

For it to happen, I think you would probably have to have a referendum in Greenland. I find it quite plausible that Greenlanders—about 50,000 of them—would say, “Wait a second. I get to be an American?” They just showed positive results. He just did a survey there.

To become an American is, in many ways, the greatest gift we can give anyone on planet Earth. The billions of dollars of investment if Greenland became an American territory could make an enormous difference for Greenlanders.

We could pay $200 billion for the territory to Denmark. Their national debt is about $150 billion, so they'd have a $50 billion surplus they could build a pension plan around.

That's why we have you.

You could spend another $10 billion to put everyone in a great situation for the rest of their lives. Every resident of Greenland could become an American territory resident. It would be a whole new philosophy for us.

I think we should go straight to 60 states. Let's just make an open offer.

No, but it's an American territory, not a state.

Panama is next. If they want to come on board, why not?

Panama is in the middle of those 2. Panama is a little more complicated.

I think Jimmy Carter giving away the Panama Canal remains one of the most spectacularly stupid decisions a president has ever made in office. It was profoundly harmful to U.S. national-security and economic interests.

That being said, it's been long enough that unwinding it is really tough.

President Trump, if you listen to what he's saying about Panama, is making some very sophisticated legal arguments. Number 1, when we gave the Panama Canal to Panama—we technically sold it for $1—we had a binding agreement that laid out the terms of that transfer.

One argument President Trump has put forward is that Panama is in violation of that agreement because it has allowed China to effectively seize control of the canal.

How is that happening?

A Chinese state-owned enterprise owns a building on one end of the canal and another building on the other end of the canal. If we were ever at a point of military conflict with China, it's not hard to imagine those Chinese state-owned enterprises using those locations to try to shut down anyone traversing the canal.

It sounds like they violated the contract.

That's a pretty powerful argument.

The second argument is that I had breakfast this morning with President Trump and all of the Republican senators. We were there for 2.5 hours. He gets sworn in tomorrow, and he spent 2.5 hours in a stream of consciousness talking.

We talked about Panama. The president pointed out this morning that U.S. Navy ships pay double what any other country's Navy ships pay. He said American commercial ships pay 58% more than ships from other nations.

We need to drill down into those facts, but on the face of it, I think there's a powerful argument that this is inconsistent with the terms of the agreement.

Is the final outcome that we get total control of the Panama Canal back? Probably not. I think that's a high lift. But in many ways, I think Trump is negotiating on price.

I could easily see an outcome where both Navy ships and commercial ships that are American pay much lower rates, and, critically, that we get China the hell out of the canal. If we accomplish those 2 things, that would be a massive improvement for U.S. interests.

I'm sure you've been paying attention beyond the things you've been a part of, including the confirmation hearings. Can you give us the blow-by-blow of where you think things have gone well, where there was room for improvement, and whether there's going to be some spotty weather ahead?

I've been really happy so far. I think the array of cabinet nominees has been very strong.

Were there a couple where you thought, going in, “This one will be a little bit harder than the others”?

Clearly, the most bumpy was Matt Gaetz. They withdrew Matt Gaetz because he was not going to get confirmed. There were multiple Republican senators who were going to vote against him.

They withdrew that nomination pretty quickly. It was strategic: They sent him up to the Hill to take the first 2 hits, and Pam Bondi seems amazing.

Pam Bondi is going to be terrific, and she's going to get confirmed easily. Right now, every Trump cabinet nominee gets confirmed.

Pete Hegseth is clearly the nominee they're shooting at the most.

I don't think they've scored real blood. I did a whole podcast on the Hegseth confirmation hearing, and it spoke volumes that virtually all of the Democratic attacks were personal attacks based on anonymous charges, typically with no evidence and with no one coming forward and putting their name on them.

They had virtually nothing to say about the job to which he'd been nominated or what he intends to do as secretary of defense. I think that is fundamentally a flawed strategy.

I think everyone gets through.

Do you think you'll see any Democratic senators support any of the candidates?

Yes. Marco Rubio will get 90 votes. He could get north of 95 votes. It will be a huge bipartisan vote for Rubio.

John Ratcliffe, for the CIA, will get significant bipartisan votes. Sean Duffy at Transportation will get a bunch of bipartisan votes. Howard Lutnick at Commerce will probably get bipartisan votes, although he hasn't had his hearing yet, so we'll see.

There will certainly be some. Pam Bondi is terrific. Brooke Rollins will get bipartisan votes.

Part of it is that everyone wants a bridge or a road in their state. I chaired Sean Duffy's confirmation hearing for secretary of transportation, and it was a love fest. If you're a Democrat, you're thinking, “Wait, you're Santa Claus, and you're giving out hundreds of billions of dollars? I want some.”

Everyone wants it. Brooke Rollins at the Department of Agriculture is similar. Everyone wants things for the farmers in their state, so in those roles it's easy for it to be a love fest.

Even though Pam Bondi did very well, I'd be surprised if Democrats vote for her, given the nature of the attorney general's office in this politicized environment. My guess is that the Democrats on the committee will vote no, but Pam will hold every Republican, so she gets through easily.

Bobby Kennedy gets through. I spent an hour with him. It will be interesting. I was talking with him about whether any Democrats will vote for him. Obviously, he's been a Democrat his whole life until about 12 minutes ago. They hate him. They really do view him as a Judas for daring to change.

Look at Red Dye No. 3. Look at what Bobby is doing. I'm rooting for more change before he even becomes HHS secretary. The food system is so screwed. Let him cook. Let's see what he can do.

His willingness to take on corruption is important—corruption involving big pharmaceutical companies getting in bed with big government, perpetuating their monopolies through government power.

I talked to Bobby, for example, about a bill I've been fighting for a long time that I call the RESULTS Act. It says that if any pharmaceutical or medical device is approved in another major developed country—Canada, Japan, or the European Union—the FDA has 60 days to approve it here, or it is deemed automatically approved by operation of law.

I love it. Brilliant.

I'm going to fight for it. I have been fighting for it, but I think now I'll have an HHS secretary who agrees with it.

If you look at these cabinet nominees, the most striking characteristic of virtually all of them is that they're change agents. They're going to be fundamentally disruptive. That's exciting. We need that.

All right, listen. Your people have been trying to get you for 20 minutes, but you know what? Let the man cook.

I've got to tell the president that our bestie Phil Hellmuth, every time he sees you, comes back to our game and says, “What a great poker player. What a gentleman.” He drops your name.

I can get him on the phone right now.

I told him, “Call him right now.” He never does it.

He was 100% right. You are amazing.

Great to have you on the show. You are tempting me with poker chips. We're going to get you in a game. I know you don't make it to California much, but when you do, come play.

Just so you know, the boots play.

We need Scotch and a cigar.

I am perfectly happy. Maybe we'll go playing often. I can't stand all these gang balls where everyone's in tuxedos, but my happy place is sitting around the poker table.

Man, you're going to fit right in. Good Scotch.

Great to have you, and congratulations on the big win. Thank you for your service.

Thank you very much.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you. That was great.