Transcription
. It was a wide-ranging conversation. Part 1 of my exclusive interview.
"Glad to have you in Middle America. You bring up Middletown, Ohio. It's a lot like La Crosse, Wisconsin."
"Very similar."
"Not unlike my hometown of Sherman, Texas, about 40-50,000 people, manufacturing towns. And there's a lot of excitement today, but it hasn't always been that way. To your point, whether it has been job loss, no crisis, a cultural malaise and a sense of loss of purpose, I believe is deeply rooted in what has happened in Middle America. What do you think that has done to America?"
"Well, I think it was very bad for our country, and all of these problems are very connected, right? You take a dad who has a good middle-class manufacturing job, is able to support his family, a couple of kids, and that job disappears. Well, now the family is feeling financial stress that it wasn't ten years ago, it wasn't 20 years ago. So sometimes families dissolve in the wake of that. That stress affects the kids. Some of those people turn to drugs. And all of that stuff is very connected. If you look at what the President is trying to do, it is also all connected, and I think that is why it is leading to this very early days of an American Renaissance because you bring jobs back, you give people hope, optimism, you give them a little extra money to spend in their pockets. Maybe some of those people go and start a business. But then simultaneously, we are focused on the Southern Border because we don't want this poison to come into these communities and destroy people from fentanyl and other related problems. I kind of think the same way that America's decline was a problem of interconnected issues, I think this American Renaissance, led by the President, is also interconnected, and we are trying to work on all of these different problems because if we solve all these problems, it leads to a virtuous cycle."
"Well, the Big, Beautiful Bill is big and interconnected, as well."
"It is."
"What would you say to the people sitting right on the other side of this curtain? By the way, there is a beautiful bridge being built right on the other side."
"Yep."
"The Big, Beautiful Bill and how it begins to address the depth of what you laid out with those problems."
"It is all connected. We're going to talk, obviously, in a little bit to the crowd that has assembled and say a few things. Number one is you have the biggest amount of money from border enforcement that we have seen in our country's history. Those criminal cartels that are bringing the fentanyl into places like Wisconsin, that are killing people by the bushel, we are now going to war against those cartels in a way we have never done before because of that Big, Beautiful Bill. We have also got incredible working families tax cuts to reinvigorate the economy here in Wisconsin. So you've got the Child Tax Credit going up, you've got no tax on overtime, no tax on tips. 27% of Wisconsin workers work an overtime shift in the last year. 5% of Wisconsin workers rely on tips either in part or entirely. So this is going to mean a lot more money in people's pockets. And of course, if they have more money in their pockets, they can spend it on American-made products. That's the final point. The President of the United States, this is not the main part of the working families tax cuts. We are going to make it easier to save and invest in the United States of America. The tariffs, of course, are separate, but it's all connected because if we make it easier to build things in the United States of America, we are also making it harder to build things overseas. This generation of failed American economic policy where we rewarded companies for putting factories in Mexico or in China or somewhere else. No, we've got to reward people for putting factories right here in Middle America, right here in Wisconsin, and paying good American workers to make great American products. That's the whole purpose of President Trump's economic agenda, and again, it's already bearing real fruit, but it's going to, I think, lead to a great American Renaissance over the next three years."
"I saw this this morning, that in 74 out of 100 metro areas in the United States, half of all starter homes are unaffordable to the average American worker. You are the first Millennial Vice President. You have personal experience with people of this generation not being able to make that leap, that first economic leap into adulthood, homeownership. Is the system rigged?"
"The system is absolutely rigged. I mean, look, you go back to the four years of the Biden administration, from 2021 until 2025, when we took over, the average price of a new home doubled. That's a 100% increase in four years. That price, millions upon millions of young Americans out of the housing market. Good news is, even though we have only been in power for seven months, you've already seen home prices flatten off a little bit. They have gone, depending on what metric you believe, about 1%, maybe less than 1%. That's a big, big improvement, but there's so much more that we've got to do. And this is why the President of the United States, because after Jerome Powell for being too late, because of course the housing crisis in this country is really two things. Number one, that the prices are too high. We have made some progress on that. In some ways, more importantly, the interest rates are too high. So even if you can afford the topline dollar value of a home, if the interest rates are way too high because the Federal Reserve isn't doing its job, that also makes the American dream of homeownership un-affordable. So we are working on both of those things, with lower interest rates and housing prices. We have made, again, progress, but it is early and we realize there's a lot more work to do."
"Absolutely, the system is rigged. You have been a longtime critic of the system, but I've got the Vice President of the United States, and one could argue you are the system. So how do you fix a rigged system?"
"Well, we inherited a rigged system, but I think in seven months, we have already made a lot of progress to fix this. If you go back to 100% housing price increase in four years under Joe Biden, we've already seen that level off under Donald Trump. To fix the rigged system, you ask that question, you've got to understand the root causes here. Why did housing get so unaffordable for American citizens? Two big problems. Number one, talked about interest rates are too high. Number two, you have way too many people in this country who are competing against American citizens for scarce homes, and that is the illegal immigration problem. Why has housing leveled off over the past six months? I really believe the main driver is you have had negative net migration into the United States for the first time in 60 years in this country. You cannot flood the United States of America with 20, 30, 40 million people who have no legal right to be here, have them compete against young American families for homes, and not expect the price to skyrocket. It's a simple supply and demand. You increase the demand, you are going to increase the price. And the final thing I want to say here is we are working on issues right now in the White House every single day because we want to make it easier to build homes, too. Because in the same way that getting illegal aliens out of this country means fewer people competing against young American families, we also want to increase the housing stock in this country by making it easier to build. We are working on all of this stuff, but man, we've got to be honest. The system was rigged against Americans."