Rahm, I was just in Israel for a long reporting trip,
and while I was there, you showed up,
and you delivered some pretty bitter medicine
to the Israelis.
You gave a speech at Tel Aviv University.
You basically said to Israelis,
You don’t have a problem with the Democratic Party.
You have a problem with America.
What was your message that you wanted to bring to Israelis,
and why did you bring it?
Why now?
You’re a small country and an important ally.
So let’s step back.
Somebody’s spent time as ambassador of Japan.
Japan’s quite popular.
It’s a long pole of America’s Indo-Pacific policy.
NATO enjoys not only bipartisan support
in the House and Senate,
but bipartisan support in the United States is above,
I think, the last time I saw 57%, 58% support.
You’re the one ally with unbelievable degradation.
Its numbers are 32% support, used to be 64%.
And among kids 30 or younger,
my own three children’s generation,
you’re in the low 20s, sometimes high teens.
In 22 years, the country that my father fought
for its existence and my uncle who the family’s named after,
will be 100.
We just celebrated 250 years.
It’s not sustainable politically.
You’ve decided that your military power isn’t a tool,
but is your national security toolbox.
And to you, every security challenge is a nail.
Israel has more Nobel science winners
than any other country on a per capita basis.
Yet those scientists can’t go to international conferences
and join on research papers.
And many of them may leave if Netanyahu wins
the election again. Yes.
But I met with the CEO
of a top, top, top cybersecurity firm.
He said if the government wins again,
people will already leave.
Many companies today that are Israeli-based,
Israeli-founded, are setting up their companies
outside the state of Israel.
Did you find that Israelis understand
that this is not an ideologically narrow feeling?
This ranges from J.D. Vance to Zohran Mamdani and now you,
who I think can be described as a centrist Democrat.
Yeah. Well, I am.
I laid out a 23-state solution that is actually…
It’s a variation of the Arab League’s proposal
that would give Israel 21 countries
with full diplomatic relations in the region
to an economic strategy
that also breaks out of its isolation
and dependence on Europe,
but makes both of them, heads and tails,
makes Israel a member of the Middle East,
a full participant in the Middle East,
rather than standing apart from the Middle East.
But part of your message, Rahm,
was that unconditional support from the U.S. has to stop.
It has to be conditional.
It has to change.
Now, this is not a recent problem or a recent idea.
You’ve worked for the Clinton administration
and then later for the Obama administration.
Was our support for Israel too unconditional in those days?
Yeah.
So short answer is yes,
but not just limited to those two presidents.
Well, I did work with President Clinton
on both the Oslo Accords, the Wye Plantation.
And while I wasn’t an employee,
I consulted with him often on Camp David
with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat.
When I worked for President Obama,
I was direct to the prime minister.
This is 18 years ago.
I didn’t need a war to realize there was a problem.
I said, What you’re doing on housing in the West Bank
not only undermines the possibility of a two-state solution
will lead to the isolation of Israel
and will lead to perpetual conflict.
And your reward for that
was that he called you a self-hating Jew?
Loathing.
Ah, well. Okay.
That’s better. Self-loathing.
Publicly.
I was also in the room…
And I think these two go together.
I was in the room when President Obama made a decision.
I encouraged him to make this decision
to fund the Iron Dome.
I happen to think being against
provocative housing on the West Bank
that undermines a two-state solution
and funding the Iron Dome
that saves thousands of Israeli civilians’ lives
are complementary, not contradictory.
I do get the politics in Israel today
doesn’t support a two-state.
So you have to make it more valuable.
A 23-state solution is a more valuable solution
both for the Israelis, Palestinians, and the Arabs.
The Arab League gets stability
so they can get the economic big bang
that they’re looking for.
Israel gets security, and they get a problem,
meaning the West Bank, removed.
And the Palestinians get sovereignty
and get the determination of their own.
So you make the politics actually work together
rather than against the policy.
The other thing is-
How did you feel about the way
the Israelis prosecuted the war in Gaza?
Somebody like David Grossman, who’s hardly,
you know, a self-loathing Israeli,
used the word genocide.
With great pain used the word genocide.
Other people like Ehud Olmert, former prime minister,
has talked about war crimes.
This is not just an opinion on the far, far left in Europe
or something like that.
How would you describe the prosecution of the war?
I think Israel was reckless.
You had no day-after plan.
Your own military begged for a day-after plan.
And now what you have is occupation and isolation.
And again, look, I say this out of care for a country
that’s not only our allies as an American.
This was a country my father fought for its existence.
My uncle lost his life trying to create.
You can’t have,
and this is the first kind of canary in the coal mine
by way of example: Israel’s 78 years old.
The last two years, something happened
that’s never happened in the first 76:
more people left than came.
You think you’re gonna occupy the West Bank and Gaza,
suppress the Palestinians’ rights to self-determination,
which I happen to think are legitimate.
Not more legitimate than Israel security.
One example that gets lost in this:
for 50 years, there’s been an Assad in Syria,
father and son.
You now have a Syrian president
who has said publicly to Israel,
We share a common enemy in Iran.
He has asked for and seeking a security agreement.
I will give you my AT&T calling card.
Call him.
Have the United States,
where he’s very desirous of United States for economic
and political and military relationship,
have them facilitate the conversation.
You could have peace on the east with Jordan,
which you have in 1994, peace in the south with Egypt 1979.
And the Northern Galilee, you can have peace.
Every piece of what was the threat for since 1967
would be either ally, diplomatic, or neutralized.
Call him.
You’re not exercising what is part of your security tools.
Rahm, when I got back just the other day,
I was on the phone doing a reporting call
with Naftali Bennett.
Former prime minister, minister of many other departments,
former ally of Netanyahu.
Chief of staff.
Exactly. [laughs] Think of that. [laughing]
Even that. Even that.
That degraded office.
He’s not a doctor, but he could be a spin doctor.
Think of that. Exactly.
And I said, So what did you think
of Rahm Emanuel’s speech?
He said, Well, yeah, I don’t like it when people come here
and angrily lecture us on our security.
Even somebody who’s now in the opposition was not pleased.
I don’t imagine you made that speech to please anyone.
How much of it was for domestic consumption
here in the United States?
It is very likely that you’re gonna run for president.
We’ll talk about that in a bit.
How much was this speech directed
toward particularly Democratic Party voters
for, I don’t know, a primary down the line?
Maybe possibly a primary.
David, since you wrote about
my upfrontness to the prime minister in 2009,
I wasn’t thinking about a Democratic primary
for president then.
I was thinking about what was in the interest of both peace
and Israel security.
The through line
from working with President Clinton on the Oslo Accords
and the peace with Egypt all the way through to this moment,
that speech at Tel Aviv University,
this is one man’s view of myself, I’ve been consistent.
Has he changed?
Has Netanyahu changed in your view?
Well, there’s no doubt.
I mean, Netanyahu once called for two-state solution.
Under pressure from the Obama administration
at the Bar-Ilan speech.
And then when he got off…
I should say, as soon as he made that speech,
he came off the stage, and he looked at Martin Indyk,
an American diplomat, and said, Okay, there, I’ve said it.
Now can we move on?
With respect, I have to tell you
that I feel sometimes the Americans are deluded by this.
There’s a famous clip of Netanyahu in an apartment.
And he says in the ear of one of the people,
loud enough for the cameras, of course, to pick it up,
Don’t worry about the Americans.
I know how to handle them.
In other words, he’s had full confidence
that he can manipulate American public opinion,
not least American Jewish public opinion,
by going over the heads of presidents.
You remember all too well he came to the United States-
2015.
And he managed to get an invitation to Congress
from the Republicans
and got standing ovation after standing ovation,
after standing ovation. But David, even then,
and I was mayor, but I said it publicly as others did,
you have now made Israel a partisan political issue.
And he has mismanaged U.S.-Israel relationships.
I’m not gonna live with myself being biting my tongue.
Now, I have told the prime minister 18 years ago the truth.
When I’ve been here,
I have been honest about to the Democratic Party
how the cultural cul-de-sac has led us into a dead end.
I took on interest groups from the health insurance industry
to give 10 million kids their healthcare,
or whether it was on the banking financial.
And I took on the educational bureaucracy
and infrastructure of Chicago.
How does your view differ on Israel
from the critique from the left of the Democratic Party?
How do you differ on your view of Israel
from Zohran Mamdani?
Yeah.
Well, this actually is a classic thing.
So the mayor wins his first election, but not the final.
His team knew that I was coming
and asked if he would like to have a meeting.
So we met.
And the bulk…
And I want to be clear, the bulk of the conversation was
Tell me about when you were mayor of Chicago,
things like that.
It was mayor to mayor,
you know, What’s the combination to the lock? kind of.
It’s a big job.
So when he walks in, I said to him, I said,
So who’s gonna hate this more, AOC or my rabbi?
And he started laughing,
and I said, And I’ve listened to my rabbi’s sermon.
I listen to Israel.
I prefer my rabbi’s sermons, okay?
Last 20 minutes of an hour and a half breakfast,
I said to him, I said, Look, we got to the Middle East,
and I said, Because being mayor of New York, like Chicago,
you do do foreign policy. [laughs]
Whether you like it or not.
I said to him, I said, Look, I’m gonna be clear to you.
The river to the sea will never happen
because you’re calling for the elimination
of a Jewish democratic state and the Jewish people.
Now I don’t believe-
How did he react?
Hold on one second.
I don’t believe, and I said that.
I don’t believe in a greater Israel
because it means there will be never ever
the self-determination of Palestinian people.
And the difference between-
Greater Israel meaning the annexation
of the West Bank and Gaza?
Yes.
And I said, The difference between you and I
is want to acknowledge Palestinian people’s right
to self-determination.
You don’t want to acknowledge the state of Israel
or the Jewish people.
But how did he reply to you?
I haven’t really thought about it in about a year.
I think he was in the receptive mode.
We didn’t get into an argument because I don’t think he…
I think he probably made a decision.
I asked because I want to be fair to him
that he’s not taking…
Yeah, that he didn’t just take
your description of his views.
No.
I mean, he didn’t do that, but we didn’t…
Listen, this was…
I don’t know if I was just getting something off my chest,
but I told him, I said, You have to understand…
And one part of the conversation, I said,
You are your father’s son.
I’m my father’s son.
When I hear what you say,
I hear the elimination of the state of Israel
and the home of the Jewish people,
God forbid the world comes to an end.
And I said, That will never happen.
And so when you ask me, how do I differentiate?
There are elements in the Democratic socialists
and maybe even activists in the Democratic Party
that do not believe in the state of Israel.
I at least, in my own view,
support something you’re advocating,
which I happen to think is in Israel’s interest,
which is the Palestinian people
will finally have a homeland.
They have to spend money.
And part of my visit was what I call healthcare diplomacy.
We’ll get to that maybe in this conversation,
of how to build that up.
I said, You have to understand when you say what you say,
don’t give me your crap about one nation.
Well, everybody will live together.
There’s no kumbaya.
I said, I hear what you say.
There’s no binational state.
No.
And I said, I at least understand
the legitimacy of the Palestinian sovereignty
and self-determination.
You do not understand the Jewish people
and what Israel means to them.
Now, we didn’t get into a big discussion
because we weren’t gonna persuade each other.
I made my point.
He heard it.
It wasn’t something you wanted to argue about.
Let me ask you this.
There is an election going on.
Gadi Eisenkot, who is a 40-year army veteran, a general,
maybe you know him, is suddenly leading the polls,
and he has the possibility,
when there’s an election in October,
that he may form a government.
What difference would Gadi Eisenkot-led Israel mean,
and one in which Netanyahu, after 19 years in office,
is eclipsed?
Do I think a new government would exercise the muscle
of the political diplomatic front of Israel
that’s been atrophying?
I do.
Do I think they’ll do it on day one?
No.
But I think there’s opportunities
besides just Palestinian front.
There’s an opportunity on the Syrian front,
and there’s opportunities beyond
occupation isolation in Gaza.
That’s why the 23-state, when you’re a pariah,
is a valuable political…
You get 21 countries that will have
full diplomatic relationship with Israel.
All members of the Arab League sign on to this proposal.
So my attitude is, game on, it’s your proposal.
The difference between 1990s and now,
you actually have to stand up a Palestinian Authority
that doesn’t exist.
The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have a right
to reject something that you get 98%.
The other piece of this today,
while you and I are talking, David,
there’s a story about how the UAE is building new ports
around the Strait of Hormuz.
The India, Mid-East, European trade corridor
that I outlined as the IMEC,
that is the economic lifeline
for the most technologically sophisticated country
of that corridor.
And it will bypass the Strait of Hormuz,
which is what Iran is trying to hold
the world economy hostage.
That too offers a complement.
You can’t beat something with nothing.
You don’t like my ideas?
Fine.
I can find fault with my ideas.
I can tell you what the weakest are.
Tell me what yours are, besides more occupation.
I have to tell you, as you indicated,
in all the debate I’ve been hearing
in the run for prime minister and for Knesset,
it’s obviously a parliamentary system,
the impermissible thing is to mention
the Palestinian question.
Correct. The Arab-Israeli.
It is not to be discussed.
Even Yair Golan on the left
barely does, except to say
there needs to be some resolution.
And you’re not even allowed to say that
we’ll make an alliance with the Arab parties
when Palestinian citizens of Israel
are 20% of the population.
22. Yeah.
And they’re 10% of your Knesset.
They are 1/3 of the entire medical staff.
Exactly. And hopefully
we can talk about that, of all of Israel.
The reason we have also an interest in changing this,
the United States, as you and I are talking today,
is involved in one war right now with Iran.
I don’t want to be led into not only
led or engage or make a decision to go to war.
I want a different type of Middle East.
And that means changing up the dynamics.
I spoke the other day with Danny Citrinowicz,
who was years and years in Israeli military intelligence.
And he said this war has been a strategic disaster-
Yes. For Israel,
for the United States, and for the entire Middle East.
Who do you blame for it?
Well, I blame the president.
President Trump?
Yes.
The prime minister has shopped this idea of military action
to George Bush, turned it down, and did the Olympic Games.
To Barack Obama, turned it down
and did more than the Olympic Games.
To Donald Trump 1.0, he turned it down.
To Joe Biden, turned it down.
So I blame the president for saying yes to something
because you have agency and you are responsible
for the men and women of this country.
The JCPOA by President Obama.
You had Russia and China on the side of enforcement.
Today, they’re backing Iran
and funding them to kill allies and American soldiers.
Two, you had all the uranium moved out.
Today, the uranium is in the country.
Three, the uranium was at 3%.
Today it’s at 90% and in the country.
Four, Europe and the rest of the world
was part of this agreement.
Now the world is split on not only that agreement,
but how to approach Iran.
Five, you had international eyes and ears on the ground
inspecting the nuclear facilities.
They have been kicked out and haven’t been in the region.
Six, the Strait of Hormuz was open.
Today you fought a war,
and all your negotiating is the Strait of Hormuz
getting open. That’s a great triumph
all around. Okay. [laughs]
So when I looked down this list, and again, I was for JCPOA,
but I wasn’t like, This is Nirvana.
It was a 51/49, a 52/48,
and I thought it was worth the equity.
Now you’ve taken the military action,
and these are the consequences.
They now not only have built,
trying to build a nuclear weapon,
they have a nuclear option,
and it’s called the Strait of Hormuz.
That is a disaster.
And others in Israel’s security know that this war
was a total debacle,
and the prime minister has been shopping this
for 19 of his 20 years.
Rahm, I don’t think you’re gonna
announce one way or another on this program-
I am not.
Whether you’re gonna run for president.
But you haven’t been shy
about critiquing the Democratic Party.
[laughs] Your ability to spot the obvious is a gift.
It’s amazing.
It’s taken years.
You say you’re, quote, Done with the discussion
of locker rooms.
I’m done with the discussion of bathrooms,
and we better start having a conversation
about the classroom.
Now, bathrooms in this context,
this means transgender rights in general.
You’d like Democrats to be done with that,
but Republicans clearly aren’t.
Should Democrats really be silent
in response to attacks on trans people?
It just seems that this line is clever,
but it doesn’t do service to some human beings
who want their rights.
Well, two things.
Since it’s about education,
and I spent a good part of my tenure,
the entire tenure as mayor,
taking the worst public school system
to what Sean Reardon and Stanford called the single best.
In 2016, I passed a law, a decade ago, on bathroom access.
Did I take my eye off in the graduation rates
that we took from 56% to 84%?
Not a chance.
That’s why parents send kids to school.
Did I take my eye off- Why can’t you do both?
Why can’t you do both?
Because you have an issue, in which coming out of COVID also
is a lightning rod that distracted.
I didn’t take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of school
in San Francisco.
I didn’t ask for defunding the police.
I didn’t get yourselves wrapped around the axle
on the term Latinx, which nobody identifies with.
It was an example, David, not just of this particular issue,
of a party when people’s backs are against the wall.
They’re holding on to that windowsill,
and they can’t make a college payment.
They can’t make a home mortgage payment.
Their healthcare is now being denied to them.
They expect us Democrats to show up.
And we’re showing up talking about bathroom access,
sporting events, who gets to participate?
We just come out of COVID.
Our reading scores and math scores are in the tank.
50% of our kids cannot read or do math at grade level.
And we’re gonna talk about bathroom access.
So my view is if you want to win elections
and you also want to help kids get prepared for the future,
focus on the bottom line of what schools, I did do-
I understand that, Rahm,
but all I would say that there were times and earlier times
with other groups that didn’t have their rights,
and they were told to be patient too,
and focus on their rights was distracting.
That’s what Letter from Birmingham Jail
is all about: patience.
Okay.
Versus urgency.
Well, as a country, we proved we couldn’t do it
because you haven’t told me and asked me a single question
how to get 50% of our kids-
We’ll get there.
We will get there. No, no, wait a second.
Wait a second.
You started where you thought was a priority.
I’m gonna tell you, you may not get-
No, but I’m asking you, Rahm, about what’s become,
in a lot of your speeches and interviews,
a kind of a tagline to differentiate yourself.
I think that’s the motivation.
It’s not just a tagline.
I passed a bill in 2016, 10 years beforehand.
I made sure the kids had access to a bathroom.
I just didn’t let it distract
from reading, math, or graduation rates.
This is why I went down to Mississippi
before anybody knew about the reading scores,
because I pay attention to this.
Not that others don’t, but they went from 49 to ninth.
You have a president of the United States
who’s never mentioned it.
No governor has called for an emergency meeting
like you had other governors of both parties.
Mayors aren’t doing anything.
You don’t have a Department of Education,
and people have accepted failure.
And 50% of our kids can’t read in third-grade level,
which doesn’t make fourth and fifth
and sixth grade in high school any easier.
You have to prioritize what’s an A and a B.
I’m gonna make sure children feel accepted.
And the best way to make sure they feel accepted
is they know reading, math, and high school graduation.
One of the things we did in Chicago, only city to do it,
only education system, nobody gets a high school degree
without showing us a letter of acceptance from a college,
a community college, a branch of the armed forces,
or a vocational school.
I want to ask you about the- That makes every child ready
for tomorrow.
I want to ask you a little bit about the political moment.
How much will Trumpism trail after him in 2028?
How much of it is a cleanup operation
if a Democrat wins of any kind?
A centrist like yourself, somebody more to the left,
whatever it might be.
How much does the hangover of Trumpism persist?
Last week we had on Atul Gawande,
and Atul Gawande estimates that the destruction of USAID
has led already to 700,000 deaths
and demonstrably will run into the seven figures.
That’s one little part of Trumpism.
What is the damage report
that a new president is gonna have to deal with?
The presidency, whoever wins it,
will be known as Hurt Locker.
You’re gonna be cutting the wires everywhere,
making sure that the bomb doesn’t blow.
There’s gonna be one on the fiscal side.
You’re gonna have the level of corruption
that has been normalized
and that degrades people’s conscious support
for a government that can meet their needs,
not just serve those in office.
You’re gonna have an economy…
And I don’t think, and I want to say this,
you can’t have a free market system with corruption.
They’re inconsistent.
And for all these corporate leaders
that have bitten their tongue
in the destruction of the rule of law and replacing kinda
how much you can buy access and influence
and making it the norm,
it is undermining the most important thing,
which is a system based on law and free of corruption
and doesn’t accept the degradation corruption brings
to the free market.
I think across the board, the failure in education,
the failure I think in enforcing good environmental laws
that bring advance our public health.
Every year he has proposed and actually driven cuts
in our major research at the National Institutes of Health,
National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Defense Department.
At very time that China’s advancing on research
and increasing their funding,
the genius, with the Republican Congress support,
is cutting funding.
I don’t see how you win the future
by cutting your way there.
And so across the board, there will be not really cleanup,
but I think there will be crises that have been delayed
that are gonna be accelerated.
Rahm, we have midterm elections
coming in a very few months.
And the presidential race-
I noticed that too.
The presidential race is already taking
at least some form.
How do you see that race shaping up?
Here’s what I think is exciting.
We’ve had two presidents, both President Biden and Trump,
when you really step back, are trying to restore a past
that’s not coming back, David.
Build Back Better, MAGA, while different in values,
it’s retrospective.
2028, both for the Democratic Party
and, more importantly for the country,
will be the first election
since, I think, Obama ’08 versus McCain
that will be about the future.
The reason I’ve been going to Mississippi
or laying out ideas on research, education, high school,
affordability of college education,
political reform, 75 years you’re up and out.
You can’t be involved in the prediction markets
because I think we not only need fundamental change,
but it’s most importantly is how to make sure…
To your core question a minute ago,
how do you make sure the next 75 years of the 21st century
are not China’s, but America’s?
To the second point, a little more granular.
2024 Democrats didn’t have a choice.
We were told who our nominee was.
Truth is 2020, we didn’t have a choice.
Biden versus Bernie, Biden.
It was over like that [clicks fingers]
even though Biden lost Iowa and New Hampshire, bad.
2016, not really also.
You’re gonna have 31 flavors.
It’s gonna be Baskin-Robbins.
As I said, if I decide to do this,
I’m gonna be Rocky Road.
That’s the flavor I’m gonna go with, brother.
Okay?
And I think that’s-
No, but you remember very well that one of the advantages
that Barack Obama had in 2008
was he was all potential.
There was not much of a record there, right?
He was a senator for 25 minutes.
24.
Ah.
[laughs] And a state senator.
And so there was nothing to really hold onto.
You have a record as long as your arm,
as they say in the criminal justice system.
Did you have to use that metaphor?
[laughs] You’ve had ups, and you’ve had some things
that people are gonna bang away at.
They’re gonna bang away at, was NAFTA the right thing to do
in the Clinton administration. Sure.
Whereas, as mayor of Chicago,
the Laquan McDonald case will trail you.
The crime bill in 1994 will trail you.
Do you see the fact that you have such long experience
and arguably mistakes as well
as triumphs to your record
as something that can drag you down
in a race that’s all about the future?
The only thing I can offer you
is I’ve learned from my mistakes.
And hopefully, like John F. Kennedy
learned from the Bay of Pigs
and he applied it to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I’ve learned from my mistakes.
I’ve made them.
Give me an example of that.
A serious one.
Not that you love too well,
but give me a serious mistake that you’ve learned from.
Look, I’m very proud of the record
I’ve built on education.
Very proud of what we did in Chicago.
I made a mistake cornering the teachers’ union early
when I pulled the last year of Rich Daley’s
contract with the teachers, 4%.
And I made Karen Lewis,
who was then the president of the teachers’ union,
put her back against the wall.
We would have our disagreements,
but I made it existential for her,
and it made everything we were trying to do
much more difficult.
I own that.
When we had the second contract,
they worked a year without a contract, which is unusual
because Karen and I were trying to solve the pension,
and we did.
Second is on all the other contracts
I did with the other labor unions
across the city on everything,
about four weeks before you would commence,
I would ask the president to come in
and say, Give me your five priorities for this contract.
Know when you come in, I’m gonna give you five from me.
I want you to take those five.
I want you to tell me what you can live with,
what you can’t live with, or what you would like to change,
or maybe meet me on the 50-yard line.
And I’m gonna do the same to yours.
So that before the contract started,
we had a meeting of the minds and understanding
what was an A, what was a B, and where was the compromise.
That’s before everybody got into their
other side of the table.
And so did I make mistakes?
Damn right, I made a mistake.
Did I learn from it? Yes.
Did I apply it forward?
The biggest supporters I had when I ran for mayor
and ran for reelection, rather, the building trades.
Rahm, I think you’ve made clear
that you have no truck with socialism as an economic system.
But I think you’d also agree
that the level of income inequality in this country
has gotten so radical.
Yes. And the flagrant behavior
of the ultra, ultra rich has gotten so distant that-
Yeah, they’ve walled themselves off
from the rest of the country at every level.
But you know that world too.
Your brother, one could arguably say,
is a big Hollywood mogul, knows Trump well;
he’s done business in his area.
Yeah.
Is he wrong to live like that?
Is there something systemically wrong with the country
that you can live like that?
I know that world, which is why I can upend it.
So how would you upend it?
Look, I don’t accept redistribution,
and I don’t accept crony capitalism in the corruption.
I believe in growth.
I think there are five pillars to it.
One is turning a tax code away
from preservation of wealth to creation.
Two, which is true about American history.
We live in an age where you earn what you learn,
making sure everybody has something post-high school.
Everybody, 100%, set it as a goal,
and I’ve laid out a plan from pre-K to BA
and everything between.
Three, double our research.
I’m gonna tax the prediction markets,
and I’m gonna attack online sport gaming.
And it goes into an innovation fund for R&D.
NIH, National Science Foundation, DARPA,
not replacing money, doubling it.
Four, modernize our energy and digital infrastructure.
And then fifth, as I proposed in the Dignity Act,
where you have 23 Republicans and 23 Democrats,
an immigration bill
that’s true to being a nation of immigrants
and a nation of laws.
And I tell you this one example from a bike trip
I just had in New Hampshire.
Met a couple not far from Hanover.
He’s a plumber.
She sells real estate.
They both are on the ACA for Obama, separate
Their premiums just went up 150 bucks a month.
And he wants to move into a home,
they’re not sure they can afford their healthcare.
The whole system of the middle-class dream
that I not took for granted, but I know I could achieve
and I know my kids can, it’s broken for everybody else.
I think being an American
is winning the lottery ticket of life.
And if I decide to do it, it is to restore confidence
that that possibility still is open,
doesn’t mean you’re gonna walk through that door,
but the door’s open to you.
And for a lot of people, they feel it’s shut.
Rahm Emanuel, thanks so much.
Thanks, David.
[bright upbeat music]