“F#%k YOU, TED” - Trump Exploded at Cruz 12 Hours Before Pausing His Tariffs

0:00You were about to talk about the Republican Party. And maybe, and then we, I asked you a question about Massie and Tucker, we got a little bit of sidetrack. Maybe break down what the Republican Party to you is. And what's going to happen with Maga post Trump? And even what role Trump's going to play. Because, you know, Bush, after he was done, don't even talk to me. I'll go to jail and I won't say I'm doing Obama. It's still kind of trying to show how important he is. And my God, hey, we missed you, Obama. What do you think's going to happen post Trump? And who is the Republican Party? If you can break that down. Oh, look, Trump is not going to write off into the sunset. Trump is always going to be engaged and say exactly what the hell he thinks. And it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. But he's going to get in the way. I mean, you have to, he's going to get in the way because he's not going to give up that power. He's not going to do it. That's not his personality. It's, you know, I will say I work with Trump every day, every week. Look, right now, second week of September,

1:01we're going to come back and the Senate's going to take up and pass my legislation to save college sports, which has taken me three years to do it. College sports is in chaos. I'm working hand in hand with the president on him. He desperately wants this to pass. He is enthusiastic. I'm talking to him constantly. He's been very helpful, corralling the votes. We got to get it through the Senate. I think we're going to. That is massively important in terms of battles in the Senate. President Trump has, I have been his number one ally for 10 years. And I will say, look, he and I have a different relationship than most politicians in Washington have with him because he, he views a lot of politicians in Washington as beta males. He doesn't view them as very strong. I'm the only person who's ever stood in the arena. And he's punched me in the face as hard as he could. And I punched him in the face as hard as he could.

2:01And I ended up winning 12 states, winning over and over and over again. Now, he ultimately won. He beat me. And I made the decision to be at peace with that and became his strongest ally and a good friend of it. But having been through, look, you'll sit down with Trump and he'll go on and on with, you know, tons of people in his administration, but like, you know, they back to Ted. They back to Ted instead of me. They shouldn't have back to him, but they did. I mean, I've had a thousand conversations with senior Trump appointees where he just gives them grief on that. And look, that's, that's his progodid. I deeply respect the strength he has had. Now, what is Trump going to do in 28? Who knows? Nobody knows. I could easily see him essentially letting something like the apprentice play out of, you know, you guys fight it out. Let's see what happens. He might not, but at the end of the day, I don't lose a lot of sleep speculating on things

3:04that neither I nor anyone else on planet Earth knows the answer to. Has he ever asked if you plan on running? Has he asked you? Because I'm sure he has. We have had multiple conversations. Okay. So he's, so the reason why that's probably a, if he's asked you to question, if I can speculate, he's either asking you for his own reasons to see who the playing field's going to be. Maybe he's just doing a selfishly because he's a competitor he wants to know who's at and the marketplace. He's asking you because he's wondering if, you know, that could be a person for him to endorse because you were a formidable opponent. Again, people have assured, people forget what happened. 10 years ago, people forget you couldn't turn on the TV or look at anything without seeing Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz, you were everywhere. So if he's asked you, you obviously can't answer the question what your responses, but you also can't say no

4:10because saying no is also strategically a mistake because he needs to know that you're somewhat open to it, right? So I'm going to keep my conversations with Trump. Confident. Of course. But I will say part of the reasons why we work so closely together is is that I tell him the truth. And I tell him the truth sometimes where very few other people do. One of the challenges sometime in the admin is that people surround him who just tell him, yes, yes, yes. I don't think you're actually being a good friend. Look, I look at the team I've hired. I don't want yes man around me. And in fact, I tell my team, if I'm right, you're valuable, but you're not that valuable. When you're really valuable is when I'm wrong. When I'm about to step on a land mine, that's when I want you to step in and say, Ted stop. And so my approach to President Trump, I've spent a decade encouraging him to do good things and discouraging him from doing bad things.

5:11Now, on the discouraging side, I mostly do that in private because it's not helpful. It's not my job to go on CNN and attack Donald Trump. That is not helpful. And it's actually not productive. If you go do it, it pisses him off and it does the opposite thing. Yeah, it's privately. Privately, I call them I publicly always support. But, all right, look, I'll give an example. Let's take trade and tariffs. This is the story I've told before. So let's go back to April 2nd of last year. That's when the president announced massive new tariffs. And you'll remember the market collapsed. The next Tuesday, there were a group of, I think, seven senators we called the president, about 11, 11, 30 at night, called the president. And we were saying, Mr. President, we've got to change the path we're on. This current path is not working well.

6:12And my view on the question of trade and tariffs is that there are two camps in the Trump administration. Camp number one, views tariffs or the threats of tariffs as leverage to get our trading partners to open up their markets, to reduce their tariffs, to repeal non-tariff barriers. I think Scott Besent is in that camp. I am very much in that camp. There's a second camp that views tariffs not as leverage to open up foreign markets, but as the end in and of itself, that they just want high tariffs forever. And it's pretty closely linked to an isolationist foreign policy. The idea is we don't want to deal with the world at all. We want high tariffs and just stay at home and say to hell with everyone. Who's there? Who's in that camp? JD would be in that camp. I think that's where his instincts fall. What I told the president on this call is I said, Mr. President, my advice,

7:14pick a country, pick any damn country. And tomorrow morning, announce that we are slashing the tariffs to that country and announce simultaneously that they are slashing tariffs on American goods. And I said, if you do that, two things will happen. Number one, it will calm the markets, because the markets weren't freefall at the time. And I said, number two, it will give people some confidence that we're on path number one and not path number two. People are not sure which direction we're going to go. And if you do that, people say, okay, these tariffs are meant to open up markets and expand trade. Trump did not like this conversation. He was in a bad mood. I've had conversations when he's in a great mood. He was really in a surly mood. He did not like what we were saying to him. And I went on to say, Mr. President, look, if we get to November of next year and people's 401Ks are down 30%. And people are going into the department store, grocery store, and spending 30, 40, 50% more

8:18to buy groceries and buy the goods they need. We'll face a blood bath in November. And you'll spend the next two years being impeached every damn week. To which his response was FU-10, although he did not abbreviate it. And that's, look, that is not a typical of a rough and tumble conversation with the president. Now, the conversation went past midnight. We hung up, I think, about 1230 at night. As we hung up the phone, Lindsey Graham was one of the other senators on the call. Lindsey goes, well, that didn't go well. The next day, Wednesday, at noon, Trump announced the pause. And he halted all of the tariffs that he had announced the week before. And the stock market took off. And I will say, even though Trump was pissed, 12 hours later, he implemented what we were urging

9:23him to do. That was the course of action we urged. And he did precisely what we were encouraging him to do. And actually, I was in the oval the next day on Thursday. He was signing a bill that I just passed. And I said, Mr. President, congratulations, you just produced the single largest one-day increase in the stock market in the history of America. So I say that to say, look, a good friend doesn't just say to someone, everything you're doing is perfect. It's great. A good friend helps you solve a problem. And by the way, I wasn't saying this with this level of candor on television. I was saying it directly to the president. And that's part of why he and I have a good relationship. Because I think he knows I will tell him the truth if he likes it or not. And in my view, that's a better friend. Have you ever broke bread with JD? Oh, yeah. Oh, so there's a relationship there as well. Look, I like JD. JD is a friend. I barnstormed all over Ohio with JD to help JD get elected.

10:26I was very glad he got elected to the Senate. I've had JD as a guest on my podcast. I like JD personally. We get along and we're friends. He and I have meaningful differences on policy. Every journey starts with a choice. People who inspire us don't wait for the path ahead. They create their own from handcrafted Italian leather by generations of artisans engineered for life and motion. Every piece is created with purpose for the work, the journey, the moments that matter. For those who aren't defined by a title but by how they live, the standards they set, the risks they take, the work they put in, engineered for performance, crafted without compromise. Because the future isn't something you wait for. It's something you move toward. Introducing the new FLB icon collection. The future looks bright. If you enjoy this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here.

11:28And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click here.