Well speaking of rare, I'm going to finish up with the future of the GOP and your personal ambitions. Let's talk about domestic politics. You recently compared Congress to a high school reality TV program. The Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gates saga, the punching, the merry

go round, seems

absurd. Is the Republican conference interested in governing?

I think we're having a walk and you're writing. Yeah, exactly. But you said high school reality TV program, not me. It's my fault. It's a fair question. I think our conference has been unwilling to accept the basic fact that with a narrow majority and control of only one aspect of the federal government, one chamber of Congress that no one gets 100% of what they want. You can push for the best conservative solution but at the end of the day you're going to have to compromise within your own caucus and occasionally compromise with the other side. And that is a problem when you have a subset of people that are unwilling to compromise and I think that's at the heart of a lot of our problems right now. I will say I think the bigger problem with Congress and it's expressed in both parties and the challenges they have is Congress has just become so structurally weak relative to the executive branch that it's as if we've turned Congress into a green room for Fox News and MSNBC where we spend all our time trying to score soundbites or hug Tucker Carlson to use your first. The only reason I said that is because I think you're smart so that's why it was a compliment. But go ahead. Well, thank you. Thank you. And while we await the coming of a president to solve all our problems, right? Like that's the story of the modern Congress. We keep giving up our power to the executive. So performative, the performative. Yes, performative. It's not substantive to fix that. You have to reclaim some of that authority from the executive branch and then devolve power within the institution from the office of the speaker to the committees because the committees are really the place where productive work can be done. But we're not, we're not really doing that right

now. But can you even resist it? I mean, you had a daddy act that was supposed to shame Hunter Biden and who I think is just a sad drug addict really in the end and corruption between politicians and family. But you didn't talk about Jared Kushner. This is what happens. Nobody is actually,

you know, not to equalize anything, but it is equal. Like it's, it doesn't ever apply

to anyone. It's always

sort of getting one off on it. Wouldn't it have applied to, and it wasn't like a, it wasn't like the words Hunter Biden weren't mentioned in the act. Like it would have got to nepotism. So one could have interpreted it as a sort of slight to either party. I mean, we kind of have like this problem where we basically like, we did mention Hunter Biden on your website, but go ahead. We're infatuated with like, like political dynasties and royalty. And we have like a very old political class, like as a result of this. Yeah. So yeah, I think, and honestly, a lot of the ethical kind of drain the swamp reforms that Trump promised and put into an executive order disappeared either the day before, like on January 19th or on the morning of the transition, which just shows you they were empty, empty promises. It's like, like both parties get sucked into the swamp. I get, I get, you probably don't like that phrase. I don't know a better way to convey. Yeah. No, I get it. No, I get it. But you know, I'm saying, my only point

is you're not immune from it. Gallagher introduces daddy act to ban Hunter Biden, like influence peddling. So it could have said Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, like influence,

but you probably would have been thrown out of the park. I will confess, I do at times like to see how we can stretch the limits of acronyms for bill naming. Yes. Maybe it's the most, that the five AIs act that we referenced before was just too good to pass up the anti social CCP act, which is an acronym. Maybe this is the most productive use of my staff. Okay. All right. I'm not going to give you

hard. You're not the worst of them. So, all right, I have two more quick questions. Earlier that when dictators tell us they're going to do someone, we should take them seriously. Trump said that it's great that she made himself president for life. And maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday.

I've always believed everything he said. I would argue with people. So after January 6, should we take that threat seriously? Well, I would just ask. I think the wake of January 6 shows that our system, despite the stress put upon it, still helped, right? I mean, Xi Jinping could have done any number of things that Donald Trump couldn't have done. Listen, the, let me just generate sex, like all the misinformation leading up to January 6, I mean, it was just all these claims made about dominion voting machines and then filtered through the cesspool of social media. I mean, I really did drive our system crazy, right? And like you had smart people that didn't know what was true and what isn't. So we sort of have to figure that bigger thing out, which I think is bound up in all these things we've been talking about, for which there's no silver bullet solutions. All the more reason, in my opinion, where if you actually genuinely fear that a strong man could get elected in America and then refuse to leave and successfully achieve that ambition, we should invest less power in the presidency. The presidency shouldn't be this all-consuming office. I don't think this was the intent of our framers and founders, right? Congress needs to step up and reclaim its authority, the House and the Senate need to do that so that presidents, whether through incompetence or malicious intent, can't do things that are damaging to our constitutional

republic. That's a very sensible thing. All right. My very last question is about China. I think a lot about Nixon and China and the impact of that. I was a kid when that happened. And I cut things out of the newspaper, you know, when they did the Panda diplomacy. And it was a great moment for someone like that who was such a China hawk to engage with China. Do you ever see that happening again? What a moment that was for the world at the time. Is that ever possible again?

Certainly, it's possible. I think in terms of the goal of US policy of easy V China, well, the short-term goal is obvious, right? It's to deter a war. The midterm goal, I think, is something along the lines of for us and our allies to control the commanding heights of critical technology so that the CCP doesn't. And I know I framed it in an adversarial way, but I just think that's the reality based on what they would do with that technology and what we're seeing them do in Xinjiang and other parts of the world. It's a balanced economy. Yeah, exactly. The long-term goal is harder to define and something I'm hoping to devote the committee to next year if we get through kind of our short-term policy recommendations is really to think through in the same way that there was sort of a general bipartisan agreement on the goal of containment, though there were vicious disagreements about the variants of containment we had in the old Cold War, particularly expressed over what our approach to China and Formosa should be at the time, that we could somehow figure out what the long-term goal of US foreign policy is. I think it's possible to achieve some level of constrainment, like we could constrain their worst impulses, i.e. taking Taiwan, i.e. genocide, i.e. surveillance or irresponsible biotech experimentation, et cetera, while saying nothing about, let's say, internal regime change. But I suspect it would require a different leader other than Xi Jinping for us to have a breakthrough diplomatically at this point in the near future. Now I'm not advocating for regime change, but it just seems Xi is bent on consolidating power and taking the country in a very dangerous direction. And we just forget that this is a profoundly Marxist-Leninist organization we're dealing with.

Yeah, well let's end on that. Happy note.

So when do we think he's

running for president? I think he should run for president. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's just the kind of executive we need. era, swisher, becoming a Republican voter again. No, I have voted Republican. You backed Republican. I have. I voted Republican too.

I think he's smart. I think he thinks clearly. I think he's, you know, he has a fresh viewpoint and it's Reagan-esque a little bit. It's a little bit of old time, he's

a very young man. And so he's thinking in a partisan way, which has been all but lost in Washington. Yeah, and he also has a winning issue. And this China issue is not foreign policy. It's very much domestic policy. We bifurcated that interview in a way between international and domestic.

But China is a winning domestic issue at this point. I think what they have to do is make a better case. I think Trump didn't make a good case. He also never had any follow-through on anything. And you know, it's often hard for me to agree

with Donald Trump on certain things. But I think he articulated the symbol of it, which is TikTok. But it's a much bigger issue. It's around chips, it's

around transportation, it's around AI. We have to

deal with China. Even in a way, it's about globalization. It's about the factors of production and the fact that we can't even right now measure where and how the tentacles of China's economic power touch the

United States. It's China's Asian. We should have been across the globe. We relied on China because they were so efficient and it was a growing market. People getting wealthier.

And we did not think these companies went for what they do, which is the cheapest and best-weighted manufacturer of this stuff. And when people started the China plus one strategy, that didn't start until like the late, oh, it's like two thousand. I was in Asia at the time in Vietnam. And I remember everyone was clamoring to get into Vietnam because they needed to diversify. They were just starting to

recognize how much

power

the Chinese suppliers had over American companies. And it's a little late. Did you find there was this efficient smoking gun on TikTok? I did not. I think he's right directionally. I think he's got to

prove it to us. If he wants it to happen, which is a very big lift, he, not just him, but Mark Warner. All of them have to explain to us, not just say, trust me. They're bad. Well, OK, why are they bad? Let's make a case to the American public. You know, I was at a recent event here in Washington with a bunch of innovative defense companies. And one of them was a company that looks at drone activity. And there's so many Chinese drones over Washington, DC. They've identified them. It's not just the spy balloon. They have drones everywhere. They're attacking on so many fronts. I think he's just got to start talking like that, like

saying, this is what they're doing. This is what they're doing. This is what they're doing. I just don't know what the remedy is in some way. The remedy is going to be very challenging. No, it's not sanctions. We're going to kick you out. We're going to sanction this. We're going to sell TikTok. We're going to do this, but sanctions. We're scared of angering them and we shouldn't be. They are our rival 100%. Well, I mean, I don't know. Here's a flip side to that argument, which is look at TikTok right now. And analogy for that in the 1990s might have been in Hollywood in a big way. American soft power was everywhere when I was growing up. You know, when when American films were banned abroad, they were. That was seen. Yeah, that was seen in the United States as a great affront. And so we didn't do anything about it. Fine.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. It doesn't they can do it. These countries can do what they want, but they should not be able to operate with impunity here in this country without some repercussions. And that's what they're doing. And we're letting them do it because we're dependent on them. And and in a lot of ways, they're dependent on us. So we have to figure out a way to get along in some fashion. But I have under no circumstances. Do I think this is a government that wants to do anything but dominate? You listen to what she is saying.

It's rather clear what they want to do. Well, he certainly wants to dominate in his own sphere. He wanted to dominate the world. But one thing that was interesting was him talking about the strategic benefit of the two level games. In a lot of ways that interview was him advocating for a renewed role for the house, which has been seen as kind of a complete joke show, right? In many ways.