From CPAC TX 22: Ronnie Jackson Joins Liberty & Justice with Matt Whitaker

I'm going to be an unwavering supporter of law enforcement. Welcome to Liberty and Justice with your host, Matt Whitaker. Welcome to Liberty and Justice. I am your host, Matt Whitaker. We're here at CPAC and it's my great pleasure to bring a friend on, Ronnie Jackson, Admiral, Doctor, Congressman. I mean, what else can you do? Patriot, most importantly. I got my plate full right now, Matt. You have had an amazing life of service to your country. You've written a book about it. I have. Tell me about your book. The book is called Holding the Line. It's a book just about my life in general, but it focuses a lot. It starts out with what really happened on January 6th on the inside because I was on the floor of the House when that happened. It's my perspective on that. Then it goes into me growing up a little bit, my time in the Navy, my time with the Marine Corps in Iraq. Then it goes into my time with three administrations, taking care of President Bush, President Obama, President Trump. It talks about my VA nomination. It talks a little bit about some of the COVID stuff. It's just got a little bit of everything in there, but a lot of stories over the last 30 years. How do you condense all those stories into a book? Yeah, it was hard. It's not as big as I thought it was going to be, but I've got another one to write after this one. I'm going to have to fill in some gaps. I kind of hopped around a lot, but I kind of hit some of the high points. But I think it's an interesting read. Did you include pictures from all those moments in time? I did. There's a bunch of photos in there. Yeah, I bet it was hard to pick the right ones. Yeah, there's a lot of them. I have quite a few over 15 years at the White House, accumulated quite a few photos from all over the world, but we put a few in there. As someone that has been doctor to three U.S. presidents, I know that you have, like everyone on the right, has been criticized because you've observed what we've all seen from President Biden and think that he may have some cognitive decline. He may be prescribed certain medicines that are helping him perform. But obviously you haven't examined Biden. You don't have any idea what his current status is. But just generally, as someone that's been a doctor to presidents, how concerned are you that we might have a president that isn't fully cognitive and able to do his job really 24 hours a day? Well, I'm very concerned about it. I'm concerned as a citizen of this country because I think it's becoming a national security issue for us, quite frankly. And I was saying it back when he was candidate Joe Biden, and I wasn't getting a lot of traction on it. People were questioning why I was saying that. But now the whole world sees it. It's on display for everybody. You can see what's going on overseas. Our reputation abroad is just taking a huge hit because of this man's incompetence. Domestically, we're getting destroyed. I mean, whether it's crime or the price of gas or our southern border, these are all just huge issues for us. But I've been saying it since he was candidate Joe Biden. I said at the time, I said, you mark my word, another two years it won't be Ronny Jackson talking about it anymore. It's going to be the Democrats talking about it because this is not going to get better. Joe Biden's not a fine wine. He's not going to get better with time. All of these diseases, whether it's Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or multi-infarct dementia, like you said, I'm not his doctor. I'm not making a diagnosis. You don't have to be a physician to see what's going on with him right now. Everybody sees it. But all of these diseases get worse with time, not better. And he's going to have fewer and fewer good days as time goes on, more bad days. They're going to have to really work hard to keep him out in front of the camera. But eventually, with two and a half years left, they are going to have to do something about it before the end of this term. So I honestly do not think he'll make it to the end of this term. Yeah, and one of the stories you famously tell in the book is that after you initially had raised those questions, President Obama, who you had been his doctor for, I guess, eight years, sent you a text or a letter to say, Ronnie, this is below you. No, he did it. The way it happened was I was going to a fundraiser in Wichita Falls, and I was late for the fundraiser. And I was just getting frustrated with the double standard and the hypocrisy, because you remember how they came after me relentlessly with Trump for nothing because they didn't like his personality or they didn't like the nature of his tweets. He didn't really do anything to make them think he had cognitive issues, but they tried that along with everything else to get rid of him. And we did a cognitive test. I briefed it. I stood up and briefed the press for an hour and a half in front of the cameras. And here we have a president that's literally having—he doesn't know where he's at. He doesn't know what office he's running for when he was running. He's confused. He's lost. He looks weak. He looks feeble. Shuffles when he walks, slurs his speech. Where are these people now? Complete crickets. Nobody's saying anything. And I was frustrated because I saw this tweet that came out from Ronald McDaniel back when he was running for president and I was running for Congress, and it said—it was a clip of him where he thought he was running for the Senate. And he was confused about what state he was in. And I just looked at it and I said, wow, man, this is— So I retweeted that and I said, does anybody remember the cognitive test that I gave at Real Donald Trump, the one that he aced? The famous man-woman camera TV. Yeah, exactly. But I said, looks like somebody else needs a test. It was a pretty benign tweet overall. But, ding, within like 20 minutes I got this scathing email directly from President Obama just tearing me up and saying, I can't believe the cheap shot you took at Joe. It's beneath you as a Navy Rear Admiral. It's beneath you as a physician to the president. It's a direct assault on me and my administration and my family and the people that, you know, that you worked for for eight years. And I hope you use better judgment in the future. I mean, he just butchered me, right? Wow. And so I didn't really know what I was going to do. I went into the fundraisers already late. I thought, you know what, I'm not going to write him back. I'm going to call him. So my plan was when the fundraiser was over, I was going to call him and talk to him about it, right? Because, like you said, I did have a relationship with him. I worked for him for eight years, right? And so when I came out of the fundraiser, I had a little more time to think about it. And I thought, before I do this, I'm going to call somebody who can kind of, like, you know, make sure that I'm not missing anything here and I don't say anything that I'm going to regret. So I picked the phone up and I called Dan Bongino because Dan had been Secret Service agent at the White House during the Obama administration. He and I traveled all over the world together. He got out. He kind of had some of the similar kind of things happen to him when he got out. So I thought, Dan will understand kind of the way this is impacting me because it was a weird emotional thing. It was kind of a combination between being a little pissed off and then having my feelings hurt a little bit, right? So I called Dan. And being reprimanded by, you know, somebody that held the position that you have a lot of respect for. Right. And so Dan was like, Ronnie, let me put this in perspective for you. You don't owe this guy a damn thing. You don't owe him a response, right? Did he do anything? Did he lift a single finger to help you when you were getting butchered with the VA nomination? He knew that was all garbage. He knew it was made up lies and crap. He could have made one phone call and stopped it. One, you know. And he didn't bother to help you at all. I thought, you know what, Dan's right. I don't owe him anything, so I didn't reply. And I never talked about the letter at all until the book came out, you know, just last week. And now it's out in the book, and that's how it got out. Yeah. Well, and, you know, I think most conservatives, Republicans, remember when you were nominated for the VA, how poorly you were treated, unfounded accusations, unsubstantiated really political hits against you and your reputation that were never true. Nobody went on the record and said this or that happened. It was just disgusting. And having been in the barrel like you and just knowing because they didn't like President Trump, they didn't like us, and they were just trying to ruin your life. I mean, I tell people all the time, you get the Trump stamp on you, which I'm proud to have, by the way, but you get the Trump stamp on you, and you're marked for destruction. And I tell people I didn't know it at the time because I was pretty naive. I wasn't in politics yet or anything. I was still on active duty in the Navy. But, man, I got Cavanaughed before Cavanaugh did. I was the warm-up. I was the pregame. I just didn't know it at the time. Great comedy called The Campaign, which you may be familiar with Will Ferrell. You know, the famous line, welcome to the show, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. So you represent in Congress a lot of North Texas, the Panhandle, Amarillo. I guess that goes out to Wichita Falls. Wichita Falls. Yeah, and all that. And so as you get around the district, what are you hearing from your constituents? What are they telling you? Well, my constituents are still really worried about voter integrity, right? They want a change. I mean, they do not like where we're at right now, but they want to know if they go to the polls and they vote that it's one person, one vote, and that there's not fraudulent votes, you know, all over the state that are undermining or taking their vote away from them. So they're worried about that. They're worried about the economy. They're worried about the price of gas. I mean, my constituents are hardworking, blue-collar people, farmers, ranchers. And, you know, they can't afford to gas their trucks up. I mean, in my district, gas is huge because, you know, you've got to drive 40, 50 miles sometimes just to get to, you know, from your house to your tractor where you work and 50, 100 miles back, you know, round trip. So people are worried about what's going on. They're also worried about, you know, kind of our national security and what's happening overseas. And, you know, but we got a lot of concerns. They have the same concerns. I tell people all the time it's pretty easy to run right now. You don't have to run on district-specific issues because it's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, where you don't worry about whether or not you have a hot tub if you can't put food on the table or clothe your kids. And that's the situation we're in in this world right now. We are all worried about the most basic freedoms that we have in this country and our ability, you know, to live free. And we're not worried about district-specific stuff. We're all on the same page right now. And as you look forward into the 22 election and potentially Republican control of the House, what do you think should be the priorities of the Republicans in the House when they take control in 23? Well, we want to be forward-looking, OK? We don't want to be looking back completely, but we do want to make sure that some of the stuff that happened in this country never happens again. So we're going to have some oversight hearings. We're going to dig into some of the stuff that happened with the origins of COVID and how that was handled. We're going to dig into, you know, Dr. Fauci and his involvement in all this. We're going to address our border and some of the stuff that's been going on on our border. There's a lot of issues that we're going to look into. But we're going to be looking forward, and we're going to be working on building our economy back. We're going to be working on deregulating, getting government out of people's lives, you know, and quit wasting and spending our kids' future. Because the Democrats are just on a spending spree that's driving us into an area that we will never be able to recover from if we don't start doing something about it. So we're going to take this country back is what we're going to do. OK. Well, that's fantastic. Do you feel like your constituents are really telling you that they want to convert their gas-burning trucks to electric vehicles? Is that a popular subject? I do not hear that anywhere in the state of Texas where I go. People think that it's insane, that's crazy, you know, to go tell somebody that you're going to cut their supply of gas off and they should just deal with it and go buy an electric vehicle, right? People in my district cannot do that. They couldn't do that if they wanted to. And if you gave everybody here an electric vehicle right now, you wouldn't have any place to charge it anyways, right? So, you know, the logistical support that's behind that, it's not in place, won't be in place for many, many years in my district, maybe never. But to tell people to just deal with it and go buy an electric vehicle just pisses people off here, to be honest with you. Yeah. So you traveled the world with the Navy. You served in Iraq. I did. And tell me what you learned in seeing the rest of the world and then apply that to the United States and really how tenuous our hold on this unique brand of liberty and freedom is. Well, I'll tell you one thing. You know, when I was in the military and during my time at the White House, I traveled to 120 different countries and a lot of them I went to many, many times. So I've been all over the world. I've seen it all. And what irritated me and one of the reasons I got in the race was I was sick to death of these people on the far left like AOC and Tlaib and Omar and Presley and Cory Bush and all these far left progressive, you know, just idiots in my mind talking about how this was a horrible place to live and there are better places to live than here in the United States. I tell you right firsthand, there is no better place to live in this world than right here in the United States of America. And if they don't think that, they need to go spend some more time overseas and what's going on. But, you know, we are not America first anymore. And that's what really concerns me. We've got to get back to where we're make America great, keep America great, America first. And we don't have those people running our country right now. But we need to get those people back into office. We need to start with President Trump. And I think a lot of people miss President Trump. I mean, you know, it is literally almost incomprehensible how we have driven into a ditch so quickly as a country, whether it's inflation, whether it's our southern border. I mean, you're uniquely, as a Texan, you're uniquely affected by this border crisis. And so I just wonder, you know, even in the north Texas, I'm sure that you're still feeling a lot of that pressure of almost 2 million people coming in in the last year. Well, we are, and it's really hard for us here in Texas. You know, we're paying an unfair price here, to be honest with you, because we're using millions and millions and millions of our Texas tax dollars to secure that border down there. That is not the job of the state of Texas. That's the job of the federal government, right? And when we get the majority back, and certainly if we get the House and the Senate back, the first thing I'm going to do is put a bill together to pay the state of Texas back for all the money that we've wasted doing the federal government's job, because Joe Biden and his administration refuse to do it and refuse to acknowledge that it's a problem. But these people are falling in on our welfare system, on our schools, on our roads, on our health care. These are resources that taxpayers nationwide and taxpayers in the state of Texas pay for with their tax dollars. And we're inviting anybody and everybody that wants to come up here and take advantage of it to just fall in on these resources. It's not right. Well, make sure your reimbursement to Texas includes the price of the buses that are taking folks to D.C. and New York. That's the one thing that I think people right now are okay with. They're saying, spend as much money as you want busing these people up to New York and D.C. Thanks, Ronnie, and God bless you. Thank you, Matt. Appreciate it. See you next time.