Name: Eric Trump: How America Can Outcompete China in Manufacturing
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T18:55:12.000Z
Description: In this episode, I sit down with Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization. We dive into his vision for revitalizing American manufacturing, making American-made products competitive globally, and building alternative financial and tech systems where people can’t be canceled.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, I sit down with Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization. We dive into his vision for revitalizing American manufacturing, making American-made products competitive globally, and building alternative financial and tech systems where people can’t be canceled.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Eric Trump, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve been huge on American manufacturing being a centerpiece of not just, you know, kind of success in the world for America, but frankly, for the free world. I think it’s something that’s really important as actually a Canadian myself who’s very bullish on America. Tell me a little bit about your vision for bringing back manufacturing and exploding manufacturing in America?

Mr. Trump:
I’m not sure if I had a vision before 2016. And now I think, you know, our entire family has a huge vision. I spent every day on a campaign trail and the amount of kind of campaign speeches I gave in shutdown, broken factories, factories that had chain link fences around them, factories that had no lights, the electricity had been turned off. They had the most beautiful buildings you’ve ever seen, right? I mean, they were the base of the industrial complex for America and manufacturing, the greatest steel mills, the greatest foundries, these unbelievable brick buildings that were lifeless. We allowed all our manufacturing to go overseas, and it’s not okay.

We can manufacture the greatest products in the world here in America, we should manufacture the greatest product. I’m not talking about the stuff that gets sold in dollar stores around the world. I’m talking about how we can manufacture products better than anyone. We can do it better. We can innovate better. We’re better entrepreneurs. And we better bring it back to the United States. And it’s been a big part of my father’s thesis.

A very quick story. Yesterday, I was at the Ford Motor Factory. I got invited there. And I was literally on the assembly line. It’s very infrequent that I take these kinds of field trips to go do things that are outside of my job, but I wanted to go see it. And I’m walking these lines as F-150s are being produced.

Every 57 seconds, another F-150 comes off the assembly line of the plant that I was in. And these hardworking Americans who are building the greatest products for the greatest companies that are representing the automotive industry to the entire world. And the only thing I can think of is that America can do it better than China. American can do it better than Asia. American can do it better than all these places. I’m not talking about the trinkets, but the things that are important to us, the high tech items, the items that are imperative to national security that are imperative to health.

We better manufacture in this country, but we also better be able to put ourselves in a spot where we can actually have a competitive advantage. And when we were paying more taxes, when we had the worst EPA laws in the world, when we were putting in, you know, 10 extra regulations every two days that were just absolutely crushing the profitability, the productivity of our companies. You couldn’t, right?

And I think with my father, all of that stuff is getting reversed right now. Taxes are going down. Interest rates are going down. Obviously, regulation is going down. Speed to build plants is massively increasing, meaning as they cut red tape. And it’s actually giving American companies a chance again, including one other thing, by the way, the tariffs, which have really made all the difference in the world and are actually allowing America to once again have an advantage and equal playing field to the rest of the world.

Mr. Jekielek:
Eric, you know, to your point, I just recently visited a small business, about a $30 million manufacturing facility in sort of in the heart of Amish country in Ohio, where the gentleman John Miller, he basically was told at the time when everybody was shifting to China, he was told, you’re going to be in China and you better be in China. We’re not going to be buying from you anymore. What he decided to do is innovate and invest in his company. He kept the company in and now he actually exports to Mexico. So it’s completely doable. And I actually, I’m curious what you think. You mentioned, of course, the big business Ford, one of the massive American mainstay companies, but what about the small business like John Miller’s?

Mr. Trump:
I think we can do that better than anybody as well. America was founded in a really interesting time. Back to Ford, and I know this is a completely separate conversation. But when Ford created the Model T, it gave people this kind of renewed spirit. If you go over to Europe, if you go to the UK, everybody hopped on a train at nine o’clock in the morning and everybody would get on that train. They’d go from point A to point B. It created a very monolithic thought.

The American industrial revolution was really around the car. If you want to go to New York city, because you were into jazz, you could do that. If you want it to go to the Adirondacks, because you were into the outdoors, you could do that. If you want to head West to California across Route 66, you could do that. And it created just different thinking, right? People approach problems in a different way and create the greatest entrepreneurs in the world. And we make products better than anyone.

And I don’t care what anybody says about China. China is a, what, $24 trillion economy. We’re at almost 30. The difference to China is they’ve got five times the amount of people. So our productivity is not only greater, but it’s greater in terms of productivity per person. It’s like 5x in America. We do it better than anybody in the world.

We’ve got the best system. We’ve got the best country. We’re the best innovators. I mean, we’re shooting rockets into outer space. We’re catching them with chopsticks right now. I mean, we lead the way in terms of everything we do. And that’s a beautiful thing. We can never, ever let it go. And that’s why government needs to set great policy that allows the best entrepreneurs in the world to create the greatest companies. And then it’s got to get the hell out of the way.

It’s got to keep us at a great competitive advantage. And so long as you do that, allow capitalism to reign. That’s the advantage that none of these other countries in the world has. Allow capitalism to reign and America will always win. We will always win if we allow them to do that. Where we get into real problems is every single day when incompetent politicians start putting, you know, kind of their foot on the pedal, right?

They start skewing those dynamics, and they start putting in crazy regulations. They start putting in crazy taxes. They start putting American businesses at a massive disadvantage. It’s why we lost those factories in the first place. And so long as you can keep government the hell out of the way, so long as government can actually do their job and create competitive advantage, we’re going to win.

People want to be associated with American companies. People want to be associated with the American legal system. People definitely want to be associated with the US dollar, as many problems as we all know we have. There is no second best to us and people want it. And we’ve got a tremendous competitive advantage in that regard.

Mr. Jekielek:
Someone I’ve come to trust quite a bit on the side of the economy, both Chinese actually and American, Kyle Bass. I had him on the show just recently. And one of the things that we talked about is his belief that really, you know, we do have a huge debt problem in America, but his vision is that we absolutely have to grow out of it. Like that’s really the only way to kind of unleash that prosperity in a very serious and deliberate way
to deal with the debt.

To your point, I’ve had Mike Rowe on the show a number of times. I’ve been on his show as well. And one of the problems that he sees that he’s trying to solve with his foundation is this, you know, basically skilled worker shortage. And it’s kind of dramatic in America. There’s so many of these skilled jobs that are out there. There just simply aren’t enough people to staff. Have you thought about this? What is it that we can do to actually shift that?

Mr. Trump:
It’s actually deeply personal to me. I was on construction jobs at the age of 11, making minimum wages, working for stonemasons, working for electricians. I spent an entire summer cutting rebar with an acetylene torch.
I can run any backhoe, any excavator. I spent every summer of my life doing that. I can wire a house like it’s nothing. I have calluses on my hands that prove it. I mean, my father really believed in putting us to work at a young age, making us truly understand what real estate is. And that’s bricks, that’s mortar, that’s concrete, that’s electrical, that’s plumbing, that’s HVAC. And I can do all of those things extremely well.

In fact, that’s still kind of a hobby of mine today. I laugh at friends who literally, and these are incredibly competent people. These are people that work on Wall Street and do very nicely for themselves in a lot of ways. But they can’t hang a picture on a freaking wall. I mean, it’s embarrassing. Something broke in their house. Give me your tools. Like they might have a screwdriver in a drawer and it makes you laugh. But it’s sad, though.

We’ve lost the skills. We need manufacturing, we need skilled labor. And that’s why you see so many people coming at us, you know, they don’t even necessarily go to, they don’t go to college in so many cases, they go out, they create these great electrical companies, they create these great plumbing companies, they go get licensed, and all of a sudden, they build them into massive enterprises. Because, you know, so many people are trying to run toward the Ivy League degree, when there are so many jobs out there, mean, look at some of these diving jobs, the saturation diving.

Look at so many of these, you know, these welding jobs, you know. I mean, some of these jobs are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I mean, incredible careers. And yet, you know, people largely ignore them in this country. What Mike Rowe is doing is absolutely phenomenal. He’s prioritizing the trade schools again. I mean, we need to be able to build. We need to be able to manufacture. We need to be able to create. We need to be able to manufacture. We need to be able to create.

But you better understand electrical engineering if you’re going to do that. You better understand metallurgy if you’re going to do that. You better understand all these complicated things. And there is no person in the country who is a bigger fan of Mike Rowe and what he’s accomplished than I am, because those skill sets are fading away. And that’s going to be a horrible day for this country.

Mr. Jekielek:
You know, just a bit on the personal side, I also had the benefit of my father teaching me how to wire electrical, and I did quite a bit of it. I didn’t realize how odd that was for me. I think I was 12-years-old when I was doing it or something like that. But your father, the president, didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would be doing that. That’s amazing. So he was encouraging you to dive into all these things back then.

Mr. Trump:
It’s been the greatest thing in my career. Obviously, we were building high-rises all over the place. We had properties all over the place. And I spent every summer, you know, working on those job sites. And, you know, it’s, I still have one, one property where the guys called me up, Hey, there’s a tree near one, near one of the houses. Can you drop it? Because we’re all petrified to do it.

He really believed in teaching us kind of the fundamentals of the business. And I can’t tell you how many times in my career that’s, that’s come across, you know, I deal with contractors every single day and you’ll get a,
you’ll get a bid and you’ll say, give me a freaking break. You know, that doesn’t take you 14 hours because guess what? I’ve done it, you know, and you’re full of you know what, right? And the second they know what you’re actually talking about, the second, you know, you can impart a little bit of that knowledge on them, all the BS disappears and you get a much more honest conversation.

And it’s funny. My wife and I moved into a new house and I didn’t have any plugs in my closet. So I started running conduit and she goes, honey, you’re gonna kill yourself. I’m like, honey, no, I’m not. It was what I did every summer of my entire life. But it’s important. It’s important to ground kids that way. And you’ve lost so many of the skill traits. Those skill traits are some of the greatest jobs in this nation. And we have to stop doing that. We have to focus on trade schools. We have to bring it all back. Our country will be a lot better for it. And I think a lot of people’s lives will be a lot better for it.

Mr. Jekielek:
What would you say would be like the single most useful thing to kind of get people motivated to actually build these skill sets? Because I mean, these are pretty high paying jobs, many of them.

Mr. Trump:
Honestly, I think the woke cancel culture in so many of these institutions is probably doing that better than anything. I mean, I’m not sure if you could beat them at it. There’s so many people, including me, who literally look at college for their kids. I mean, you have to debate whether or not it’s just a total waste of time and money. I’m not confident I learned a whole lot in college that I didn’t know beforehand.

I think you learned social skills. Do I remember anything about multilinear statistics? No, of course I don’t. Did so many of the people I graduated with, as I said before, not be able to calculate a mortgage, not be able to calculate a car payment? So many life skills aren’t being taught. And that to me is deeply depressing, right?

I went to a business school, right? Let alone go to liberal arts college where they’re teaching you Basket Weaving 101 and you come out $300,000 in debt, and you can never dig your way out from under that debt. And so I think the whole system has to be shooken up in a big way. God bless, if you can pay for it, you know, go major in Basket Weaving, but you literally have college debt that lingers over people’s heads for 30 years. That’s not fair when a school actually teaches them no tangible skills, but kind of dupes them saying that they’re going to come out with the greatest careers, right?

I think at some point you need to reprioritize, you know, true skills and skills
that matter and skills that you can ultimately monetize, skills that benefit society. And I think the college system in this country is gravely, just gravely failing at that mission. And I think it’s causing a lot of people across the spectrum who are sitting there saying, okay, my son, my daughter can’t walk across Columbia as a Jewish student without getting the crap beat out of them. And by the way, then they come out, they’re in debt, and they’ve really learned nothing. Do I really want my child going into that environment, you know?

I think you’re seeing a kind of paradigm shift where maybe the Ivys are becoming less impactful than they were. Certain schools like Liberty University that are embracing the exact opposite of that and are really going against the tide, are doing magnificently well. And a lot of people are taking that opposite approach. Why does my son or daughter or whatever, why don’t they go get their electrical contracting license? Why don’t they get their plumbing license?

And all of a sudden, they take the same amount of money that they would have invested in a bad education and put it into one of those fields. And 10 years later, they’ve got 15 work trucks doing tons and tons of jobs.
They grew this incredible company and they’re making millions and millions of dollars without the baggage hanging over their head. And so I think people are questioning the traditional route more than ever before. And it’s not that I’m not the biggest advocate of higher education. I am. But higher education, if you actually get something out of it versus I think so much of the nonsense and crap that these schools are espousing right now.

Mr. Jekielek:
I wanted to shift gears a little bit. You know, you actually have a couple of new initiatives that you’re into. One of them is Trump Mobile, perhaps perhaps most prominently. As I understand it, you’re basically trying to create, you know, businesses that are kind of more difficult to cancel, if I understand that correctly. Tell me a little bit about what Trump Mobile brings to the table.

Mr. Trump:
Let me zoom out to technology in general, if you don’t mind. I’ll talk about Trump Mobile in a second. You know, when my father was in office, they did everything they could to kill us, literally. I mean, obviously, they tried to impeach him twice. They went after Supreme Court justices. They took him off the ballots of every state. Every AG and every DA started coming after him and me. I became the most opinionated person in American history.

You know, the banks started canceling us like we were going out of style. I’m sitting there saying, I don’t understand. I have a golf course in upstate New York. Why would you cancel that bank account? Like, it’s not part of the political discussion. We have nothing to do with politics. My father is not on any of the entities in our company. He has nothing to do with running our company. He’s commander in chief. Why am I being canceled?

And the answer was F-you. You’re in the political arena. You’re in the political arena and you’re gone. These are banks that I had done business with for 30 years, never had a default, never had a breach, only had the greatest relationship with the bank that had made them hundreds of millions of dollars in so many cases. Just like that, we were turned off.

This was done for free speech as well. We created Truth Social based on the fact that we were deplatformed from Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and everybody else. We had no way to communicate. So all of a sudden, this kind of brought us into this new digital realm, this new technology realm. We created Truth Social to give ourselves free speech back.

We got into crypto, World Liberty Financial, which is one of the fastest growing companies on earth right now, because we needed something to counter the banks canceling you and not having any kind of traditional finance, right? So we went into DeFi [decentralized finance], and centralized finance, stablecoin, but using blockchain, right?

Then obviously, the mobile phones was a third initiative, which is, here’s hardware. Here’s hardware that can bring it in a certain way altogether. But again, it gives people freedom. It gives people freedom from the conventional choices. We can do something better. We can put more effort into it. We can put more heart and soul into it. We can do it cheaper with somebody that people ultimately trust.

So technology has become a lot bigger part of our company than I would have ever possibly fathomed before. But it was normally kind of a reaction to the pendulum going so far in one direction that you actually had to create this product because you had no other alternative. Again, we had no other alternative for communication if we didn’t build Truth Social and it skyrocketed the second we did it.

You know, we’re going to build a financial institution that can’t be canceled. And we’re going to do it, if need be, on DeFi. We’ll put JP Morgan out of business, right? I mean, because there’s nothing that can’t be done in crypto better, cheaper, faster, more transparently than these massive financial institutions and buildings behind me right now that are filled with tens of thousands of people, you know, pushing paper forms back and forth, you know, that work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, that don’t work the weekends, and that take two hour long lunch breaks.

Why isn’t finance 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Why is it that you can trade Bitcoin on Saturday night at nine o’clock while having a glass of wine with your wife, but yet, you want to pull out $5 and you can’t. Why is it that a bank takes 120 days to know your customer, to give you a home mortgage, because you and your wife want to buy a property that you saw while you’re driving home one day. After banking you for 25 years, you have to fill out a paper, and know your customer form? It’s insane.

And so Trump Mobile, all the crypto ventures that we’re doing, World Liberty Financial, obviously Truth Social was a way to combat that woke, weaponized culture that was being thrown at us. These have been some of the most incredible projects we’ve ever done. It has been so much fun.

Mr. Jekielek:
Just on the Truth Social side. I mean, I was stunned. Of course, you know, I became friends with Devin Nunes through, you know, us covering Russiagate, and he being one of these key figures who was kind of digging in and trying to figure out what was going on. But then he suddenly left Congress to head up Truth Social. That was, I mean, it was shocking to me. And I was like, are you sure you want to be doing this? This is, you know, you’re playing a kind of an important role here. It turned out, and we actually did an interview about this, and I can see a lot more clearly what he was thinking.

Mr. Trump:
Jan, I was sitting at this desk when I got the calls from the Washington Post and New York Times. Eric, I hear you have servers in the basement of Trump Tower that communicate directly to the Kremlin. I kid you not. I go, excuse me? What? Servers where? Yes, we hear from very credible sources that you have servers in the basement of Trump Tower that communicate directly with the Kremlin.

I go, first of all, like we’re largely a cloud-based computing company. So, you know, we’re pretty server free. Second of all, you don’t put servers in basements because basements flood. Third of all, I don’t know a damn person over in Russia. You know, I mean, I hardly knew what a delegate was. You know, we hardly knew what a caucus was, let alone, you know, some high tech scheme to communicate with Russia to overthrow an election. I mean, it was all BS, as obviously, everybody came to find out.

But now it’s amazing. I mean, the political discord is really amazing. Devin was amazing, that whole process, but he’s doing a great job on the Truth Social front. You know, I think really, between what we did, which was was create a community that actually had free speech that brought 10s and 10s and 10s of millions of people into it, you know, really forced Twitter to do what it ultimately did.

And then obviously Elon came in later and did what he did so well. I really believe that we are the catalyst to restoring free speech in this country because every single one of us and certainly The Epoch Times and certainly all of your viewers, they would post something and everybody could see them turn down the dials. You know, normally if one of my posts was liked by 70,000 people, it would get liked by 2,000 people. And then I’d ask my friends to go in and search for it, and it wouldn’t come up on any of their profiles.

I mean, they were turning down the dials. They were controlling what people saw. They were censoring free speech. And in my father’s case, they just flat out turned him off, despite the fact that the Ayatollah was on there, the Taliban was on there, and Boko Haram was on there. I mean, literally, all these terrorist organizations were on Twitter, yet the 47th President of the United States, who was beloved by, you know, I think, well over half America, but let’s just say half America was thrown off, but the Taliban could stay on there. Now, I really think that these things were catalysts to restoring free speech in the country. And Devin was a very big part of that.

Mr. Jekielek:
You know, it’s very interesting that you talk about this, you know, ability to dial down messages, right. And this is something I’ve been reflecting on a ton because there’s kind of two sides, right? One side is you can dial up a message, especially when you put a lot of money in there, you have a lot of, you know, different channels to do so. But that’s a lot less pernicious than the ability to actually turn off a voice to basically have a whole swath of people never actually hear that alternative viewpoint at all. It’s astonishing.

Mr. Trump:
Yes, and it backfired on them. I mean, let me just give you a crazy example. You know, CNN, how many people does it have watching primetime now? 400,000 or something like that? I mean, it’s horribly bleak numbers. Horribly bleak numbers. You could go look up the stats, but it’s like, it’s a total joke.
Now, CNN’s about four blocks that way, right? I’m in Trump Tower right now. CNN is over at Columbus Circle in the AOL Time Warner building, filled with thousands of employees. It’s the fanciest studios you’ve ever seen, the nicest elevators.

Then all of a sudden, you look at Joe Rogan, and Joe Rogan’s literally broadcasting off of an iPhone, right? It’s slightly more sophisticated than that, but not a whole lot, right? Small studio, small operation, and he’s literally touching the entire world. And man, what a great job that guy has done. He has done a phenomenal, phenomenal job, and the whole world was watching.

You have these kids that popped up through the campaign that were literally broadcasting off of an iPhone. Their setups were nothing. One one-thousandth of what CNN was. And yet their message is getting disseminated to the masses in the ways that the mainstream media could never possibly imagine. In terms of costs per viewer, they’re one thousandth of what the big networks would otherwise be.

And so what’s happened is you have this massive paradigm shift in mainstream media. Mainstream media has gone like this and it has just absolutely tanked. And you have all these independent voices who aren’t controlled by kind of, you know, the corporate world by, you know, by one of three families that controls all of media, and they’re skyrocketing
while the other people are falling like, like, like bricks. And so I do think that, you know, they did it in 2016. But they did it to their peril, right?

Always be very careful of unintended consequences. You want to talk about the law of unintended consequences? The law of unintended consequences is as they dialed this all down, they empower all of these people. They create such dissent against their own networks that people canceled these people and went with these people and created a whole new media paradigm.

The media right now is the weakest it’s ever been by far. People don’t trust them. People don’t like them. People don’t like them. You know, people don’t want to listen to them. People want the counter messaging, you know, and most of the time people, when they listen to them, if they do listen to mainstream media, frankly, roll their eyes.

And so in a certain way, it’s created this unvarnished honesty in society, you know, and my father was catalyst number one for all of this. But it’s amazing. Again, remember that word, you know, the unintended consequences and the unintended consequences of the media’s actions doing what they did, discredited them in such a way that will actually make them eventually disappear.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, I do think something shifted after the 2024 election. I do feel like a little bit of this weight is not as heavy anymore. But you’ve still, you know, you’ve still been out there slandered and all sorts of stuff for a very long time. And I don’t mean you, I mean everybody who had, you know, messaging unapproved, so to speak, messaging.

Mr. Trump:
We won. A year ago right now, I was sitting in a cold ass courtroom with my father, right behind him. I wouldn’t leave his side. I was there every single day with him as they literally tried to imprison him for doing absolutely nothing wrong. And every single day, those networks, the MSNBCs, CNNs, ABCs, CBSs, every single day they sat there and they slandered him and they slandered him and they slandered him. And we won, right? What does that tell you?
So you’re right, they dragged our name through the mud. I can’t tell you how many negatives, I can’t tell you how many kill piece doors were written about me personally. Honestly, they don’t even bother me anymore.
Like, we’ve won the battle. We won the war. They did that for eight years. Actually, they did it for 10 years.

I’ll never forget, you know, 12 minutes after my father was sworn in as commander in chief, the Washington Post wrote a story about the impeachment of Donald Trump begins, right? Like, they didn’t even try to hide what their intent was. I mean, every subpoena of the 116 subpoenas I received every single subpoena came out of a story that was planted in the Washington Post or New York Times that was then sent to either some state AG or DA, you know, who would end up going down some, you know, rabbit hole, send you a subpoena three seconds later, the coordination between all of them was like not, I mean, the media became the lobbyist arm of the DNC and the entire Democratic Party, you know, yet we still won.

And so for all the people who were hurt by these people, for all the dials that were turned down, again, take solace knowing in the fact that they did not win because people understood exactly what they were doing. It pissed them off. And they decided to vote against the very establishment that was trying to take away not their Eighth Amendment right, not their First Amendment right, the very right, along with freedom of religion, you know, that they’re entitled to under the U.S. Constitution the first.

Here’s what I’ll tell you. Don’t try to control Americans’ free speech. It will not work out well for you. And the media and the entire Democratic Party and all the people that orchestrated the nonsense found that out the hard way. And frankly, they’re weaker for it and we’re a better country for it.

Mr. Jekielek:
I think you did mention World Liberty Financial. Of course, you’re trying to create an institution based on crypto, a financial institution using crypto at its core. There’s been a lot of initiatives out of your father’s White House
around crypto. I mean, there’s a strategic Bitcoin reserve, this digital asset stockpile, there’s been a working group, there’s been the sort of promotion of stable coins, and so forth. So, you know, some people are saying, hey, this is, you know, looks like the Trump boys might be trying to leverage this somehow. How do you respond to that kind of criticism?

Mr. Trump:
I respond very, very simply. I mean, my father’s always loved crypto. We’ve always loved crypto. We started World Liberty Financial when we were sitting in a courtroom when we had a 0% chance of winning, according to the mainstream media. Isn’t it really interesting? I mean, my father wants to do the things that are best for this country, all right?

And we have to win the digital revolution because we don’t believe China’s running at it as fast, maybe faster than even we are. So we’re going to get totally left behind. But no, these projects were started pre-politics when the New York Times said we had zero chance of winning because we truly believe in the future of finance. And you’ve got to break the antiquated system.

By the way, the people that the antiquated financial system and the traditional finance benefits, it’s guys like us, right? It’s guys that have big balance sheets, guys that have big companies, guys that have a lot of zeros behind their name. You know who it’s absolutely devastating to? Everybody else.

I can negotiate my interest rates. I can negotiate bank terms. You know who can’t? The person who’s trying to buy that $80,000 or $100,000 house, which JP Morgan doesn’t even want to finance because it’s a waste of their time and it doesn’t move their needle based on the enterprise value and the capitalization of a company.

That’s where really crypto comes in in a massive way. It gives people financial freedom. It’s cheaper. It’s faster. It’s more transparent. You don’t have a person who’s going to cancel you because they don’t like the fact that you’re wearing a red hat that says Make America Great Again on it, or your company is affiliated with a church or a thousand other reasons that I’ve heard.

I literally had a guy come up to me saying, my company’s bank accounts were canceled because we make springs. Some of those springs go in fishing reels. Those fishing reels are sold in Bass Pro Shops. Bass Pro Shops also sell guns, and they thought we were too close to the equation. I mean, you can’t make this up.

So no, our involvement in crypto started when we had no choice, when every person, every bank in the world deplatformed us for no reason whatsoever. We’re moral people. We run a great company. And we were left with no option. That’s when it started. But now it’s very convenient for them to say, okay, it’s, you know, it’s based in politics. It wasn’t based on politics. It was long before politics that this company started.

Ironically, the same people that asked that question are the same people who never asked the question of, is it morally okay for Hunter Biden to happen to find his way into finger painting and sell his art for, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to, you know, God knows who all over the world, you know, I mean, I still ask, Hunter Biden had more entities, legal entities and shell companies than any person I’ve ever seen in my entire life. What product was he selling?

We’ve been in real estate for four generations. My entire life starting at 11-years-old, as I said, was working on construction sites and building projects. We sell condos, we sell hotel rooms, we sell rounds of golf. We’re in hospitality. Companies that we were affiliated with long before anybody even thought my father had a chance of regaining office as we are in a courtroom, you know, are somehow questioned. I find that rather amusing to tell you the truth.

But no, I stay out of any kind of political legislation in terms of crypto. I don’t get involved in the fray. I put my head down, as I’ve always done. We’re building the greatest real estate projects on earth. I’m very proud of them. I’ve got, you know, well over 10,000 employees around the world. But we’re an American company.

We’re an incredible company. We’ve got phenomenal people, the most iconic projects. And we do it the right way. We absolutely do it the right way. And we do it for the benefit of America. We pay a fortune in taxes. I wouldn’t say the same is true of a lot of people, to say the least.

Mr. Jekielek:
Eric, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A quick final thought as we finish.

Mr. Trump:
First of all, I appreciate you guys because you’ve always been on the right side of the fight. You know, the way they’ve targeted you, the way they’ve targeted the publication and your outlet is nothing short of spectacular. And they did it to you both in Asia and they’ve clearly done it to you in the U.S. So thanks for having conviction.

The amount of people I’ve met in my life who have very little conviction, very little backbone and don’t actually stand up for what they believe, it’s kind of tremendous. And you guys have been on the right side of this. So thank you for honorable journalism and the fight that you’ve taken on every single day. And again, having the resiliency that you guys are, you guys are truly amazing. And I say that with all of my heart.

Mr. Jekielek:
Eric Trump, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

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