‘Shark Tank’ star and famed investor Kevin O’Leary joined Fox News & Friends Weekend and urged Americans headed to the polls in November to “protect the brand of America.”
Kevin O’Leary: Well, first of all, you can’t have a robust economy without energy. It’s the core. Energy security and independence is a very good mandate. There’s no question about it. The debate we have, raging in the country is what energy?
So, if you go back just a few months to the climate meeting that happened in Dubai, I attended that meeting. It’s the first time the world finally said, ‘Okay, there’s no such thing as transition out of oil, there’s only diversification to other energy sources.’ So probably for the next 200 years, we’re going to need oil, maybe longer. We have it in the United States. We could be 18 to 21 million barrels a day if we wanted to.
You heard Trump mention Anwar, and let me tell you why that’s very interesting. Anwar is a remarkable asset. It’s in Alaska. Not only would it provide a tremendous amount of oil, but think about this. Back in 1978, what Norway did is they said, ‘We’ve discovered a ton of oil offshore. We’re going to charge a small royalty off every barrel in perpetuity and put it against national debt.’
We have a big debt in this country. Anwar could solve a portion of that problem in a big way. Because if you open it up and you say, ‘Look, we’re going to charge a 6% or 7% royalty on every barrel,’ but it has to be by law, this is the key, because you know how politicians like to take cash. It has to be put against the national debt.
I think that mandate would get a lot of people saying, ‘Why don’t we do that to solve this debt problem, at the same time making ourselves energy independent?’ That is how you sell it, because I understand the whole raging debate about green and climate and everything, but this is America we’re talking about. We need energy. We have to have it.
Rachel Campos Duffy: I think it’s a super clever plan. It’s the kind of plan I could see Donald Trump saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ I read your article in the Daily Mail. It was fantastic because I think you nailed the problem economically for America because of the verdict. You said, ‘Banana Republics are bad for business’ and you talked about the American brand being dragged through the mud and the reputation we’re getting internationally. Explain to our viewers how that affects business.
Kevin O’Leary: So I was over in London fundraising. As you know, I’m trying to buy TikTok. Just trying to get my ducks in order for this deal, it’ll probably happen in January, February. It was at the same time that the testimony, the porn star stuff was coming. Talking about salacious sex and condoms and all this stuff, no one understood what that had to do with campaign financing. But why was it happening?
It really dominated the conversation, institutional meetings, asking me ‘What is this? Is that really America?’ Because G20 countries, G7 countries, you usually do not do this to former leadership because you’re protecting the sovereign brand, the mother egg of the United States of America, the White House, regardless who’s in it, it doesn’t matter. Any president, you really have to raise the bar. Maybe if they murdered somebody or were accused of that, maybe you’d bring a trial. But if you look at any G7 country, they protect the sovereign brand.
We have somehow stopped doing that. Look, I’m not saying… I don’t want to get partisan about it. I’m just saying we should protect the brand of America. And think about this, whether you’re a Democrat, whether you’re a Republican, what are we doing to ourselves is a question.
And then the remarkable unintended consequence that I want you to think about here. Just 24 months ago, Trump had about a third of his party starting to think about swapping him out because he was controversial, and they thought, maybe we need new leadership in the Republican Party.
Then Bragg brings these charges, and immediately the entire party coalesces behind him. The country biafricates. All of a sudden, and I know this sounds crazy, but I believe it to be true, history will look at this 5, 10 years from now and say, ‘How did Trump become President again?’ Alvin Bragg was the kingmaker. He did it for him. I know it sounds perverse, but that’s what he did. That’s called an unintended consequence. I don’t know if he’s happy about that, but that’s how he’ll be marked in history.
Will Cain: Kevin, you bring up the other people that were in the Republican field looking to replace him. He talked about that with us yesterday. He talked about he’s really the only one that could be in this environment and come out preserving that brand of America.
Donald Trump: These are bad people. These people are sick, and they do things that are so destructive. I mean, look what they did from the day I got there. I don’t know, a lot of people said, We have no choice but to elect Trump. Republicans, because he’s the only one that can withstand this. Don’t forget, if it weren’t me, they’d be going after somebody else. And I know a lot of the competition, they wouldn’t do so well. They wouldn’t be doing so well right now. They’d be saying, Mommy you take me home. I want to go home. This is brutal. But these are sick people. And for instance, the 51 intelligence agents, who thinks of these? And they think about it just like they say, I’m guilty of… And all this information was from so many years before the election. It was before the election.
Rachel Campos Duffy: That clip, what he talked about there, in addition to what we were talking about with what Alvin Bragg did, all of this is hurting the brand of America, correct? I just am curious, why do you think, who are these people? Why are they willing to wreck America for him? What is it about Donald Trump? What is it about his policies? This is unique. We’ve never seen anything like this.
Kevin O’Leary: I would ask everybody, regardless of your politics, to think about the big picture and what America means to the rest of the world. It’s the largest economy on Earth. It has the best legal system, including the appellate system, which now Trump will go through. If there’s something wrong with his trial, it wasn’t done properly, the appellate system will catch it. That’s what people believe about the American legal system.
It also attracts more foreign capital than any economy on Earth because of the transparency. You want to think beyond Trump. You want to think beyond Bragg. You want to think about after Biden.
What did we do to ourselves here? That should be the question.
When this sentencing occur, and it happens on July 11th, everybody should ask themselves, do we want to belittle someone that was in the White House, make him pick up garbage on the street or jail him?
I mean, this is the American brand we’re talking about. It’s not about Donald Trump only. It’s the White House.
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