WASHINGTON, DC—President Donald J. Trump strolled onto the stage, cool as a cucumber. The crowd was rowdy, the libertarians raging at their own political impotence, but still, it scarcely stirred The Donald.

How does a man like that stay so calm under such pressure? Simple: sang froid.

Raheem Kassam discusses his night at the Libertarian Party Convention at the Washington Hilton on Saturday night, comparing it to prior such events over the past 10 years and illustrating its potential impact on the 2024 election.

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AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT:

Well, you may have heard yesterday that President Donald Trump was in Washington, DC, a rare visit to the nation’s capital to address something, I think, an even more rare occasion, the Libertarian Party convention at the Washington Hilton, also known as the Hinckley Hilton.

That is where, of course, President Reagan, there was an assassination attempt on him there many years ago. And funny story. It’s not that funny. I couldn’t remember the name of the hotel when I was ubering over there yesterday afternoon in preparation for our coverage of, of the speech last night. But I just ended up typing into my Google maps, Hinkley Hilton. And it directed me exactly there. See, I told you it wasn’t that funny a story.

Welcome to another episode of the campaign trail. I’m Raheem Kassam. Been on the campaign trail as ever. You can tell because my back hurts. Planes and trains back on again this coming week. More movement, more coverage over at thenationalpulse.com. A great amount of coverage being brought to you by our fantastic team. And I’m grateful for all of you who are members of thenationalpulse.com/upgrade. You sustain us. You keep us in business. We are 100% reader-funded. All that being said, I want to jump straight into it. Don’t have a lot of time this afternoon. We’ve got a lot of news out there that we’re covering. And as I say, thenationalpulse.com, where we continue to build different things into the site we’ve got some new developments that we’re deploying over the next couple of weeks to make the site even more engaging, even more informative, and even better community. So I’m going to be working on that today.

But I wanted to jump on and talk to you about something that I witnessed in person yesterday. There are a number of elements to the events that took place at the libertarian convention. I’ll take them broadly in order as I remember them, occurring, chronological order, just because I, you know, I want to be able to put you guys in these rooms. I know a lot of you watch them on television, you see clips on social media, but it doesn’t really do enough justice to what’s taking place in the room.

And I say that as having been somebody, you know, both on the outside and on the inside. And when you watch those things on television, I put my hands up, by the way, and confess that I skipped the Bronx rally. I was all accredited to go. I was just exhausted. I had to run the site and the team and all these technical issues we’ve been having. And I just couldn’t bear the idea of going up to New York last week. But that kind of creates the juxtaposition of knowing what it’s like inside, knowing what it’s like watching it from the outside. And the two things, for those of you who have been to such events, I know you will know what I mean when I say it is incomparable.

You know, the television camera angles, the microphones, all of that, they just simply cannot convey what is really going on in a situation like that, and especially in a room such as yesterday, which was so obviously fraught for all number of reasons, by the way, but especially because it was Donald Trump and it was a libertarian party convention, we can, we can get into analyzing, and many people will have their thoughts on this. And I’ve spoken to a bunch of them this morning before recording this podcast here on Sunday at 930 in the morning at my desk recording this. By the way, we can get into the, the wisdom of appearing at the Libertarian Party convention, if you like. But let’s start at the top, from when I first walked in, and I’ve been, as you probably know, to my fair share of these things all around the world now, party convention, party conferences, non party conferences, CPACs, freedom fests, european parliamentary events, you name it, british parliamentary events. I’ve been there, Yavapai county speeches in the middle of, you know, the, the parks, and, you know, you start to get a really good idea, I would say an expert idea of how these things should take place, how difficult it is, for instance, to advance the event, which is, which is the technical campaign term for being on the ground early, making sure things are in place. The podiums there, the lecterns work, you know, the microphones work, the sound plays right, the volumes are correct, the visuals are good, the security’s fine, etc. Etc. Etcetera.

You then throw in the giant anarchist bombshell of it being a libertarian event, which is to say, you know, take them at their word when they have the, they have the step and repeat behind them that says, become ungovernable. They really, you know, they really mean that, not just in a political sense, but in a cultural sense, too. And it was fascinating, because if there, if there are any two groups that I think really, truly embody that, and as President Trump said on the stage last night, embody that Patrick Henry quote, give me liberty or give me death. Like, on one side, it’s the hard-line, uh, libertarians who I’ve known for a very long time. I remember writing a very contentious piece back in 2014 up in breitbart.com. it’s still there about this libertarian party I went to and how cultish it was. And there were people in there getting married under pictures of Ron Paul. And, you know, very strange. I’m sure they will just tell you it was a big laugh, but for an outsider, definitely very strange. And then, on the other hand, you know, hundreds of, of MAGA, Trump supporters who came from all over DC, Maryland, and Virginia last night to see their president speak and loggerheads would be perhaps a mild way of pushing it. These, these two worlds did collide last night.

And I was sort of standing in the middle of all of that, maybe making some trouble of my own. But as I say, from the moment I arrived and there was just no signage where to go, what to do. There were no staff on hand. I was looking for the press entrance. Nothing really. There was a piece of a four paper, letter sized paper taped to a wall that said press right. I didn’t mean anything. I think it meant press go to the right. But to the right was secret service, and it was all blocked off. So finally found my way. It wasn’t to the right, by the way. Finally find my way into the line for press entry. And I walk through, and I go through the secret service mags, you know, I don’t, I know how these things roll, so I don’t take a lot of things with me. You know, you got people there with their makeup bags and all this equipment and laptops and all this stuff. I just have my cell phone, my wallet, and my id, and I stroll through pretty easily, some might say too easily, because I didn’t have any accreditation on me. I was never asked for any identification. I didn’t have my lanyards on. They told me I had to go and pick these things up on the other side of security. Doesn’t really make any sense. And then I got to the other side of security, and there was nothing. There was nobody. There was no staff. There was nothing there.

So I was very much at a libertarian event, actually ended up speaking to a bunch of the security staff and a bunch of the Secret Service, and they all sort of rolled their eyes at me, and they were just like, look, these guys have no idea what they’re doing. There’s no staffing around, et cetera, et cetera. Now, in fairness to them, I guess I hear that the delegate floor stuff went over time in a separate part of the venue. And so they were not able to get over in time for the Trump speech. And that all led to a very indecent clash, as I’m sure some of you saw on the floor of the hall last night before Trump came out to speak. And that was kind of the next big moment was, you know, we were told, and it was in our emails. And I can, I can publish their emails if they would like that. Look, if you get there within a certain time, you know, feel free. It’s first come, first serve. Take whatever seats you like. There’s a bunch of tables at the front for our vip’s. They have reserve signs on them. Besides that, you can sit pretty much wherever you like.

So myself and my colleague at the national polls, will upton. We’re very excited because we were basically the first in the room. So we sat front and center, right in front of the lectern, right in front of where President Trump would be speaking. And I figured that would give us our best opportunity to cover the event for our audience and to take lots of lovely pictures. So we’re sitting there for about 2 hours, and we have lots of fans come over taking selfies. Lots of war room fans come over sending messages to Steve and really kind of just geeing us up. And it was a very nice environment until the libertarians arrived at their own convention, and it is their own convention, and so you have to bear that in mind. But at the same time, they set the rules out, and then they started trying to change them in real time. And that’s where a lot of the kerfuffle started. That’s where a lot of the, a lot of the spillover that you saw from, from boos and jeers and things like that, the things that were coming from a bad place with these people in a lot of senses, that’s where it started. Now, to rewind a little bit, there were definitely people who were out there just coming to see Trump to make trouble.

We had noted that the day before that there were people with paper airplanes that they were trying to get in to throw on stage. There were people with kazoos. I don’t know if you know what a kazoo is. Makes a, it’s like a little, uh, what do they call it? Makes a little duck noise. Right. Um, there were people with, uh, rubber chickens that made loud squeaky noises. Um, and all number of other people and things, placards and such things that they wanted to disrupt the Trump speech with. However, as I say, we’re all sitting there, everyone’s got their seats, lots of people in the front rows, obviously Trump supporters.

And then the libertarian party chairman comes up on the stage and says, look, the front rows should have been reserved for our delegates. We’re sorry. We didn’t actually point that out, but Trump supporters. Could you basically bugger off to the back of the room or to the sides? This is, this was my personal Rosa Parks movement, ladies and gentlemen. And it was terrible because, you know, for those of us who had been there from 02:00 in the afternoon and were in the right place at the right time, it felt like we were being punished. And so a lot of us originally didn’t move. They then sent in the thugs. And, you know, if you can believe it, the libertarians right sending in the, sending in the state party thugs of the Washington Hilton to remove MAGA supporters. It just wasn’t a particularly good look. And then what happened as a result of all of that, just to kind of read you into the room a little bit, was the Trump supporters, instead of going off to the sides and instead of going to the back of the room, kind of stood in the gangways in the aisles of the seats so that they could be as close as possible without having, you know, actual chairs up front.

And that caused a lot of issues with the people behind them. You know, they were like, sit down, we can’t see. And then the Trump supporters were saying, well, you know, if you hadn’t ejected us, then you wouldn’t have this problem. This is, this is on you guys. And so there was all of that. And in amongst everything, I mean, even as President Trump was speaking, you can find some of these clips on social media. I posted some yesterday.

There’s lots more floating out around there. We had fights breaking out, like, in real time. And for those of you who remember, who are old enough to remember, like I am now, the 2015 rallies, the very early rallies, you saw a lot of that back then. You saw a lot of protests. You remember Trump’s quips in the moment.

You will remember fisticuffs and scuffles and people being thrown on the floor and all that sort of thing. And it was very, very similar in there last night to, to a lot of the things that I remember back from 2015. And it’s, it’s interesting how, how, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because as I say, it was 14 where I wrote that article, march, I believe, 14 about that libertarian kind of cult marriage event. I was tracked. I didn’t get married in a libertarian cult. Just want to make that clear. And, and it was 15 where really, people started to look for something else and say, you know what, the current conservative political establishment, the neoconservative establishment, the neoliberal establishment, the libertarians, like all of that, are just simply not cutting it. And so a lot of people started to look for this kind of MAGA nationalism, this populist nationalism of Donald Trump, which, as you know, was really cutting through in the United Kingdom at the same time with Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement.

And of course, you know, again, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Look at us on the precipice now of a July 4, UK general election, which I suppose I should go into at length on another podcast. And very much the same issues being discussed as ten years ago, mass migration, our relationship with the EU, so on and so forth. And, you know, one of the things that I thought was really fascinating about what happened yesterday was President Trump has gone to sneaker Con, if you remember that, selling the shoes, by the way, I ordered the shoes. I’m still waiting on my shoes. I think they said July was a delivery date, so I’m not too bad. As long as they hold to their end of the bargain, unlike the libertarians last night, I’ll be all right. He’s been obviously, to that massive Bronx rally. You saw that massive Wildwood rally. I mean, it really does feel like years upon years worth of campaigning are being played out in a matter of weeks at the moment, right, to kind of elongate and butcher that phrase that Bannon uses all the time. There are weeks in which years happen. There are years in which decades happen. But it really does feel like that. And I noticed something. You know, we had a scoop. I got tipped off by a person familiar with the remarks that Trump was going to make up on the stage, that he was going to call for the commutation of the sentence of Ross Ulbricht.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who Ross Ulbricht was, founder, creator of the Silk Road, imprisoned for two life sentences plus 40 years for effectively aiding the sale of narcotics through the dark web, you can go away and do your own research on it. I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about that. But it is a big, Ross Ulbricht is a huge cause celebra amongst libertarians. And so that, that scoop of ours, which I broke on the national Pulse last night, about an hour before Trump was up on stage and went on real America’s voice to talk about that was a really, really massive moment. And that was probably the moment in which there were the largest cheers for Trump in the audience of libertarians. Now, if you ask me to break down what part of the room was hostile and what part of the room was friendly and what part of the room was somewhere in the middle, I would put it around 30, 30, 30. And I know that’s, and I was surprised by the way to watch it back on television and watch some of the clips back because it does sound like the boos and the jeers are way louder than they were. But I mean, you know, these were a very, they were very hard headed group of people that knew that they were going there, Taboo and Jeer Donald Trump, and they were just trying to cause trouble for him. So they, so they set their faces to it, right, and they put their shoulders to that. And so they were extremely loud and they were positioned kind of around the hall, so it, so it resonated and reverberated a lot more. But slap bang, kind of in the middle of the room. You had, as I say, a lot of Trump supporters, and then you had a lot of people who were just kind of there as libertarians or libertarian leading people who were just there to hear him out. And I felt a little sorry for those people because they did, they did kind of get caught in the crossfire. And they were, you could tell they were equally as irked by the MAGA people shouting as they were by the libertarian people shouting.

And it really did descend into a shouting match. And, you know, I will take some credit for that. But those moments are for, you know, men with chests, right? They’re not for shrinking violence. They’re not for people who are going to be easily shifted around, shouted down. And I have to say it was a terrible thing that the libertarian party conference organizers did. And I’m not trying to take shots at them. I’m just calling it how I saw it from my perspective, where they came over to the people who were standing in all the aisles, and I was one of them, and they said, well, look, if you don’t move, we’re going to get venue security. And we were all like, all right, get venue security. The venue security comes over, says, can you move? We said, no. All right, well, we’re going to get Secret Service. Okay? Get Secret Service. No secret Service ever came. And for those of you who know me well enough, I was in touch with people who would be in touch with secret service, let’s say, throughout the entirety of that event. And I knew that no secret service was coming. So, you know, I said to the guys when they came over, they were just lying at this point, right? Oh, Secret Service are coming and they’re going to remove you. I just said to them, look, I’m in touch, you know, with these, with these people right now. And they’re saying that effectively you’re full of shit. And the guy just looked at me, stared at me blankly, and turned around and walked away. I mean, he knew he had been caught in a lie. And I just think there is something so, well, actually, there’s something so libertarian about that, right? There is something just so morally weak and morally relativistic about knowingly lying to people to try and cover up for your own failings as event organizers, that it really did remind me of why I haven’t gone to a libertarian event in a very, very long time now onto Trump himself. Right?

Because that was, that was why we were all there. And that was, that was the standout moment of the entire night. All of the other things considered, by the way, Mike Lee’s speech and the Fed, he gave a huge endorsement of Trump from the stage, told the delegates to, to really listen and consider what he was saying. But, but what really stuck out to me was not the Trump speech, right? Although even though it was a little bit different from the normal Trump speech that he gives, you should watch it. And bear in mind what I say about the booze and the jeers, if you do watch it back, if you hadn’t seen, if you haven’t seen it yet, but there was a phrase that came to me yesterday. I think it’s a french phrase, sang froid. I’m really bad at doing a french accent, by the way. Sang froid. S a n g f r o I d. Let’s hear how. Let’s hear how I’m supposed to say it, by the way. Okay, that’s. If you can hear that, that’s the. That’s the computer doing it. Sang froid. Believe me, you wouldn’t have thought that. I took French for many years at school and actually spent a lot of time in France. I used to. I used to be able to speak it rather well, but you can probably hear as well if you go back and listen. About ten years ago, since I’ve been in the US now, all this time, my accent is also changing because. And it’s. And it’s not because you end up wanting to sound more american or something. It’s because bloody emails. It’s because it’s. It’s so hard for people to understand you if you say things a certain way, and so you end up just mildly tweaking certain words so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself over and over. One of my. One of the biggest things. I’ve just gone off on a massive tangent. We’re talking about Trump a second ago. One of the things that I find really frustrating is when I go into a restaurant and I say, can I have a bottle of water, please? And it’s just blank stare, and, you know, it’s not. It’s not Jimmy or Johnny or, I don’t know. Paula. Paula serving me in there. It’s Jose and it’s Tariq or whatever. And it’s just like they’ve got their own, like, little patois, right? Their own way of speaking, and then I’ve got mine, and then neither of us are really speaking with a clear. Well, I’m definitely not speaking with a clear american accent. They’re speaking in different dialects of american accents. And so I go, can I have a bottle of water? And, you know, mostly what I get, I get vodka. You want vodka? And that’s my american accent. You can live with it. And it can be in a coffee shop at, like, 09:00 in the morning, and I’ll ask for a bottle of water, and they’ll be like, oh, we don’t have vodka. I’m like, yeah, now I know. I’m aware of that. I also don’t need vodka at 09:00 in the morning. Thank you very much. You looked at me, by the way, and thought I needed vodka. I’m offended. But. But I digress. The sang froid. So, anyway, I end up saying, water. Can I have some water?

Sang froid of Donald Trump was absolutely on full display last night. It was extraordinary. And he’s done it before, and he does it sort of every time he walks up to the sticks going into the courthouse. And he’s done it in debates, he’s done it in television interviews. It’s sang froid is, I guess, directly translated, cold blooded. Right? Blood cold. But it means kind of composure, coolness under pressure. If you look it up, it can even suggest an excessive composure, which is a strange concept, isn’t it? It’s like, it’s like you’re so. You’re just so dialed in. You’re so in the zone that nothing can rattle you. And that was what I really took away from last night. That was against all of the backdrop of what the left tries to portray Trump as, which is quite the opposite, by the way. Right? Hothead. He’s a hothead. No, he’s cold blooded. He’s composed. They try to portray him as unpredictable and in a bad way, because there’s obviously great levels of unpredictability, varying degrees of unpredictability. And it’s sort of the answer to my own question that I asked him. And he often quotes me, by the way, on stage, in the speeches, because I asked him once on his plane, by the way, that great Trump force one, that Boeing 5757, I said to him, look how, you know, how he looked at me? He’s like, how what? How do you do it? How do you do it? I don’t know how you could do it. You know, I don’t know about you ladies, gentlemen, but I…

There are days that I feel so stressed just by the relatively small amount of work on my plate in the grand scheme of things, right? Oh, you got to put some articles up. Oh, you got, you know, typos and, oh, you got meetings and what have you, travel. Oh, terrible. And he’s got the whole evil world crashing down around him. All the cases and all of the machinations, the lies, the spin, the trolls. They attack his family, they attack his marriage, they attack his sons, they attack his daughters. They follow them around the paparazzi. You know, they’re spying on him, for goodness sake. You know, they’re spying on him right now. There’s no chance that they’re not tapping his phones, his electronic equipment. There’s no chance of that they’re raiding his home, they’re rifling through his wife’s drawers. They are, you know, just mocking him on the, on the evening shows every night. And. And all of it, right? All of it. Any one of those things, perhaps. Perhaps you and I could both handle. Right? I could probably handle being mocked on the late night shows. That’s okay with me. But all of those things I just said how? How? And he took a beat and he looked and he looked around and he said, what choice do I have? And I’ve told that story before. I’m sure you’ve heard me tell it before. And he’s not talking about choice for him because, of course, he definitely has other choices, right? Very wealthy man, very successful man, big family, lots of properties. Could go and retire, big plane, go wherever he wants. He was talking about what choice he has as the only person in the moment who can do what he does. That is called a sense of duty, okay? And it’s a wonderful weekend to be talking about a sense of duty. But there’s an addition.

There’s an additional answer to that question that he didn’t give me, that I saw up there on that stage last night, and that answer is sang froid. That answer is coolness under pressure. That answer is keeping collected, keeping cold blooded. He stared into a room, and the lights were on, by the way. He could see every person in there into a room that was rowdy as all hell, throwing signs all over the place, screaming all their different slogans, end the fed, free Ross, fuck trump, all of this stuff, right? He stared into their faces and he said, listen, I think you should nominate me. If you want to win, if you don’t want to win, I get it. If you want to keep losing, if you want to keep turning out 3% every four years, keep doing what you’re doing. My goodness, what it takes to do that, to do it. He wasn’t rattled. This wasn’t something where he was, like, heckling back. He wasn’t like, doing crowd work like a comedian getting heckled. He was just cool. He was like, listen, I get it. I hear you, I understand. And he definitely, he definitely meant that, by the way, because he was talking policy wise along their lines. He was talking about their issues. He says, look, I get it. I get all of these things. I get the Russell brick stuff. You mentioned a whole bunch of other things up there on that stage. The crypto stuff, central bank, digital currencies, etc. Etc. I get it. But. But this is a partnership. This is a two way street, and we need you to do certain things, and you want certain things out of that deal. That’s the deal. That’s the deal. And that’s it. That was the moment I thought, where it just really cut through. And I think, you know, for all of that, they’ll play on the television today and say, oh, Trump got booed out of the libertarian convention, I guarantee you. So I first ever saw Donald Trump in 2015 at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, and I should make sure that is the correct date. And I walked in there really not knowing what to expect. I had really never truly known that much about Donald Trump as a politician and as somebody who could present to an audience. I sat at the back left of the room with my buddy Ben from England, and it wasn’t a huge crowd. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t huge.

And I watched him turn an audience that was probably 80% hostile when he walked in to 80% favorable when he walked out, and he had standing ovations. And when he walked in, there were people with signs that say, we don’t want Trump here. We hate Trump, screw Trump. He’s not a libertarian. Blah, blah, blah. And then he got standing ovations and left, I would say, with at least, I think, 70% of the room thinking like, yeah, okay, fine, fair enough. I get it. I get my part of this deal, and I’ll take the deal. And I’m not saying that that was quite the same last night, because it was really a 30 30 30 split in the room where the other 10% go. But I think of those, of those middle ground people in that room, of that one third that were just there to listen, I think he probably got the vast majority of them. I think, of the 30% who were booing and jeering and trying to troublemake and so on and so forth, I think probably around 50% of that 30% will say, you know what? I got it out of my system. I had my little tantrum. He’s offering a way better America than Joe Biden is, and he’s offering policy things that we really can get on board with. And he said up there on that stage, he said, listen, when I’m back in the Oval Office, there will be an open door for you to come and make your cases about things. And I think that’s what a lot of people want to hear for far too long. You know, ordinary Americans, be they. Be they libertarians or whatevers or nothing at all, right, have felt themselves shut out, disenfranchised by the process. And Trump’s coming along and, you know, the left and the media and everything’s calling him a fascist. And meanwhile he’s saying, like, no, listen, this is a nation. We need to be united. The world.

Number of times he used unite and unity and together and words like that up on stage last night, conciliatory hand out phrases. You know, that really kind of showed, and I think it’s a moment in which, and I’ll just wrap on this, where it’s gone from being, because I think for a little while it was, it’s gone from being the, the revenge campaign of Donald Trump to the, to the unity campaign of America. You know, and if there’s anything, I mean, I think there were lots of positives about last night, by the way, but if there’s anything really to pull from that moment, that sang froid from Trump, that, that coolness of the mind, it’s that trajectory, it’s that shift, it’s that, it’s actually a, a dovetailing in this current moment of those things. And so I’ll leave you with that. I mean, you know, I think it was a, I think it was probably, on balance, a worthwhile event thing to do.

I think it was definitely dangerous territory, definitely treacherous, and definitely will lead to some, let’s say, negative press covfefe. But sometimes you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet. And that omelette, ladies and gentlemen, is America. What are you to go over to thenationalpulse.com/upgrade, if you haven’t done it already, please sign up. It is Memorial Day weekend right now. So I launched my fundraiser for tunnel to Towers. I’ll be doing their five k in Manhattan again. For the fourth year running, we raised $25,000, no, $35,000 last year, 25,000 the year before that. We’re already at 15,000. The website is runsignup.com raheem. It’s also on the top of the nationalpulse.com linked there for you. It’s on all my social media. Raheem Kassam, make sure you’re following us at the Nat Pulse. And I’m very grateful for your time. Please share this show, leave your comments and post it around. Tweet it. Tag me as you know, I love to get involved on social media. I love to reply to just about almost everybody that I possibly can, uncle Tom Cobbley and all, as we say. So I hope you have a lovely Memorial day weekend. Think about the people who sacrificed so much for your freedoms and. And I will see you next time. We got to talk about the UK election next time, so. So prepare yourselves for that. Cheers.