Finance guru and mentor Dave Ramsey has interviewed presidents in the past, but his latest one-on-one with former President Donald Trump was completely different.
“I tried to just sit back and listen. I wanted to talk about ideas on a pretty low, even keel instead of getting into stump hyperbole and all of that. And by and large, if you watch the interview, we were able to do that,” Ramsey said on “Varney & Co.” Wednesday, the same day as the interview’s release.
“He was very direct and very knowledgeable about tax rates and about the things that move in the energy world,” he continued, “and how that does intersect the economy, and how to control a commodity market as best you can from the presidential seat.”
The Ramsey Show uploaded the nearly 25-minute interview with Trump on their YouTube channel titled, “Can Trump’s Plan Clean Up America’s Financial Mess?” Ramsey opens with questions about inflation and then goes into topics like U.S. energy dominance, real estate and the president’s two assassination attempts.
“In terms of inflation, you’re right. And it’s almost inflation over the economy, if you want to really know, because people are getting wiped out like never before,” Trump said. “I think it’s the highest inflation we’ve ever had. They say it’s the highest in 48 years. I think it’s the highest ever. The first thing you have to do is get the energy [costs] down.”
“You can encourage, ‘drill, baby, drill.’ You can encourage opening the Keystone Pipeline, and if you flood any commodity market with that commodity, we all know it’s supply-demand that drives the price down,” Ramsey told FOX Business’ Stuart Varney.
“As he and I were talking,” Ramsey added, “around 15% of the GDP is direct energy production, and then the rest of it is impacted by energy. So the loaf of bread that’s gone way up on the grocery shelf had to be delivered by a truck that had more expensive gas than it used to have.”
In Trump’s beginning answers to Ramsey, he argues that once energy prices come down, “other things are going to follow,” like interest rates. Trump also said that he aims to have prices decrease by 50% in his first year back in office.
GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
“That’s your indirect connectivity of energy if you want to bring inflation down and stimulate an economy,” Ramsey explained. “But I have no idea of 50%. That didn’t make sense to me.”
Ramsey reportedly has also reached out to the Harris campaign for an interview with the vice president. In a TikTok caption, he writes that he’ll “do the same thing with Vice President Harris if I get the chance.”