NORTH DAKOTA — Doug Burgum wasn’t even a household name in 2016 when he ran for governor of North Dakota, but there he was on that debate stage alongside other prominent Republican presidential candidates this week. In an interview conducted before the debate, Burgum talked to the Washington Examiner magazine about the race and his long-shot bid. The following has been edited for space and clarity.
Washington Examiner: There are two ways to ask a candidate, “Why are you running for president?” The first is the straight, aspirational, literal question. The second is delivered with an assumed “when you know you aren’t going to win and may help Donald Trump just by crowding the field.” Why is Doug Burgum running for president?
REPUBLICAN DEBATE: THE WINNERS AND LOSERS OF THE FIRST GOP SHOWDOWN
Doug Burgum: The simple answer there is that president of the United States, most important role in the world, one way to think about it, is the CEO of America. When you do that job right, we have an opportunity to improve the life of every American. That’s the simple answer, is that we can do that. We can improve every American life.
With that, we can bring out the best of America. That is the inspirational aspect of that because there are so many things that are going right in this country. There’s a bunch of things that need to be fixed at the federal level where Biden is going 180 degrees [the] wrong direction on the economy, energy, and national security. We can talk about all those, but the “why” is to improve everything — improve every American life and bring out the best of America.
The second one … there’s a part of me that rejects the premise. Because it’s just so interesting to me, having spent my life in the private sector … which is always such a crowded field. Anytime, like in North Dakota, if we were posting to fill one of the positions for our 11 universities, if we had only 12 people apply and eight of them were qualified or they really didn’t want to be president — they wanted to sell a book or they wanted to be a Cabinet member or they wanted to be a vice president — and you only had two or three candidates, I know we’d probably say, “Man, we should repost this position and see if we can get a bigger, better pool.”
I always believed that when you’re making hiring decisions, which is part of what the electoral process is: The American people are deciding who they want to hire to lead the country. When they’re doing that, competition’s great. It’s great for the Republican Party. It’s great for everything.
This idea that somehow a plurality is going to win implies that no one is going to consolidate a block of voters to compete because I think everybody understands that there’s a leader right now. I wouldn’t look at the national polls — I’d look at state polls because the state polls is where all of us are campaigning.
Right now, there’s only two candidates in recent polls gaining significant share there. One of those campaigns is ours. We’ve only been out at eight weeks. … It’s like the football season hasn’t even started the preseason, much less been played. Super Bowl’s not until February, and about every interview I’m on, somebody is like, “You should drop out,” or … [they] write editorials: “We have too many candidates.”
It’s like telling your Pittsburgh Steelers or something they shouldn’t start the season because they don’t have a chance in the Super Bowl. I think people like to see the season actually played. We like our chances.
Washington Examiner: There is an endless obsession with Trump in the press and in our culture — understandable since it’s not often you have a former president indicted not once but four times. However, there’s a lot of issues we’re not talking about. Are we spending way too much of our time still reliving 2020?
Doug Burgum: Two people love it when we’re talking about 2020. The first of that would be … Biden would love that because he doesn’t have to campaign on his horrific record on national defense or national security. He doesn’t have to compete. He doesn’t have to campaign on the border. He doesn’t have to campaign when we’ve got the highest interest rates in 22 years.
The nation got downgraded from a debt rating standpoint. That gets buried. They rolled out a bunch of regulations here … on the same day as an indictment. It was essentially an attack on not only American industry, American U.S. energy industry, it was an attack on all liquid fuels.
That’s an attack on every farmer because farmers provide a lot of liquid fuels through ethanol. It’s an attack on that. It was an attack on pickup trucks, basically, because they proposed new standards that would be worse than what California passed in terms of saying that you can’t have, basically, internal combustion pickup trucks after 2032.
They slip that in. That’s on page 18 because talking about the stuff that you mentioned, that’s the first move that wasn’t — because it’s one way for Biden to get reelected, is to not have to talk about his record. That’s why, in our campaign, when people ask about other candidates, we just remind them, “We’re running against President Biden. We’re going to talk about economy, energy, national security at every stop.”
Then the other group that loves it when we’re talking about 2020, of course, is China because they forget that we’re not focusing on what our greatest threat to our country is. We’re having these internal squabbles where we forget that we’re actually in a proxy war with Russia that needs our attention. Those are just the tip of the iceberg of some very complex things going on, not to mention North Korea and Iran, as well.
Leadership in the private sector and the public sector requires leaders that can focus on the things that are the most important things. It turns out that economy, energy, and national security are the most important things for the country, but they’re also the things that, if done right, would improve every American life. That’s why we’re just so laser-focused on trying to shift the dialogue around these things because that’s what an election should be about.
Washington Examiner: Let’s discuss energy.
Doug Burgum: Happy to do that. I would say the first thing that we would do on day one, from a policy standpoint when we’re in the White House, 180 degrees different from Biden, is we would say, “We’re going to sell energy to our friends and allies. Stop buying it from our adversaries.” That would be the biggest change to address both economics and for the cost of the price of the pump for Americans.
The price that people are paying to heat their homes, the price they pay for electricity … during this period of incredible inflation, it’s one of the things that does that. Maybe they want jobs. You’ve got low-priced energy and high quality, clean U.S. energy like they produce in Pennsylvania — that brings manufacturing jobs back to our shores. One of the things we’ve got to do is we got to fix some of our supply chain dependencies. It’s super, super critical.
I would just say, again, everybody’s talking about Ukraine. Putin wouldn’t have even invaded Ukraine if they didn’t have all of Western Europe totally dependent on Russian energy. Being invasive, he knows what’s going to happen. He’s got smart people working for him. Supply disruptions, price spikes up through the roof in the first three to six months of that war, he just made more bank than he’s ever made. He already is worth $70 billion or something.
Belatedly, then we decide, “We’re going to sanction Russian oil,” and that drives the price down 20% after the markets have gone up higher than that. That brings them back down, so then now he’s selling his oil and gas at 20% off the world market to China. A lot of it’s going to China.
The farmers in Iowa and North Dakota, they’d like to get diesel in their tractors at 20% off, but no, we’re subsidizing the Chinese economy with our sanctions on Russia. Of course, Russia and China had 40 high-level meetings at the highest levels in the last 10 years.
Then a lot of other stuff that the Biden administration’s doing with the Middle East, where they’re driving the Saudis and everybody else closer to the Chinese. … Then, back home, at the time of that invasion, when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was 400,000 barrels of oil a day of equivalent, a lot of it dirty heating oil, just being offloaded into New England to heat homes in New England. That was happening there.
At the same time that was happening, and Biden had been going around in the midterms, trying to get … what? State Department went to Venezuela. Seven and a half million people left Venezuela, fled the country where there’s no human rights and no EPA.
The State Department was saying, “Venezuela, could you produce more oil and gas if the price is too high at the pump here” in the United States? Biden himself going to the Middle East, trying to get them to produce more — we know how that went.
Then, to get the price down at the pump, he drains the petroleum reserve from 800 million to 400 million barrels, which is … again, I don’t want to say it should have been against the law because there should be some definition of what strategic is. Because I don’t think, when we loaded that thing up, strategic meant, I’m sure, for the defense of the nation, not, “Let’s get the price down at the pump to help fight the inflation you created ahead of the midterms.”
You cannot separate economy from energy, from national security.
Washington Examiner: The border: Do you have any sense as to why this administration is ignoring it?
Doug Burgum: I don’t have an answer to your question about why the Biden administration’s doing it. I do know that the job of the president of the United States includes national security, and that includes border security.
One of the reasons I’m running is because, when elected, I will do the job that’s actually described the president is supposed to do, which includes border security. I’m heading down to the border … again. We have 240 North Dakota National Guard troops down there.
When you’re on the border and you see what’s actually happening, it’s not what’s really being reported. It’s being underreported because there’s entire sections of the border when I’ve been down there that are unguarded, and … there’s not even any technology in terms of knowing whether people are walking across or not. I take the Biden number for apprehensions and double or triple it based on my experience from down there.
Every state becomes a border state with the process that they’re using, but the thing that’s most disturbing, and why it has to be closed, is because the fentanyl — 110,000 deaths in this country of overdoses, 70% of those because of fentanyl-based products occurred in 2022. The year before under Biden was 107,000. We’re averaging, for two years in a row, 300 people a day dying of a fentanyl overdose and fentanyl-related, 70% of those cases.
We’re taking as casualties, and all the precursors we know are being made in China and then coming through the border. Again, when those people are dying, this is not the Democrat versus independent versus Republican issue. Closing the border apparently is a Republican issue because Biden refuses to actually do his job that he’s required to do by the Constitution to lead our national security.
When we’re out campaigning and somebody says, “We lost our granddaughter to an overdose,” or, “We found our son dead in his bed, and we didn’t even know he was using, but he bought a $30 Percocet pill that turned out to have fentanyl in it,” that just cuts across all the income groups, it cuts across all geographies, and it cuts across all political affiliations.
When I’m down there [at the southern border], talking to people in customs and Border Patrol, and I’m like, “Where is everybody?” They go, “Look, everybody that can take early retirement did because we signed up to be in law enforcement. We didn’t sign up to do paperwork.”
A lot of the folks that should be out on the border are back processing the tens of thousands of people that are coming across every week. They didn’t get into that job to be pushing paper. I’m not talking computers — I’m talking paper. They’re totally demoralized. They feel completely unsupported by the White House.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Then, how’s recruiting going? When I asked them how’s recruiting going, “Who would sign up today?” It’d be like the same cities that wanted to defund their police. Ask them how their recruiting is going in terms of new recruits.
If you disrespect the people that are enforcing the law and keeping our nation safe, people are going to say, “I don’t need to go into it. This job is hard enough, it’s dangerous enough, and then [to] be disrespected by the people who I’m actually every day putting my life on the line to try to protect?” We have to get back to honoring those people in uniform and those people in law enforcement in this country, because if we don’t, we’re just going to continue to see a complete degradation of respect for the rule of law in this country.
