INTERVIEW: Omeed Malik on the MAGA/MAHA partnership that’s reshaping American politics, and the “secret meeting at Mar-a-Lago” that made it happen

THE LOWDOWN:

• Successful businessman and entrepreneur Omeed Malik told the Reporter the MAGA/MAHA merger culminated with RFK, Jr.’s nomination to lead HHS.

• Malik was a key figure in the MAGA and MAHA movements merging.

• Malik was a critical player in the GOP’s big tent expansion in 2024 — now he has his sights set on competing with the Olympics by investing in the Enhanced Games, a new sporting contest that wants to “build superhumanity” by allowing athletes to take performance enhancers that would disqualify them from the Olympics.

The 2024 election represented the culmination of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) and Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movements uniting; this merger culminated with President Donald Trump nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Through it all, Omeed Malik, a successful businessman and entrepreneur, had a front row seat. As Democrats pushed for policies that bolstered China’s middle class at the expense of America’s own, backed “useless wars” abroad, and advocated for “radical gender ideology” at home, Malik found himself breaking with his former party. His “authentic evolution” allowed him to both support Kennedy during the 2024 Democratic Party primaries, which Kennedy was blacklisted from, and to bring Kennedy on board with Trump after the former ended his independent campaign for the presidency.

“This is no longer about just partisanship,” he said of how the two movements complement each other. “It's about common sense and loving the country and believing that you should have a nation state with borders; really basic stuff is what this coalition represents. My attraction to Bobby goes back to what I felt was going on during COVID; I had to support him, because he was such a hero, speaking out against the tyranny during that period of time. His very courageous stance meant that I wanted to platform him, especially in the Democratic primary against Biden, but what I also saw was just the fact that the Democratic Party doesn't believe in democracy.”

The MAGA/MAHA merger played out extensively throughout the transition process, which Malik played a key role in.

“My input from the private sector was really simple,” Malik said. “I wanted to get the most qualified folks who actually believed in the mission…there need to be two qualifications to be great. One, is you have to believe in the vision. And two, you have to be really smart. Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, is a perfect embodiment of that combination.”

Malik, a close personal friend of both Kennedy and Trump’s newly-minted Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. He played an “instrumental” role in getting the duo to a place where they felt comfortable endorsing Trump, a Trumpworld source told the Reporter.

“I did some shuttle diplomacy between both camps, and it culminated in a secret meeting at Mar-a-Lago in the middle of August with me, Bobby Kennedy, Donald Trump, Don Jr, who's my very close friend, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, and Susie Wiles,” he said. “And it was over a three hour meeting where we sketched out what this would look like. And just a week and a half after that meeting was that famous endorsement that took place in Arizona.”

Malik, who was Gabbard’s largest 2020 donor during her presidential campaign, had also spent years telling Trumpworld that she could be a valued asset on the campaign trail.

“I always was talking to Don Jr. about [Gabbard] all the way back to 2020,” he said. “I said ‘look man, as a former Democrat, I'm telling you these other guys, you want to bring them into the tent.’ And I was trying to explain that we basically agree on everything. We're against stupid foreign interventions that don't benefit us. We're against doing that while at the same time making China a superpower, literally creating a Frankenstein to the detriment of our own citizens. We're all against the open border, we're all against radical gender ideology. So every big ticket item that was going on the country, I know that these guys are on our side.”

When it comes to Gabbard specifically, Malik told Trump’s orbit that she “generally approaches [policies] from trying to seek peace and not doing stupid interventions, because she served herself and saw how bad that was in Iraq.”

“That was the biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history, which was done by a Republican, George W. Bush,” Malik said.

While Malik had been a major donor in the Democratic Party in the past, Trump’s 2016 victory changed his mind, and he never looked back.

“We pushed out the Ws, the Cheneys, and we've gotten the Kennedy’s and the Tulsis,” he said. “This is the greatest trade known to mankind.”

However, he thinks that there won’t be many more converts coming to the GOP from the Democratic Party’s ranks.

“If you didn't make that switch in this election, you're brainwashed,” he said. “If you are still on that side, you're a lost cause. If you didn't think that you needed to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 and you voted for a puppet like Kamala Harris, and the vegetable like Joe Biden, you have serious mental health issues, and I don't think there's anything we can do for you. So my biggest advice is to go seek professional help.”

Malik gives no thought to rumors that Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman (D., Pa.) will switch parties.

“He dresses like a slob, and he voted against every one of the appointees that we wanted him to,” he said. “He's fake. They don't have anybody who thinks outside of the box. That entire party is a party of sheep currently.”

Malik was a critical player in the GOP’s big tent expansion in 2024 — now he has his sights set on competing with the Olympics by investing in the Enhanced Games, a new sporting contest that wants to “build superhumanity” by allowing athletes to take performance enhancers that would disqualify them from the Olympics.

“We definitely are contrarians by nature, and if we think that there's something is just a cartel that's making money off noncompetition, then we're going to try to bust that up,” he said of the Olympics, which he called a “monopoly, just by default [with] arbitrary rules in order to enrich themselves.”

“In the Enhanced Games, we're not proposing to use illegal substances,” Malik said. “Anything that we're suggesting to use in the Enhanced Games is legal, and we think that it's a libertarian mindset, which is also consistent with the way we look at the world, to allow people to compete with the most legal enhancements on the market and see what happens. We're not saying the Olympics shouldn't exist, but why shouldn’t we have another version of it that I think is going to be more entertaining to people.”

Outside of sports, Malik’s next efforts are likely to include major investments in both artificial intelligence and in supporting efforts to bring back vocational education, he said. He recently brought Donald Trump Jr. on board at 1789 Capital, the venture capital firm he founded.

“We need to get back to vocational training in this country,” he said. “One of the biggest mistakes we made as a culture and as a society was to tell everyone that they should go to a four year university, so they can major in basket weaving and provide no value and then loan them money for them to go into debt to get this useless liberal arts degree, but they can’t do anything and can't participate in society. We should get trade schools back. We need to start teaching shop again in high school, which we don't do, and understand that you can actually make more money and be more productive in society if you have a vocational expertise. That's an area where I'd be really interested in providing funding to, because not only do I think it is the future, somewhat counterintuitively, it's also really good for our society.”

Below is a transcript of our interview with Omeed Malik, lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:

You are a businessman and entrepreneur. How do you feel the Trump presidency is going?

Omeed Malik:

It’s been absolutely phenomenal. It's exceeded even my very high expectations. I'm someone who knows a lot of the players who are in these positions, and I think they're doing a job that's bar none. Namely, I love what they're doing with DOGE. It's a long time coming that any leadership in this country thinks more than just a few months ahead, and what we're doing now is bringing down the unsustainable trillions of dollars of debt that's been put off into the future of this country. Is completely unsustainable. I'm in full support of what the administration is doing there. As a businessman, the economy is of the utmost importance to me, and we had people who had no idea how to be a steward of an economy in the Biden administration, because it was run by bureaucrats who’ve never worked in the private sector. What you have to do in response to that is you got to do a couple of things. One, you’ve got to cut the deficit, which is going to reduce borrowing rates long term. You've got to dismantle the excessive regulation, and you've got to cut taxes and keep them low. That's going to create growth, and that's how we're going to get out of the mess of the Biden administration put us in.

Washington Reporter:

You were one of Trump’s top donors and you were very involved in the transition. Tell us what that was like.

Omeed Malik:

My input from the private sector was really simple. I wanted to get the most qualified folks who actually believed in the mission, and I think that's an important point. The America First philosophy that Trump has championed, and that JD Vance is an heir apparent to, was relatively new when he first got elected. So the game in Washington, where basically Republicans and establishment Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, meant that you can't just pull from those same people, from the lobbyists within the Beltway. You have to go find people from outside of the system, and they didn’t have the time or expertise to do that. So what you end up having is there are two qualifications to be great. One, is you have to believe in the vision. And two, you have to be really smart. Eight years ago, you had either people who are just blindly loyal, but not that smart, or really smart, and were not really on the program. They were not really with us. They were RINOs undermining the president from within the administration. So here the goal is, how do you get the most exceptional talent who have the pedigree and experience, but then you couple that with people who actually really believe in this innovative, forward thinking America First ideology that's much more populist in nature. That was, I think, the prism to which you're looking at every one of these appointments in the cabinet. So let's take one example of that: Scott Bessent, for example. So as Treasury Secretary, you have to call on someone who really understands the bond market, who has an illustrious career on Wall Street, but has to agree with something like tariffs that the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal typically has not, which is where the demographic you call these people from. So I think he's a perfect kind of personification of what we're looking for in every aspect of this new cabinet, which is why it's the most intellectually diverse and impressive cabinet I've seen in my lifetime.

Washington Reporter:

Your political journey is very interesting. You went from a Democratic donor in New York City to a fervent Trump supporter. How did that happen?

Omeed Malik:

Well, I think the world changed, so I have some sympathy for other people who had my world view. You had a very different international system in, let's call it 2000. Then, the United States was looked at as a hegemon. So you had neoliberal and neoconservative thinking that said the United States imports its economy, or its opens up markets, that everyone will just become a liberal democracy. That was kind of the thesis. And a lot of us bought into that, whether you supported when I was younger, someone like Bill Clinton or Tony Blair, that's what they represented. And so it was a theoretically cool idea, I thought. And you know, quite frankly, I just found them more compelling than other politicians on the Republican side at that time. Now, if I look back, I think I'm excused for not thinking that Mitt Romney or John McCain were great people, so it's not like they were really offering me anything great. Then, a lot of positions that I had, that I really believed in, the Democratic Party started to abandon. So it really came to light to me right after Trump wins in 2016 and he started pointing out that globalization, the way that we had embraced it, had failed most of the American population, so that we had created a middle class in somewhere like China, and at the same time eviscerated a middle class in the United States based on our economic policies. And then, at the same time, we decimated that same cohort by sending them to useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And then to add the cherry on top, tell them that girls can become boys and getting them to embrace all this radical ideology. So it's like a trifecta of just kicking these people. So as opposed to getting upset about it, I started to say, well, there's this whole part of the country in 2016 that's just so pissed off. We need to change the way we go about things. And that's when I really started warming up to the Trump agenda. It was after he won, because it surprised me being from New York City, and I didn't get annoyed about it. I said I need to figure out why it happened. And so that's when I started getting closer to them. But ultimately, I was Tulsi Gabbard's first big supporter in her 2019 presidential campaign. I was her biggest donor. And when I started seeing how the Democratic Party was going after her, where they were calling her a Russian asset, and I'd seen that they were saying the same thing about Trump, I realized that the Democratic Party is now the McCarthyite party. They don't believe in free speech. They're pro-war, and I want nothing to do with these people. So that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back for me, and I went all in on the 2020 campaign to support Donald Trump, and was one of his first people from the Wall Street world to really go all in for him. And obviously I was 110 percent in. My evolution was really about the pro-war and anti-free speech, anti-due process mentality that I saw from the Democrats, culminating in COVID, which fully pushed me away from them, because it was the idiotic policies of blue state Democratic governors, continued by Biden when he got into power, that was draconian, not based in any rationality or science, that was just meant to take away our rights. And that's why they did it, even though all of the data suggested that their policies were idiotic. So that's when I moved to Florida and fully decided to support the kind of federalist policies we need to push back on what was going on on the blue state side, destroying places like New York and California. You don’t need to look any further than the failures of those states and cities. How can anyone be a Democrat when you see how they’ve ruined these cities? As an economic comparison, New York has some of the highest income taxes in the country. Florida has zero state income taxes. We run a surplus. They run a deficit. Someone explain that to me?

Washington Reporter:

How do you see these changes reflected in the MAGA/MAHA merger?

Omeed Malik:

It was personally extremely satisfying, because it mirrored my own personal evolution in that marriage. I'm just an avatar for it. It just so happened that I was able to bring those worlds together because I had one foot in both worlds. My very authentic evolution meant that I knew that there were tens of millions of people who maybe weren't as vocal as I was, who felt the same way in the country. And that's exactly what the Trump-Kennedy alliance represents. This is no longer about just partisanship. It's about common sense and loving the country and believing that you should have a nation state with borders; really basic stuff is what this coalition represents. My attraction to Bobby goes back to what I felt was going on during COVID; I had to support him, because he was such a hero, speaking out against the tyranny during that period of time. His very courageous stance meant that I wanted to platform him, especially in the Democratic primary against Biden, but what I also saw was just the fact that the Democratic Party doesn't believe in democracy. They kept him off the ballot in every state, and spent tens of millions of dollars doing that, just like they tried to do with Trump by throwing him to jail. What this means is that Democrats don't believe in democracy. They are the party of tyranny. I've also never seen anyone come closer to being a dictator in American history than Biden was. Don't forget, he tried to pass unconstitutional shot mandates for private employers that if they didn't take the shot during that period that a private employer could fire them. They tried to push that through OSHA until the Supreme Court determined that was unconstitutional. Of course, Bobby also wrote a very important book called The Real Anthony Fauci during that period, which spotlighted the corruption that takes place at our health apparatus under a corrupt bureaucrat like Anthony Fauci, who somehow was able to enrich himself to the tune of tens of millions of dollars despite never making more than several hundred thousand dollars a year in government for 50 years. Ask that question: how is he rich? The person who’s in charge of ethics within the HHS apparatus was his wife. This is why DOGE is so important. It's cutting all of this corruption out, and that's why you're seeing the pushback.

Washington Reporter:

You are close friends with Bobby Kennedy and played a key role in getting him to endorse Trump. Take us through that; how did you pull it off?

Omeed Malik:

I was in a unique position when he was running as a third party candidate, and when it became clear that he was going to take votes away also from Trump, and I saw that I could create an alliance there, because I knew that if Bobby came to Trump, we'd win, because he could potentially push over the president in battleground states, because I knew what a huge following he had. So I approached President Trump in August of 2024 and said, ‘look, I know I can get a deal done here.’ And the president said, ‘do whatever it takes’ to me. So I did, and I went back to Bobby and I said, ‘look, let's, let's come up with the contours of what this would look like.’ And I did some shuttle diplomacy between both camps, and it culminated in a secret meeting at Mar-a-Lago in the middle of August with me, Bobby Kennedy, Donald Trump, Don Jr, who's my very close friend, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, and Susie Wiles. And it was over a three hour meeting where we sketched out what this would look like. And just a week and a half after that meeting was that famous endorsement that took place in Arizona. It was crazy that I was thrust into that, but I knew I had to do it, and I'm really happy. And so much has changed since that meeting. Now, to your point, he's the most important health official in the world, and a year and a half ago, he was deplatformed from every social media platform, media platform, and any network would never even have the guy on and it just gives me a ton of hope, and I'm really happy that I played a small part in bringing sanity back to government and also creating, as you pointed out, a really important alliance. So that was how it went down. And if I hadn’t been a Democrat and hadn’t had that authentic evolution, I would never have been in a position to have the credibility with both sides to broker that deal, which is why I could do it.

Washington Reporter:

Can you walk us through how you also helped do this with Tulsi Gabbard?

Omeed Malik:

I think both Tulsi and Bobby are kind of transcendent figures in that respect, and they totally fall in really nicely to to the MAGA viewpoints. And so that's what I always was talking to Don Jr about, all the way back to 2020. I said ‘look man, as a former Democrat, I'm telling you these other guys, you want to bring them into the tent.’ And I was trying to explain that we basically agree on everything. We're against stupid foreign interventions that don't benefit us. We're against doing that while at the same time making China a superpower, literally creating a Frankenstein to the detriment of our own citizens. We're all against the open border, we're all against radical gender ideology. So every big ticket item that was going on the country, I know that these guys are on our side. Tulsi generally approaches it from trying to seek peace and not doing stupid interventions, because she served herself and saw how bad that was in Iraq. That was the biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history, which was done by a Republican, George W. Bush. We pushed out the Ws, the Cheneys, and we've gotten the Kennedys and the Tulsis. This is the greatest trade known to mankind. And I knew that Harris was going to lose when she was touting an endorsement by Liz Cheney. Who even cares about those neocons? They represent maybe 10 percent of the population of Washington, D.C. and its suburbs. No one cares about those people outside of that area, and that's who they were banking on as a great endorsement. Any party that thinks Liz Cheney and Megan Thee Stallion is an awesome coalition should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Washington Reporter:

Are there other Democrats you think you can pull over to Trump’s side?

Omeed Malik:

No. I think at this point, if you didn't make that switch in this election, you're brainwashed. If you are still on that side, you're a lost cause. If you didn't think that you needed to vote for Donald Trump in 2024 and you voted for a puppet like Kamala Harris, and the vegetable like Joe Biden, you have serious mental health issues, and I don't think there's anything we can do for you. So my biggest advice is to go seek professional help. Who's their big maverick? John Fetterman. Why? Because he dresses like a slob, and he voted against every one of the appointees that we wanted him to? He's fake. They don't have anybody who thinks outside of the box. That entire party is a party of sheep currently.

Washington Reporter:

You are business partners with Donald Trump Jr. at 1789 Capital, which you founded. What are you guys up to?

Omeed Malik:

We started this fund during the dark ages for us, which was the Biden administration, when we saw not only the weaponization of politics and culture, which we've now pushed back on successfully, but also in the private sector. We saw that what they were doing to take away our rights wasn't just passing shitty laws and bills, it was also they were using large monopolistic companies to take away our rights, whether it's the First or Second Amendment, quite frankly. So they would get a company that they would not have any antitrust enforcement whatsoever to become so big, and they would basically tell them to do their dirty work for them. Don't take my word for it, Mark Zuckerberg just went on Joe Rogan and admitted this, which is that you could not talk about what was actually going on during COVID. So that is not how it works. If the federal government is using a conduit to tell someone to take their First Amendment rights away, it's still a violation of the Constitution. They also did things like getting Stripe, which is a large payment processor to not process gun purchases. They have banks under the ESG paradigm, to not loan to companies that invest in fossil fuels. We look at this as absurd. The only way we're going to fight back in the private sector is with money, and we do have money on our side. I decided to do this when I saw a big venture capital firm called Sequoia, which is one of the oldest in Silicon Valley, had started a China only fund. They were investing in our biggest adversary. I went on Tucker’s show and I said ‘can you imagine a venture capital firm during the Cold War going saying, I'm only investing in the Soviet Union?’ What is wrong with these people? Not only do we have a messed up Democratic Party and all this. But even the private sector has gone crazy, and that was really when woke capital was at its highest. So what we're able to do is fight back by putting companies in a business that reflects the values of the majority of the country and have no ESG or DEI components in them whatsoever. We believe in what we've coined entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. So we have our own acronym it's called EIG, so it's actually about supporting companies that are going to uphold our rights. That's why one of our first investments was in the TCN network, which was Tucker's new company. That was our first investment from the fund, we're proud to say. But we also invest in defense tech companies that are gonna make America stronger. We invested in a company called Firehawk that creates rocket fuel for weapons, because we're not ashamed of supporting the U.S. military. We want us to be the strongest country in the world. We also invested in free speech platforms like Substack, which during COVID were really important to have. And we're taking a company public right now, Don Jr. and I, called GrabAGun, which is a company that is a gun retailer because we're not going to let the private sector take away our Second Amendment rights. Everything we do is to push back on the tyranny of ESG and of woke capital. We have a big battle ahead of us, but this is the other element of the fight. We're the leaders in it. 1789 Capital, which is named after the year that the Bill of Rights was introduced, is the only fund of its kind. And we've got a ton of firepower behind us, and we're just getting started.

Washington Reporter:

You and Trump Jr. are investors in the Enhanced Games — a rival to the Olympics. How’d that come across your radar?

Omeed Malik:

We definitely are contrarians by nature, and if we think that there's something is just a cartel that's making money off noncompetition, then we're going to try to bust that up. And so inherently, the Olympics is monopoly, just by default. They're the only game in town, and they make arbitrary rules in order to enrich themselves. And the reality is, it's also a complete canard, the way they try to be holier than thou. We've seen statistics that over half the participants in the Olympics are doping, so they’re all pretending that they're not doing it, but they really are; it is disingenuous. In the Enhanced Games, we're not proposing to use illegal substances. Anything that we're suggesting to use in the Enhanced Games is legal, and we think that it's a libertarian mindset, which is also consistent with the way we look at the world, to allow people to compete with the most legal enhancements on the market and see what happens. We're not saying the Olympics shouldn't exist, but why shouldn’t we have another version of it that I think is going to be more entertaining to people, as long as it's safe and legal. It's the same thing about purchasing a handgun. It's safe and legal, applies to the existing laws, so we should allow people to do it. The International Olympic Committee does whatever it wants. They don't want to hear it and we're not okay with that. We know that there's a market for it. For example, we also think fossil fuels are good. If you want to go invest in freaking windmills, go ahead. But don't tell us that we can't invest in natural gas. We're going to do that.

Washington Reporter:

What do you see as the next frontier for innovation that most people aren’t thinking about yet?

Omeed Malik:

As far as a policy, there are two things that have to happen at once. One, we are invested in AI. We invest in almost all of Elon Musk’s companies; we're investors in xAI, which is his company. And what is going to happen with AI is that we want competition there, and we think it's going to make a lot of the private sector, particularly the white collar sector, be more efficient. There's a lot of people sitting around making six figures who don't really add any value. What's interesting, though, is that it's not like the industrial revolution of half a century ago, where it was workers who use their hands that are being pushed out. It's white collar people who are made expendable with AI. And what I think that means is we need to get back to vocational training in this country. One of the biggest mistakes we made as a culture and as a society was to tell everyone that they should go to a four year university, so they can major in basket weaving and provide no value and then loan them money for them to go into debt to get this useless liberal arts degree, but they can’t do anything and can't participate in society. We should get trade schools back. We need to start teaching shop again in high school, which we don't do, and understand that you can actually make more money and be more productive in society if you have a vocational expertise. That's an area where I'd be really interested in providing funding to, because not only do I think it is the future, somewhat counterintuitively, it's also really good for our society.

Washington Reporter:

Thank you so much for chatting today, Omeed.