The Charlie Kirk Show - 6 Presidents Who Tried to Drain the Swamp with Larry Schweikart
Aired: 2022-02-18
Duration: 36:01


=== Presidents vs The Swamp (03:26) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:00:01]  Dragon Slayers.
[00:00:02]  What presidents have tried to take on the swamp and have they been successful before?
[00:00:07]  We talk about that and so much more on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show with Larry Schweikert, author of Dragon Slayers.
[00:00:14]  You guys can email me as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:18]  Just email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:21]  If you want to support our show, go to charliekirk.com/slash support.
[00:00:24]  That's charliekirk.com/slash support and get involved with Turning PointUSA today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:32]  That's tpusa.com, where we play offense with a sense of urgency to win the American Culture War.
[00:00:39]  tpusa.com.
[00:00:42]  Buckle up, everybody.
[00:00:43]  Here we go.
[00:00:44]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:46]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
[00:00:48]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:51]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:00:54]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:00:56]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:00:57]  His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
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[00:01:28]  I'm honored and excited to have a conversation with someone that I have followed on Twitter.
[00:01:34]  When I used to have Twitter for quite some time, he had the best Twitter feed going into the 2020 election.
[00:01:41]  He's a smart man, and it's an honor to have him on the show.
[00:01:43]  Larry Schweikert, author of Dragon Slayer, Six Presidents and Their War with the Swamp.
[00:01:49]  Larry, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
[00:01:51]  How are you doing, Charlie?
[00:01:52]  Yeah, those are the glory days when I had 130,000 Twitter followers.
[00:01:58]  Those were the glory days.
[00:02:00]  And forget the followers.
[00:02:01]  The wisdom you had was extraordinary.
[00:02:03]  I got to tell you, you were spot on.
[00:02:06]  You predicted Florida going landslide for Trump before anybody else.
[00:02:10]  You were on top of that thing.
[00:02:11]  You really were.
[00:02:12]  So, first, just tell our audience about your background.
[00:02:15]  And then I want to talk about your book, which I find to be super interesting.
[00:02:18]  Sure.
[00:02:19]  Well, I'm a native Arizonian and I went to Arizona State University and got a degree in political science, which I found totally useless.
[00:02:28]  And then I joined a rock band.
[00:02:31]  I'd been playing rock and roll all my time through college and high school.
[00:02:34]  And we went on the road and opened for groups like Steppenwolf and Savoy Brown and cut a couple of records that didn't go anywhere.
[00:02:46]  It was interesting.
[00:02:47]  Somebody brought up today the Who.
[00:02:49]  We played the Troubadour, which is the place that broke Delton John.
[00:02:53]  And we had one set on a Monday night.
[00:02:56]  And the Who came in just after we started our set and stayed through the whole set.
[00:03:01]  And when we got done, they walked off.
[00:03:03]  They slapped me on the back.
[00:03:04]  Pete Townsend slaps me on the back and goes, play good show, walk.
[00:03:08]  So they were totally drunk.
[00:03:10]  So I don't know what that said about our music.
[00:03:12]  Okay.
[00:03:13]  Well, so you're the author of this new book, Dragon Slayers.
[00:03:17]  So as Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, my man Teddy Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.

=== Calvin Coolidge And Fiat Currency (06:04) ===

[00:03:26]  So, and thank you.
[00:03:28]  Please promote it.
[00:03:29]  It's a very interesting take.
[00:03:31]  It says, you basically six presidents and their war with the swamp.
[00:03:35]  So the way we define the swamp on this program is the fourth branch of government, the deep state, the unelected, right?
[00:03:41]  Kind of the German historicist model of infiltrating the constitutional order with a subversive, suppressive group of people that are always trying to have their agenda implemented.
[00:03:52]  How would you define it?
[00:03:54]  Well, I like Bannon's definition, which is the administrative state.
[00:03:59]  And it was started early on.
[00:04:04]  It really starts with Martin Van Buren, one of the people who came out more than almost anybody else in history because he was the eighth president.
[00:04:16]  Right.
[00:04:18]  And as I said, he stepped on the stage, just collapsed, had a massive financial panic the minute he became president.
[00:04:26]  But he had created a spoil system to protect slavery.
[00:04:31]  And this is why I try to insist to people, you know, the Democratic Party was created and founded and formed for one purpose only, and that was to protect and preserve slavery.
[00:04:44]  That was the entire basis for which Van Buren and Andrew Jackson create the party.
[00:04:49]  And to do so, they set up a system whereby loyalists to the party would be rewarded with jobs, what we call the spoil system or, you know, the administrative state, because you got to put these guys somewhere.
[00:05:01]  So you put them in bureaus and agencies and so on and so forth.
[00:05:06]  And up till the time of the Civil War, this wasn't a very big deal because the Democrats more or less had total control of government for about 30 years.
[00:05:15]  But then Lincoln gets elected and everything changes because now it's sort of like Trump, the wrong guy's in charge of this giant apparatus that we built and could be a real threat with it.
[00:05:27]  So I deal with Lincoln's war with the slave swamp, which was also known as the slave power conspiracy.
[00:05:35]  And it was very real.
[00:05:36]  It was a real group.
[00:05:38]  And he was a genius in how he and the other Republicans of the day figured out, you know, slavery is not in the Constitution.
[00:05:45]  They don't mention the word slave.
[00:05:47]  They talk about unfree persons.
[00:05:50]  And they latched onto the personhood of black people to emancipate them.
[00:05:55]  Because if the Southerners had had their way, they would have been treated as property.
[00:06:00]  But nowhere in the Constitution are slaves mentioned as property.
[00:06:04]  They're always people.
[00:06:06]  So when we come out of Lincoln's time, we get to Grover Cleveland, whom I call the last good Democrat.
[00:06:14]  And he's faced with this giant spoil system now that Lincoln created to run the war.
[00:06:22]  And what you find is that people, especially in the Grand Army of the Republic and other veterans groups, are getting tons of money from the federal government, and they never even were in the war.
[00:06:34]  I mean, you got guys claiming pensions that fell out of a tree two years after the war, right?
[00:06:39]  And so Cleveland is amazing in that he steps in to attack this swamp.
[00:06:47]  And next to Lincoln is the most successful of all of our presidents in dealing with it because he really cuts it down.
[00:06:54]  They pass a bill called the Pendleton Civil Service Act, which, like most reforms, doesn't really fix the problem, just kind of shifts it to a different direction.
[00:07:06]  But at least Cleveland fixed the notion that Congress and the president would get tens of thousands of these requests for bailouts and personal money and pensions and all this kind of stuff.
[00:07:21]  So from Cleveland, we get to Teddy Roosevelt.
[00:07:24]  And Roosevelt has a different kind of swamp that's been growing the whole time Cleveland is dealing with the spoil swamp, and that is these giant corporations.
[00:07:34]  And it's very interesting.
[00:07:36]  Most people don't know this.
[00:07:37]  The reason Roosevelt was such a trust buster was that he felt he was protecting business in America from the media, the press, journalism, that he thought the journalism, the muckrakers were going to touch a war against business that they were going to burn down the whole capitalist system.
[00:08:02]  And Roosevelt, right or wrong, truly believed that he was saving capitalism from this group of muckrapers.
[00:08:10]  And of course, he was very successful in reining in the truly big corporations of the day.
[00:08:16]  What he didn't do was rein in the media.
[00:08:20]  And so we're going to pay a price for his failure today because he didn't put in place any measures to control the media, you know?
[00:08:31]  Mark that up to nobody's perfect and nobody can see everything.
[00:08:36]  So you don't have some of the other presidents I thought you would have.
[00:08:41]  You don't have Calvin Coolidge.
[00:08:42]  You don't have...
[00:08:43]  Well, Warren G. Harding had his own problems, but you don't have Calvin Coolidge and you kind of wait a little bit and then you get to Kennedy.
[00:08:50]  Sure, you have a lot on Kennedy.
[00:08:51]  And I mean, he tried to expose the CIA and many other agencies.
[00:08:55]  Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:08:56]  Kennedy's problem was that while he felt he was being controlled and manipulated by the CIA and wanted to expose them, he needed them too much.
[00:09:05]  He needed them in Cuba.
[00:09:06]  He needed them in Berlin.
[00:09:08]  And he needed them in Laos and Vietnam.
[00:09:11]  And so you end up with a kind of view of Kennedy that he had to almost lie to himself to perpetuate the CIA and keep them going when on many occasions he says, you know, I need to get rid of these guys.
[00:09:27]  But the bottom line is he did not.

=== Kennedy Exposing The CIA (02:21) ===

[00:09:31]  Yeah.
[00:09:31]  And so there is a lot of different components to that.
[00:09:34]  But if I remember correctly, he also kind of waged war on the fiat currency model as well, which was a whole separate issue of how kind of the banking system was going to be rigged against regular everyday Americans.
[00:09:47]  So, and then you have Reagan and Trump.
[00:09:48]  I want to get into both of those.
[00:09:49]  But I think that the thesis you're getting into is, you know, these six presidents more than any others, they made great attempts to actually rein in the unelected power structure.
[00:10:01]  And I guess the question is how successful were they?
[00:10:03]  Because you look at some of them.
[00:10:06]  You know, Reagan was shot.
[00:10:08]  Kennedy was shot and killed.
[00:10:10]  Lincoln was shot and killed.
[00:10:11]  Trump was spied on.
[00:10:14]  You know, Teddy Roosevelt, was Tony Roosevelt ever shot at?
[00:10:17]  I'm sure he was.
[00:10:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:10:19]  And don't forget that Cleveland's predecessor, Chester Arthur, became president only because the president Garfield was shot and killed.
[00:10:31]  He had two predecessors, because he served non-consecutive terms.
[00:10:36]  We will dive into that.
[00:10:37]  And I love the book, Dragon Slayers by Larry Schweikert.
[00:10:41]  I'm so excited to be talking to you.
[00:10:43]  I've followed you for years.
[00:10:47]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
[00:10:48]  You should be very concerned about today's headlines.
[00:10:51]  I am too.
[00:10:52]  It's not looking good.
[00:10:53]  So here's the thing.
[00:10:54]  You need to rely on yourself, especially when it comes to food.
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[00:11:50]  So talk to us about Reagan.
[00:11:52]  Sure.

=== Reagan Reducing Government Size (14:55) ===

[00:11:53]  I do want to mention Coolidge because you like Coolidge, and I have him as my fourth best president, Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, Coolidge, Trump.
[00:12:04]  And Trump is not for only because he's so far only served one term.
[00:12:07]  If he serves two terms, he'll be moved up to number four position.
[00:12:12]  But the reason Coolidge didn't make the book is that, first of all, Harding did a lot of the heavy lifting when he came in.
[00:12:21]  He dramatically scaled down the size of government, got rid of a lot of these agencies, cut a lot of government personnel, ended government-owned and run railroads and shipbuilding.
[00:12:34]  So Coolidge, in a lot of ways, coasted on Harding's already very good record.
[00:12:41]  He didn't need to do a lot when he came in.
[00:12:44]  So after Kennedy's death, there was a major transformation in the swamp.
[00:12:50]  And it was this.
[00:12:52]  The administrative agencies, the bureaucracy, had previously been more or less regulated by Congress.
[00:13:01]  It was Congress's authority to oversee them.
[00:13:04]  And in the late 60s under Johnson, early 70s under Nixon, the Congress stopped doing that.
[00:13:13]  And they basically handed off that authority to the courts.
[00:13:18]  And the problem there was that the courts were more or less lazy.
[00:13:22]  And they said, well, if Congress authorized this agency, this bureaucracy, Congress must know what it's doing.
[00:13:29]  So we will let the agency or bureaucracy kind of define itself in its own rules and its own regulations, which, of course, is a disaster.
[00:13:37]  I mean, you're letting the people who are supposed to be regulated regulate themselves.
[00:13:42]  And so that's when it really started to get out of the control of either Congress or president or the courts.
[00:13:50]  And it's been almost impossible to rein in.
[00:13:53]  And Reagan tried his best.
[00:13:55]  I will say he did philosophically do the best job in the modern era till Trump of framing government as a problem.
[00:14:04]  He was very good at messaging that.
[00:14:06]  I wouldn't say that he was technically as effective as we would have liked, far better than George H.W. Bush.
[00:14:12]  H.W. Bush loved the era of big government and unelected bureaucracies.
[00:14:17]  He ran the CIA, for goodness sake, for years.
[00:14:20]  So he knows all about that.
[00:14:22]  But unfortunately, you know, Reagan, he lost plenty of battles, even though he won some, especially towards the later years in his presidency.
[00:14:31]  And then finally, Trump.
[00:14:33]  So you have a PhD.
[00:14:34]  You're supposed to hate Trump.
[00:14:35]  Why would you put him on your list of presidents you like?
[00:14:38]  No, I think Trump is the epitome of what an American president should be.
[00:14:43]  People don't understand.
[00:14:44]  He is probably the most federalist of all of our presidents going back to Washington.
[00:14:51]  If you go back to all the debates, whether it's over the wall, whether it's over almost any of the policy issues, Trump would always say to Congress, pass a law.
[00:15:02]  This is your bailiwick.
[00:15:03]  You need to handle this.
[00:15:04]  But if you don't, I will.
[00:15:07]  And the problem was, of course, Congress had no interest in solving these problems.
[00:15:13]  And so, but Trump was constantly trying to hand over control to the legislative body, and they simply wouldn't take it.
[00:15:21]  Now, the really horrible thing, and I think I came to some of this conclusion with new research after the book came out, but it was in the Chinavirus management.
[00:15:35]  I'm convinced that Mike Pence and his deputy got to Trump and fed him a line about federalism.
[00:15:45]  Mr. President, you're into federalism.
[00:15:48]  You believe in federalism.
[00:15:50]  Let the states handle the China virus.
[00:15:53]  Let the states handle it.
[00:15:54]  And to Trump, that sounded good.
[00:15:56]  It sounds reasonable, but you've got to go one step further and say, what does that mean?
[00:16:00]  And what that meant was no state had a medical examiner or a head of medical policy within the state who could in any way compete with the CDC.
[00:16:12]  So what that did, the quote, federalist approach to the China virus, was to hand authority of the China virus over to Dr. Fallacy.
[00:16:23]  I'm going to ask you about that then, because in the longer segment, I want to ask how effective were these dragon slayers?
[00:16:29]  Because I'm a friend of Trump.
[00:16:32]  I support him 100%.
[00:16:33]  He's terrific.
[00:16:34]  But I think, you know, the dragon slayer against the dragon, Fauci, did Fauci win?
[00:16:40]  Don't answer it now.
[00:16:40]  That's a question, though, right?
[00:16:42]  Because in some ways, you know, Trump's instincts were like, who is this serpent?
[00:16:48]  Why is he here?
[00:16:49]  And Fauci kind of ran our government for the most critical year.
[00:16:56]  Look, there's so much political pressure out there from the left and the woke mob, and it's from the Democrat Party.
[00:17:01]  Our society has ultimately been controlled by cancel cultural elites.
[00:17:05]  Look, we talk openly on this program about what you need to do.
[00:17:10]  And so I am involved.
[00:17:12]  I am invested personally and also through the Charlie Kirk show to try to do everything we possibly can to try and push back against these Democrats and their lies.
[00:17:22]  And so look, you can get a signed picture by President Trump himself.
[00:17:24]  Look, I vetted this.
[00:17:26]  It's terrific.
[00:17:27]  And not only will you be taking a stand against the radical left, you'll be entering the Winnipeg history itself.
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[00:17:38]  That's V-I-C-T-O-R-Y to 55404.
[00:17:42]  Join me in standing up for President Trump and canceling the radical left.
[00:17:46]  Look, here's what we're really doing, though.
[00:17:47]  We're building a grassroots army to push back to try to win the Senate race in Georgia, try to win the Senate race in Arizona.
[00:17:53]  This is paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
[00:17:56]  And I could tell you this, we have got to retire Chuck Schumer.
[00:17:59]  So text right now to win a signed picture with President Trump, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y 55404.
[00:18:06]  Take out your phone right now, free of charge, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y 55404.
[00:18:16]  So let me ask you, how successful or how effective was Trump in particular being a dragon slayer?
[00:18:24]  Well, Trump came in wanting to drain the swamp, as he said, multiple times.
[00:18:30]  What people missed was his definition of draining the swamp at that time was to get rid of the K-Street lobbyists.
[00:18:38]  He wanted to get rid of the lobbying influence on DC.
[00:18:43]  And, you know, I was pretty close at that time with Steve Bannon.
[00:18:47]  I had worked with him in the 2016 campaign quite a bit.
[00:18:50]  And they had no idea coming in that the Intel communities, the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ were so incredibly politicized.
[00:19:04]  They really thought they were going to make inroads in attacking some of these problems.
[00:19:08]  And they were, I think, taken a little bit aback by the fact that, first of all, Sessions' recusal just floored them.
[00:19:18]  Don't let me go off on sessions because I could be here all hour on how he so damaged the country, not just in failing to oppose the Ma Russia thing, but he did nothing against sanctuary city mayors.
[00:19:32]  He did nothing against governors who were opposing immigration laws.
[00:19:40]  He did nothing about the protests by Antifa, nothing at all.
[00:19:44]  In a dozen ways, even if you exclude the Russia hoax, Sessions was probably our worst attorney general ever.
[00:19:52]  So I think all of that just really, I think that knocked him off guard for a good six or eight months before they figured out we're going to have to take a flamethrower to this.
[00:20:03]  We're not going to be able to just replace people.
[00:20:05]  This is an infestation that's going to require, you know, the Terminex people come out.
[00:20:11]  Yes, yes.
[00:20:12]  So let me ask you, it's an interesting premise, your book, because it's very focused, right?
[00:20:18]  It's very focused on trying to take the power away from the unelected and back to the people.
[00:20:26]  And so if you had to rank these six people, who was the most effective president who was a dragon slayer?
[00:20:33]  Who really was able to win against these institutional forces?
[00:20:39]  Was it Lincoln, Cleveland, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, or Trump?
[00:20:44]  Well, the book is actually divided into two parts, winners and losers.
[00:20:48]  Oh, there you go.
[00:20:48]  And the first three, Lincoln, Cleveland, and Teddy Roosevelt, to one degree or another, one.
[00:20:53]  Lincoln was the most successful because he had a whole half of the country geographically and regionally aligned with him.
[00:21:03]  And of course, they fought a war.
[00:21:05]  And it is easier to accomplish your goals in wartime when you can just by fiat say, you know, you people are terrorists.
[00:21:12]  We're not going to let you vote again until you ratify the 13th Amendment or whatever it is.
[00:21:17]  Cleveland was very effective, but the Pendleton Act just shifted the spoil system away from individual jobs.
[00:21:28]  Here, I'll make you customs commissioner.
[00:21:30]  I'll make you federal marshal and moved it toward lobbying interest groups.
[00:21:35]  And Cleveland didn't see that.
[00:21:37]  Like I say, you can't expect these guys to be prophets and see everything.
[00:21:41]  TR was extremely effective against big business, except when it came to the media and the power of the press, which is the entire reason he attacks big business.
[00:21:52]  The latter three were largely ineffective.
[00:21:55]  JFK needed the swamp too much.
[00:21:59]  He needed the CIA too much to achieve his foreign policy goals to really do anything about it.
[00:22:05]  Reagan, let me put in a plug for my book from two years ago, Reagan, the American president.
[00:22:10]  I spent a lot of time in the Reagan papers in Simi Valley, a lot of time.
[00:22:17]  And Reagan started off.
[00:22:20]  One of his three main things was to reduce the size of government.
[00:22:24]  What you'll notice is that after about 1983, he quit even mentioning that.
[00:22:28]  And one of the reasons I found in some of the papers was the agencies themselves, surprise, surprise, were pushing back.
[00:22:36]  They said, oh, we can't cut our budget.
[00:22:38]  We've already spent all of it.
[00:22:40]  You know, I get this from one department that said, how am I going to cut my budget?
[00:22:44]  I've already spent all of it.
[00:22:46]  And then Trump comes in.
[00:22:47]  And like I say, I think his idea of what the swamp was when he came in was much different than when he left.
[00:22:54]  And as Bannon said, I expect when he comes back, he's coming back with a flamethrower.
[00:22:59]  So I suppose let's just focus on Lincoln in particular.
[00:23:03]  You know, he was able to kind of marshal half the country together.
[00:23:08]  What else, like tactically, can a second term Trump do to learn from Lincoln or these other presidents to remove this infestation?
[00:23:17]  I mean, going at the flamethrower, I understand what that means, sort of, but how would you do it?
[00:23:22]  I mean, like, you can't fire Fauci, or can you?
[00:23:25]  I mean, what wisdom from the people that have fought these battles before can a future president apply to not just say it, but to actually win this fight?
[00:23:35]  Yeah, that's a great question.
[00:23:36]  And, you know, it's interesting you mentioned Dr. Fallacy again because Bannon told me that when they went in, they were instructed.
[00:23:45]  He didn't tell me by who.
[00:23:46]  I know it was Yertle, and I know it was RuPaul.
[00:23:50]  That would be McConnell and Paul Ryan if you don't follow Larry's nicknames list.
[00:23:54]  Okay.
[00:23:55]  So Yertle told him, keep your hands off Francis Collins and keep your hands off Dr. Fallacy, right?
[00:24:03]  And Bannon said they were prohibited from the get-go and that going after these guys.
[00:24:08]  Come on.
[00:24:09]  No, I'm laughing at the nicknames.
[00:24:11]  You want Nancy Pelosi, Botoxic?
[00:24:13]  No, I love that.
[00:24:14]  I need them all.
[00:24:15]  I'm laughing at you.
[00:24:18]  Okay, so five days a week, I do a news column: today's news on uncovereddc.com, and right at the bottom are all of the nicknames.
[00:24:26]  And I've started using nicknames for cities like San Francisco is New Mogadishu, and Chicago has been ghazy by the lake, right?
[00:24:37]  So, but what you could learn is that Trump has to go in next time, understanding he's going to need allies in the Senate and in the House.
[00:24:47]  And I think he'll have far more this time than he had before.
[00:24:50]  We got rid of, you know, McCain's gone and we got rid of a lot of these guys that Wicker and some of these people just were useless.
[00:24:58]  But we've got to replace him in this Senate race and in 24 with MAGA people who are going to go in and support Trump.
[00:25:07]  And by that, I mean not impeach him when he kicks out Christopher Wright and says, I'm sorry, we're going to put a head of the FBI in who's actually going to do something.
[00:25:16]  So that's incredibly important.
[00:25:19]  Let me ask you, you said something interesting.
[00:25:20]  You said he was the most federalist president.
[00:25:24]  You're an authority on that.
[00:25:25]  I won't challenge that.
[00:25:26]  So let's just take it as is.
[00:25:28]  But should he have been more embracing of executive power?
[00:25:33]  Well, that's a good point because he would have followed everybody from FDR on in terms of embracing that power.
[00:25:42]  With Trump, though, the problem was always he was walking this tightwire where if he stepped a little bit too far to one side, he was going to get impeached.
[00:25:52]  And I don't mean just from Botoxic and her ilk.
[00:25:55]  I mean from the Rhino Republicans and the Senate that was there.
[00:26:00]  He could have been removed.
[00:26:01]  And so he had to walk a very fine line so as not to get removed from office by the Senate.
[00:26:08]  And I think if we get five or 10 more MAGA people in in the next two years, that won't even be a consideration.
[00:26:16]  And he will have considerable more authority to do as you say, to be more of a less of a federalist president and more of a TR type, which I wouldn't like to see, but different times call for different measures.
[00:26:32]  Yeah, I mean, I philosophically agree with you for sure, but I'm more open-minded to using executive power to get us back into alignment with constitutional principles than ever before.
[00:26:44]  And I think that it's a dangerous precedent, but we're already kind of in wartime.

=== Civil War In America Today (05:09) ===

[00:26:49]  You know that.
[00:26:49]  We're already in a not-so-cold civil war happening.
[00:26:53]  It's not kinetic, but definitely is heating up.
[00:26:57]  Where, you know, when Trump actually started to embrace this, though, was when all of a sudden he realized he could get parts of the border wall in the Yuma sector by using the reappropriation of national defense funds, right?
[00:27:09]  I think that Trump was embracing some of the, let's say, more Aggressive interpretations of Article II, you know, as he lost both chambers of Congress.
[00:27:21]  And, you know, the left, they've always been willing to push, you know, boundaries that.
[00:27:26]  But I want to ask you, with just a couple minutes remaining, wasn't Teddy Roosevelt a little bit embracing of that?
[00:27:31]  Didn't he push the boundaries for executive power?
[00:27:34]  Yeah, very much so, which is which is why he's not in my top five favorite presidents.
[00:27:39]  I think he went too far.
[00:27:40]  And you can attribute all of Roosevelt's weakness in terms of his over-aggressiveness sometimes in going after business to the fact that of all the things TR did in his life, he never ran a business.
[00:27:55]  He had this cattle ranch out there, but he never ran it.
[00:27:59]  He never met a payroll.
[00:28:01]  He never had to deal with balancing the books in a downtime.
[00:28:05]  It was just a playground to him.
[00:28:08]  I wanted to mention one thing to you, though.
[00:28:10]  I raised the issue of the FBI to a rather powerful member of the House.
[00:28:17]  I'm not going to give you his name, but you just have to trust me.
[00:28:21]  This guy's up there.
[00:28:22]  And he agreed.
[00:28:23]  He said the FBI is out of control and the whole institution needs to be taken down to the studs.
[00:28:29]  He said, but finding the right people who will do that is another thing.
[00:28:35]  And it's not something you go around saying openly in Washington, but he says it is totally out of control.
[00:28:42]  And we need MAGA people in who are going to look at it like, we don't just need a new FBI director.
[00:28:49]  We need a new FBI.
[00:28:51]  And so I've taken to calling them the fine people at the FBI for that Charlottesville slander that they use on Trump all the time.
[00:28:58]  So, Charlie, anytime you refer to the FBI, it's always the fine people.
[00:29:02]  There you go.
[00:29:03]  That's why I think Trump could do, or whomever is president in the future that believes in the Constitution.
[00:29:11]  There is a fair amount that an executive can do.
[00:29:14]  I mean, Lincoln, he was willing to use executive power, suspension of habeas corpus, amongst many other things, even without congressional approval at times.
[00:29:25]  And so that's something that I want to explore with you a little bit.
[00:29:29]  And I also have to ask you about a couple presidents you don't have on your list.
[00:29:35]  One in particular that is one of my favorite presidents, and we might totally disagree on this.
[00:29:39]  And you're the historian, so you're going to win the argument, but that's okay.
[00:29:42]  I'll still believe it, which is someone who I think sent out one of the most clear, clarion calls of warning against a swamp or a deep state.
[00:29:52]  You probably already might know who it is.
[00:29:53]  Don't say it yet.
[00:29:54]  Someone I have a great admiration for, and someone who I think actually had a lot in common with Donald Trump and why he didn't make your list and whether or not he was successful.
[00:30:04]  Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
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[00:31:08]  Okay, I got to ask you, dragon slayers.
[00:31:11]  The man who tried to warn us about the military-industrial complex and the scientific industrial complex was Dwight D. Eisenhower.
[00:31:19]  Was he not a dragon slayer?
[00:31:21]  Well, I thought you were going to say Andrew Jackson.
[00:31:23]  Boy, I was ready to unload on Jackson.
[00:31:25]  No.
[00:31:26]  But Eisenhower was a pretty good president, but he just was a little bit ambivalent.
[00:31:35]  He didn't push anything.
[00:31:37]  He sort of is one of these go-along to get along presidents.
[00:31:40]  I know my co-author Mike Allen disagrees.
[00:31:42]  Mike Allen is a very, very big Ike fan.
[00:31:47]  And I attribute a lot of that to the fact that Eisenhower had terrible health after 1955.
[00:31:53]  But, you know, he might make the second 10, you know, a draft pick to be named later.

=== Near Extinction For Democrats (04:02) ===

[00:31:58]  Yeah.
[00:31:59]  So, I mean, Eisenhower used executive power as well.
[00:32:02]  You know, he mobilized the National Guard to Little Rock.
[00:32:06]  He was willing to challenge this whole idea of the military-industrial complex.
[00:32:11]  But you're right.
[00:32:11]  I mean, he's really not known for many domestic wins.
[00:32:15]  I mean, the National Highway program, the Interstate Highway Program was one of them.
[00:32:19]  Let me ask you about a couple other presidents.
[00:32:21]  So, you know, you kind of look at going up.
[00:32:24]  You said that Van Buren was kind of the creation of the deep state swamp.
[00:32:27]  Would you say that is about right?
[00:32:29]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:32:30]  So prior to that, you know, whether it be Washington, Adams, Jefferson, you know, Madison, Monroe, and the kind of, you know, ramping up, we do get to Jackson.
[00:32:40]  You're not a fan?
[00:32:42]  Not a fan.
[00:32:44]  He caused government to grow.
[00:32:45]  I did a study that I never published on the size of population of government, the number of offices.
[00:32:51]  So he caused government to grow, number one.
[00:32:53]  Number two, he destroyed a perfectly good private institution called the Bank of the United States, only one-fifth public, and he divvied the money up among all of his pet bank cronies.
[00:33:06]  Number three, he crushed the Indians, contrary to what the Supreme Court said.
[00:33:11]  And, you know, he's a slave owner, and he's the part and parcel of that Democrat elite, the slave swamp that Lincoln's trying to fix.
[00:33:22]  Well, that sounds pretty convincing.
[00:33:24]  Trump liked Jackson, though.
[00:33:25]  He had a picture of Jackson.
[00:33:27]  Why did Trump like him?
[00:33:28]  I don't know.
[00:33:29]  I've got to talk to him about that.
[00:33:31]  I haven't had a chance to sit down with Trump.
[00:33:33]  I've missed him two times, both at Trump Tower and then later in Florida.
[00:33:40]  You hang with us.
[00:33:41]  We'll get him with you.
[00:33:41]  He'll sign a copy of your book.
[00:33:43]  So in closing, average person reads this book, they hear our interview.
[00:33:47]  What's the takeaway?
[00:33:48]  Can the dragon be slayed?
[00:33:50]  Can self-government be restored?
[00:33:52]  Yes, but it's going to take an executive with vision and energy and a desire to reduce it.
[00:33:59]  It will take not necessarily a legislature that's in tune with him to help him.
[00:34:05]  All they have to do is not oppose him.
[00:34:08]  And then third, and most important, it'll take a public which is ready to embrace these ideas.
[00:34:13]  And I think we're getting there.
[00:34:15]  Are you starting to see that?
[00:34:16]  Historically, let me ask you with the six dragon slayers outside of Trump, is there usually a correlated grassroots populist movement alongside of it of people that are demanding it?
[00:34:24]  Not populists, but you know what I mean.
[00:34:26]  Oh, yeah, absolutely.
[00:34:27]  I mean, the Republicans and the free soilers in the North vastly outnumbered the slave owners in the South.
[00:34:34]  I could go through each one of them, but yeah, there is a popular movement that helps mobilize everyone.
[00:34:40]  And, you know, I think we're getting there.
[00:34:45]  I mean, the tide has definitely turned since 2018 in a way I've never seen in American politics.
[00:34:52]  I think the Democrats are in for a massive bloodbath in 20, only held back by the fact that we won 20 seats or so back in 2020.
[00:35:03]  If not for that, you'd be looking at a shift of 60 or 80 seats.
[00:35:07]  Yeah, I think it's a near-extinction event that the Democrats could be looking at.
[00:35:11]  I think it could be a seismic generational change where they have to totally rebrand and reintroduce themselves to the American public over the next couple decades.
[00:35:22]  That's what Dannon says.
[00:35:23]  And there's an article today about how they've already totally lost the rural areas.
[00:35:27]  Yeah, it's basically extinct, gone forever.
[00:35:30]  There is no coming back.
[00:35:31]  But we got to fix our elections, which is part of the deep state as well.
[00:35:34]  That's a separate issue.
[00:35:35]  Thank you so much, Larry, for joining us.
[00:35:37]  Dragon Slayer is the name of the book.
[00:35:39]  Check it out right now.
[00:35:40]  It is terrific.
[00:35:41]  And the winners and the losers, it's a two-part book.
[00:35:44]  And we'll have to have you back on.
[00:35:45]  Really appreciate it.
[00:35:46]  Thanks, Charlie.
[00:35:48]  Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
[00:35:49]  Email us your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:35:52]  Thank you so much for listening.
[00:35:53]  God bless.
[00:35:57]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.