SECRETS OF HIS SUCCESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep626
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth. Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com. That's friendofdinesh.com. Coming up, a special episode. I'm going to consider the life and importance of Reagan and his two-term presidency.
So remember, Reagan remains the iconic standard of a highly successful Republican president, maybe the most successful since Lincoln.
I, of course, worked in the Reagan White House, so I can give you an informed, up-close perspective on what made Reagan so successful, how he learned the skills that enabled him to get the job done.
Hey, we're no longer living in the Reagan era, but I'm going to argue there's a lot our leaders can learn from Reagan.
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I'd appreciate it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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I want to do a special edition of the podcast today focusing on the issue of leadership and specifically on the spectacular presidency of Reagan.
Now, Reagan is an iconic figure on the right and certainly the most successful president, I would argue, of the 20th century.
In that sense, he is a kind of guiding light for the 21st century.
If you look at the 20th century, I suppose the two consequential presidents were FDR and Reagan.
But I think FDR mostly for the bad.
Not that FDR was all bad, but a lot of his legacy, I think, was bad, particularly the things that were built on top of it by Lyndon Johnson and others.
But Reagan was for the good.
And Reagan, in a sense, saved America.
You can argue whether he saved America for a time.
Some would argue the Reagan revolution began in 1980 and perhaps ended when Obama was elected in 2008.
But think about that. That's still an almost 30-year We're good to go.
The presidency. And as they look to examples from the past, really only two stand out.
I would say Lincoln, maybe the greatest president of our history, at least I think so.
And Reagan in a close second place.
But closer to us.
And in that sense, his legacy seems perhaps more relevant.
Lincoln is not irrelevant.
In fact, we're in a divided phase in this country, such that what Lincoln dealt with is relevant today.
It's eerily similar to the late 1850s, a very divided society, and so I would argue we have a lot to learn from Lincoln as well.
But Reagan dealt with socialism.
He dealt with collectivism.
He dealt with many of the same issues we're wrestling with today.
And he also had a very unique, perhaps irreplaceable personality.
But while we can't replicate Reagan, we're not going to get Reagan back, it doesn't mean that we can't learn from Reagan.
And this doesn't mean that we can't learn aspects of leadership from Reagan and then look to the candidates out there now to see if they reflect, if you will, this Reagan spirit.
Now, the question of leadership is a tricky one because leadership is, in general, adapted to the circumstances of a particular time.
In a sense, Reagan was a creature of his time.
I don't think he would argue any differently.
And this is true of everybody.
Washington was a creature of his time.
So was Lincoln.
And so, while leaders are leaders in a given place and time, nevertheless, there are aspects of them, of their personality, of their character, of their leadership that transcend that place and time.
What I'll be doing in the next several segments is zooming into Reagan, understanding Reagan as a man of his time, but at the same time looking to see what are things about Reagan that we can learn from, that we can use now.
Now, There's no question that this is not a Reagan moment in American history.
The circumstances are very different.
I would argue that the Democratic Party has become more radicalized, more ruthless.
They're doing things that they didn't even attempt to do in the Reagan era.
Cases in point, going after our basic liberties, trying to criminalize and even arrest and prosecute and lock up the leader of the Republican Party, the leading candidate of the Republican Party.
There is a sort of dedication to sort of pure majoritarianism now on the part of the Democratic Party.
We're the majority, so we can trample on all your rights.
We can establish a one-party state.
As I say, this was stuff that was not even attempted in the 1900s.
And when I remember when I came to the United States, the Democrats were the party of majority rule.
This was something that they had gotten used to since FDR and LBJ. But at the same time, they were pretty outspoken on behalf of individual rights.
In fact, when it came to cases involving free speech, very often it was the Democrats who were in the forefront.
The same with cases involving equal rights under the law.
And Republicans, of course, did defend rights of religious liberty and so on.
But the Democrats were certainly not the threat to individual rights that they have become today.
So it's not a Reagan moment.
And in that sense, Reagan's approach was Which was a genial approach, a kind of cock-of-the-head approach, an attempt to sort of reach out to the opposition, form bipartisan coalitions where he could.
Reagan often got important votes through by leaning on the so-called Reagan Democrats.
All of that would be a strategy that really wouldn't work today.
In fact, the idea of getting large numbers of Democrats to come on board for particular policies is almost a kind of illusion.
So we're going to try to see, recognizing the difference between the Reagan moment and now, what we can still learn from Reagan and that will help us in the path going forward as we move toward the next and perhaps the most consequential election of our lifetimes.
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I'm talking about the legacy of Reagan and the qualities that we can look to in Reagan and learn from today.
And to do that, we have to get a sense of...
The challenges that Reagan faced.
And we begin by noting that Reagan was very much of an outsider.
And I remember this even in 1980 when Reagan was running against Carter.
One might think that Reagan had unified the Republican Party.
But let's remember, Reagan had run against Ford in 76.
He had narrowly lost.
The Republican establishment was leery of Reagan.
and also culturally Reagan was seen as not only an outsider but something of a something of a an unserious character almost a laughingstock.
Here are a couple of examples. Paul Laxalt who was a close ally of Reagan said he once took Reagan to the Bohemian Grove a kind of gathering of elites in the woods of California and here's Laxalt from a conversation with me And when they came to his name, they would groan and say, oh no, you mean we have to listen to that same old crap again?
This was basically Republicans and Democrats talking about Reagan.
Reagan was essentially an old man with tired old slogans.
And this was certainly the attitude on the campus of political scientists at Berkeley, Aaron Bildovsky.
Who was kind of a student of political leadership said that he would ask his students, what kind of a man is Reagan?
And he goes, quote, and immediately faculty and students broke into disdainful chuckles and giggles why they simply couldn't bring themselves to take Reagan seriously.
Now, part of the reason for this was that Reagan was seen as somebody who was really not a sort of smart guy, not an intellectual.
When we look at political candidates, I mean, Trump.
Trump went to the Wharton Business School.
We have guys who sort of claim to have a knowledge.
DeSantis claims to have a detailed knowledge and does for a lot of aspects of public policy.
Reagan went to Eureka College, a college that maybe no one would have heard of if it wasn't for Reagan.
Eureka, of course, is a slogan that comes from Archimedes, the idea that, I have found it, Eureka.
Archimedes makes a discovery with a flash of insight.
But Reagan admitted that when he went to Eureka, he says, quote, my favorite subject was football.
Reagan's grades were kind of mediocre, kind of in the B minus to C range.
And there's an amusing incident of Reagan who many years later, while he was president, he went to Eureka College in We're good to go.
We see here something about Reagan that I think is very striking and today almost extinct in American politics.
And that is Reagan's kind of trademark sense of humor.
Not just a humor that was cultivated, which it was, through many years of acting, through many years of speaking.
Reagan had kind of the perfect timing and perfect delivery, but also a humor that was natural to Reagan.
It came out of his ebullient good spirits.
And we see that very little today.
Trump is probably the one who comes the closest.
Trump is kind of a comedian.
I think this is part of the way that Trump is misunderstood.
When Trump does his rallies, a lot of his one-liners, some of them a little outrageous, are nevertheless in that Reaganite tradition.
Now, Trump's sense of humor is very different than Reagan's.
And Trump's is a little more cutting.
It's more sarcastic.
And it also relies heavily on hyperbole.
Reagan's humor was a little more self-deprecating, a little more genial, a little more based upon situational experience.
Reagan was kind of a storyteller.
Trump is not a storyteller.
Trump is more like Bob Hope.
He's like a one-line guy.
He delivers these kind of one-line bombshells, and the more that the press is aghast, the funnier the lines seem.
Reagan was an actor, and his critics basically said, he's always just an actor.
But it's worth remembering that politicians are actors.
Part of what a politician does is he projects an idea of leadership, and that is part of what acting is.
One of Reagan's heroes was John Wayne.
And what's really impressed Reagan about John Wayne was that John Wayne was actually a normal guy.
In fact, I think, I'm trying to remember his real name, Marion Montgomery or Marion Morrison.
This was really John Wayne.
But Reagan saw that somehow through his acting, through his performances, this ordinary fellow, Marian Morrison, became John Wayne.
He was able to project a character that was obviously part of who he was.
If it wasn't, how could he do it?
But was only a part of who he was, but he made that his persona.
And Reagan understood that That is what leadership is.
It's projecting a public persona.
A good example that I sometimes like to give is Reagan wasn't himself a military hero in the way that, say, George H.W. Bush was, but Reagan projected military valor much better than Bush, who was the real thing.
Yet, if Reagan went out before the Marines, they were wildly enthusiastic, like Bush, but they loved Reagan.
And it's because Reagan had this amazing ability, in a sense, through leadership to project something that was larger than himself.
And this is really what he got from John Wayne, that there is a way to perform on a public stage.
That is, that makes you larger than life and as a result inspires more confidence than you would if you just follow the normal advice that people give, which is to be yourself.
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Feel the difference. I want to talk about how Reagan developed his philosophy and also his sort of understanding of the ordinary guy.
By the way, the book I wrote on Reagan in the late 1990s was called Ronald Reagan, How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, a book that you can still enjoy today, and you'll see its relevance as you read through it.
Reagan kind of entered politics when he was doing a lot of speeches for General Electric.
Of course, he had previously been involved politically, but in a one-dimensional way when he was at the Screen Actors Guild.
And at the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan fought against the communists who were trying to take over the Screen Actors Guild.
So he was exposed to politics in that way, through the union.
But then he was hired by General Electric to go around the country and maybe We give speeches about the American way of life and the American dream, and he did extensive traveling, and he would often speak multiple times a day to multiple audiences, and he discovered what I want to call the ordinary conservatism of the working man.
This is relevant today because, in a strange way, this aspect of the Reagan legacy has passed along to Trump.
Now, Trump is a billionaire.
Reagan was well-off because of his acting career, but in no way a billionaire.
Trump has this feeling for the working man and the ordinary guy that's pretty remarkable.
I'm not saying he's the only one who has it, but he does have it in a very noticeable way, and it's striking because Trump has that.
With Reagan, he would give these speeches to people and you would think that he learned to give a speech and partly he did, but it was also that he was listening to who these guys were.
He got a flavor for what they cared about and he recognized that there is a kind of deep vein of conservatism that runs in this country.
And it's a very anti-Marxist, anti-collectivist sentiment.
Why? Because Marx had predicted that the working man would be alienated from his work, would be alienated from capitalism, would be alienated from business, and would be smoldering with resentment, and there would be kind of a natural, and Marx felt, historical urge to rebellion.
But Reagan realized that the opposite is true.
The working man recognizes that he has a hard life, But all he wants is a life in which he can find productive work, in which he can get a sense of fulfillment from work, appreciation from work, get a decent salary that can support, ideally on one income, but if necessary, two incomes, can support a family, and can aspire for his kids to have a better life than the parents.
This was, for Reagan and for the people that he talked to, sort of a lot of what it meant to be an American.
America offers this chance at upward mobility, and many other countries don't do that.
You're sort of running on a treadmill in the same place.
Your children basically get what you have, but they don't get any more.
And so this idea of moving up in life becomes very hard to do.
Reagan also learned that the ordinary working guy doesn't want and doesn't appreciate the idea of just getting a handout from the government.
And the reason for this is really twofold.
The first one is just a sense of pride.
A handout is degrading.
It's degrading because you're getting something for nothing.
You're turned into a kind of alms receiver.
You're kind of a beggar with outstretched hand.
Hey, listen, I can't pay my mortgage.
Give me money. Hey, I can't pay to go.
I got a cold. I want to see the doctor, but I can't pay my bill.
Or I can't pay for my car.
I can't pay for my college.
And Reagan realized this is complicated.
Kind of insulting in a country that does offer opportunity.
Now, if there are countries where you're a serf, you don't have the opportunity, then you can't pay because you can't pay.
But what if there is a way that you could pay and you refuse to pay and you would rather take the easy road?
Well, that's a sign of a person who is fundamentally defective in character.
And the other thing is it creates, ultimately, a kind of negative spiral of incentives.
Why would you want to work if you can get stuff for free?
Regan liked to tell a story, one of my actually favorite stories from Regan.
This is about a man who goes to his boss and he says that he wants a pay cut.
And the boss is like, what?
You want a pay cut? Are you nuts?
And the man goes, no.
You know what? If I get a pay cut, I can then get subsidized housing.
I can get health and dental care.
I can get university scholarships and other benefits for my kids.
There are other welfare benefits available.
He goes, I'm just not poor enough.
I make too much to qualify for any of that.
And he goes, if I make less, you know, I'd get to be eligible for an apartment in the city's new development, the one that has a pool and a sauna and a tennis court.
My son would qualify for a government scholarship.
We can get his teeth fixed at government expense.
And so the boss goes, okay, listen, I'm going to give you the pay cut that you want.
But hey, listen, if your work slips, you're going to get a raise.
And the man is grateful, but on the way out, the boss says, Hey, listen, if you're going to get these benefits like tennis courts and stuff, maybe you'll invite me over to play on the court or maybe take a swim in the pool.
And the man goes, Certainly, sir.
I believe the poor should share.
With the less fortunate. Now, for Reagan, these anecdotes would produce a lot of chuckles, a lot of applause, a lot of hilarity.
And so this is how Reagan communicated, if you will, the degradation of government benefits.
It's that he didn't do it by sort of tirading or by declaiming against it.
He did it by telling stories, often very witty stories, That illustrated the evils of socialism, the evils of communism, the evils of the Soviet Union.
For Reagan's story was a way to get a point across.
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When we think of Reagan, we think maybe most prominently about defeating the Soviet Union.
Margaret Thatcher memorably said that Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.
And that is perhaps the most important aspect of Reagan's legacy.
There are others who would point to Reagan's economic record, his economic policies, the fact that Reagan was able to dramatically lower taxes.
People don't realize, but the deepest tax cuts we have ever seen, maybe in the country's history, but certainly in the 50 years or so that I've been part of the American story and going back to the beginning of the 20th century, The top tax rate when Reagan came to office was 70%.
Hard to believe, but true.
And that means that we're talking about the marginal tax rate.
And that means that if you make an extra dollar above a certain income, you pay 70 cents on that dollar to the government.
You get to keep 30.
And Reagan, in two strokes, and by two strokes here, I mean the tax cuts of 1981 and then a massive tax reform in 1986, this top rate came down from 70% to 28%.
I mean, think about, that's a revolution.
Now, we've had modest adjustments in the tax rate since then.
We had a Trump tax cut, which was nevertheless more modest.
We've had some tax increases.
The top tax rate today hovers around 37%, 38%.
But it's not going back up to 70%.
So in that sense, an aspect of Reagan's...
Revolution remains intact even today.
But Reagan was also, and this is the point I want to stress in this segment, he was a cultural figure.
He stood against the 60s.
He stood against the hippies.
And a lot of what we're dealing with today in America is the extended legacy of the 60s.
In other words, it's the baby boom generation absorbing the legacy of the 60s.
And then the younger generation, the millennials and now the so-called Gen Zs, Picking up on the 60s ethos and trying to extend it.
So in the 60s, people talked, for example, about race and they talked about feminism.
Now we're talking about gay rights and trans rights and LGBTQ. So you can see that it's the same thread being extended and radicalized even further.
But the activists of the 60s were very hostile to Reagan.
And I want to give a couple of anecdotes to this effect.
At one point, a student stands up and says to Reagan, at that time, Reagan wasn't president, he was just governor.
And the student goes, you grew up in a different world.
Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers.
And Reagan, without missing a beat, goes, you know, you're right.
It's true that we didn't have those things when we were young.
We invented them.
So think of how Reagan turns the tables on this kid, shuts him up.
And on another occasion, Reagan was...
Reagan was walking out of the governor's office and a group of activists surrounded his limousine and one of them held up a sign saying to Reagan, we are the future.
You can see what he's getting at.
Reagan is a creature of the past.
He's so old, even then.
And we, the young people of the future.
And Reagan basically scribbled on a piece of paper and held up his sign in reply.
He pushed it to the window.
He goes, I'll sell my bonds.
And that's where Debbie and I sometimes chuckle about this today.
It's like, wow, look at these young people today.
They seem to have, at least when it comes to self-sufficiency, at least when it comes to sort of making it on your own, paying your own mortgage, making your own life, taking responsibility for getting your car fixed, calling your landlord.
It just seems that the younger generation today is a little more reliant, a little more dependent, a little less able to fend for itself.
And this was, by the way, again, these things aren't completely new.
They were to a degree true, even in Reagan's own generation.
Reagan was very successful in the people that he appointed to office.
And you might wonder how he was able to do this, because when you're president, a lot of the people who you hire, you don't know.
So yes, Reagan did bring some of his friends, people that he knew and trusted from California, the so-called California Brain Trust, the people in California that Reagan had gotten to know over not only the six years of his governorship, but even before that.
So people like Ed Meese came from California with Reagan.
So he did know those guys. There was a guy named Malcolm Baldrige whose name had been put up for Commerce Secretary.
And he was a Bush supporter.
Reagan didn't know the guy.
And Reagan was a little bit unsure if he wanted a guy like this for the job.
The question in Reagan's mind is, is Baldrige kind of an establishment guy?
Is he one of these guys who sort of is going to undercut the Reagan agenda?
So listen to this. Reagan calls over to the Baldrige residents and he goes, I want to speak to Baldrige over the phone.
And the Baldrige family tells Reagan, sorry, you can't reach him right now because he is out west riding in a rodeo.
And Reagan pauses for a minute and goes, is he watching or is he riding?
And the Baldrige family goes, no, no, no.
He's in the rodeo. He's participating.
He's riding. So Reagan goes, don't bother to reach him.
Let's go ahead with his nomination.
He'll be fine.
So this is Reagan on the basis of just recognizing that Baldrige is an outdoor guy.
He's a cowboy.
He's in a rodeo.
And Reagan goes, you know what? That kind of guy is not entirely going to be a creature of the establishment.
Baldrige, obviously, I've seen his file.
He has the credentials. He's well qualified.
But the good thing is anybody who embodies the rodeo spirit, It's going to be just fine in the Reagan administration.
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I want to talk about Reagan's supply-side economics.
But a lot of times when people talk about supply-side economics, they do it mainly in, well, econometric terms.
They do it in terms of measuring...
Tax rates, measuring the decline in poverty, measuring the number of people in the middle class who moved into the upper middle class, measuring the number of millionaires that swelled under Reagan, measure the increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was around 800 in 1982, and about 3,200, a four-fold increase, and then the increase continued in the 1990s.
So all of these are the kind of economist index of the success of Reaganomics.
But that's not really not what I want to focus on.
Rather, what I want to focus on, because I think it's more applicable to today, is the idea of creating an America where entrepreneurship is valued and celebrated, in which ordinary people are encouraged to become entrepreneurs.
And what do we mean here by entrepreneurs?
We don't necessarily mean someone who starts Google or somebody who starts a financial firm or comes up with a new invention that is then turned into a marketable product.
No, we're talking about people who just figure out how they can work for themselves, how they can create businesses and hire out other people.
So consider, for example, a guy who's a successful electrician or plumber.
And then he realizes, well, look, I'm working for a plumbing firm, but I have all the skills.
I pretty much know how to fix anything.
So how about if I go out on my own and maybe I'll train my son and maybe my son has a couple of friends and I'll train them and all of us together will create a company.
But now instead of working for XYZ Plumbing, I'm going to work for the Dinesh D'Souza Plumbing Company.
And what this means is that when people pay me now, the money doesn't go to the firm, which then pays me an hourly wage.
The money goes to me.
Now, admittedly, as an entrepreneur, I've got to pay my employees and I get to keep everything that is left over, which now takes the name of profit.
So, Prior to Reagan, the ethos of America had been set by John F. Kennedy.
You might remember John F. Kennedy famously said, you know, if you're young, if you're idealistic, do what?
Well, join the Peace Corps.
So for John F. Kennedy, the way to have a kind of embodiment of American idealism is to become...
A bureaucrat. Now, it could be a noble bureaucrat.
I'm going to become an astronaut and go to the moon, or I'm going to go work in El Salvador for the Peace Corps.
But Reagan understood that, look, there's nothing wrong with those things, but the real way that America creates prosperity is through entrepreneurship.
So, in other words, the entrepreneur and not the bureaucrat is the embodiment of American idealism.
And so, for Reagan, there were a combination of economic policies, but also Reagan wanted to articulate the spirit of entrepreneurship, and he did.
I remember years ago...
I was at a Forbes magazine conference, and all these entrepreneurs were there.
And I looked across the room.
I was actually sitting next to Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers.
By the way, Michael Dell had started his Dell company out of his college basement.
Now, think about that for a moment.
Why would a guy who's in college suddenly decide, I'm going to start a computer company.
I'm going to sell computers out of my dorm room.
Well, it was because he caught the Reagan bug.
Now, what was interesting to me was that he had done that without even realizing that he caught the Reagan bug.
Because I once asked Michael Dell, and on that occasion, I said, hey, listen, do you think it was a coincidence that all these companies, Microsoft, for example, founded in the early to mid-1980s, all these companies were started in the Reagan era.
Do you think that Reagan's, not just his policies, his monetary policies, his fiscal policies, but Reagan's evocation of the entrepreneur, the cultural mood, let's call it the bonfire of the vanities mood...
Entrepreneurship can have a double side.
Entrepreneurs can become arrogant.
Tom Wolfe captured, if you will, the pluses and minuses of the entrepreneurial sensibility.
But on the balance, this is what creates wealth.
This is what creates success in America.
And I asked Michael Dell, do you think that Reagan was responsible for why you did what you did and why all these entrepreneurs in this room were suddenly motivated not to join the Peace Corps, not to go work for the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Housing?
Reagan had kind of, you may say, depreciated the idea of working for the government.
He made jokes about the bureaucrats.
His assumption was that these people are bums.
most of them do nothing.
He would make jokes about this one guy sitting at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In fact, he's seen crying at his desk and someone comes up to him and he goes, why are you crying?
He goes, well, my Indian died.
And so for Reagan, it's like the bureaucrat was sort of a do nothing type of guy.
And I think that this use of the bully pulpit is one of the underappreciated aspects of Reagan.
And even though Michael Dell looked at me with kind of a funny look as if to say, well, I don't really know what you mean.
I don't think that my decision to form a company was in fact the result of Reagan's rhetoric.
But see, I think it was.
So I think in that sense, what you have is entrepreneurs who are carried by the Reagan tide, almost like a twig that's pulled by the water.
The twig doesn't realize that he's being pulled by the water.
The twig thinks, I'm going where I want.
But there is a cultural trend that's been established.
By the way, it shows the importance of conservatism regaining its hold on the culture.
Because if the left defines the culture, then many Americans like Twiggs will be carried in that direction.
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I'd like to talk in this segment about Reagan's foreign policy, and you might expect me to focus on the Cold War, and I'll say a word about that, but I want to focus actually on a different aspect of Reagan's foreign policy, one that I think is more relevant today.
Now, with regard to the Cold War, there was a real effort to give the credit to Gorbachev.
So, when the Soviet Union collapsed, now first of all, think of how odd it is.
You have two countries in a rivalry, and a rivalry that is the Cold War, and it lasts for decades, at least since the late 40s and early 50s.
Churchill talks about an iron curtain descending on Europe.
This is a clear rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, each side building allies and satellites in their respective orbits.
And then the Soviet Union collapses.
So it's a clear victory for America.
And yet, oddly enough, the leftists in America, nobody won the Cold War.
It somehow ended all by itself.
Or... Just as prominent a thesis, Gorbachev did it.
We gotta give Gorbachev the credit.
But Gorbachev had no intention of ending communism.
This is a very critical point to realize.
Gorbachev was, in some respects, a nice guy.
There's no question that he was different in many ways from previous Soviet dictators.
He was not the same, for example, as Brezhnev or Chernenko or Andropov.
In that sense, he was somebody who was amenable to being influenced by Reagan.
And it's partly to Reagan's credit that he realized, I can actually convert Gorbachev.
Not convert him over to the Western way of life, but convince him of my good intentions and convince him that it is the right thing to do for him to proceed with the dismantling of the Soviet Empire.
In other words, letting Eastern Europe have its own way.
And then ultimately to preside over the destruction of the Soviet Union itself, the communist system, that is.
And Russia is a very different place.
There are people today, in fact, oddly enough, Democrats today, who act as if today's Russia under Putin is the same as the old Soviet Union.
In fact, they've taken some of the Republican intensity of opposition to communism from the last century and are now applying it against Putin as if there's been no change in the Soviet Union.
But of course, the Soviet Union is no more.
But the point I'm trying to make is that Gorbachev did not intend that.
Far from him being the great calculator, he was the great miscalculator.
Gorbachev wanted to save communism, and he didn't realize that communism can't be saved.
Once you begin to question and change the underlying assumptions, the whole system will come toppling down.
Now, Reagan didn't win the Cold War by himself.
I've said this before, but many people deserve credit.
Margaret Thatcher was part of that.
Even Mitterrand, the Socialist Prime Minister of France.
Helmut Kohl, the leader of West Germany.
Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa in Poland.
Vaclav Havel in what was then called Czechoslovakia.
Now, of course, the Czech Republic.
So there were a lot of people who deserve credit, but the lion's share, I think, does go to Reagan.
Without him, I don't think it would have happened.
I want to also highlight the Reagan doctrine because of its relevance today to the Ukraine war.
Because Reagan's view was that the United States should defend freedom around the world, but do it prudently and do it within our means and do it responsibly and pragmatically.
In other words, it's not the United States' job to establish democracies all over the world.
Now, when there are people who are willing to fight for their own freedom, and in the Reagan era, we saw that.
We saw that in Afghanistan, where Muslims were willing to fight for freedom against Soviet occupation.
That would be a pretty good analogy for what's happening in Ukraine with the With the invasion again by the same country, although under a different regime, Russia, Reagan's idea was, I'm not going to send troops.
I'm not going to provoke World War III. On the other hand, I'm going to make it a little more difficult for the Soviets.
I'm going to help arm the Muslims who are fighting for their own freedom.
So in other words, they fight.
We help. And Reagan's understanding was, over time, let's wear the Soviet Union down.
Now, if we had a similar policy in Ukraine that understood the limits of American power, understood it's difficult to fight a war very far away, offered strategic support to Ukraine, but let the Ukrainians fight for their own freedom, that would be one thing.
We don't have that in Ukraine now.
We're escalating in a way that's very provocative and dangerous.
I think if Reagan were alive today, he would say that's not the way to do it.
In this final segment on Reagan, I want to talk about Reagan's willingness to take up stances that would seem inconsistent if you measure them in a sort of algebraic way.
Wait a minute, he said this, now he's saying that.
I also want to talk about Reagan's very unusual approach to public opinion.
And finally, Reagan's way of dealing with the media.
Now here's a quotation from Winston Churchill that is really worth reflecting on.
A statesman in contact with the moving current of events, anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a steady course, may lean all his weight now on one side and now on the other.
His arguments in each case, when contrasted, can be shown to be not only very different in character, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction.
We cannot call this inconsistency.
The only way a man can remain consistent amidst changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.
A classic example of this is Reagan was very tough on the Soviets in the first term.
And then when Gorbachev came in, which was, by the way, during Reagan's first term, Reagan recognized, hey, we're dealing with a little different kind of guy.
I wonder if I can get through to him.
And Reagan in the second term becomes kind of soft On the Soviets and willing to deal with Gorbachev and many conservatives, I remember vividly, became very scornful of Reagan.
In fact, even in some cases, insulting toward Reagan, claiming he's a buffoon.
He doesn't understand the Soviets, right?
He doesn't understand the nature of communism.
Did he himself call it an evil empire?
And Reagan's view was, well, yes, I did.
And it is an evil empire, but it's an evil empire with perhaps a guy who has somehow come to the helm Who's not as evil as his predecessors?
And so, Reagan understood that a different type of approach could work, and in fact, did work, remarkably.
Let's talk about public opinion.
I interviewed for my Reagan book, The Pollster, Richard Worthlin, and I asked him, did Reagan consult public opinion surveys when he was trying to figure out what his approach should be toward a given aspect of public policy?
And Worklin told me something that I've never forgotten, which was very striking to me.
He said, well, quote,"...he consulted the polls to identify areas where a majority of his fellow citizens disagreed with him so that he could use his power of persuasion to change their minds." Now, this is important because we live at a time when a lot of people, they consult the polls, they're like, I gotta go with what the American people think.
In other words, the American people are the leaders and I am the follower.
But Reagan's view is not really.
The statesman is in a very interesting relationship with people.
He is supposed to represent them.
On the other hand, he can come to believe that on a particular issue, They're mistaken.
They're wrong. So, for example, they think that abortion can be used as a form of birth control, or they think it's not such a big deal for a woman in a difficult situation.
So Reagan's view is, all right, I can see that in this particular area, the American people disagree with me.
Well, guess what? I'm going to now focus my attention on making the case even more frequently, even more eloquently, even more clearly, because I want to try to change their minds.
Reagan also recognized that you have to do things differently.
You can't do them the same way.
When Reagan was first elected, and this gives you a pretty good idea of his view of the establishment, of the way things, you know, were done before, there was a treaty in place called the Law of the Sea.
This was kind of something promoted very much at the international level, part of the globalist agenda.
We deal with the globalist agenda today.
Well, it was there even then.
And Al Haig came to Reagan and said, you know, we got to stay with the Law of the Sea Treaty.
And Reagan was like, no.
And Haig is like, well, you don't understand.
The American people support it.
Virtually all the leading figures in both parties accept the general framework of this.
The Law of the Sea Treaty has been going on for years.
And Reagan goes, well, yes, but you see, Al, that's what the last election was all about.
And Haig goes, what?
The last election was about the Law of the Sea Treaty?
And, of course, Haig is being here very condescending toward Reagan, and Reagan's like, no.
The last election was about not doing things just because that's the way they've been done before.
And so Reagan's willingness here to chart a new course is, To learn lessons from things that were not done well and do them differently.
This is very important because even with Trump today, even with DeSantis and with others, a recognition that we've underestimated the deep state.
We've underestimated the gangsterism of the Democrats.
We can't do it the same way the Republican Party needs to change with the circumstances and with the bitter lessons that we've absorbed over the past several months and years.
I interviewed Sam Donaldson after the Reagan presidency, and Donaldson had been a kind of consistent critic of Reagan, and I kind of want to close with, this is Donaldson's words, and it's so telling that Reagan was able to get through even a guy like Sam Donaldson.
He's talking to me now.
He goes, we thought he was a lightweight.
And maybe he didn't know everything, but he was a tenacious fellow who knew what he wanted.
He reminds me of a Gila monster.
When it grabs you, you can't get away.
He came to Washington to change the world for the better.
And for the most part, he did.
I didn't think I would say this, but I miss him.
There's no one like him on the scene today.
This is Sam Donaldson.
So imagine the impact of a guy, not just on the political level.
And Donaldson realized, I tried to stop Reagan from having this impact.
But guess what? At the end of two terms, he did.
And even more important, I tried to undermine Reagan as a man, as a person, undermine his character, undermine his personality.
And now I have to admit that he was right and I was wrong.